(esoteric / exoteric 8)

             But if we have here denied that cogency is the sensory, what we have denied is that cogency is sensation per se, the atomizing function of the particularity of the nerves, in which every atomic instance of sensation is a function of the yes / no impulse of a single nerve cell; something which of itself cannot possibly imply coherence with any other neural report, whether by association or any other means. Something other than sensation itself, as thus defined, is necessary for ‘perception’. And yet, at the same time, the sensory is the basis of cogency if, by ‘sensory’, we mean that holistic act of ‘self’ we see in the ‘skin’ of the unicellular creature. In this, our language defies us, since we tend to speak of the ‘reactive’ nature of such a creature, tacitly denying it volition, since, of course, it cannot possibly be ‘conscious’. But then we apply the same linguistic predisposition to all ‘sensation’, assuming its essentially passive or reactive essence, a mere electro-chemical response transmitted by reactive sequences. But our example of the unicellular creature shows us that act and react are the same at the first ‘skin’, that sensation and action were originally inseparable.
             It is time to assimilate the Kantian Copernican revolution with the fact of evolution. If ‘logic’ and ‘experience’ share the same origin, it is in the origin of sensation from this primeval ‘skin’ in which action and ‘reaction’, volition and ‘sensation’ are simultaneous and synonymous.

             The unicellular creature tells us that all modes of sensation originate from skin, that skin is the evolutionary basis: the varying sensitivities inherent in skin, its responsiveness to warmth or vibration, for example, evolving into sight and hearing. But the evolutionary differentiation not only does not radically separate the sensory except in terms of the differing sensory ‘objects’: the seen, the heard and so forth; it does not finally separate ‘sensation’ and ‘action’, except in terms of the apparent ‘bridge’, which we ultimately know as consciousness or the witness. While this apparently represents something ‘retained’ at ‘the center’, when viewed from the ‘perspective’ of awareness or witness, i.e., reflexively, it necessarily still ‘contains’ both the sensory and the volitional.
             However, the ‘separation’ between these ‘two sides’ is now apparently ‘real’. And the fact of self-witness is not only apparently this ‘reality’, the real itself now certifies the separation, not necessarily between perception and volition, but in terms of the witness itself.
             While consciousness apparently ‘emerges’ from this context and is somehow still entirely immersed in it, it is also now radically distinct.

             Given the wall of opposing presumption in present intellectual culture, one hesitates to assert that awareness or the ultimate separability of awareness was an original predisposition or potency within ‘matter’, much less a ‘purpose’. Clearly, evolution itself shows that this ‘predisposition’ precludes anything except a probabilistic process of emergence; and therefore no ‘purpose’ in our common sense. And since consciousness, with all its foibles, is the apparent ‘object’ of this process in any case, one necessarily distances one’s self from all the apriori language of ‘believers’.
             But the separability of awareness, not only tacit but radically necessary in the fact of reflective awareness, brings us forcibly back to the categorical subjectivity or solipsism addressed by Kant. But now the dialectic recedes from the shores of logic versus experience and immerses us in the new tidal surge between skin and awareness.