Modulation to a New Key in The Syntax of Time: Peter Byrne Manchester and Anna-Teresa

Tymieniecka's Common Telos of the All

Randolph Dible

Stony Brook University, New York

Thought builds on time on many scales.

(Peter Manchester, Unpublished Introduction to The Syntax of Time)

Abstract

Peter Byrne Manchester's The Syntax of Time (Brill, 2005) presents a phenomenology of

time extending from Husserl to the Ancients. By establishing that time has a syntax, Manchester

reorients the paradigm according to which we think about time, and establishes a contrast with an

ancient way of thinking. The goal of his study is to recover the ability to imagine eternity, a

capability that our tradition has largely forgotten. He argues that the lived experience of a now

is nothing like the domain of the variable 't' in Cartesian analytic geometry, to which it has more

recently been compared. The logical abstraction of time is qualitatively unlike real time. Through

philosophical reconstruction of an ancient worldview, Peter Manchester uncovers a lost doctrine

called the spherics (ta sphairike), 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, this time in the intrinsic functioning of life. Her
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extensive philosophy of lifes inner-workings yields a phenomenological cosmology of multiple

spheres of being grounded in a great vision of the All (Tymieniecka 2000, 643), much like

Manchesters spherics. The convergence to similar frameworks arrived at independently by these

two philosophers is an occurrence rare enough in phenomenology, but what is even more

surprising is the convergence of their specific functional systems and metrological terms. This

convergence arises from the pursuit of a phenomenological cosmology entailing a 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 this intuition. By arriving at the most fundamental ontological

units of analysis, a new speculative cosmology and transcendental logic emerges from the model

of the sphere.

Keywords: Ancient philosophy, cosmology, Mathesis universalis, metrology, paradigm,

phenomenology, Pythagoras, spheres, syntax, synthesis.

Modulation to a New Key in The Syntax of Time: Peter Byrne Manchester and Anna-Teresa

Tymieniecka's Common Telos of the All

It is often the case that different but related regions of philosophical inquiry can enhance

one another, and when this happens we sometimes achieve new perspectives on old ideas. This is

certainly the case with the two phenomenological undertakings explored here. Two

phenomenologies, one of time and one of life, have each independently reached a level of

analysis that reactivates ancient categories of thought that were operative at the origins of the
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Western metaphysical world-view, and that have since gone dormant but have not disappeared.

Both Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, a student of Roman Ingarden and the founder of the Analecta

Husserliana and the World Phenomenology Institute, and Peter Byrne Manchestera professor

of philosophy and speculative theology at Stony Brook University in New York and a student of

Hubert Dreyfus, Hillary Armstrong, and Hans Jonasseek to open up transcendental

phenomenology, beyond the tendency to logical abstraction, and in effect, open the

dimensionality of thought up to the fullness of life. Each thinker strives towards a holistic vision

of the way the total cosmos makes its mark in every ordered and measured part. Manchester

conceives of his framework of the Sphere of the All as "an all-encompassing self-referential

equality of an intentional kinda disclosure space" (Manchester 2005, 53). Tymieniecka's key

concept of phenomenological disclosure is the unity of apperception, extending the meaning of

this Kantian and Husserlian concept to encompass the ontopoietic functions of life's essential

individualization (Tymieniecka 2000, 265-80). Tymieniecka's modal thematization of life in its

elementary operations presents in relief the place of life's inner-workings within the big picture

of the All of possible fulfillments, and develops outward into a phenomenology of possible

worlds (Tymieniecka 1974, 3-41). It could be stated that in large part what the modal realism of

her cosmic architectonics gives us is a visualization of individualization. Manchester's

phenomenology of time and Tymieniecka's phenomenology of life will be shown to have

sufficient structural and methodological convergences to frame a phenomenological exploration

of the ancient doctrine of the spheres, Pythagorean and otherwise.

The manifold nature of life's self-disclosure in extended space and time is the systematic

background of the original Husserlian phenomenological methodology, and this too-often

neglected framework is what is reactivated in the phenomenological work of both Manchester

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and Tymieniecka. Tymieniecka's cosmic architectonics presents a vision of the human position in

the All "as the underlying unity of the life of the cosmos and human life" (Tymieniecka 2011, 5).

