In addition to functioning within the production and exchange system, the mailbox functions as the end intended by those systems within another system, the postal system. Its final end is the exchange of written statements.
6.
Such systems within which I function involve the mediation of my relations by anonymous others through those I directly encounter: the salesperson or the postman. The postal system aims at a mediated presence, a presence-in-absence, of others whom I intend directly as the recipients of my own letters or the authors of those directed to me. Such presence-in-absence develops out of an original situation of immediate encounter.
I see the postman bringing the mail. He is an empirical object, in that respect like other such objects: the trees, the hills, the dog running around the yard, the mailbox, the birds fluttering above, the clouds. He is set off from the hills and the mailbox which are inanimate objects. He has something in common with the trees in that he is an organically living process. The latter is set off from the inanimate by exhibiting developmental phases of a single, functional whole. An organism is a self-formative process, self-sustaining, self-repairing as well as self-reproducing. It thus necessarily appears as an individual of the kind belonging to its reproductive line. The notion of “self” here refers to a kind of centeredness, operating “from inside outward” and resisting that which would dissolve it. Its self-formation depends upon specific kinds of mineral elements, oxygen, and light in its environment. Its native powers, active and passive, are oriented toward the kinds of individuals in the environment correlative with those powers.
The postman is an organism, but he is different from the trees in that he is, like the birds, sensorily aware. Such awareness adds a dimension of self-manifestation as correlative to the manifestation of what stands outside it as sustaining, threatening, or indifferent to its own existence. Its sensory life is focused upon individuals and is immediately linked to its organic needs experienced in terms of desire and the pleasure and pain of possession or its lack regarding beneficial and harmful goods.
The postman is different from the birds, not only in physiological structure, but in his whole style of behavior. For one thing, he is clothed—usually in a uniform that identifies his functioning in an official capacity within the postal system. Being clothed places him within a set of cultural practices with its different styles of dress, but also, as with the mailbox he opens, in the systems of production and exchange. He functions by reason of knowing his way about within these systems.
But he is not simply a different sort of object sharing identical traits with other sorts of objects appearing in the environment. He is another self whom I experience as “you.” He looks; he smiles; he speaks to me. The look and the smile are expressive of the inwardness of his disposition. His state of mind is directly available in his comportment. But the fuller content of his mind is available through his speech. Here he rests, like I whom he addresses, within the same linguistic conventions as I do.
7.
The postal service is itself made possible because of the invention of writing. Writing is a kind of surrogate presence of other subjects as it is a kind of surrogate for living speech.
Speech itself is a temporal flow. Sentences are generated in such a way that the sound of the beginning of each has passed away before the sound of its end is generated. And each sentence flows into the next. Indeed, we do not ordinarily think in terms of sentences but in terms of the objects about which we speak in continuous discourse. Sentences are analytically isolatable from the flow of discourse. We can carry out the analysis further when we isolate the words: the nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, articles, prepositions, conjunctives. Some are subjectable to inflections of various sorts: declensions in terms of gender, number, and case with regards to nouns and (in some languages) adjectives; conjugations, for example, in terms of time-relations (variations on past, present, and future) and relations to the intent of the speaker (declarative, interrogative, optative, and imperative) as well as the abstract infinitive in the case of verbs.
Speech is embedded in sound. When we carry on a phonological analysis, we find that the unit proximate to words is the syllable, but the ultimate units are vowels and consonants. The vowels are basic: a, e, i, o, u; the consonants “sound with” (sonare con) the vowels by clipping them in various ways termed dentals (d and t), labials (b, f), gutturals (c, g, k), sibilants (s, z), and the like. Vowels and consonants are based upon the sound possibilities of the human oral cavity on the one hand and an idealized selection of certain ranges of sound that carry absolute identities. In the case of “a,” for example, there are many concrete individual modulations for individuals or groups when sounding out the same identical “a” sound. And to determine how a given sound counts for “a” one has to hear it in relation to the way in which the other vowels are sounded by that individual or in that group. In other words, the vowels and consonants form part of an eidetic system of humanly selected ideal units. They are subservient to communicating identical meanings abstracted from and applied to things originally given in the environment, for example, features like colors, tactual qualities and the like. Linguistic sounds arise by historical selection out of the sound-generating capacities of the organism that situates human awareness in the environment. They are themselves the incarnation of distinctively human awareness. We come to ourselves as thinkers as we incarnate our thought in speech or writing.
The spoken sentence persists in memory, until it is forgotten. Of course, much depends upon the quality of one’s memory. It is memory—good or poor—that allows one to return to the same singular historical event long after it has flowed down the stream of time. But writing rescues memory from its tendency to weaken over time. Memory also implies that the past event, long since flown away, still retains the sameness of objective immortality to which our memory refers and which we attempt to revisit through deliberately employed techniques of recovery.
Writing is an exterior supplement to the native, interior memory which is inclined over time to forget what was said. The Romans noted: Verba fluunt, scripta manent: Spoken words flow, written words remain—a warning by the pragmatists to be careful what you commit to writing, but also a significant observation about the relation of speech to writing.
Writing also changes the scope of the audience. Speech is restricted to the immediate situation of the interlocutors—or eavesdroppers: to the space within which the voices can be heard and the time within which the conversation occurs. But writing opens up to all those capable of reading the language, wherever they might be spatially located and whenever they might read the text for the duration of the time when the material medium supports the text. The same words can be read again and again. But the flux will inevitably overtake the medium. However, these same words can be written again and again by copyists and later reproduced by mechanical means. Indeed, today the living voice itself can be transcribed electronically—thus significantly disambiguating by tonal dynamics what, as written, could remain ambiguous.
Not only the written message sent and received through the postal service, but the very account we are giving is made possible both because of the various levels of structure involved in my awareness and because of the antecedent development of the English language. Language places me from the start into a peculiar space together with others. Those who taught me language brought me out of my bodily point of view as a needy sensing being and into a common set of eidetic structures. Language holds in place the eidetic recognitions and creations of those long dead. It is the system within which all the other systems function, the basic openness of the Whole for a tradition. Each of us lives in it in such a way that we are brought out of our own privacies and into a public space. It is within this space that we carry on all the operations we have been examining. It is within this space that we are able to carry out the sciences that have inter-subjective validity.
8.
Return now to the character of the subject who is carrying on this inquiry. It is a single, embodied subject. As such it is in the midst of a career as an organism that began as a fertilized ovum replete with the unobservable potentialities directed toward the adult stage of a human being. It will inevitably end with the dissolution of the