Individuals, universals, and capacity.

Wood, Robert E.

SENSING PRESENTS TO US INDIVIDUALS. But, though directing us practically, the way it presents them misleads us systematically about the nature of the individuals with which we have our practical dealings and poses serious questions about the status of the universals we use to describe them. We are all quite aware of the consequences in the practical order of unsettling the question of universals. The notion of capacity can overcome the problems involved.

What is it to be an individual thing? If we attend to the immediate evidence provided by seeing and touching, there are five characteristics involved. To be an individual is to be (1) actual, (2) immediately present, (3) spatially circumscribed, (4) in external causal relations with other such actual, spatially circumscribed individuals, and (5) utterly other than the universals used to describe it. Descriptive universals are mental constructions conventionally tagged by naming. Seeing and touching, as individual acts of individual organisms produced by causal connections with other individuals, present us with such individuals. Furthermore, looking at the conditions for seeing gives us a physical-physiological causal account of light propagation and electrical stimulation culminating inside the head of the seer wherein the individual privacy of visual awareness occurs. All the evidence displays the general features of individuals as actual, immediately present, spatially circumscribed, in causal interaction with other such individuals, and utterly other than the problematic universals used to describe them. Thus a common empiricist-nominalist account. (1)

What I intend to do is to reflect upon the capacities in things, most centrally the capacities for seeing and for being seen which together provide the overriding evidence as to the nature of individuals. In so doing, I will present another and, I would claim, fuller account of individuals, which takes into consideration the conditions for the possibility of the account given above and generated out of the evidence provided by seeing. The whole field of sensory givenness is comprised of features both actual and individual, with not a crack of capacity or universality showing. As Sartre put it, the realm of the immediately given is full, like an egg. (2) It is upon the individuality and actuality of the sensorily given that empiricist nominalism bases itself.

I will proceed in two stages. First I will attend to the conditions for the possibility of seeing, which presents us with our typical evidential starting point. In so doing, I will attempt to secure the general notion advanced in Plato's Sophist that the definition of being is the capacity of acting and being acted upon. (3) In the second part I will attend to the capacities involved in giving an account, specifically the capacity for seeing and for intellection. In the first part I proceed downward, so to speak, to a most general notion; in the second part I proceed upward to the specific capacity for "general notions."

I

Begin with the seeing capacity. Though an individual feature of an individual organism, it is not simply individual in the way a seen object presents itself. It is a universal orientation correlative to the kind of objects which it requires. It is oriented a priori toward all those individuals that could actualize it, wherever and whenever they might appear. So if there is the capacity for seeing, there are not simply individuals, but, of necessity, the kinds of individuals in the environment that correspond to it, namely colored objects. (4) Visibility is spelled out in color, necessarily coexistent with extension and correlated with both light and distance from the seer as co-given eidetic features verified every time we open our eyes and look. Thus we have universality, not simply in some abstract construction of the intellect, but in both the universality of the orientation of the capacity for seeing and in the existence of specific kinds of objects, instances of universals--in this case color and its eidetic accompaniments--in the environment. This explains Aristotle's notion that through sense the human soul is, in a way, all things sensible. (5) The way is that of an a priori orientation of openness toward the kinds of objects proper to each sense. The abstract universality of the kind is correlative to the concrete universality of the capacity. So in the notion of the concrete universality of an individual capacity, the distinction and opposition between the individual and universal is aufgehoben, canceled as absolute opposition and yet preserved and synthesized in fact. (6)

What Berkeley would call "the abstract idea" of color is not manufactured by the mind; (7) it is given within the fundamental character of visual capacity even qua individual; it is the a priori horizon of the power. (8) However, it is not given in sensation but only through it by way of reflection. It is verified every time we open our eyes and see. Though we begin with individual seen objects, through reflection upon experience over time our thinking catches up with the horizon within which they all operate: the single concrete universal capacity for seeing correlates to color as the overarching genus aimed at by the capacity.

There is thus, in the case of the seer-seen relation, a duality on both sides of the subject-object relation. On the side of the object, there is the seen individual as instance of the genus color. On the side of the subject, in the act of seeing there is individual activation of the generic orientation of the capacity. In between the two poles on the side of the object we learn to discriminate species and develop theories, such as that of the primary colors red, blue, and yellow, of which the other colors are combinations. What this indicates is that in order to function as seen objects, things have to come in determinate kinds--not yet functional wholes, but what we might call epistemic correlates. Sensory objects, what Aristotle calls "proper sensibles," (9) are further differentiated into kinds corresponding to different capacities of observation.

Now, in addition to its own concrete universality and in contrast to its actual objects, the notion of capacity involves its own nonactuality; it is a possibility of actualization. It is the features of nonactuality and universality that cannot be apprehended by seeing or by any other sensory act for sensory acts always involve manifest individual actuality. (10) Before it is an actual act of seeing, seeing is actually a capacity, a determinate feature of my own being at the level of what Aristotle called first act, determining the kind of process that a given individual organism is and providing its fundamental dynamic capacities. The capacity of seeing is oriented toward second act, toward being actualized by the actual presence of individual visual objects. (11) When it is actualized it displays separate, spatially circumscribed, always actual, causally interactive, individual visual objects. Such an image is not adequate to the seeing capacity, nor indeed to the full reality of the things seen which have their own capacities, among them the capacity of being seen. This involves their subsumption under the generic notion correlative to the capacity. That we might see them, things have each their own capacity of being seen, which entails their orientation to being seen not just by this or that factual seer but by any seer, by the kind of being we call a seer, in all those situations where they might be seen, that is, once again, any time and any place the conditions for being seen are met. The passive capacity for being seen is as universal as is the active capacity for seeing.

