22 August 2025
21 August 2025
Devastation of the Earth
The horrendous consequences of global climate change, along with other calamities such as plastics pollution, are becoming more apparent every day. Its deniers remain stalwart in their (self-interested) denial. Huge efforts to make a transition to so-called sustainability make headway and also suffer setbacks from fierce resistance. Powerful, effective opposition is led by profit-seeking corporations and national states with their 'developed economies'.
Well-meaning, concerned scientists work hard to present the undeniable facts of climate change. They gather the empirical evidence, interpreting it through well-established laws of physics to enlighten both politics and the general public. The opponents do their best to present 'alternative facts' that downplay the threats of climate change or deny it altogether. They are the stooges of another, unspoken, non-physical global law of movement. Only the profit-making interests of certain big players in the gainful game are visible. If only their interests could be contained and curtailed by appropriate political action on all levels from the local to the global! That would be democracy in action, progressives say.
This amounts to whistling in the wind so long as the underlying, hidden global law of movement in its own Medium remains unknown. Due to profound ignorance of the law of movement of the global economy, the facts on the surface, although modelled correctly, misinterpret events in their truth and therefore propose illusory or makeshift remedies. We continue to live and act blithely in the untruth. The empirical-positivist thinking of modern science is unable to even diagnose our dilemma, to reveal its truth. It is entirely oblivious and essentially blind to our toxication and intoxication by the Medium that enslaves us as free players. Spellbound by the illusion that we humans are free individual subjects acting collectively through 'our' democratic institutions, it is already captured by the status quo and obliged to dismiss any thinking that delves deeper than the facts on the surface as ideological.
The tatters of philosophy remaining after the onslaught of empiricist positivism are engaged in a scholarly game of tiddlywinks among positions concerned inter alia with ethics, normativity, history of philosophy, defence of 'our' democratic values, including fair play. The core value of liberalism, viz. fairness, is rendered hollow by the Medium, since, despite the best efforts to devise norms and laws to implement and ensure fair play, it is thoroughly undermined, subverted and trumped by the Medium. The Medium dictates its terms and conditions (e.g. ruthless exploitation of mineral resources, containing (wage-)inflation) for its continued successful valorization, upon which all seems to depend (e.g. to 'create' jobs). The capitalist agents of the Medium's valorization, aligned as they are with 'conservative' politics, are always at an advantage, since they stand for 'growth' and promise prosperity.
Who or what is the culprit responsible for the ongoing devastation of the Earth? 'We' humans in the so-called 'anthropocene'? Due to our 'technological progress', as proffered by so-called 'philosophers of technology'? Are these interpretations of our dilemma seen through as woefully inadequate? The question, who we are as humans, demands that the question of whoness be insistently posed. Today's degenerate philosophy is unable to even understand the question, having long since given up even on the question of whatness. How, in view of the ubiquity of the Medium as universal medium of sociation (Vergesellschaftungsmedium), have we been cast as humans in the present historical era? As merely more or less free, as more or less unfairly treated players in the global gainful game? Is that what the so-called Free World amounts to? While the Earth descends ever deeper into utter degradation?
Further reading: Three laws of movement (again).
Social Ontology of Whoness: Rethinking Core Phenomena of Political Philosophy De Gruyter, Berlin 2018.
Thingified value begets individualized freedom.
16 August 2025
Life, death, degeneration (temporalogically)
What is life?, a question related to the question: What is the psyche? Aristotle answers the former question by answering the latter. For him, the psyche is the eidetic 'look' or εἶδος of a physical body capable of living, its very essence or whatness, which he expresses in the formula that a living physical body has its starting-point for movement and stasis within itself. This having of such a starting-point is its entelechie (ἐντελέχεια) or perfected presence as a living physical body. Aristotle's gaze is thus directed toward such physical bodies that can move themselves, animate, empsyched things (ἔμψυχα) in distinction from physical bodies that are not so endowed, i.e. inanimate ἄψυχα.
Only physical kinds of movement are therefore pertinent, which for Aristotle comprise four kinds or ἔιδη: change (μεταβολή) of i) what, ii) how, iii) how much and iv) where, i.e. i) progeneration, ii) quality (sense perception e.g. hearing-not hearing; sleeping and waking, activity and inactivity), iii) quantity (growth and decay), and iv) locomotion/mobility. For Aristotle, only physical bodies capable of such self-movement can partake of life.
