Can I—Can You—Can We?

Chapter 8 aims to fully address the question: What is the mode of awareness which frames the building of the pragmatic world, and what are its “passive” transcendental conditions? As such, the discussion turns to the issues of the signitive cosmos of space-time-movement, the practical domain, and the abstract versus the concrete. The concepts of significance and understanding are brought to bear on a discussion that relates perception and praxis to kinesthesis and embodiment, requiring an exposition of the logic of analogy. This leads to an explanation of the importance of the vital-kinesthetic, which has, up until now, been obscured by the primacy of Cartesian dualism in Western thinking. The dualism appears between the postulation of a “mind” as a thinking subject, and a body as a material mechanism, which functions as a reaction to specific stimuli. There is no self-initiating movement, which would explore the environment, have orientations or even any sense of what is forward or backward, up or down, left or right. Yet, our kinesthetic body understands all these orientations, and in fact, they become the coordinates of our practical world.

Keywords: Abstract, Concrete, Instrumentality, Kinesthesis, Phenomenology, Universal.