The word life has a technical sense in Tymieniecka's vocabulary. For her, life is the unique

phenomenon where the disclosure of being to itself occurs through an implicit idea of order. But

this also happens to be an intuitive insight that is implied in the common idea that life is

something self-promoting and self-steering, so the familiar sense of the word life is perfectly

applicable. Tymienieckas technical term for life is ontopoiesis, and it includes the definition of

the biological systems term autopoiesis within its scope, but the usual sense works as well.

Life is also the subject of Manchester's phenomenology of time, specifically the experience of

time and the imagination of eternity by eternal life. Manchesters primary aim is to expose the

reductive understanding of time as a linear concept, and show how time is the operative opening

of a disclosure space.

Manchester's central motif of phenomenological disclosure in the Sphere of the All can

supply Tymieniecka's overall corpusfrom the "multi-sphere model" of her earlier work

(Leibniz' Cosmological Synthesis, 1964) to the later "geo-cosmic transcendental positioning" of

Analecta Husserliana volumes 100-115a geometrical definition, and with that the beginning of

a synthetic mathesis universalis. Manchester's allusions to "a lost continent in the history of

philosophy" (Manchester 2005, 56) that he calls "the ancient 'spherics'" (54), and "the original

phenomenology of the sphere" (53), indicate a lost work, and his choice of the Stoic formulation

"Sphere of the All" gives important first clues to how the general spherics functions. The

phenomenology of the sphere discerned in the meeting of the phenomenology of time and the

phenomenology of life reveals through methodological and formal coincidences a well-defined

clearing for future phenomenological development. The convergence of Manchester's and

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Tymieniecka's philosophies implied by the work of weaving together their structural and

methodological coincidences hints at the possibility of developing a more explicitly convergent

phenomenology of life and time, perhaps already discernible on the horizon.

Over many years of development, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka's cosmic architectonics

came to define a phenomenology whose method did not limit itself to the constitution of the

given world, but included the human and cosmic creative dimension of the genesis of the world

and its structures. The self-evidence of the given phenomenal world of the individual is a

coherence superseded by an intercoherence of universal self-evidence at the level of the world

order,i and finally at the ultimate level of transcendental logic. Her thesis takes the orderliness

and universality of mathematical science as a model for both thought itself and Kant and

Husserl's architectonic structures. This universality of self-evidence is a theme whose roots lie in

the origins of mathematics, within what Burt C. Hopkins calls the ancient precedents to pure

phenomenology (Hopkins 2010, 21-83). The Cartesian notion of self-evidence is developed by

Husserl in the depths of his own unfinished task, and in the foundation for his universal science

in the mathesis universalis of Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant. Tymieniecka's phenomenological

realism of possible worlds is a conjectural extension of the given or indexical universe (this

universe; the actual universe). This realism is based on anticipatory evidence of the other spheres

in a multi-sphere model that provides a monadological, Leibnizian constitutive scheme that

explains how the universe is producible or at least possible" (Tymieniecka 1964, 6).

A prototype of Tymienieckas Leibnizian phenomenological architectonics and

Manchesters phenomenological Spherics is detectable in the work of one of Tymieniecka's

sources, Dietrich Mahnke, a phenomenologist of the Gttingen period (Tymieniecka 1964, 96-7).

Contemporary phenomenologist James G. Hart also employs a Leibnizian scaffolding in his

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intersection of modal realism and phenomenological eidetic analysis (Hart 2009, 25-32). The

extension of phenomenology into the All, therefore, is not unprecedented. The Pythagorean

harmony of the spheres is an obvious inspiration of Leibniz possible worlds theory. Leibniz'

architectonic scaffold, in turn, was a furnishing of the kosmos noetos and other ancient ideas of

hierarchy and eternal structure.ii These common roots have inspired generations of thinkers, and

could be seen to condense in the perennial statement originating the Book of the Twenty-Four

Philosophers; Deus est sphaera intelligibilis, cujus centrum ubique, circumferential nusquam

(God is an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere, whose circumference nowhere).

Intellectual genealogies of the great philosophers, poets and mystics who have found inspiration

in this definition of the Sphere, can be found in Georges Poulets The Metamorphoses of the

Circle (Poulet 1966), Dronkes The Fable of the Four Spheres (Dronke 1974, 144-53), and in

Dietrich Mahnkes Unendliche Sphre und Allmittelpunkt: Beitrge zur Genealogie der

Mathematischen Mystik (Mahnke 1937).