Restricting consideration now (temporalogically) to human living, what about other kinds of self-movement, i.e. those of the non-physical variety? In the preceding post I have already spoken of the movement of the mind as the psyche's capacity to move freely throughout three-dimensional time, a degree of freedom that material, extended, physical things do not enjoy, since the mind is thoroughly pre-physical, unencumbered by matter.
Or, to take another kind of movement: what about the movement of interplay between and among mortal humans when they sociate with each other, mutually estimating who each other is? Is that not their social living? Interplay is a kind of movement that eludes efficient-causal explanation within the bounds of a tacit ontology of productive movement. This, of course, does not prevent sociology and social psychology from fabricating countless explanatory models based on endless empirical research to account quasi-causally for social behaviour.
There is yet another kind of self-movement to consider, since the self-movement of life is only the converse and complement of the self-movement toward death. What does mortality mean for us humans? Do we die only when, through decay, the physical body loses its self-movement? Which kinds of self-movement? The loss of mobility, for example, does not equate with death, nor even the loss of sense perception. How about loss of movement of the cardio-respiratory organs? If machines can maintain the functioning of the cardio-respiratory organs artificially, does this still count as living? After all, it is doubtful whether lungs and heart that cannot move themselves, and are thus no long empsyched, are still living.
Does death coincide with the loss of movement of the brain, i.e. the organ employed by the mind for mental movement? It is at least plausible that the mind loses its freedom of self-movement in three-dimensional time when its physical organ is defunct. Furthermore: is there the possibility of mental life after the physical body dies, i.e. is no longer capable of self-movement? Such a possibility seems to lie beyond the realm of human experience. Whose mental life could it be after death? Conversely, is there the possibility of mental death (e.g. coma), while the physical body lives on? Can mental movement, i.e. thinking, degenerate qualitatively, without impairment of brain function, e.g. through exposure to mass media and the cyberworld?
Mental movement through three-dimensional time, i.e. imagining, would seem to be the freest of all human self-movements and probably also the most potentially deleterious. Why? Because imaginings can become untethered from any phenomenal touchstone. Opinion, belief, conviction rely upon an imagination that is more or less careless, fanciful, undisciplined in interpreting what comes to mind. Does the freedom of the mind degenerate into arbitrariness, caprice, prejudice and dogma when thinking does not bother to carefully interpret the phenomena, to at least establish the correct facts as best we can? (Even though the truth of the phenomena thereby remain concealed.)
Presumably it was the freedom of movement of the imagination that occasioned Kant to subject it strictly to the rules of understanding when revising the first, A edition of the Critique of Pure Reason of 1781 to produce the second, B edition of 1787. In this way, the superiority of the logical mind was reasserted and upheld. Kant's logical rules of understanding, however, are fashioned after the Newtonian laws of movement of physical objects, and these are laws of continuous movement in one-dimensional, linear time conceived as a succession (Nacheinander) of now-instants. The so-called superiority of human rationality is thus maintained at the cost of a massive petitio principii, or begging of the question, since the power of imagination (Einbildungskraft) is the prototype of three-dimensional time as inadvertently conceived by Kant within the strictures of his subjectivist metaphysics. Kant's subsequent suppression of the imagination's role amounts to a suppression of the truth of the phenomenon of three-dimensional time.
A similar petitio principii is performed when it is conceived that the mind moves, or at least rationally moves, according to syllogistic rules of logical inference. This dogma opens the way to conceiving mental movement as constrained by a series of if-then rules, i.e. as a kind of computation, that then can be adequately imitated by a Universal Turing Machine. Since any computer whatsoever, including those running A.I. algorithms, can be conceived, in principle, as a concatenation of Turing machines, nothing then prevents our believing that the algorithmically steered cyberworld, although patently artificial, nevertheless faithfully models our human mind so that, conversely, we (mis)conceive our mind itself as some organic, 'wet' kind of computer (to wit, the brain), thereby suitably degrading our self-conception.