Let us take a further step. As the evidence of seeing shows, seeing itself cannot take place without the appropriate instrumental complex of eyeballs, optic nerve, and cortical locus in coherent functional relation not only with each other but also with the illumined environment and the objects manifest through the capacity. Without the instruments there is no activation of the capacities. Just as, if there is no saw made out of hard material, there is no sawing, no matter what skill the carpenter might possess, so, if there are no eyeballs attached to the optic nerve and grounded in the back of the cortex, there is no seeing. (12) The point upon which I want to focus here is that such instruments (eyeballs, ears, hands) have to be grown and sustained by regularly repeatable and repeated unconscious noncognitive processes, activating peculiar capacities in the complex functional totality we call an organism or system of organs. One of the aims of the need for food is to grow the organs that would allow us, in a natural feedback loop, to see the food which sustains us.

The organism is a system, a complex interrelation of factors such that the absence of one factor could destroy the whole. Once one understands the systematicity involved in organic existence, one sees that the observations we make of it are not "loose and separate," as Hume would have it, and that certain generalizations we make about this organic necessity do not admit of falsification. (13) Cut off a head of an animal or crush its heart, and the whole organism necessarily ceases to function. (14) One could not speak of falsifiability here: there is systematic, universal necessity that grounds whatever verification we make through seeing. This would ground a Popperian view of science, as the sum total of those disciplines subject to falsifiability, in the structural features of experience which are not so subject because they are always verified in wakeful experience. (15)

A self-developing and self-sustaining organic system requires peculiar capacities correlative to other kinds of things in the environment, namely the capacities for energy extraction and processing. Once again, qua capacities, they are concrete universals requiring specific kinds of things in the environment, namely the kinds that can nourish the given organism. Carnivores require other animals, herbivores plant life, and plants inanimate features of the environment, specific kinds of things such as sunlight, earth, and water. But certain kinds of animals, certain kinds of plants, and certain kinds of elements are inimical to certain kinds of organisms. That is, each organism requires for its sustenance not just other individuals but the kinds of individuals correspondent to its capacities, just as it is inimical to those kinds that would thwart its development. The sense capacities present kinds of aspects of things; the nutritive capacity requires kinds of things displayed through the sensing capacities.

Amidst all the contemporary talk about the rejection of so-called Platonism which believes in essences, one has to eat, and, indeed, to eat the kinds of things that are nourishing. (Of course, as one does not see color but specific individual instances of color, one does not eat the kinds but only the individuals that instance the kinds.) The evidence for that is irrefutable evidence--irrefutable under penalty of there being no one around to refute or prove or indicate unless that evidence is recognized and lived by. The thinker has thus first of all to be an eater; but to be such involves being oriented, via specific kinds of capacities, toward specific kinds of presentations, namely those that satisfy the needs of the organism. An animal has to be able to recognize features which involve the distinction between the edible and the inedible, the beneficial and the harmful, under penalty of organic dissolution. The theorist who disallows the eidetic continues to exist by reason of being able to recognize instances of the eidetic. One might say, as a variation on a Feuerbachian theme: Primum edere, deinde philosophari. First eat, then think about it--or, unless you eat first, you won't be around to think about it. But only specific kinds of things in the environment can contribute to that.

A further feature of organisms, besides their self-developing, self-sustaining capacities, is their capacity for reproduction. A seeing organism cannot be unless it has been generated by another such organism of the same kind as itself and unless it, under normal conditions, has the same capacity for reproduction in itself. Qua capacity, once again, it requires a specific kind of individual object in the environment, namely a mate of its own species, with which it must perform a specific kind of operation in a specific kind of location (a pretty lame description of sex). The kind is determined, at the level of the species, by the same cluster of capacities in each mate and, at the level of the individual organism, by peculiar gender capacities correlative to the opposite sex.

Organisms then necessarily come in kinds, and for them to flourish as a species, they require specific kinds of things in the environment: not only nourishing kinds but mating kinds of their own species. To be for an organism is to have been produced by an organism of the same kind and to be able to reproduce another of its kind. As Hegel, and before him Aristotle, noted, reproductive capacity is the claim of the concrete universality of the species upon the individual organism. (16) Organisms thus necessarily come in kinds, for that is the only way they can come into being. So not only are there necessarily kinds of individuals correspondent with our faculties, but, to be able to see and act in relation to such things, we ourselves, as organisms, must be generated by one of our own kind and thus belong to a species. Visual observation requires species, both the species of the visual observer and the correlative sustaining species in the environment.

