(esoteric / exoteric 6)

             My first impulse against academic philosophy began with my first and only philosophy course: ‘modern philosophy’ as taught by an epitome analytical philosopher and Humean scholar. I have not only detested Hume ever since, I have always assumed his ‘philosophy’ was erroneous. While solipsism requires that all experience is necessarily a ‘representation’ in consciousness, Hume’s definition of experience negates experience, since nothing whatsoever can be experienced from sensation as he defines it. That is, if his imputation of validity to ‘the sensory’ alone is correct, representation itself cannot appear in consciousness. He denies any validity to abstraction – that is, to ‘inference’ – which, being the necessary condition not only for analysis, but for ‘representation’ itself, his skepticism not only negates ‘matter’ and ‘mind’, it denies awareness and experience as well. ‘Representation’ requires that perceived objects be assembled from the sensory; and nothing in sensation itself, which is totally atomizing, could thus produce perception. Inference itself is the necessary condition for perception.
             What Hume does allow, however, is feeling. And he asserts that we can construct a valid moral framework on the basis of feeling or emotion alone, as the grounding orientation for social transaction. This, of course, is the historical condition for the evolution of the Kantian ‘categorical imperative’ within his framework for ‘practical judgment’. But neither Kant nor Hume takes this question back to its radical conundrum. Both speak of ‘feeling’ primarily as ‘emotion’, which, while not altogether a reflexive category, is necessarily a reflexively defined, more or less whole body response.
             Thus far, we have distinguished between the immediacy of value response and the primitive moment of reflection in which the spontaneous value response begins to appear as a cogent perception as against the inherent cogency of the witness, the most primitive instance of the reflex, prior to the formalization of ‘object’ and ‘self’. In this instance, ‘value’ itself begins to emerge as a potential experience, but obviously has no discreteness in its own nature. And it is only when ‘value’ has emerged as a ‘fact’ which is ‘simultaneous’ with ‘object’ and ‘self’ that we can assess it in terms of cogency, the discrete nature of the value.
             Prior to that point, the value itself can only have been, or be defined as, a feeling.

             It is this function of immediate value response as a feeling that stands at the base of Hume’s assignment of value to ‘the sensory’. But, obviously, his assignment is erroneous. The value feeling appertains to the representation precisely in terms of the value response which is the representation, quite apart from its specific ‘sensory’ content. The value response is not only the validity, it is the representational act that ‘assembles’ the perception in its most primitive form; and it is the simultaneity of feeling and act; and hence the simultaneity is precisely the sense of validity which ‘attends’ the act.
             Therefore, the validity itself, in its most ‘primitive’ form, is already an ‘inference’ or inferential basis, a ‘reference’ to the instrumentality of the body as the ‘instrument’ of sensation, since ‘sensation’ as such is essentially a whole body response, the basis of the act of consciousness. And while, clearly, the context for this response is the ‘field’ of sensation, the field of sensation is first of all defined by the instrumentality of the body. Sensation is of the body, and not first of all of the world. That is, touch, sight and so forth are first of all functions of the body. If we have cited the cogency of response in the unicellular creature prior to the development of the nervous system, we could say that we are first of all pointing to ‘skin’, since, from an evolutionary standpoint, all of the senses originate from this ‘skin’, not only as the defining condition for ‘cell’, but also, at that evolutionary point, as the basis of ‘act’ or ‘response’. Skin is not only first cogency, it is also the premising instrument for both volition and perception, and ultimately for consciousness itself.