If free mental movement is at the core of our mortal animation, and if this mental movement is (mis)conceived (hermeneutically) as computation that can be replicated by A.I. algorithms running on ever more powerful, energy-hungry, inanimate computers, have we thereby already cast ourselves as the living dead? What's the remedy? Think again! From scratch.
Further reading: The human psyche (temporalogically) (previous post).
Aristotle De Anima (On the Soul).
Social Ontology of Whoness: Rethinking Core Phenomena of Political Philosophy De Gruyter, Berlin 2018, Chapter 5 'Ontology of Exchange'.
On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.
Immanuel Kant Kritik der reinen Vernunft 1781/1787.
'Turing's cyberworld of timelessly copulating bit-strings' 2012.
'Turing's Cyberworld' in Information Cultures in the Digital Age: A Festschrift in Honour of Rafael Capurro Matthew Kelly & Jared Bielby (eds.) Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2016 pp. 65-81.
'Algorithmic Control of Movement in Time: Abolishing even our selves ourselves' in Kinder und Jugendliche in der Krise: Gegenwärtige Herausforderungen und neue Perspektiven Rainer J. Kaus, Hartmut Günther (eds.), transcript Verlag, Bielefeld 2025 pp. 219-233.
Movement and Time in the Cyberworld: Questioning the Digital Cast of Being De Gruyter, Berlin 2019.
09 August 2025
The human psyche (temporalogically)
300th post
Psyche according to Aristotle
What is the human psyche? The modern empirical science of psychology does not confront itself with this question, but contents itself with a quick definition such as consciousness or cognition and, more recently, with the dogma that these latter are somehow generated by material, neurological brain processes.
For deeper questioning of the human psyche, we have to return to Aristotle's De Anima (On the Soul), if only because his investigation laid the groundwork, i.e. the foundational concepts and way of thinking, that has governed Western (and today global) thinking on the psyche, even, unknowingly, on modern psychology.
After reviewing and criticizing the thinking of his predecessors in Book I, Aristotle starts anew to pursue the question, "what the psyche is" (τί ἐστιν ψυχὴ 412a3), a question that cannot be answered without understanding fundamental concepts from Aristotle's Metaphysics. Here I will have to assume a knowledge of these concepts. His investigation proceeds in a number of steps to find the psyche of "physical bodies" (σώματα...φυσικά 412a12f) that "have life" (ἔχει ζωήν 412a13), and is thus wider than the question concerning the specifically human psyche with which I am concerned here. Living bodies for Aristotle comprise plants, animals and humans as a special kind of animal.
The first answer deems the psyche "to be an essence as the 'look' of a physical body having the potential/ability to live" (οὐδίαν εἶναι ὡς εἶδος σώματος φυσικοῦ δυνάμει ζωήν ἔχοντος 412a20f), whereby this eidetic 'look' is the body's "having its end" (ἐντελέχεια 412a10) or "perfected presence" as living. (A non-living thing such as an axe, for example, has the eidetic look and perfected presence of something that is good for chopping.) This perfected presence of the psyche accounts for a living physical body's both "sleeping and waking" (ὔπνος καὶ ἐγρήγορσις 412a25). The "ability to live" is further specified as having organs (ὄργανα 412b1) which is exemplified by a plant (a living physical body) having roots in analogy to the stomach (412b4) that enables nutrition.
The general definition of the psyche is then given as the "essence/whatness of such a body" (τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι τῷ τοιῳδὶ σώματι 412b11) with organs, which amounts to "having the starting-point/principle of movement and stasis within itself" (ἔχοντος ἀρχὴν κινήσεως καὶ στάσεως ἐν ἑαθτῷ 412b17). Note that the psyche for Aristotle is an eidetic 'look' or 'idea' formulating the principle of self-movement of living bodies, and not a material cause (αἴτιος). The emphasis is on understanding what life is, rather than trying to causally explain it — especially not from material causes.
This concept of psyche applies to the living physical body as a whole and also to its parts. Aristotle provides the example of the eye as a bodily organ, whose essential whatness as organ of a living body is its "eyesight" (ὄψις 412b19), i.e. its ability to perceive visually. The eye is endowed with such psyche even when it is closed and cannot see, just as a living body is still alive even when asleep, i.e. 'dead to the world'. The organ of sight in this case is an organ of sense perception (αἴσθησις) that enables an openness to and receptiveness for everything presently visible in the world. Such sense perception is necessary for a living physical body in order for it to orient itself and move itself in its environs, and the bodily organ of the eye enables such self-movement characterizing for Aristotle what life itself is, and the role of the psyche as the essence or whatness that enables life, in this case, the sense perception necessary for life.