What I have been attempting to do up to this point is to supplement the account that seeing gives of the properties of individuals, namely, that they are actual, immediately present, spatially circumscribed, in causal interaction with other such individuals, and set in contrast to the universals used to describe them. The central insight is this: capacity involves nonactual universality and correspondent kinds in the environment. The seeing capacity that provides the initial evidence requires its own organs and the organ-system that sustains it. Each capacity of that system has its correspondent kinds of individuals in the environment. These kinds, in turn, require other kinds in their environments to sustain them, all the way down to the specific kinds of nonliving elements required for specific kinds of plant life. The kinds are presented in individuals as functional wholes. Each must be of the kind that can act and be acted upon in such a way as to sustain the food chain in the kinds that lead up to the seeing organism. As a function within such perceiving organisms, seeing ultimately requires the reproductive capacity in its parents that brought its organic base into being, so that living things in general must come in kinds. So universality is not merely a construction of the mind; it is ingredient in the capacities of things and in the corespondent kinds of things in the environment. It is ingredient in the nature of organic being as reproductive. It is involved in the conditions for the possibility of seeing, which provides us with our initial evidence as to the nature of individuals. Seeing requires not only seeable objects but integration within a supportive organic system and into an interrelated systematic hierarchy of nourishing kinds as its overarching environment.

The world we inhabit and observe is a world of the encompassing interrelation of things with specific capacities of acting and being acted upon. Each capacity as a universal orientation anticipates space and time as the whole within which it can operate, for its capacities can be activated at any time and any place the conditions for its operation are met. Observed actuality and the actuality of observation both arise out of the specific capacities, the universal orientations of the passively observed and actively observing individuals.

Peculiar clusters of capacities form differing kinds of individuals: for example, the kinds that are gathered systematically in the Periodic Table of Elements or the kinds listed in the taxonomic schemes of organic types. None of them comes loose and separates, but rather they are integrated into the systematic interrelation of inorganic and organic types that constitutes the cosmos within which we exist. Any entity is the locus of concrete universal capacities that determine what kind that entity is. So we can go beyond conscious activity, sensory or intellectual, to consider any real entity under the same rubric, following the Stranger's suggestion in Plato's Sophist that the definition of being is the capacity of acting and being acted upon. Any entity--not just one having cognitive capacities--is not simply spatially circumscribed but involves, through its active and passive capacities, a priori relations to the cosmic whole within which it exists. Hence we see the place for Plato's eidetic realm, the so-called separate realm of the Forms, not in some separate heaven of abstract universals but in what Martin Buber has called "the earth of our bodily meetings." (17)

This moves in the direction of Leibniz who claimed that the least thing has to have inscribed within itself its compossibility with the entire actual universe within which it exists. (18) But I do not go quite as far as Leibniz because my observations concern only the possible causal interactions. Such interactions are precluded by Leibniz's notion of the windowless character of the monads. Further, his monads would include all relations, such as the changing spatial relations between a given entity and the entire universe, and would precontain its whole actual future, not simply the possibilities of causal interaction in which I am interested here.

Now we move to our second part: an examination of the peculiar capacities involved in providing evidence and giving an account.

II

If sense data positivism overlooks the notion of capacity and thus systematically misleads us regarding the nature of individuality in general, it also systematically misleads us regarding the nature of the specific kinds of capacities involved in observation. Now I want to examine the capacity of seeing and to attend to another feature of individuals derived from seeing: their apparent spatially circumscribed character. (19) Let us look again at the account of seeing given by looking. Light sources reflect off of visible objects, pass through the pupils of the eyes and through the lenses that invert on the retina the images carried by light, stimulating electrical movement in the rods and cones of the retina and thus activating the optic nerve which carries the electric impulses to the visual center in the back of the brain where seeing of a noninverted image is said to occur. Seeing then is viewed as an intraorganic event. (20) What else could it be, since seen objects are quite evidently spatially circumscribed, and when one observes someone looking, spatial circumscription characterizes that looker? However, one could not give that account unless each of the items involved were seen precisely outside the organism of the observer. But that means that seeing organisms are not serf-contained in the manner that seeing sees them. Seeing transcends the self-enclosed character of the seen organism. The visually descriptive account explains the necessary conditions for seeing, but it does not yet touch the nature of seeing itself. Seeing is the necessarily presupposed framework within which the seeable appears and which cannot itself appear within that framework because it exceeds it. Seeing transcends the spatial circumscription, the apparent self-containment of the visually appearing organism. Seeing therefore, though grounded here inside my organism, involves a certain sui generis mode of being there, outside my organism. Sense data positivism follows the descriptive plenitude of the seen object and misses the essential expressivity of the look that indicates a kind of absence from that plenitude in the direction of the manifest object. So when we see something that is seeing, we see an actual, immediately present set of moving color patterns belonging to a spatially circumscribed organism. But that organism's seeing is a kind of absence from the plenitude of immediate sensory presence, an absence in the direction of the seen object. When a cat watches a rat, the awareness of the cat is, in a real sense, not simply in the cat; it is with the rat. (21) Here opens up the realm of the interior dimensions of awareness as ways of being with what is exterior. (22)

Further, seeing not only involves the functional correlation of its specific organ system and the supportive nutritional processes, it also requires a functional coherence at the level of sensing itself, a coherence in the field of awareness between its present and past experiences and between the deliverances, past and present, of other sensory capacities in relation to the seen object. The awareness of the animal must be able to recognize the differing presentations of each of the sensory capacities and is thus other than such capacities. In order to recognize, it must transcend the present object given through one of the senses by retaining in the present the past of other experiences from the operative sense and also from other senses. (23) Sensory coherence thus manifests not simply sensory objects but coherently functioning things, some of which are able to see.

