(esoteric / exoteric 12)


             We could say that the error of western philosophy begins in the presumption that cause is One, the formal integer as it expresses itself, backhandedly, in the tacit cogency of non-contradiction. If we begin from the integer, as we necessarily do, since we cannot analyze number until we are more or less fully lodged in the reflexive world – the world of abstraction, from the primitive tangibility of the object and first self-sense on up – then we begin from the first integer as no more than the residual cogency of the body, the abstract inertial premise. But this premise cannot arise from itself.
             As we saw, historically, the analytical integer begins from the unbounded, the wholeness we have been trying to grasp throughout history, from the Milesian ens to the unified field theory. But the whole is the first other as against any premise at all. Therefore integer is not enough. What we are trying to define by assimilation is the first other which produced the One, and this desire for assimilation is both the impulse for and the necessary consequence of the separation. The closed integer cannot stand for it. What the developmental process of Greek philosophy shows, by fact as well as allegory, is that the separation can only appear as a consequence of the sequence of numbers. Abstraction is the act of self-awareness. Substanceless self-witness is impossible. But, as Renaissance philosophy records, a single substance denies cause. How many substances are therefore necessary before the radical separation arises which allows for cause, and therefore for legitimate analysis?
             We can take the Aristotelian ‘discovery’ of the fifth element, with its radically distinctive substance, as simply a quirk of history. But history is also allegory. While we now ‘know’ that the circular motion of the heavens is in fact the empirical consequence of the rotation of the earth, and therefore ‘the heavens’ or aether does not in fact constitute a radically alternative mode of substance to the sublunar world, in which motion persists in a straight line.
             But, historically, this is the first inertial moment, the first definition of inertia. In other words, the allegory becomes the defining condition for substance as we now understand it.

             Let us revert therefore to the conditioning question of solipsism. Does inertia subsist in the world? Or does it subsist in consciousness?
             We have the ‘tangibility’ of the object. But without the reflexive definitions of time and space, the apperceptive response to an ‘external value point’ is only immediate. It does not involve an ‘abstractable’ inertia. The abstraction of inertia is a function of reflective awareness that we reapply to ‘the object’, the value point reflexively redefined as an intellectual as well as ‘tangible’ cogency. Cogency itself only emerges formally, whether perceptually or intellectually, through the reflex.
             Substance as we experience it is a reflexively produced abstraction, an abstraction necessarily incorporating the subtending elements of the sensuous brought into cogency by the Eye. But the fact of substance itself is essentially abstract.

             What the five elements bring to this instance of inertia are the five ‘causes’ necessary for this instance of inertial cogency.

             The One itself as Five is this ‘substance’ mirror, the only formal or substantive nature of the reflective mirror itself.