Temporalogical conception of the human psyche
What does this entail for the attempt to conceive specifically the human psyche starting from the elementary concept of three-dimensional time? The conception of life in this case is restricted to that of human life. The psyche is conceived first of all as belonging to the openness of three-dimensional time composed of its three characteristic dimensions of past, present and future familiar to us humans, but also mostly taken for granted and overlooked because, as such, these temporal dimensions are empty. We humans are instead focused on what comes from each these dimensions: from the past, from the present and from the future, and not on the empty, unmoving dimensions themselves that hide themselves in their inconspicuousness.
What moves or stands still in coming from any of the three temporal dimensions is received by the human psyche which has this temporal receptiveness by virtue of belonging to the openness of three-dimensional time which thus provides the initial conception of the human psyche itself. Openness to the environs through sense perception is at the basis of the traditional conception of life in general*, and human life in particular, entails that this openness is restricted to what sense perception can perceive in the present. By contrast, a temporalogical account of the human psyche, and thus of human life itself, starts with its openness to all three temporal dimensions and what comes from each of these dimensions into the psyche's focus in order to be understood. This implies that the human psyche has a faculty of understanding that interprets what comes into focus in one way or another. It is thus hermeneutic through and through. This psychic faculty of interpretive understanding may be called the mind which is able to roam throughout three-dimensional time.
Hence e.g., to expect the visit of a friend from the temporal dimension of the future, is already to understand, to interpret the friend as a living human, which in turn implies already an implicit understanding both of what life is and of what, or who, a human essentially is, i.e. of a human's whatness or whoness. For Aristotle and Plato and the entire Western tradition, the human is a kind of animal, a legacy by which today's thinking remains bound, or rather, in which it remains incarcerated for the sake of preventing any deeper questioning and recasting. Even though the metaphysical, ontological interpretation of human being has receded into oblivion since the rise of empiricist positivism in the mid-19th century, and today's hegemonic understanding of the human as an evolutionarily evolved animal with an exceptionally large and complicated brain holds sway, there is still the need to pose the question of who the human is, thus revising this traditional understanding that has become thoughtless dogma. This requires 'doing a da capo' and starting again from an alternative beginning that may be called temporalogical, rather than ontological.
The phenomenon of human life itself, interpreted temporalogically, starts from the psyche's belonging to three-dimensional time. The self-movement of human life is then initially conceived, i.e. interpreted hermeneutically, as the ability of the psyche's understanding to roam, perhaps apparently haphazardly, throughout the openness of three-dimensional time by virtue of the psyche's power of imagination, focusing on this or that which comes to mind from any of the three temporal dimensions. This kind of self-movement of human life may be appropriately called the life of the mind. Mental movement thus gains precedence over physical movement upon which Western thinking remains fixated to the present day.
A friend's coming to visit is then tacitly 'always already' (a priori) interpreted eidetically** as a human endowed with a psychic openness to three-dimensional time and a mind able to roam freely through this temporal openness. This has consequences for how an encounter between friends is to be understood, namely, as an interplay between two humans, each of whom is endowed with an understanding mind endowed with free, temporally three-dimensional movement. To unfold further the phenomenon of interplay neglected by traditional thinking, however, cannot be undertaken in this brief post, whose aim has been to merely indicate how Aristotle's metaphysical-ontological conception of life can be recast temporalogically from an alternative starting-point. I have attempted this recasting, at least in outline, in On Human Temporality.
* Cf. "..the living being characterized first of all by sense perception", ...τὸ δὲ ζῷον διὰ τὴν αἴσθησιν πρώτος 413b3, the first sense treated being that of touch (ἁφή 413b5).
** εἶδος (_eidos_) reinterpreted temporalogically is the hermeneutic 'look' an essent offers of itself when presencing and absencing for the mind from three-dimensional time.
Further reading: Aristotle De Anima (On the Soul) esp. Book II Chap. i 412a1-413a10.