The things presented are of the kinds that could serve the appetites for nourishment and mating by the seeing organism. Driven by need, seeing is instrumental to the display of just those kinds of things. Hence manifestation occurs in terms of action. Action is dictated by those needs which lead me to seek or to avoid specific types of things appearing in the field of the senses. Seeing is correlated not only with other externally oriented sensations but with appetite, for seeing serves need. (24) In this function it is necessarily correlated with tactility, for the end of seeing for the organic being is to take in food and to come in contact with mate and offspring. (25)

Furthermore, since seeing occurs in the animal in function of organic need rising to awareness as desire, what we see in the seeing organism expresses not only an absence from the plenitude of sensory presence in the direction of the presently seen object of the animal's awareness; what we see also expresses an absence in the direction of the future of the satisfaction of the animal's desire. The look of the other is not simply sensorily there, fully present; but the full presence expresses the inner orientation of the animal. The future component involved in desire means that in observing the look of an animal, what we observe is a kind of absence from the full plenitude of sensory presence, intending both the immediate presence of things in the environment outside the observing organism and the future fulfillment of its desires. (26) It exists beyond the punctual now in the living now of what Husserl called retentions and protensions. (27)

Functioning as an optometrist, one systematically looks away from the patient's looking as a kind of absence expressed in the overall behavioral comportment and centered in the look. The optometrist zeros in on the eyeball mechanism, all of whose features can be made visibly present to him. But, of course, the aim of optometry is to allow the seer to look away in the direction of the seen and in function of its goals. And as a matter of fact, optometrists shift their own seeing attention back and forth from the eyeball mechanism to the expressivity of the total facial gestalt when they speak to their patients before, during, and after the examination. They themselves are guided in their examination by how the patient responds when asked how the E-chart appears as different lenses are interposed between the eyeballs of the patient and the chart. Themselves seeing, optometrists are concerned with aiding the act of seeing in their patients; but what is focal for them is the observable plenitude of the eyeball mechanism. The optometrist presents in miniature what observational science tends to follow in toto. Such science thereby tends to fall into what I have called the empiriomorphic fallacy, considering all things in the form presented by a sensorily observable object. (28)

Let us come back again to the situation of seeing. I look, and what I see is a smooth, placid desk, separated from my eyes by empty space. But looking in function of the kind of thinking that produces instrumentation presents a different picture. The empty space is full of dust particles, sound waves, air molecules, photons, TV and radio waves--indeed, with irradiations across the whole electromagnetic spectrum. The smooth surface of the podium is only smooth relative to the rather crude sensors in my fingers, and the placidity conceals the fact that it is composed of elementary particles as pulsating centers of energy irradiating their light spectra. Seeing as an organic function carves out a space of appearance relative to the needs of the organism. Not seeing everything is the condition for seeing at all. And the seen presents itself in a way in which it is not. Seeing creates a kind of illusion, a third thing nonexistent apart from organism and object, a new emergent in the world of physical processes and capacities. I take this to be what Aristotle means when he says that "the sensible in act is the sense in act." (29) Aristotle further made what many realists would take as a startling claim, namely that the senses are mostly mistaken. (30) One could easily verify that through vision which necessarily presents us with perspectival distortions. The quasi-illusion is correlative to the spatial point of view that establishes the perspective. The sun looks like a rather small disk; railroad tracks look like they join in the distance; a cube appears larger in the face it presents to us than in its other faces, and the top and bottom edges of its sides do not appear parallel to each other. Furthermore, the horizon within which perspectival color presentations occur is simply not there without a seer. Like a psychic hoopskirt, it moves when the seeing organism moves. Color, perspective, and horizon do not exist apart from perceivers; but that does not make them merely subjective. The horizon, the perspective, and the color are neither wholly objective as naive realism would have it nor wholly subjective as modern accounts from Galileo to Kant would have it. Color, perspective, and horizon appear in a sui generis subject-object relation, a relation of manifestation between the organism and environmental objects, precisely an appearance of the reality of environmental objects but not a presentation of the full reality of those things. Indeed, because of the organic dependency of the appearance, we could say that things appear in a way they are not apart from the appearance. In the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, the use of the language of phantasmata (from phainomai, "I appear") and of species (from specio, "I behold") for aspects of perceptual process underscores the peculiarity of the relation of appearance. (31)

However, the appearance, though relative to the organic conditions of perception, nonetheless does not present us with merely apparent food, mate, and enemies. (32) Because it occurs in function of organic need, the appearance allows us to identify the kinds of things that can support or thwart the immanent ends of my organic being. Nietzsche said that the senses lie but that the lie is necessary for life. (33) So the world of immediate sensory presentation is an organ-dependent construction, stably relating us to things in the environment. A realism confined to such an appearance is what I would call, following Owen Barfield, a "dashboard realism" which conceals as much as it reveals and misleads speculatively as much as it leads pragmatically. (34) Hegel calls it "the hard rind" of the everyday world through which speculative thought must break in order to arrive at the encompassing truth. (35) That phenomenal surface teaches us input and output correlations without any practical need for knowing what lies under the hood and behind the dashboard of sensory observation. But to know that involves a move which situates the functional circle of appearance within the wider circle of full being.

