I open the box and take out the mail. I notice that there is a lingering fragrance left from a perfumed letter I received yesterday. As I close it, it emits a peculiar clank, louder or softer, depending upon how hard I push it closed. I knock on it and it produces a different sound. Both fragrance and sound diffuse themselves into the space surrounding the smelling and sounding object, diminishing in intensity as they recede from their irradiating object, with the fragrance lingering longer, but in a more reduced area, than the sound. I open one of the letters: it is a valentine with some little red candy hearts. I pop one in my mouth: it is smooth and hard with the sharp but sweet flavor of cinnamon. Taste is a variation on touch: the object exhibits the tactual qualities and adds its own specialization: flavor with variations between sweet/sour, sharp/flat, and the like. Flavors interplay with smells; hold your nose and you can’t taste anything.
Now all these features—visual, tactual, olfactory, audile and also gustatory—are spontaneously linked together as features of the object I have come to call my mailbox. But it is not these features to which we ordinarily attend. Regularly we attend through each feature to the thing, the aspects appearing only subsidiary in our attention focused on the thing. And each presentation points beyond itself to the sum total of possible perspectives within each of the senses in their togetherness. I intend the mailbox itself in and through the subject-dependent perspectives on it that sensation affords me. The mailbox presents itself as exceeding each of the perspectives but containing all of them.
3.
Now we have been attending primarily to the mailbox itself. The thing presented through the continual variations of its sensory features stands present to me outside my body. Attend now more carefully to that awareness. Though my awareness is grounded in my body which furnishes me my mobile point of view on the thing and the organs for sensation, awareness itself is not in the body the way my eyeballs and brain are. I attend from my body to the thing outside. My awareness is literally with the mailbox, not as one body alongside and perhaps in contact with another, but in the distinctive mode of manifestation, of appearance. The mailbox is shown as existing outside me, its viewer and user. It is present as other than me. The condition for that happening is my self-presence as a conscious being, other than which the other is present. Embedded within the darkness of material processes with their blind action and interaction, a clearing, “a lighting” occurs, an open space in which things not only are but are shown, they appear, they become manifest, they become phenomena.
The first condition that makes this possible is involved in every sensing being, namely touch. Some animals, like worms, seem to have only touch. Animals who have other senses must also have touch. The reason for this is that the point of sensing is to present opportunities and threats to organic development and sustenance. The latter is served by apprehending the appropriate objects, eating them, mating with them, struggling with them, caring for them.
One of the peculiarities of touch is that, though the hands are the typical locus of its operation, the organ for touch is the whole surface of the body. That contrasts with the other senses that have specifically localized organs: eyes, eardrums, mouth, nose. There is another feature linked to that: touch involves the suffused self-presence of the animal that is functionally, pre-focally aware of its entire body. As aware, it lives in and from its body, not as something that it simply has, as it has any other instrument, but as something that it is, with which it is identified. The body is mine as consciously self-directive and is me myself in one of my phases. Awareness is related to body, not as one thing to another, but as a pervading, overarching presence to the whole functioning organism, a kind of concrete universal in relation to the particulars of its organic parts. Of course, that presence does not involve even implicit awareness of all of the body’s parts. There is no lived awareness of one’s own cell-structure nor of one’s brain. Most of the body remains beneath the threshold of awareness: an animal is present to it as a functioning whole, implicitly aware of what it needs to do to move itself in reacting to its environment. The field of awareness in its pervading the lived body is an expression of the fundamental pervading of the whole organism in all its parts by the unifying principle of its kind of life, by what Aristotelians call the “soul” (psyche). The soul is the principle of holistic functioning involving conscious, and in the human case reflectively self-conscious capacities.
The lived body is both other than and the same as the body observed in physiology. Analogous to the same body seen and touched, each human body is both exteriorly apprehensible and lived from within. But in the latter mode of access, it is not entirely other than the awareness that lives it. Its otherness is more like the otherness of the liver in relation to the brain: two features of the single functional whole we call an organism. But unlike the relation between the liver and the brain, the relation of feeling to its organic base is not a relation of two separable parts but of a self-presence to its own dark basis.
The diffuse self-presence of the animal organism in the mode of feeling is the basis for the manifestation of what is other than the conscious organism. Manifest otherness presupposes self-presence, other than which the other is manifest. Tactual sensitivity spread over the whole surface of the organism is the result of primordial self-presence in the mode of feeling. It is the basis for the differentiation of sensibility found in relation to localized organs.
Linked to this are the kinesthetic feelings whereby I operate through the organism, moving from position to position, sensing in various ways and taking hold of things. As I take hold I feel myself feeling things, feeling the effect things have upon me. There is, in addition, the sense of balance as there might be a sense of dizziness as I stand and move from place to place. Pervading my awareness of identity with my body there might also be a sense of vigor or weariness or perhaps nausea.
Again, there is the frequent recurrence of hunger, thirst, and sexual desire experienced in relation to certain organs of the body. Whereas the various sensory capacities are oriented toward aspects of things in the environment, the natural appetites are oriented toward the things presented through these aspects, namely those kinds of things that can nourish or can fulfill sexual desire. Feelings expressive of such appetites are linked to the appearance of certain sensorily present objects in the environment or even to the inner recollection of such objects. When such desires become intense, they seem to pervade our whole organism and magnetize our attention. When they become very intense, they rise to the level of pain. But when they are being satisfied, there is the feeling of pleasure.
Awareness is thus rafted upon an underlying organism whose needs dictate the way in which I am engaged in the environment outside my organism. I find myself always thrust “outside,” always engaged in the things that are opportunities or threats to my organic well-being. I am always “tuned,” anticipating feeling pleasure and pain in relation to the things given outside.
The organically based desires are latent as I approach the mailbox, but other desires are operative. Perhaps I am a bit anxious about a letter I am expecting. Will I get the grant for which I applied? Did my friend accept my apology for having offended him or did the offense produce a final breach to our long friendship? So I am engaged in another way: in expectations linked to my relation to other persons mediated by practices that are not themselves directly organic.
As I go to open the mailbox, I cut my finger on a sharp edge. There is a feeling of pain. Pain arises both from bodily injury and from the frustration of intense desire as pleasure does from the satisfaction of that desire and in proportion to the intensity of the pain of desire. If I receive the grant and secure forgiveness from my friend, I am pleased; if I do not, I am saddened. Both being pleased and being saddened are in proportion to the value I attach to the objects of that happiness or sadness.
4.
There is another feature involved in our attention thus far. In order that the thing may be manifest as enduring through the variations of its various presentations to me, I myself must be self-present as likewise enduring, as the same one who first saw the mailbox at a distance, approached it, opened it, smelled its slight aroma, and heard the clank of its closing. I must—or rather my psycho-neural system must—retain the first moment of encounter through the whole experience. Indeed, I must further retain the integrated experience as the ground for my re-visiting the mailbox