On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.
02 August 2025
27 July 2025
Quest for truth or will to power?
Philosophy is often characterized as the quest for truth, a noble striving. Truth itself is usually said to be located in the λόγος (logos), i.e. in statements, propositions that can be true or false. Plato's famous struggle against the Sophist in his eponymous dialogue strives to catch the slippery Sophist, who claims that it is impossible to make a false statement because that would amount to saying and asserting what is not, μὴ ὅν (mae on), non-being. The great predecessor, Parmenides, had been interpreted as prohibiting any attempt to say μὴ ὅν because it amounts to saying nothing. The Sophist, however, always said something, and accordingly this could not be contested because a false statement was impossible to make. His statements were all true.
The upshot of Plato's famous, intricate dialectic in his Sophist dialogue (254b-257a) among the five generic ideas (γένη) of movement (κίνησις, kinaesis), standstill (στάσις , stasis), same (αὐτό , auto), other (ἑτερον , heteron) and being (ὅν, on) is that non-being (μὴ ὅν) is indeed possible, because the idea (εἴδος, eidos) of other is able to mix with that of being. The negation of being through otherness does not result in total annihilation of being, but rather in a determinate negation. E.g. the negation of beauty (τὸ καλόν) is not nothing but the non-beautiful (μὴ καλόν, mae kalon), the ugly.
With respect to the logos (λόγος) as being (ὅν), it is shown through the dialectic that the logos can be either true (ἀληθής) or false (ψεῦδος), the latter through mixing with otherness. The Sophist is thus unmasked as a purveyor of falsehoods, and correspondingly, the Philosopher is shown to be the one who seeks the truth through true statements and enters the battle to refute false, sophistical ones.
Does that mean that the philosopher is like an investigative journalist who uncovers the true facts of the matter by exposing false statements? Not so fast. There is a difference between true, i.e. correct, facts as stated by a logos, and the truth of phenomena themselves, as we shall see.
The philosophical quest for truth would seem to have nothing to do with a struggle for power over others, for truth itself is supposed to be pure, standing above and untainted by the falsity that is employed to fool and mislead others. Philosophy would then be the endeavour calling upon us to humbly submit to the unvarnished truth as revealed by true statements. In particular, such true statements can be deduced syllogistically, i.e. by drawing conclusions from accepted premises via rules of inference. Logical argument then consists in presenting such a cogent derivation from accepted premises, that the opponent has to bow to the superiority of the incontestable argument. Hence there is an element of striving for power, after all, albeit a benign one, for the so-called good of the other, when all falsity is expunged from argument as far as possilble. Indeed, today's (analytic) philosophy is often represented as the contest among various positions to present the better, irrefutable argument.
A statement, however, always says something by interpreting what it is talking about as such-and-such. E.g. I hear a noise above my head and interpret it as a pigeon scratching around on the roof, an interpretation that may turn out to be either factually correct or false on closer inspection. I also implicitly interpret the pigeon, without further ado, as a living being, and in this interpretation there is further a implicit interpretation (or preconception) of what life itself is. The 'as' here is the hermeneutic or interpretive as, that is not merely factual, but concerns the preconceptions that inundate our understanding of the world and without which we would not be able to lead our daily lives.
What is the case, then, when I see swifts wheeling about overhead? I implicitly interpret them as a kind of bird flying in the sky, and flying itself is a kind of movement, so the generic idea of κίνησις (kinaesis) comes into play here. I easily recognize and understand the phenomenon of movement, albeit implicitly. My implicit interpretive understanding of what movement is has to be unfolded to become explicit. This interpretation is not singularly my own, but borrowed from the long tradition of interpretations of movement going back to the Greeks. The explicit interpretation of what seems to be self-evident has been the proper business of philosophy from the start.
Why the Greeks? Because it is the Greek philosophical interpretations of movement that tacitly have become globally hegemonic today by providing the foundations for all the modern Western sciences. The question, What is movement?, motivated Greek thinking from the very beginning. Early on, in Timaios, Plato counterposes the kind of movement called γένεσις (becoming) to ἀεί ὅν (eternity, standstill). Movement for the Greeks comprises especially all kinds of physical change, starting with becoming. The early philosophers were therefore also called 'physiologists' (φυσιολόγοι). Even time itself is conceived (hermeneutically) as either a measure of change or as the element in which all change takes place, whereas standstill, changelessness are identified with timelessness, as still is the case today. In this way, the phenomenon of time was interpreted as derivative of physical movement.
