(esoteric / exoteric 9)

             Our concern with skin, however, does not resolve into the five senses alone, much less into the five senses as commonly presented as a parity.
             I often wonder why we speak of five senses. Sight and hearing resolve into more or less discrete phenomena, as complex as they are anatomically and as physiological processes. But ‘touch’ is a known congeries of sensory functions. Even using our fingertips to define an object involves radically distinct responses. But not only have the other ‘four’ senses ‘emerged’ from touch, a sense of touch stands at the base of our purely subjective or ‘internal’ experience of ‘the body’. Touch involves the whole skin history of evolution, since the involution of the blastula makes the first skin not only the basis of ‘inner’ as well as ‘outer’ sensitivity, but also establishes the substantive basis for all tissue.
             From an evolutionary standpoint, we could perhaps consider this involution or ‘evagination’ of the blastula as a first reversal in the evolutionary process, if we do not consider the transition from self-reproducing molecules to living tissue to be a reversal. Nor does it elicit the peculiar force of some later reversals, although it appears to be the requisite change between a ‘community’ of cells and a ‘body’ proper. But evolution seems to be fraught with reversals which appear to have no purpose apart from what follows. Sexuality, of course, is the supreme early example.

             Why does evolutionary differentiation produce gender? The net force would appear to be in the result rather than the prior cause. That is, gender itself allows for greater differentiation, as if the basic evolutionary stimulus, differentiation itself, were pro- rather than re- active. Does ‘matter’ desire differentiation?
             But, of course, Darwinian incrementalism does not allow us to ask such questions. Or, rather, the Darwinian prepossessions which dominate incrementalism do not allow us to ask such questions. Incrementalism itself, in its basic form, is simply analytical reductionism, and as such does not necessarily include such prepossessions. But, presumably, even here we can reduce the evolutionary process to such tiny increments that we can deflect – that is to say, turn our backs toward – the larger question. Perhaps science is no longer about asking the larger questions.
             But the evolution of gender presupposes a potency ‘in nature’ for ‘the other’. The reversals throughout the evolution toward consciousness – the separation and evolution of both the sensory and the volitional, as well as the evolution of consciousness itself – point precisely toward an emergent function from ‘within’ matter, rather than toward the ‘manipulation’ of a matter – internally essentially monolithic and inert – by ‘accidental’ external events.
             The epitome of this potency for the other, of course, is self-awareness. While self-awareness is socialized, and while we see the development of incipient self-referencing functions of awareness throughout the animal kingdom and particularly in the primates, self-awareness nevertheless represents a pure and, at its inception, a spontaneous human act.
             That is, ostensibly, self-awareness stands outside the evolutionary purview. But the whole of evolutionary awareness points toward this reversal.

             But gender crosses both plant and animal kingdoms. That the evolution of stationary organisms retains and develops in terms of gender separation – although some plants persist in pre-sexual generation – suggests the inherent potency of gender, quite apart from any Darwinian accounting