Innerness and Time

Despite being sometimes called 'peripatetic', Aristotle's characterization of his God as 'unmoved' places him squarely in the Pythagorean-Parmenidean-Platonist tradition of privileging Rest over Motion. In contrast, one of the significant innovations of Newtonian Physics is the centrality of Force and Acceleration to the System. Constant Motion and even Inertia are defined in those terms. But Philosophy has been slow to catch a hint, continuing to treat Corporeality in static terms. With the Kantian revolution, there is the beginning of dynamic treatment of Corporeality, one which two hundred years later continues its slow development. The 'Body' is still frequently promoted as the essence of individual corporeality, whereas from a dynamic perspective, it is an hypostasization, derived from a homeostatic representation used to guide movement. 'Inside the body' is thus, likewise, a derivative representation. Given a static notion of the Body, the 'inside' is what is contained by the periphery, i. e. the epidermis, and 'internalization' is simply a relocation of something from beyond that periphery to within it. But in the dynamic concept, it is not merely that the bodily image is constantly getting reconstructed, but that such reconstruction is one of the phases of Internalization. To put it more generally, in the dynamic concept of the Individual, Inner Sense is a feeling of a part by a whole that is itself a product of that feeling, the static image of which only being subequently generated. The Kantian, and Formaterial, association of Innerness with Time primarily, not Space, is one expression of a commitment to a theory of the Individual as dynamic.