As seeing is taken up in scientific investigation, what appears does so in function of another capacity, namely the capacity to uncover capacity that we have come to call intellect. What makes the intellectual capacity different from the sensory capacity is its inprinciple transcendence, not simply of the supposed self-enclosure of the sensing organism such as occurs in seeing, but a transcendence of the realm of sensory appearance itself even while dealing with the sensory. Intellect is initially discriminated from sensation in that sensing always presents individuals whereas what we have come to call intellect grasps the universals. (36) The grasp of capacity, of universality, and of intellect emerge together. However, this initial discrimination is only preliminary.

The apprehension of the universal is founded upon a more primordial orientation displayed in the judgment that something is the case. The first thing that occurs to an intellectual being is the notion of being: we understand that something presented in sensation is; it stands outside of nothing and shares this feature in common with anything we can encounter or infer. (37) What we call intellect is the capacity for apprehending the notion of being. Involving absolutely everything that is, it also involves everything about everything. Outside being there is nothing at all. It is this orientation toward the fullness of each being that allows us to recognize the merely surface character of sensory deliverances. In a way different from that of sensory capacity, through its intellectual capacity the human soul is all things by anticipating within its horizon of awareness absolutely everything. (38) Though sensation is, in a way, all things sensible, the way is unconscious and is limited by nature to being relative to organic need. It is further limited to what is actual. Sensation is all things sensible at the level of the capacity, not of the act; at the level of the act it is only of the actual and not of capacities. But in the case of intellect the whole of being is implicitly, horizontally, prereflectively manifest in such a way that humans can grasp capacities as such and thus also their correlated universal objects. (39) Thus, included within being is not only each and every individual in its fullness but also the universality ingredient in the correlativity of capacities and kinds that are there in, among, and as individuals. The whole of being involves the interrelation of individual and universal, and intellectual capacity is the locus of the display of that interrelation progressively unfolded as reflection advances. (40)

Orientation toward the whole of being contains within itself orientation toward the whole of space and time. Space and time are given, not as abstract concepts, but as encompassing, though empty, wholes that are progressively filled in by experience and inquiry. (41) This I would claim is the basis for the ability to grasp the universal orientations in things and the kinds that they entail, for the orientations are toward all those features of the kinds of individuals that could activate the capacities, wherever in space and whenever in time they might be found. It is intellectual capacity that allows us to grasp the indeterminate repeatability of the acts and objects of the capacities.

The recognition of space and time as encompassing wholes also makes possible deliberate attempts not only to recall but to reconstruct the past which we never experienced through its traces in the present. It makes possible a deliberate anticipation of the future and thus the projection of goals that we might deliberately pursue. In this case we would introduce goals not given immediately with the appetites naturally correlative with the sensory deliverances. One of those goals might be the apprehension of the nonsensorily given features of individuals given in sensation.

The task for theoretical thought set up by our bipolar structure of immersion in sensory immediacy and reference to the cosmic whole spills over into the task for practical thought. Orientation toward being as the fullness pries us loose mentally from what is immediately given, even and especially the immediate givenness of our own motivational sources. This creates a gap in the causal universe which seeing presents as seamless. (42) Serf-determining freedom stands over against the causal networks within which it is embedded as the materials for its own operation. (43) Freedom is the ability to specify which of the concrete possibilities will be activated among those formed by the conjunction of concrete capacities in the interrelation between the individual person and its environment.

The distance and freedom of intellect allows us to make our motivational sources explicit and to assess them in terms of a growing awareness of the fuller context of the presuppositions and consequences of all our actions. The theoretical task of uncovering the fuller context of our existence is itself one of the practices; in fact it is perhaps the distinctive practice in which we engage as humans. It uncovers the universal orientations toward kinds involved in the existence of the least entity in the cosmos. Its theoria is the serf-presence of the cosmic whole, the place where the whole comes to self-awareness. (44)

This orientation toward full being through partial appearance sets the task for the history of inquiry, working in one direction, with more and more sensorily given data uncovered by following frameworks of explanation that are methodologically self-corrective as they play in relation to the expansion of our hold upon the data. (45) That is the direction of empirical science. Grounded in the permanent verifiability of the eidetic constants of the organic life-world, empirical science advances into the continually deferred full presence of the things that appear within that life-world. But this has to be seen, in another direction, always in relation to the self-presence of the knower, so that a view of the cosmos is required which includes that self-presence. Such self-presence is not an alien intruder into a world of material particulars, but is the locus of the manifestation of the universals, concrete and abstract, ingredient in encountered and encountering individuals.

Theories present different possible interweavings of the interpretive systems of sameness and difference by which we attempt to situate the permanently given organic life-world within the larger, sought-for totality whose presence, deferred, continually lures us on. The system of differences and deferral of final presence is the dual focus of Derridian differance. But deferral and difference are nonetheless anchored in the permanent presence of universal orientations and their correlative kinds. (46) Platonic essences still emerge for reflective awareness within the earth of our bodily meetings. And the horizon of being as lure for intellectual beings permanently grounds that awareness. (47)

