Space is a much-used word with many nuances and connotations, the basic meaning presumably being the physical one of where physical things are located, namely, in space. Space's sister concept is 'time'. Time and space go together like horse and carriage and are treated pretty much on a par, but with space having an edge on time. Time tends to be imagined spatially as intervals from then to then along a so-called time-line. One speaks uninhibitedly of 'points of time' and time intervals between them. It seems easier for our Western mind to imagine time geometrically. Geometries themselves are imagined spatially because (Euclidian) geometric figures are abstractions from the usual, experienceable three-dimensional space. From the very beginnings of physics with the Greeks, time was conceived geometrically, counted along a continuous time-line, and places became positions or points in geometrical space.
In modern relativity physics, time is explicitly cast spatially as the path of light in a four-dimensional space-time. When any physical event occurs, is measured by the path of light from the event to the observing subject or apparatus, any physical event in the cosmos being recorded in space-time co-ordinates (x,y,z,ct).
How does this square with the recast conception of time as three- or even four-dimensional? The tables are turned completely and utterly. The openness of three-dimensional time is entirely pre-spatial, and even space itself is attributed a derivative status. What essences — i.e. what presences and absences in three-dimensional time for the psyche's power of imagination — encompasses far more than the physical, which is endowed first of all with extension, magnitude. Physical entities in traditional ontology are also material. Such physical, material entities with extension require places (τόποι, _topoi_) to be somewhere, and so make room for themselves by taking places. This carries over to temporalogy in which only physical, extended, material essents essencing in time require places.
All other essents presence and absence in the psyche's all-encompassing openness of three-dimensional time, without requiring places, to be interpreted, and hence understood, in some way by the psyche's understanding. Thus, we mortals belong first of all to this temporal openness as the most primordial, and probably most inconspicuous, phenomenon open to our mind. What comes to mind is mostly non-physical, e.g. an everyday matter that has to be dealt with, such as your tax return or the weekly shopping or your child's overuse of digital media. Although physical things requiring 'wheres' or places are involved in such matters, even then they are generally not even physically present to the senses, but come to mind non-sensuously. They are simply part of a situation or a matter to be taken care of. Countless other issues and essents that come to mind, such as the idea of fairness or value, are in themselves entirely whereless (but may materialize somewhere).
The notion of space itself is derived from imagining physical essents in places, say, in a geographic landscape or in a building, and abstracting from the solid, physical things located therein, to attain (perhaps topographical or survey) maps and (perhaps detailed architectural) plans. Spaces such as the open sky over a valley or the empty space in a room result from subtracting physical essents in their respective places and in this sense are on the way to total abstraction. Such abstractions are a poor substitute for countryside or for what Australian indigenous peoples call 'country'. Once abstraction is performed, physically located things can then, turned around, be conceived geometrically as point masses in a Euclidian or some other geometrical space, and these point masses can then be inserted into dynamic equations of motion (perhaps to become military targets for bombing). The essencing of physical things perceptible by the senses taking their respective places at some 'where' or other, however, is existentially prior to the abstract conception of space itself. Through centuries of habituation, today's conventional Western thinking conceives space abstractly, i.e. more or less geometrically (or even mathematically via Cartesian co-ordinates), as the empty spatial openness that provides positions for connected point masses. Physical things are then conceived as the material concretion of such abstract geometrical figures. This is especially apparent in architectural design, but also, say, in how A.I. deployed in autonomous vehicles detects 'objects'. Geometry itself, however, is a discipline whose figures are abstractions from the experience of the physical world with its places where physical essents take their places.
All-encompassing three-dimensional time that is open to us mortals through the fourth temporal dimension is truly all-encompassing, encompassing even (the idea of) geometrically abstract space itself in which physical, extended essents can be conceived to take their places. First and foremost, or primordially, we essence in time. To the present day, our thinking skips over this inconspicuous, all-encompassing, three-dimensional temporal openness, confusing it with the openness of space which, however, is only derivative, d.h. not an elementary, primordial phenomenon. The wide open spaces of a landscape are themselves temporal, essencing in three-dimensional time for our mental capacity of understanding. Physically extended, temporally essencing essents taking their places generate space, rather than conversely: Space does not make room for physical essents by conceding places to them.
The same goes for the world, which essences primordially in time. Three-dimensional time itself encompasses the world, even the universe, since nothing at all can essence for us, i.e. for our understanding mind, without this temporal openness. Modern physics, however, studies the universe under the rubric of cosmology, whereby it reduces the cosmos to being composed entirely of matter and forces pertaining to matter. Otherwise this science has no purchase on its 'object', that is conceived as independent of us 'subjects' and investigated via apparatuses receiving data (principally electromagnetic radiation) from 'out there'. But if the cosmos essences in three-dimensional time, perhaps there is more to it than lifeless matter, i.e. that pre-material, non-physical, whereless essents inhabit the cosmos which we mortals, caught in the hermeneutic cast of our historical age, cannot yet conceive.
Further reading: Why three-dimensional time?
On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.
Movement and Time in the Cyberworld: Questioning the Digital Cast of Being De Gruyter, Berlin 2019 esp. Chap. 2.
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