(esoteric / exoteric 5)

             Value is immediate. Value is indirect.

             Value response is experience. But, in our present experience, the apparent immediacy of value is not self-validating apart from immediate experience. That is, we consider some experience to be invalid. And therefore we assume that apparently self-validating experience requires a non-immediate or ‘secondary’ process of validation to certify its validity, if we intend to utilize it as ‘empirical observation’. That is, for example, as soon as we try to utilize experience in the formulation of ‘scientific’ principle, its basis in principle both requires and embodies this ‘secondary’ validation. From the purely subjective perspective, of course, this secondary validation is necessary because what appears as immediate experience is not. Even before we apply a name to the ‘experienced fact’, its ‘facticity’ is a function of a first order abstraction: the primary or primal moment of self-awareness has already formalized an immediate value response as a ‘tangible object’, something not inherent in the immediate value response itself.
             Precisely, we are aware of it as a value, because it already stands at one remove from ‘actual’ immediacy.
 
             This is the essential problem of contemporary philosophy, although it remains essentially unrecognized in the current literature, academic or otherwise.

             Where does abstraction subsist?

             In this sequence, we have already established that abstraction is synonymous with self-awareness and that the basis of self-awareness is both the formal and the formally historical isolation of the One. But where we left it, this One is still indefinite, since it is both ‘integer’, or the nature of the first formal boundary, and the ‘unbounded’, or the essentially indefinable nature of the One. Paradoxically, but empirically, the indefinable nature of the One is the separation which separates the whole as comprehensive from the One as an abstraction for the whole. And what we have shown here is that both the indefiniteness and the separative are inherent in the One itself. It is this ‘negation’ or ‘nihil’ inherent in the One as both wholeness and separation that has stymied formal philosophy by bringing it up against its own assertions of logic. The principle of non-contradiction formalizes only cogency itself, and not these other premises inherent in the One. But the aggressive nature of the One – culturally, shall we say – forces us into the view of both its inherent indefiniteness as the whole and its assertion of the nihil in the basic or original negation inherent in its origin. Since these premises have been denied by formal philosophy, they have now risen culturally to that paramount place that seems to negate philosophy altogether.
             The One is culturally aggressive because, in its ground, it is the living principle of (reflective) experience. As such, it is the living principle of both consciousness and the body. But the body, as we actually experience it through consciousness, is not what we see in the mirror. In other words, the One is culturally aggressive because it is the inherent nature of the empirical, and the inherent nature of the empirical begins in the nature of consciousness as it expresses itself as volition. Reflective awareness begins in the spontaneous act by which we suddenly reorganize the world as reflectively defined, in the proto-abstractions for self and objects. And this is the nature of act itself as essentially spontaneous, the first and highest expression of body as the reflective instrument of consciousness. This volitional ‘leap’ embodies consciousness for the first time within the frame of reflection. And ‘the One’ of object and self expresses this first understanding and first ‘conscious’ perception of body as act, within the frame of our present self-aware experience. In other words, every ‘conscious’ moment of self or object within our present experience is a paradigm for ‘body’.
             ‘Body’, as such, is the One.

             In other words, the culturally aggressive nature of the One is the expression of the comprehensive nature of the body as the volitional instrument. But the instrumentality of the body is entirely volitional. We have made a false distinction between action and perception. If sensation alone cannot possibly produce perception – since nothing in sensation predicates cogency – perception is as much a function of volition as any bodily action.