The key to the Sphere of the All is another figure, the Semeion (sign or mark) of the

Pythagorean Archytas of Tarentum, which expresses the relation between time and eternity. This

mark, first reported by the early Neoplatonist Iamblichus, is expressed as the vertex of an angle,

and the precise wording that Manchester suggests is "a straight line which is broken is the sign,

on account of the fact that the breaking becomes origin of one line, limit of the other"

(Manchester 2005, 44). Manchester's reading of this vertex is that it is not an angle, and not a

point, but a breaking. Thus as an indicative mark, it is in composed not of one broken ray but of

two rays, "each in its own dimension" (45). The breaking occurs in the act of drawing the figure,

and can just as well be a moving touching" wherein order is communicated from one dimension

of time (persistence in intelligible purposiveness") to another ("distribution into phases of

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sensible motion [69]). The two-ray touching-and-communication interpretation of the figure

expresses the fundamental discontinuity (breaking) in the fundamental continuity (sphere) in the

essential fact that in order to draw it, one must decelerate and come to a stop... in order to begin

in the new direction" (68). This two-dimensionality or double-continuity is Manchester's

distinctive contribution to the understanding of these elements expressing the original topos of

time and eternity as a dimensional construct. This two-dimensionality is the key to opening up

our way of thinking about time to the paradigm of the sphere. Manchester's goal is not

exclusively to re-figure our thoughts about time and life, but to re-open the dimension of eternity

through the Neoplatonic "engine" of participation (Manchester 2002, 81).

These figuresthe sphere and the original angle marking the centerare the initials of a

synthetic way of thinking that was historically lost to the power of analysis, under whose

logistical spell we have fallen deeper and deeper. The ancient way of thinking starts to disappear

when it is first formalized by the very same thinkers we must return to in order to find the way

through to the general spherics. In this respect the historical goal of a new search for the spherics

would be to sort out the place of these geometrical insights in the beginnings of the project of the

mathesis universalis. The mathesis universalis in the present context is perhaps best summed up

in Descartes' aim of finding a pure science of order and measure part of which today is called

logic, and which is similar to Platos relation of dianoia to noesis (Kant 1974, lxi). Tymieniecka

often invokes this Husserlian foundational ideal of phenomenology, while Manchester grounds

his phenomenology in a comparatively synthetic paradigm called the spherics. Before Husserls

early investigations into the mathesis universalis in its Leibnizian context, as in Logical

Investigations (Husserl 2008, 138-40), he names his dominant and guiding strain of universality

arithmetica universalis, as we can see in Philosophy of Arithmetic (Husserl 2003, 428). Husserls
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sense of this term is that of a proto-phenomenological role of calculation-as-reduction that the

translator of Philosophy of Arithmetic, Dallas Willard, calls a general theory of operations that

will make intelligible all of the types of transformations leading from unsystematic arithmetical

expressions in general to the systematic ones (numerals) (Husserl 2003, lvi), in short, a

cognitive theory of operations of reduction. In The History of Mathematics, Dietrich Mahnkes

student and successor Joseph Hofmann gives a detailed account of the arithmetica universalis,

based on a proportion theory involving rational numbers (Hofmann 1957, 15), and tied

principally to Archytas of Tarentum, above all the Pythagoreans of Southern Italy. Since both the

ancient and modern expressions of mathesis begin with Archytas, a brief genealogy should begin

there.

The ancient arithmetica universalis of Archytas was, as far as we know, the first universal

mathematics, worked out in about 400 BCE. It was a proportion theory of Pythagorean

harmonics expressed in an arithmology of rational numbers (Hofmann 1957, 15-25). For many,

the demonstration of the existence of irrational linear ratios brought this dream of a rational

universe to an end, instigating a break in the Pythagorean idealism of a harmonious cosmos. The

mathesis universalis of the modern period of philosophical system-building revives the dream,

and Husserls early ontological philosophy is modeled on the project of a mathesis universalis in

Leibniz sense. Husserls mathesis universalis is most fully expounded in Formal and

Transcendental Logic (Husserl 1969), where it provides a model for a development of the formal

ontology at work in the general method of phenomenology. But in his earlier Philosophy of

Arithmetic, the arithmetic universalis is inspired by Newton, who in turn provides a work

significantly different from anything still connected to Pythagorean intuitions, making the later

model of the Leibnizian mathesis a more solid connection to the pre-Diophantine mathematics
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(Husserl 2003, 310). The key difference between the Pythagorean mathematical intuitions and

what comes later is the development of speculative logic and formal ontology with Parmenides

(Manchester 2005, 113-24), and the eventual formalization of analysis. This difference marks the

paradigmatic change with regard to eternity that in The Syntax of Time Manchester hopes to

"operationalize" (86) and reactivate.

