Attend to still another factor involved in the analysis thus far. As I look, apprehend, smell, and hear the object, my attention is focused upon it as an individual in the field of my own individual awareness and as having its own peculiar individual sensory features. The features are all actual and the individual thing is immediately present in them. However, our interest now is not in those individual features but in the eidetic constants they exhibit. Our aim is to disregard the contingent variations in order to attend to the universal and necessary constants that constitute the framework of each of the sensory fields. To that end, the real presence of a mailbox is irrelevant: an imaginative construct, such as the reader is now employing, is sufficient. What we apprehend as eidetic is characterized as universal, and that means as possibly instantiated in an indefinite number of particular instances, wherever and whenever we might encounter it. The senses give us the individual and actual; what we then come to call “the intellect” gives us the universal and possible.
The recognition of the redness of the flag on the mailbox is not given in the single experience of the flag. This red is given now in sensation, but redness is not. It is the result of past experience and the extraction of an ideal object which given sensory instances approach or from which they deviate in various degrees. The red on the flag is not the identical red of the cardinal fluttering through the tree above the mailbox nor the red on the pickup truck coming down the road. Other ideal types of visual objects are isolated: blue and yellow together with red being primary, pleonastically called “chromatic colors” (or colored colors) in contrast with black, white, and gray as oxymoronically termed “achromatic colors” (or non-colored colors) which “color-blind” people see. Particular shades and borderline cases are produced by combination of these “elements.” But, we recognize, overarching these color variations, color as the genus correlative to the power of seeing. Whenever I see, I see color. But it is only in individual colored things, things of a particular shade, that I come to know the genus color. Indeed, I only come to recognize the genus when I recognize the species in the individual instances. But whereas redness has visible instances, there is no instance that exhibits just color the way the cardinal exhibits redness. Color is free of both species and instances of it as capable of being applicable to both.
When we come to recognize the generic object of seeing in color we at the same time come to recognize the nature of the capacity to see. The actuality of both the act of seeing and the seen color are always individual occurrences in a given Here-and-Now. But the capacity of seeing is a universal orientation toward the kind of object we call color, whenever and wherever its individual instances can be seen. Kinds are naturally correlative to powers. Furthermore, the seen individual has the natural capacity of being seen; and that, too, involves a universal orientation toward the kinds of organisms that can see. So individuality is manifest on both sides of the subject-object relation in sensing generically, but universality is involved on both sides in the reflectively discernible active and passive capacities and their objects. Kinds or types are correlative to the natural powers, active and passive, of individual things. Though it takes the work of sorting and thus abstracting from the welter of concrete visual experiences, such work is a matter of focusing what is already operative in things, namely, their natural powers. Universality in these cases is thus no relatively arbitrary construction of the human mind but a revelation of the inner nature of natural things as such, with the intellect as one of the functions of nature, nature as manifest in its capacities and kinds and not simply in its individuals.
From the proceeding, we can see that the recognition of the eidetic is not fixation upon an isolated universal. Each such universal presents itself as embedded within a hierarchical structure of samenesses and differences. The silver-gray of the mailbox, the red of its flag, the light brown of the post upon which it is mounted fall under the general notion of color as the sameness running through all of the kinds and individual instances of color, each of which is at the same time different from all the rest. Color, in turn, is a sensory feature set off from other such features by being perceptible through sight. And each sensory feature is a dependent feature of things, set off from other dependent features such as weight, height, and functionality. Specific clusters of types of features identify things of various sorts that are themselves linked in hierarchies of sameness and difference.
Such features as universality and particularity, sameness (generic and specific), and difference (universal and individual), along with other features like affirmation and negation, possibility, contingency, necessity, and existence, thing and properties are categories that operate through the other more directly present features like silver-gray, red, light brown, or heavy and light, smooth and rough, and the like. The level of the categorical, of both the sensorily restricted and the non-sensorily restricted universals, stands fixed atemporally over against the flux of sensations (both external and internal), sensorily given things, and our awareness. Categorial awareness invades our immediate sensory awareness since we always attend to the individual given features and their clusters as something, as instances of types. But categorial awareness is subsidiary to my focus upon the individual: in our example, upon the mailbox and its perceptible features. The universal structures function like glasses: I look through them, not at them—except in the present case where I am making them the object of my reflective attention. By reason of this reflective capacity I am able to take apart my experience by isolating some of these features and then relating them back to the objects in the judgments I make about what is focally given in perceptual experience.
But just that attention involves another structural level of my awareness. Not only am I, as conscious, outside the body that grounds and situates my awareness; I, as eidetic inquirer, am outside the Here-and-Now of the embodied sensory situation by being referred to the whole field of space and time where instances of the eidetic are found. That is, I come to apprehend the eidetic constants as holding anytime and anyplace the conditions for their instantiation are met. Reflection puts me at a distance from my immersion in the Here-and-Now because it is based upon my reference to the whole of space and time. It involves a shift in my disposition: from one engaged in the world of hopes and fears gathered in the mailbox to the simple desire to attend to the eidetic features apart from any other motivation.
There is a final consideration along these lines. The overarching notion within which all the sorting of samenesses and differences goes on is the notion of Being. Whatever I recognize, I recognize as being. And everything I recognize about anything I recognize as being. Everything, and everything about everything, is included indeterminately in the notion of Being. Consequently, the horizon of all our wakeful life is the totality of things. We live out of an anticipation of the character of the Whole within which we find ourselves—not only the cultural whole or cultural world, but the Cosmos itself. As the Stoics saw, we are, by nature, cosmo-politan, our home is the Cosmos as a whole.
The notion of Being pries one loose from all determinants, organically produced, culturally shaped, and personally chosen. It sets one at a reflective distance, making possible both the simple desire to grasp the eidetic as such and making possible and necessary our each choosing our way among the possibilities afforded by our situation and our understanding thereof.
5.
Providing various handles in and through my various sensory capacities, the mailbox is in general the same as any other empirical object. But it stands over against the general class of things provided by nature and stands in the class of things provided by art. As we already noted, the mailbox is also embedded in a general system of production and exchange.
The relatively perfect geometrical shape of the box itself indicates not only a refashioning of what is given by nature but a developed process of machine technology that allows for great exactitude in shaping things according to geometric idealization. Mass production supersedes handwork. Over time various techniques develop of extracting raw materials from nature and of transforming such materials into forms that serve the ends for which we produce them. The early techniques were rather crude. The people who developed them have died long ago; but the techniques are passed on to others, some of whom refine them and, in turn, pass them on to still others.
Monetary exchange supersedes simple barter as things are subjected to quantitative evaluations that establish equivalencies. Again,