Abstract
This chapter explores foundational issues in the philosophy of time and space by comparing the phenomenological contributions of Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka and Peter Byrne Manchester. Each of these two philosophers have revived an ancient paradigm for thinking about problems of continuity in the philosophy of space and time. Peter Byrne Manchester’s 2005 book, The Syntax of Time: The Phenomenology of Time in Greek Physics and Speculative Logic from Iamblichus to Anaximander—the second in the Brill series Studies in Platonism, Neoplatonism, and the Platonic Tradition—traces Husserl’s phenomenology of inner time-consciousness back through Plotinus to Aristotle’s philosophy of time, and thereby reconnects its problematic to the most archaic origins of philosophy in the Presocratics. Through the philosophical reconstruction of an ancient worldview on the basis of an insight about the ordering principle of time as a logical syntax, Peter Manchester uncovers a neglected ancient doctrine called spherics (sphairikē, or sphairikon logon), which has deep implications not only for time but for all the dimensions of experience. He names his guiding figure the Sphere of the All, a formulation belonging to his ancient sources. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s phenomenology of life also recognizes a previously unnoticed syntax. For her, it is the intrinsic functioning of life, which she elaborates in her phenomenology of life as ontopoietic process. Her extensive account of life’s inner-workings yields a phenomenological cosmology of multiple spheres of being grounded in a “great vision of the All” (Tymieniecka 2000, 643), much like Manchester’s spherics. The convergence to similar frameworks arrived at independently by these two philosophers is a philosophical synchronicity due to the teleology at play in their phenomenological thought, common to multiple philosophical cosmologies, but what is more remarkable is the convergence of their specific functional systems and metrological terms. This convergence arises from the pursuit of an ancient and perennial cosmology rooted in a deep synthesis of order and measure. The ancient intuition that the language of God is the language of mathematics plays a special role in classical phenomenology, and the recovery of the doctrine of the spheres represents a new contribution to the synthetic and geometrical side of this intuition. By arriving at a synthesis of the most fundamental ontological units in these two systems, a new paradigm of speculative cosmology and transcendental logic emerges from the paradigm of the sphere.
Thought builds on time… on many scales.
(Peter Manchester, Unpublished Introduction to The Syntax of Time)
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Notes
- 1.
Tymieniecka engages the autopoietic theory in Analecta Husserliana volumes 60, and 100, and other contributors to Analecta Husserliana have also compared ontopoiesis with autopoiesis, for instance Daniela Verducci and Elisa Tona. See also my own study on the topic of the calculus occluded by Maturana and Varela’s theory, “Ontopoiesis, Autopoiesis, and a Calculus Intended for Self-Reference,” forthcoming in Analecta Husserliana.
- 2.
World order: the constant, intrinsic pattern of organization, whose presence is arrived at conjecturally through “structurally rooted indications concerning the relations… to the world order” (Tymieniecka 1966, 21).
- 3.
The technical details of the mathesis synthesis are inspired by two systems: George Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form and Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s “original geometry.” The right-angle bracket of the ‘marked state’ operator (the ‘mark’ or the ‘cross’) in George Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form (Spencer-Brown 2008) guides a unified mathesis, but this consideration is beyond the scope of this presentation. The iconic logic of Spencer-Brown’s calculus of indications is a void-based system that begins by drawing a distinction (“the first distinction”) in an otherwise unmarked state. The initial consequences of this fundamental operation of crossing the void yield the two laws of form, the calculus of indications. These indications of the first distinction are signs that synthesize the construction of a universe, called the marked state, or simply the form. The laws at this level are called the primary arithmetic. The next level is distinguished by the introduction of variables, and this is called the primary algebra. Within the primary algebra a new calculus grows inside the calculus, and this is the re-entry of the form into itself, which we experience as the fifth crossing or fifth eternal order. The five eternal orders correspond to the four dimensions of experience, plus the void. Husserl’s early work on manifolds and syntaxes sought just such a universal laws of form in the context of the widest sense of a mathesis universalis. Husserl’s theory of formal manifolds and Tymieniecka’s work on the universal world-order is vindicated by this achievement of a void-based eidetics.
- 4.
The other system is Fichte’s “original geometry.” In his geometry, the archaic construction “UnendlichEk” is rendered by David W. Wood as “infinite polygon” (Wood 2012), but it could also be translated ‘unending angle,’ comparable to Mahnke’s allmittelpunkt. Fichte’s “living and active self-consciousness” replaces a perceived “rigid and lifeless formalism” (4) of analytic geometry, and we shall follow the same spirit here. The working-out of a rigorous deductive system of geometrical elements gives the prototypical form of a general spherics in a way that is, I imagine, more in line with Proclus’ noetic theory of the geometricals than Euclid’s lost Sphaerica (judging by the formalism of the Elements) because it expresses the geometry of life. Seeing a point from another point cannot get to the heart of being a point, on account of the extension of experience. As Spencer-Brown puts it, being seeing being seeing being seeing being cannot see itself without going half-blind, the blind side being the future. The ontological procession of dimensionality characterizes living processes, that is, all experience. Inter-objective relations give no insight as to the synthesis of life, and neither does pure analysis. Scaled to our world, a living geometry calls on us to find a way to explore other dimensions and other worlds—the other spheres of being.
- 5.
Manchester’s work on the noetic triad (Manchester 1992) as prefiguring the doctrine of the trinity and expressing the schema of participation of the one and the many should be researched along with his insights about the noetic circle in The Syntax of Time (Manchester 2005, 149), yielding a real “engine of participation” (134; Manchester 2002, 81), the engine of the vehicle of the soul, the ochema pneuma. For my own part, triangles and circles are never alone, always dynamic, and the schema ochema is the circular activity of the original angle, which is not a closed form without the circle, but always indicates three values anyway; the marked state, the unmarked state, and the distinction. The construction of stereometric form in the Timaeus (53d–55c) can be seen as a sphere-packing operation if the constituent triangles are understood to be the angles signifying the centers, radii, and intercoherence of spheres.
- 6.
See Gaiser (1963). For an overview of this doctrine with original sources, see Hans Joachim Krämer’s (1990) Plato and the Foundations of Metaphysics: A Work on the Theory of the Principles and Unwritten Doctrines of Plato with a Collection of the Fundamental Documents (trans. John R. Catan), and the 2012 volume, The Other Plato: The Tübingen Interpretation of Plato’s Inner-Academic Teachings (ed. Dmitri Nikulin; Nikulin 2012).
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Dible, R. (2023). Modulation to a New Key in The Syntax of Time: Peter Byrne Manchester and Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s Common Telos of the All. In: Hornbuckle, C.A., Smith, J.S., Smith, W.S. (eds) Posthumanism and Phenomenology. Analecta Husserliana, vol 125. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10414-5_2
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