THE AXIAL RELATIVITY OF SENSUALITY AND SENSIBILITY

The plebeian success vis-à-vis the noble failure - how typical, one would think, of the age, of contemporary civilization in all its alpha-stemming as opposed to omega-aspiring orientations, its worship of power and glory at the expense of form and contentment, whereby those who are capable of just about anything in order to 'get ahead' (kind of going forward in reverse gear) do so at the expense of those who, more discriminating and even circumspect, would rather be true to themselves, as it were, and stick to what they believe in and know to be right, irrespective of the consequences.

These people exist in a kind of philosophic limbo to the side or, more accurately, on the right-hand wing of the brightly-lit stage upon which the successful plebs cavort and jive, to the best of their bodily abilities ...

But is that really the case? Not entirely. I think I have given a church-hegemonic/state-subordinate axial paradigm stretching from the southwest (plebs) to the northeast (nobs) points of the intercardinal axial compass. What, then, of the state-hegemonic/church-subordinate axis which stretches from the northwest to the southeast points of this compass? Do we not see the opposite there, namely strutting nobs and sedentary if not pedantic plebs? I think we do, and that is why the distinction between nobs and plebs, corresponding to the ethereal and the corporeal or, in my habitual terminology, the noumenal and the phenomenal, is not simply one of sensuality (plebs) and sensibility (nobs), or alpha and omega, but embraces both plebs and nobs at the respective alpha poles of each axis and, by contrast, nobs and plebs at the respective omega poles of each axis, so that we have a polarity between sensual plebs and sensible nobs on the one hand, that of the church-hegemonic/state-subordinate axis, and, by contrast, one between sensual nobs and sensible plebs on the other hand, that of the state-hegemonic/church-subordinate axis, the former axis characteristically Irish in a kind of Gaelic football/hurling polarity, the latter axis no less characteristically British in a kind of rugby union/association football polarity that forever distinguishes the sensual from the sensible, whether on phenomenal or noumenal, corporeal or ethereal terms.

So much, then, for my initial contentions!