- Existence is in the impression of individual perception; but human groups stay together because individual sensorial impression is homogenized to some extent and regulated, though never completely (because exclusively singular, corporeal reality is the real priming force of the need for some degree of homogenization, in the first place.)
- With this it becomes necessary to postulate physiologically sensory homogenization as the foundation of identity; that is also a form of meaning and rationality, albeit not yet of a conceptual nature.
- And further, also must the relationship between group permanence and the need for nascent identity for individuals be posited, given that human groups can only illusorily be considered a single, whole unity, making the individual’s real belonging to the group and assumption by it only physiologically possible and in regards to sensory perception, but never in a physical sense; evolutionary survival, in the history of human, physical experience, however, has only ever taken place in groups.
- Further, increasingly complex logical posits and elaborations made by the group itself, become mandatory points of support for culturally-bound paradigms of individual self-understanding, making the individual’s possibility of interpretation and rational synthesis of her own sensory experience, artifact and domain of that specific group in regards to which she is in fact an individual. That is, her individuality is a product of her physical and physio-sensory dependence on the group, first and foremost.
- Finally, the changes imposed on human groups by sedentary circumstances, and specifically agriculture, are to be understood as also the cause for the need for more elaborate, conceptually-rich forms of individuality, given that the decrease, collectively, of physical movement by no means implies that the need for physiological and physio-sensory engagement also decreases.
- And it is primarily, then, moral dilemma itself that comes to the aid and benefit of sedentary human groups as a form of physiologically rational and sensory invigoration in compensation for the absence of previous, physiological contexts that were themselves also physical;
- It is this cleavage between the physical and the physiological, then, that forces the need for more physiologically invigorated forms of collective experience that are, however, physically obstructed in the sedentary circumstances of any form of civilization as we know it.
- Moral dilemma requires a different, more conceptually elaborate form of individuality, specifically in the individual´s capacity (that is in fact patrimony of the group) to synthesis her own physiologically sensory experience:
- That the powers of rational—or at least socially congruent —analysis make socially construed, opprobrium-configured individuality in this sense possible for an individual who is no longer sure she can in fact consider herself as appropriately belonging to the group at all, can be conceptualized as a necessity agriculture did not impose on human beings (biological opprobrium originates, phylogenetically, much earlier), but rather exploited primarily as something of a proxy source of physiological sensorial invigoration for individuals, specifically to make the confines of sedentary existence more bearable—that is in fact an essential element of the very functionality of agrarian-based, human existence.
- Such a premise is inexorably founded on the human need for sensory engagement, in addition to the other, oft-mentioned primary needs of contemporary biological theories.
- How is defiance key to individuality? Social Individuality hinges on the group’s rationality of which physio-corporeal individual can avail herself; but social or cultural individuality is not simply the assumption of logical assertions opprobically imposed on the culturally-bound, perceiving subject: it is rather an assumption through opposition to the force of biological opprobrium, more than just compliance with it. Given that the individual can never physically be anything else but what she singularly is, the physiological and physiologically sensorial force of the group over the individual (felt bodily as in fact a vague but certain threat and terror of expulsion, or bodily destruction at the hands of one’s own peers) constitutes an immediate and violent internal conflict with one’s own deeper, core physical entity, for at the root of the power of biological opprobrium is in fact the individual’s will to self-preservation, which can know no compromise whatsoever with regard to its own self-imposition.
- Thus, physiologically sensorial experience and impression (that is part and parcel of biological opprobrium) can be morally real and relevant for the perceiving individual, but not necessarily socially (nor much less politically) real. The force of biological opprobrium is of a physiological and physiologically sensorial nature—it is an intimate part of the individual’s physiological process of mind, but is not in itself an event or even an act that can be publicly observed—and thus can be described as anterior to rational and command thought.
- Towards achievement, then, of greater heights of invigorated tension against the physical and physiologically sensory limitations of sedentary experience, the corporeal individual´s belonging to the group through a culturally rational self can only be understood as ultimately a form of defiance, to more or lesser degrees, and as a latent, sub-rational violence of conformity, due once again to the foundational paradox of the anthropological self in that I am physiologically you—on the opprobrium plane of human group survival—but never physically can you be me.
Physiological Man 