Riding the rails of the mathesis universalis, as she puts it (Tymieniecka 2009, 176),

Tymieniecka initiates a new phenomenological reduction of life based on the late Husserlian

phenomenology of the life-world, and expands the phenomenological method to include the

constitution of all possible life-worlds. In her phenomenology, life is discovered in the baffling

simplicity of its initial functional relations to the manifold of possible dimensional frameworks

for worlds. Life itself becomes the common thread of a science of subjectivity. Tymieniecka's

microcosmic and metrological concept of life's primogenital functioning fills the interval

between, on the one hand, living processes in the phenomenal manifold, and on the other hand,

the Archimedean point of the reduction to a continuum of life. The hypostatic reduction of life to

the synthetic a priori necessity of experience affirms the presence of life in all the possible forms

that any kind of functioning might take. Form follows function, accepting a phenomenological

functionalism, and this functioning' is the order of operations behind the articulation of a unified

mathesis universalis. The infinite variety of host vehicles of life all ride the rails of the same

system.

According to the perspective afforded by a unified mathesis in which the final term of

analysis is the first term of synthesis (Kant 1974, lx-lxvii), the phenomenological realism of

possible worlds represented by Tymienieckas philosophy stands upon a twofold mathesis: 1. the

eidetic analysis of the structure and order of the lifeworld represents the ground of the world's
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constant form at the arithmetical level, where the world order and its phenomenal form is

interdependent. This is Husserls intuition of essences at the level of the lifeworld. Call this the

real living framework of life. 2. The analysis then proceeds through conjectural inference to

constructive synthesis at the algebraic (the primary algebra or ars combinatoria) level of free

variation upon the re-entry of the given eidetic structure into its own space. This is Husserl's free

variation in imagination. Call this the imaginary framework of life. These two dimensions, the

real living framework and the imaginary framework of life, can be seen as the emblem of the

extension of life and its various forms of self-reference. In their synthesis they express the

universal forms of space and time.

The meting out of life in spatiotemporal experience can be graphically indexed, I suggest,

by a square gnomonic sign. The orthogonal relation between dimensions (between frames of

reference) bears a special relation to all geometric elements, just as the One and the Indefinite

Dyad (the monas and the aoristos dyas) are the root of all number in the Pythagorean

arithmology. The gnomic sign gives the appearance of separation and discontinuity to the

continuity of the self-referentially economic forms of sphericity, circularity, and the elemental

parameter, the point (point of reference) from which the elements of geometry are derived. Also

called the carpenter's square or sundial gnomon, the square gnomic figure is a simple archetype

that is essentially omnipresent, but its appearances in three areas of the proximal research

vicinity are worth mentioning. While I am focusing on the Semeion of Archytas the Pythagorean

in Peter Manchester's The Syntax of Time, there are other systems that inspire the perspective of a

unity of mathematics in a unified mathesis universalisiii and also a geometry of life.iv In these

systems, everything hinges on the idea of the hingethe path of crossing, common to openness

and closureand what the idea of the hinge discloses is the arc of a circle. In the primitive sense
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of disclosure, what the circularity of self-reference expresses is the continuity of radical

discontinuity in the act of crossing; a monad of change and order. The noetic triad at work in the

noetic circle is the dynamo of causality effecting the original synthesis of space and time in the

immediate act of construction.v The mathesis universalis finds in Tymienieckas architectonics a

common cord, a filium Ariadne, in the phenomena of life, and with it the beginning of a synthetic

mathesis. The synthetic a priori can be understood in this way as form that is function, that is,

life. Although not an explicit theme in Tymienieckas own writings, the initials of a mathesis

synthesis are already operational in her theory of manifolds and her analysis of lifes intrinsic

timing and spacing. Nor is the mathesis synthesis an explicit theme in Manchesters

phenomenology of time, but the figure of the noetic circle and the ultimate frame of the Sphere

of the All bear in themselves an intentional relation to the explicit theme of the original angle and

the two-dimensionality of time.

The universality of mathematical insight may be analytic or synthetic in its expression,

but its validity comes from the truth articulated at the level of indication. The sign or mark of

indication is the form of whatever presents itself, as an indication of its full sphere of Being.