Return again to seeing. I am reading, as is the reader, from the script in front of me. The page is an individual, flexible, smooth, thin, white rectangle with neat rows of small, black forms of varying but repetitive unit-shapes. But I take it up in function of an antecedent communally constituted space of meaning conventionally tied to these visible shapes. It is, in fact, the same communally constituted space of meaning which you and I, reader and writer, share in common, namely, the space of the English language. (48) Our conventional language tags the eidetic constants given in each of our sensory fields required for the flourishing of our organisms as it also tags the distinctions supervenient upon that field discovered and/or invented by those who preceded us. In taking up language we are already outside the supposed privacy of our own individual consciousnesses. We each form our own opinions in terms of occupying a position within that space. In reading a paper before an audience, through the generation of sound by my vocal chords one attempts to transfer the identical meanings tagged by the visual patterns on this page to field of awareness of each of the members of the audience. But the audience's coming to occupy the positions the speaker is advancing within this communally constituted space transcends the audile and visual patterns that convey the meanings intended. Among other things, the vastly different audile and visual patterns present identically the same meanings. The individuals that we are as intelligent knowers far transcend what is immediately given in the sensory field. Far from being serf-enclosed, we are only in our interrelation with other humans in the nonsensorily accessible space of meaning mediated by sensation. By the nature of our intellectual capacity that space extends to the whole of what is. (49)

We might gesture here in the direction of Aquinas, who unpacked the implications of the orientation of the mind toward encompassing being. By reason of the unlimited character of the notion of being we come to realize that the factual limitation of beings in experience requires a cause that is not finite and whose infinity permanently sustains all finitude. The upshot of this is that to be an individual is to be perpetually rooted in the infinite encompassing power of unlimited being. (50) But this has a double implication. As Josef Pieper puts it: for Aquinas things are intelligible because they are created by God's thought, but for that same reason they are unfathomable. (51) Here we clearly join with Heidegger's reflections on the mystery of Being. (52) Aquinas was thus no dashboard realist. He was fully aware that "we do not know the essence of a single thing, not even something as simple as a fly," (53) and "we know about God that we do not know about God." (54)

But here we are a very long way from the actual, immediately present, spatially circumscribed, universal-excluding, individual character provided by seeing. Beginning always within the confining horizon of sensory givenness, with the dashboard of our organically functional world, and being always referred to the absolute encompassing plenitude of being, we seek the fullness that is permanently deferred. Such deferral involves not simply the absence of God from the sensory plenitude; it also involves the absence of any encounterable other, rooted in the creative activity of Ipsum Esse Subsistens. But the always verifiable presence of the regularly given, sensorily present other lulls us into ignoring that deferral. We fall into the empiriomorphic fallacy or remain at the level of dashboard realism.

Dashboard realism and its empiricist opponents tend to make us comfortable with the life-world and to forget the mystery upon which it is rafted. The correspondence of our own native orientation toward the fullness of being within the horizon of which we observe and judge what presents itself within our sensory fields--the correspondence of that with the existence of an infinite plenitude of being beyond all finite presentations points us to an encompassing presence which is simultaneously an infinite absence. It is the presence that makes possible a fusion of that infinite reference with the sensory immediate in the experience of theophany; it is the absence that inflames the deepest desire of the creature who lives out of the anticipation of the fullness of meaning. (55)

Looking back by way of conclusion: What does sensation tell us about individuals? That they are actual, immediately present, spatially circumscribed, in external causal relations with other such actual individuals, and utterly other than the universals used to describe them. Sensation so presents things in function of our organic needs. But though sensing leads us pragmatically as organically needy beings, it systematically misleads us speculatively. What it does not directly tell us is that the things it presents are the loci of the concrete universality of their capacities, correlated with the kinds of capacities in kinds of things which can act and be acted upon by such capacities. Universality is not a mere fabrication of the mind but is found in the very individuality of our capacities, cognitive and noncognitive, in their concrete universality, and in their necessary correlates: kinds of things in the environment. Further, sensation does not tell us of the peculiar capacity for transcendence of the observed organism by sensing itself, which is able to manifest what is outside the observing organism precisely as it is outside. It does not tell us of its own organically relative constitutional power and hence of its own in-principle limited mode of manifestation. Further, sensation does not tell us of the peculiar intellectual capacity for the recognition of those immanent universal structures, the necessary interrelation of kinds and capacities. It does not tell us of the communally constituted space of meaning indicated by those visual and audile constructions emanating from intellectual capacity. And it does not tell us of the permanent ontological anchorage of observer and observed in the plenitude of being to which intellectual capacity is fundamentally directed.

Nonetheless, sensing provides us with the permanent phenomenal anchorage that sets in motion our reflective capacity. When we look in function of that capacity, that is, when we look intelligently at the sensorily appearing other, we see functioning wholes activating their various capacities. We come to read their natures in the capacities expressed in their behavior. When we look intelligently at the look of an animal, we see the expression of its intent upon the things present in their environment, anticipating the future fulfillment of biological need. In looking at the signs on this page, one reads the traces of what I hope has been intelligent activity. And in looking at an audience, the speaker sees the expressive look of intelligence--some perhaps slightly absent by the end of a long address, some perhaps critically reserved, some more or less approving, but all more or less within the space of meaning within which the speaker is operating. One reads further the look of intelligent observation and detached appreciation and critique coming to the present from the distance of orientation toward the fullness of being. One reads the expression of an final absence from the plenitude of sensory presence, away in the direction of the fullness of being itself. Indeed, one might even come through seeing actually to experience the least entity appearing within the field of vision as theophany, as the manifestation of God. But all that is not only because, like any animal with eyeballs, one can see, but because, like any functional human being, one can interpret intelligently and sensitively what seeing presents in the nonseeable space of meaning we humans occupy together. (56)

(1) I am, of course, thinking of Locke, Berkeley, and especially Hume, as well as, more recently, the members of the Vienna Circle and their derivatives in thinkers like A. J. Ayer. See Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk. 3, ch. 3, [section] 11; Berkeley's A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Introduction, especially [subsection] 12-15; Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature, bk. 1, pt. 1, sec. 6; Viktor Kraft's The Vienna Circle, trans. A. Pap (New York: Philosophical Library, 1953); and Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic (New York: Dover, 1946).

