Why three-dimensional time? is a question that is mostly prefaced by the question, What is three-dimensional time?, simply because the very notion meets with perplexity everywhere and, among the intellectual elite especially, very quickly with dismissal. Why? Because the phenomenon of three-dimensional time is taken as the starting-point in the attempt to go back to scratch — da capo — to revise our Western thinking. This upsets well-established ways of thinking, is strenuous and often leads to dead-ends that require steps to be retraced.
Any attempt to rethink elementary phenomena da capo will meet with massive resistance, because old habits of thought, with all their uninterrogated preconceptions and prejudices, are tied also to deeply entrenched vested interests, starting with preserving one's own status and identity, one's whoness.
Taking three-dimensional time as starting-point amounts to claiming that it is the most elementary phenomenon implicitly already invoked when trying to think through any other phenomenon. This claim can only be made good by actually undertaking the attempt to think through how our phenomenal world hangs together precisely through conceptual interconnections among key elementary phenomena, starting with: what is the conceptual relationship between time and movement. Such thinking through (διάνοια) may be called dialectic, a way of thinking, talking-through, discoursing, discussing practised already by Plato with respect to key elementary concepts but, famously, also much later by Hegel, who learned much from Plato's dialectic.
I have already published a book* undertaking the attempt to think through da capo from a concept of (the phenomenon of) three-dimensional time, so there is a danger of merely repeating myself. To avoid that, it is sufficient here to present theses that articulate salient aspects of my attempt.
i) The phenomenon of three-dimensional time is readily accessible to anyone who takes the trouble to look at it, to ponder it, providing from the outset potentially a radically different way to think about the human psyche and mind that actually has to be carried out.
ii) The human psyche is conceived as belonging to the openness of three-dimensional time, which provides the initial conception of (mortal) life. The psyche's openness to the world is no longer primarily mediated by the bodily senses in the temporal dimension of the present as has traditionally been the case with sense perception (αἴσθησις).
iii) The mind's movement within all-encompassing three-dimensional time already heals the split between subject and object that is the hallmark of thinking in the modern age, for there is no outside to time and hence no 'external' world vis-à-vis an 'internal' world of consciousness.
iv) Healing the subject/object split amounts to rehabilitating Parmenides' insight that thinking and being belong together (τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἐστίν τε καὶ εἶναι Frag. 3), putting it on a entirely new foundation, because 'being' now means 'essencing' in all three temporal dimensions. Now 'minding' and essencing belong together. 'Beings' become 'essents' essencing in the openness of three-dimensional time by presencing and absencing. What has traditionally been investigated as ontology now becomes temporalogy, an investigation of the modes of essencing of essents in three-dimensional time.
v) Physical movement of material entities loses its privileged position as the paradigmatic kind of movement from which traditional one-dimensional time is counted. Kinds of movement other than the physical, material come into view. Matter no longer serves as a self-evident basis for thinking, as in the modern sciences.
vi) Time is no longer derivative of physical movement, but rather conversely, all the different kinds of movements happen, or 'essence', within the all-encompassing openness of three-dimensional time. Linear time counted off physical movement turned the Western mind and world upside down from the very start.
vii) Traditional ontology implicitly presupposes physical movement as paradigmatic, whence the dominant ontology of physical movement was developed and generalized by sleight of hand to other kinds of movement. Different kinds of movement other than the physically material require their own ontologies, or rather, temporalogies of essencing essents.
viii) The cause-effect link ubiquitously assumed in modern science, that goes along with the one-dimensional time-line, including a cyclical one-dimensional time-line, loses its self-evidence. Movement in three-dimensional time is less constrained, freer, since the three temporal dimensions are independent of each other, but dovetail.
ix) With non-physical kinds of movement coming into view, the concept of matter is relegated to its proper place, and non-material kinds of movement beyond the purview of the modern sciences given their due. On the whole, the psychic-mindful pre-material comes into view.
x) The hoary mind-body problem can be taken on from a completely different angle, since mind and body are no longer separate, but rather, the body is within time and thus in the mind which, in turn, is conceived as the understanding faculty of the psyche. How body and mind interplay with each other is no longer restricted to the temporal dimension of the present, but attains a further intricacy by paying heed to the other two temporal dimensions.
xi) The psyche is no longer thought as embodied, but rather the body as empsyched and thus entimed. Empyschment entails that the body is alive precisely through aspiring to partake, via the psyche, of the openness of three-dimensional time.
xii) Phenomena of deconcealment and concealment associated with truth (ἀλήθεια) have to be rethought paying due attention to the three-dimensionality of time, since they no longer occur solely or primarily in the present.
xiii) How we mortals sociate with one another in society is a kind of movement in its own right, different from physical movement, requiring its own temporalogy. The sociating interplay is a one of ongoing mutual estimation.
xiv) Mortals' economic sociating in an historical kind of economy called capitalism (our own age) also requires its own temporalogy that takes into account both the character of the competitive gainful game, in which we mortals are all players, and the underlying, hidden, sociating Medium through which thingified value endlessly accumulates, or valorizes.
Further reading: On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo* De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.