Signification always involves a signifier, but the signifier only becomes signified where self-

reference becomes at least as explicit as the signifier. This means that signification always

involves an unmarked crossing of the the first distinction in the pure self-reference of noesis; the

original signification, or intentional framework. The initials of the synthetic mathesis universalis

are the relations of the directional right-angle to the sphere of self-reference. If there is an

architectural atom of form or a monad of time, it is indicated by the actual here and now. And its

truth coincides with its being in the name of the ancient Logos. This is the Logos of

Tymieniecka's phenomenology of life, and its ancient economy of eidetic power is evoked also in
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Peter Manchester's phenomenology of time in the emblem of the sphere, which we shall see is a

whole pie which we can know through its slices, or spanned intervals. The fullness of this

Logos is indicated by the invocation of the ancient name of the All (ta panta), which retains the

power of reference to both the totality of the orders of being (the cosmos) and at the same time

the postulation of an unlimited void beyond (apeiron). The suggested initiation of a mathesis

synthesis and its concomitant phenomenology of the spheres are not the product of a

comprehensive reconstruction of the lost ancient spherics on the part of Manchester or

Tymieniecka, nor of the original force of the Logos. But by harnessing the power of an a priori

mathesis synthesis, the suggested phenomenology of the spheres appears in the coalescence of

Tymienieckas phenomenology of life and Manchesters phenomenology of time.

The Syntax of Time takes the spanned interval of the now from Aristotle's writings on

physical time as the fundamental unit of phenomenological disclosure space whose continuity is

guaranteed by the constancy of its scaling and framing, like the frame-rate of a cinematic

production, or the rotation of a reel. The ancient category of the soul and the modern

phenomenological category of inner time-consciousness provides the consistency of its

spanning. The Nu-Upsilon-Nu of the Greek "Now!" (nun in Greek) is for Peter Manchester the

very "Now!" that the Goddess pronounces to Parmenides in his poem, and it is a form of unity

that is not a number (arithmos) but a measure (metron). In the context of motion, this spanned

interval is the opening of the dimension of time itself. Manchester notes that the character Nu is a

continuative consonant, laying out a flux of potential nows (Nu, Nu, ), with the actual now

marked out by pronouncing two and pronouncing the interval (Y; Upsilon) in between them

(Manchester 2005, 94). Manchester connects the Aristotelian device to its dialectical prototype

which he finds in the gnomonic sign of Archytas. Manchester interprets the figure of Archytas to
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express a measure of the spherical unity of continuity and discontinuity, a being in tune with its

becoming (Manchester 2005, 48-9).

The Syntax of Time begins with a first chapter on the topic of two-dimensional time in

Husserls time-consciousness diagram of retentional-protentional space and in the Semeion of

Archytas. By continuing through chapters on the relevance of this theme in Parmenides,

Aristotle, and Plotinus, two-dimensional time is connected to the figure of the Sphere of the All.

The metrical relations of the Sphere and the central common measure are filled out along the

way. The final chapter brings it all together by reading the famous cosmological fragment of

Anaximander through the lens of Plotinus and Heraclitus, with a new translation: for they take

amends and give reparation to one another for their offense, according to the syntax of time

(Manchester 2005, 150). Syntax here means the coordination of the origin (center) and limit

(circumference) in the figure of a circle or sphere, whereas in our culture we are more familiar

with syntax as linear contextual relations. Syntax is here the analytical form of the circle because

it coordinates the common character of the universal language with the universal and eternal life

that it draws on. This expression of life is meted out like a sentence of universal programming.

In "Chronos and Kairos" (Tymieniecka 2000, 491-501), Tymieniecka also analyzes

Aristotle's account of physical time as an interval, with the soul as the concrete principle of life

itself, the synthesizing element indispensable to the space-time matrix (494). For Tymieniecka,

the "inner workings" of life are the hypostatic fulcrum or axis of measure and differentiation that

provides the framework of possibilities for apperception. Individualization is the actualization of

objects and relations consequent on the life-functioning of spacing and timing; a process

expressed succinctly in Tymienieckas own words, "Life times itself!" (Tymieniecka 2006, xiii).