(2) Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. H. Barnes (New York: Harper, 1965), lxvi.

(3) Sophist 247e.

(4) Hegel saw this clearly. See Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, trans. W. Wallace and A. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), [section] 401, p. 77.

(5) See On the Soul (hereafter, "OS") 3.8.431b22: "The soul is, in a way, all things." He goes on to say that it is all things intelligible by way of intellect and all things sensible by way of sense. The part on intellect we will treat below. For my own general approach to Aristotle which lies behind much of this paper, see chapter 8 of my A Path into Metaphysics: Phenomenological, Hermeneutical, and Dialogical Studies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 155-76.

(6) The notion of Aufhebung is, of course, the central insight of Hegel (see The Encyclopaedia Logic, [section] 96). In fact, the separation between individual and universal exhibits in an especially clear manner the way in which we typically employ the principle of identity. Looking to the things themselves overcomes the one-sidedness presented in sensed actuality. For Hegel, identity-in-difference is the principle of Vernunft that overcomes the abstractness of the products of Verstand (see The Encyclopaedia Logic, [section] 115).

(7) Berkeley, The Principles of Human Knowledge, Introduction, [section] 8.

(8) On the notion of faculty as formal a priori see Karl Rahner, Spirit in the World, trans. W. Dych (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968), 97.

(9) OS 2.6.418a7.

(10) OS 2.5.417624. Hett's Loeb translation omits the crucial energeian in the line: "ton kath' hekaston he energeian aistheysis." He translates, "actual sensation is of particulars." It should read "of the particular and actual." See Aristotle, On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breath, trans. W. Hett (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 99. Did an empiricist focus lead him to overlook this important observation?

(11) OS 2.1.

(12) OS 1.3.407b21.

(13) Again, this is directed against Hume's notion that all our experiences are loose and unconnected. See his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. E. Steinberg (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977), 7.2, p. 49. We could not have experience unless we as observers and as organisms were "tight and connected" in very definite, systematic ways.

(14) That is why Hume overcomes his skepticism when he gets out of the way of a carriage which he knows could crush his skull.

(15) Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Basic Books, 1959), 40-2.

(16) Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Nature, trans. M. Petty (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1970), [subsection] 367-9, 3:172-6; OS 2.4.415b. Compare Symposium 207d, where Eros is described as the desire of the mortal for the immortal.

(17) "Interrogation of Martin Buber," conducted by Maurice Friedman in Philosophical Interrogations, ed. Beatrice and Sydney Rome (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1964), 57.

(18) Monadology, [subsection] 56-7, p. 248; Principles of Nature and Grace, [section] 12, p. 418. Both of these are in the collection by R. Latta, Leibniz: The Monadology and Other Philosophical Writings (London: Oxford University Press, 1951). The term "compossible" comes from the Lettre a Bourquet cited in Latta, 64 n. 2. For a general approach to Leibniz see chapter 12 of my Path into Metaphysics.

(19) For a systematic approach to the field of awareness as permanent prolegomena to any larger philosophic project, see chapter 2 of Path into Metaphysics.

(20) This is a commonplace in the tradition that goes back to Galileo and Descartes.

(21) See Michael Polanyi on the three logical levels involved in understanding animal behavior in The Study of Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 76.

(22) I have tried to follow the notion of interior dimensions so as to suggest a seven-dimensional view of humanness in chapter 2 of Path into Metaphysics by using the model provided by Edwin Abbott in his novella Flatland (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1963).

(23) This was noted for the first time in Theaetetus 184d and picked up in Arisotle's notion of the aisthesis koinone in OS 3.1.425a15.

(24) OS 2.2.413b24.

(25) Theaetetus 184e and following; OS 3.1.425a15. This, I would claim, is why Aristotle in OS, ascending from organism to sensation to intellection, concludes the book with the treatment of locomotion and touch. See OS 3.9-13.

(26) Here we are basically following the direction indicated by Aquinas (Summa theologiae I, q. 75) that in coming to know something intellectually, we move from act to power to essence.

(27) Edmund Husserl, Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, trans. J. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), 50-97.

(28) Path into Metaphysics, 36.

(29) OS 3.2.425b27. Aristotle claims that white and black have no real existence apart from vision but they do have potential existence. See also Metaphysics 4.5.1010b33.

(30) OS 3.3.427b4. Of course, regarding their proper objects, the senses are not mistaken; that is, seeing directly presents color and not sound (see OS 3.3.427b12). And there is functional correction through changing perspectives and through correlation with touch.

(31) See OS 2.7.419a4 and 3.7.431b3 on language for sensation connected with phainomai; see Aquinas, for example, Summa contra gentiles II, c. 76, par. 10 on phantasms and species.