Although the Greeks are familiar with other kinds of change, such as a change of heart or soul, i.e. of the ψυχή, their thinking focuses on physical changes. Not only are the various kinds of physical movement (change of place, quantitative change, qualitative alteration, progeneration) investigated, but such movements are conceived as having a cause (αἴτιος). Scientific knowledge (ἐπιστήμη) for the Greeks is always connected to aetiology. In this interest there resides already a will to power over (all kinds of physical) movement, and phenomena of movement are interpreted already under the impetus of this will to power. Efficient causality amounts to knowing 'if this, then that'. Such causal rules can be applied to control movement. If-then rules themselves rely upon a linear conception of time as a succession of instants that can be exactly measured by some sort of clock: If at one instant this happens, at the next, that will happen. This enables physical movements of all kinds to be predicted or, even better, manipulated and controlled.
The choice of kinds of physical movement as the focus of attention for Greek thinking on movement derives from its conceiving physical beings themselves to be composed of a 'look' or form (εἴδος) and matter (ὕλη). Matter, namely, can be manipulated. First of all, any know-how for making something, i.e. τέχνη ποιητική (technae poiaetikae), enables the possessor of the know-how, i.e. the maker, to causally control and master the movement of making toward its envisaged end goal, or (τέλος).
It was Aristotle who, in Book Theta of his Metaphysics, provided the first and only ontology of movement we have today, namely, the ontology of efficient-causal, productive movement that surreptitiously pervades all of modern science, even those sciences whose will to power over movement is directed also at non-physical kinds of movement, notably psychology, sociology and economics. Hence e.g. psychopharmacology aims to control psychic movement by means of material medications.
By trying to fit the ontology of efficient-causal movement to kinds of movement that are patently not physical, such as the phenomenon of rhetorical speaking, Greek thinking already did violence to the phenomenon by misinterpreting it (cf. Aristotle's Art of Rhetoric). Due to this infection by the unbridled will to power over all kinds of movement and change, modern science continues to do more violence to phenomena of movement by interpreting them as reducible to material causes. Hence, in particular and notably, there is a collapse of the mind into the brain in modern scientific thinking, a corollary of which is the denial of free will.
The interpretation of phenomena of movement through an ontology of efficient-causal movement is not false in the sense of being factually incorrect. On that level, given its presuppositions, everything is perfectly correct, and experiments can be carried out to verify the hypotheses postulated! The misinterpretation lies deeper, by forcing an ontological interpretation onto phenomena of movement that do not at all conform to the ontology of efficient-causal movement. The untruth of the interpretation cannot be detected by any empiricist scientific methodology, because the violence to the phenomena in question has already been perpetrated beforehand, a priori, in the very preconception. Hence, for example, data gathered from a large enough sample may reveal statistically significant correlations that point to underlying efficient-causal connections that remain ultimately merely hypothesized. A link between cause and effect is never physically detectable, but only hypothesized on the basis of experience with a postulated theoretical model. But no imaginable experiment can even prove that efficient-causal links pertain universally between occurrences.
The consideration of phenomena of movement and change different from the paradigmatic ones employed to consolidate today's scientific thinking can show that alternative ontologies of movement are necessary. The non-hermeneutic nature of today's hegemonic philosophy as taught in universities, however, prevents it from seeing the will to power nested within the noble quest for truth. This blindness is precisely the way the status quo can be upheld and scientific progress progress whilst simultaneously suppressing any alternative ontologies*.
* Cf. e.g. Social Ontology of Whoness: Rethinking Core Phenomena of Political Philosophy De Gruyter, Berlin 2018, Chapter 5 'Ontology of Exchange'.
Further reading: Plato Sophist.
Martin Heidegger Platon:Sophistes Gesamtausgabe Band 19 (GA19) Marburger Vorlesung Winter Semester 1924/25 ed. Ingeborg Schüßler, Klostermann, Frankfurt §§77-81.
10 July 2025
Space in three-dimensional time
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.