THE STRUGGLE FOR SENSIBILITY

1. Of course, there is sensibility within inorganic primacy no less than within organic supremacy, but there, too, sensibility - and therefore negative orders of morality, rightness, binding, etc. - tends to be the exception to the general rule, since the drift of things from organic supremacy to inorganic primacy was - and continues to be - characterized by a sensual bias, as especially applicable to Protestantism and the gradual erosion of religious or, better, ecclesiastical values by their secular counterparts.

2. We who live in the modern, secular world of the early twenty-first century are subject to the prevalence of sensuality - and hence moral wrongness under the banner of freedom - over sensibility in both organic and, especially, inorganic terms.

3. It may even be that sensuality has always, to greater or lesser extents, had the better of sensibility, and that the latter only exists for most people as the exception to the general rule - a rule in which common sense, meaning sensuality, takes precedence over what could be called uncommon sensibility.

4. Be that as it may, and granted that I have in the past acknowledged a dichotomy between the lower-class nature (phenomenal) of common sense or, rather, sensuality and common sensibility, and the upper-class nature (noumenal) of uncommon sensuality and uncommon sensibility, it seems that life is more typified, for most people, as an experience in which sensuality tends to prevail over sensibility, irrespective of their class or, indeed, gender (although I believe females are more given by nature to sensuality than to sensibility, given its hegemonic advantages from their point of view).

5. Instances where sensibility prevails over sensuality, or outer sense, would be more exceptional, given their 'reborn' nature and evident requirement of an introspective disposition, whether physical or metaphysical, and always as something more typifying males than females, who arrive at sensibility - and then more usually on their own necessarily chemical or metachemical terms - by default rather than through direct, conscious choice. (After all, what female falls in love of gets pregnant consciously?)

6. Therefore those males who do arrive at a sensible preference or hegemony will have done so, more usually, at the expense of females, and within the framework of a consciously-upheld, 'reborn' disposition. Obviously such a disposition would be easier or, at any rate, less difficult to uphold in a context or society consciously given to 'reborn' criteria - in short, a Christian or similar manifestation of cultural and civilized intent, whether or not institutionally underpinned.

7. But for others, perhaps the majority hitherto, matters would seem to have been otherwise, and it is difficult to escape the conclusion that a sensible hegemony or prevalent disposition can only be maintained, as a rule, by doing violence against the self, a thing which, for obvious reasons, most people are loathe to entertain.

8. Which is not to say that most people won't endeavour to be sensible, or at the very least pay lip service to the principle of a sensible bias in society at large, but that, even with the best will in the world, they will be unable to depart the sensual rule to any appreciable extent while they remain recognizably human and, just as often, young and, especially, female.

9. Modifications, as I think I have already argued, take time, literally years of pro-sensible pressure, and can only go so far on a human basis should there be - as at present - the lack of an official alternative will such that would strive, systematically and progressively, for man's 'overcoming', to use a Nietzschean type of word, and for his supersession, gradually and purposefully, by post-human life forms with a greater capacity for sensibility.

10. When we look at the present, and the all-too-prevalent inorganic present not least of all, we nevertheless find some progress towards sensibility in spite of the overwhelming basis of things (inevitably) in sensuality. Few of us would be content, these days, to just watch television as though video recorders had never been invented. People may, in the nature of things, watch more television than videos or DVDs, but they are now able, as was not the case before, to opt for a sensible alternative, comparatively speaking, to the sensual rule in connection with inorganic primacy.

11. And what applies to videos in relation to television applies no less to CDs and/or cassettes in relation to radio, or to CD-ROMs and/or DVDs in relation to computers, the latter of which tend, despite sophisticated progress, to represent the sensual rule of things as the basis, needless to say, of the sensible, i.e. CD-ROM, etc., exception.

12. Doubtless it is possible to be able to live one's life in such a way that sensibility, in relation to the above media of artificial sound and/or image reproduction, becomes more the rule than the exception, but I would hesitate to believe that most people preferred to utilize or were capable of utilizing videos, DVDs, cassettes, and CDs to the exclusion of their sensual preconditions in television, radio, computers, or whatever.

13. Yet even the small minority who might be disposed to artificial sensibility to a greater extent than to artificial sensuality would only be living negatively, in relation to one form or another of inorganic primacy, and be subject, in consequence, to negative manifestations of culture and civilization such that served as an artificial or technological parallel to cosmic and/or geologic primacy.

14. Certainly, such people would be more sensible than their television, radio, and basic computer-utilizing counterparts who either lacked the will or the means to regularly play cassettes, CDs, CD-ROMs, DVDs, and such like, but they would still be effectively negative in their commitment to those materialistic or realistic or naturalistic or idealistic manifestations, necessarily artificial, of inorganic primacy.

15. Theirs would be the binding, the morality, the rightness, within artificial terms, of the cosmically and/or geologically sane, not the comparable virtues of the universally and/or personally sane, for whom the sensibility of organic supremacy counted for more than anything else, including the morally flawed sensuality of organic supremacy in relation to the positive freedom of the 'once-born' fools and devils on whom they had sensibly elected to turn their backs, whether literally or in the sense of having gravitated from sensuality to sensibility in due process of being saved and/or damned (according to gender).