(32) This seems to me to refute at least one way of reading Kantian phenomenalism. Because a thinker must first be an eater, though the way in which the edible presents itself must satisfy the conditions of the senser in order to appear, what appears is not merely phenomenal food but real food--hence a kind of "refutation of idealism." See "Refutation of Idealism," A226/B275 and "The Ground of the Distinction of all Objects in general into Phenomena and Noumena," B296/A236, in Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. K. Smith (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965).

(33) "On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense," in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954), 43-7.

(34) Saving the Appearances: An Essay in Idolatry (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1957), 28-35. Barfield's expression is actually "dashboard knowledge."

(35) Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 1:203-8.

(36) OS 3.5.417b22.

(37) "Id quod primum cadit in intellectu est ens." See Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, 4.2. Note that the use of the dative precludes the coming into the intellect of the notion which would be indicated by the accusative. Being is the first thing that occurs within an intellect; it does not come into the intellect from outside. It the a priori horizon of intellectual capacity. On the features of the notion of being see Bernard Lonergan, Insight: An Essay on Human Understanding (New York: Harper and Row, 1958), 348-74.

(38) This could be correlated with Aristotle's claim in Nicomachean Ethics 4 that nous as intellectual intuition not only grasps the first principles of being and noncontradiction but also the ultimate particular (to eschaton). This would seem to entail that an intellectual act could apprehend itself in its individuality. As Aquinas said, it is not individuality but matter than hinders intelligibility so that an intellectual being can grasp its own intellectual act. See my "Aquinas and Heidegger. Personal Esse, Truth, and Imagination," in Postmodernism and Christian Philosophy, ed. R. Ciapolo (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of American Press, 1977), 227.

(39) I take this to be involved in Aquinas's claim that an intellectual knower implicitly knows God. See Summa theologiae I, q. 2, a. 1, ad 1.

(40) I have tried to work out the eidetic features that are implicit in the recognition that something is the case in "Taking the Universal Point of View: A Descriptive Approach," The Review of Metaphysics 50, no. 4 (June 1997): 769-81.

(41) This is a basic insight of Immanual Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A23/B37-A36/B53.

(42) Though claiming that every experience is loose and separate, Hume also claims that allegedly free human choice cannot escape the necessity involved in the regularity found throughout experience (see Enquiry 8.1, pp. 53-64) nor can divine choice intervene in the course of natural necessity through miracles (see Enquiry 10.1, p. 76).

(43) Hegel makes much of this: it is the pivotal observation in his Phenomenology of Spirit, [section] 337; it is basic to his Philosophy of Spirit, [subsection] 469-82 and especially to his politics in Philosophy of Right, [subsection] 4-29. Sartre is only repeating Hegel in his distinction between the freedom of the pour soi and the determinism of the en soi (see Being and Nothingness, lxii-lxvii and 73-9).

(44) I have tried to present the lines of an evolutionary cosmology by following out the implications of the self-presence involved in the notion of being in my "Being and Manifestness: Philosophy, Science, and Poetry in an Evolutionary Worldview," International Philosophical Quarterly 35, no. 4 (December 1995): 437-47. The analysis extends the notion of capacity back into the anticipations of intellect at the least level and requires a radical transformation of the all-too-common notion of matter.

(45) It is here that Hume is correct: empirical science is ongoing, expansive, and methodologically serf-corrective.

(46) See Jacques Derrida, "Differance," in Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 3-27.

(47) The core of these insights is in Plato's Sophist which presents various networks of sameness and difference carving the life-world in order to capture the sophist. The dialogue goes on to indicate that such carving is guided by the overarching gene: being, sameness and difference, motion and rest (see Sophist 254d). I have tried to pick up on that in my "Self-Reflexivity in Plato's Theaetetus: On the Lifeworld of a Platonic Dialogue," The Review of Metaphysics 52, no. 4 (June 1999): 807-33. Derrida himself defends the priority of the notion of being in his critique of Benveniste's attempt to reduce ontology to Greek grammar in "The Supplement of Copula: Philosophy Before Linguistics," in Margins of Philosophy, 176-205.

(48) This is one of the ways in which Socrates in the Theaetetus shows the insufficiency of the identification of knowing with sensing. See Theaetetus 163b.

(49) This is central to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: Language gives expression to "the We that is I and the I that is We." See Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), [section] 177, p. 110.

(50) Aquinas's famous "five ways" are, of course, in Summa theologiae I, q. 3, a. 4; see also Summa contra gentiles II, c. 52.

(51) Josef Pieper, The Silence of St. Thomas, trans. J. Murray and D. O'Connor (New York: Pantheon, 1957), 53-67.

(52) "On the Essence of Truth," in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. D. Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 133, and "Memorial Address," in Discourse on Thinking, trans. J. Anderson and E. Freund (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 55.

(53) Commentary on Aristotle's De Anima, 1.1.15; Disputed Questions on Spiritual Creatures, q. 11, ad 3; On Truth, q. 4, a. 1, ad 8.

(54) On the Power of God, q. 7, a. 5, ad 4.

(55) These insights are behind the studies I have recently published, Placing Aesthetics: Reflections on the Philosophic Tradition (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1999). See especially the concluding chapter.

(56) In its original form this paper was delivered as the annual Aquinas Lecture at the Institute of Thomistic Studies in the University of St. Thomas, Houston.

ROBERT E. WOOD
University of Dallas

Correspondence to: Department of Philosophy, University of Dallas, Irving, TX 75062.