Her "universal reference system" (xiv) includes functions she names scanning and spacing, a grid
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"abstracted," she says, "from all the singular steps of life's timingthe system of time and space

coordinates, a stable grid for all the change that may be drafted on it" (xiv). These "inner

workings" carry in their performance what she calls "a 'limit,' a circumference (2012, 304). A

circumference is a curved horizon, and curvature is precisely what Manchester's metrology

contributes to Tymieniecka's. This limit, for Tymieniecka, is the unity of life, but it also repeats

the Pythagorean limit concept of the monas. The One, the monas, is also the limit, the peras. Its

proper contextual framework was theorized in the physical cosmology of Anaximander: the

apeiron, the Unlimited. This state is a simplicity beyond unity, and it shares the equability of

formlessness with the other concept of paramount significance to the Pythagoreans, the indefinite

dyad or aoristos dyas. Its equality and evenness makes it the other of two elements of number

that are common to all numbers in the Pythagorean concept of arithmetical genesis. In the

Pythagorean paradigm, these two are not numbers but the non-numerical elements of all

numbers, or roots of number, and they are the first elements of the ancient arithmetica

universalis. It is the same with Spencer-Brown's primary arithmetic that all evenness or harmony

condenses to the ultimate unmarked state, which would be the apeiron.

In an extension to the aforementioned chapter, Chronos and Kairos, Tymieniecka asks,

"yet is it not time but life, which comes first to be seen at the ontopoietic groundwork of

existence?" (2005, 3). In Tymieniecka's phenomenology, life may come before time, but the

parameters of a disclosure space according to time within eternity are a necessary step in the

philosophy of cosmo-transcendental positioning that is the guiding concern of her late work. By

interpreting both the phenomenology of time in Manchester and the phenomenology of life in

Tymieniecka for their shared concern to express their architectonic systems in metrological

terms, a phenomenology of phenomenology appears: the phenomenology of the sphere(s).

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Peter Manchesters work conforms to a once-extant paradigm he calls "the ancient

Spherics," a "lost continent in the history of philosophy" (Manchester 2005, 56), which he argues

only incidentally resurfaces in his work because its recovery is underway in Neoplatonic studies.

This comment certainly refers to the Spherics, but may refer to the rootedness of Platonism in the

Eleatic and Pythagorean traditions, where the cosmological insights of ancient astronomical

civilization are synthesized in theurgy and theory. It might also refer more specifically to the

cosmological doctrines of Plato's younger contemporary Eudoxus, whose theory of homocentric

spheres exerted influence on Platonism generally and was also influential on Plato's own late

writings (Plato 2000, xlviii). It is also very likely that the recovery of the ancient Spherics could

refer to the reconstruction of the unwritten doctrines (agrapha dogmata) of Plato that he taught

inside the Academy to initiates, the so-called esoteric oral teachings. Of this latter possibility,

Konrad Gaiser's doctrine of the Mathematisierend-analytischen Elemenmetaphysik or

Dimensionenfolge, provides a reconstruction of Plato's inner-Academic systematic doctrine

based on Plato's own numerous references, the positive accounts of his successors, but foremost

through a negative or polemical reading of Aristotle's critiques of Plato's oral teachings. This

possibility is especially interesting for the purposes of a synthetic understanding of mathesis

universalis. In this system, tied to the Tbingen interpretation of Plato's unwritten doctrines, the

stereometric form of body and soul develop from first principles through the geometrical

dimensional series represented by the geometric elements of point, line, plane, and solid.vi

Gaiser's doctrine of the mathematical dimensional series is especially useful for

generalizing the dimensional aspect of Manchester's phenomenology of time and metrology of

the phenomenological disclosure space. We might even speculate that this series or schema

presents the corresponding syntax of space, but for a full comparison with Manchester's system a
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further step in Platonic interpretation is necessary, and another Neoplatonism scholar, Philip

Merlan, provides it. The efficient-causal continuity of the dynamic progression of dimensional

synthesis in Gaiser's dimensional series of kinetic-geometrical elements corresponds to Merlan's

multi-sphere model of the Platonic Academic systematic, according to which a series of

concentric spheres correspond to different levels of being. As Dominic O'Meara describes it,

"each sphere deriving from the higher and ultimately from two principles, the constitution of an

uppermost sphere" (OMeara 1998, 21-3). But Merlans doctrine of the spheres of being also

provides a doctrine of the unity of being that is a unity of the multiple spheres, akin to Lovejoy's

famous great chain of being, derived from a Leibnizian "principle of plenitude" (Merlan 1960,

152; Lovejoy 1964, 52-5). In his book From Platonism to Neoplatonism, Merlan begins his

account by characterizing Neoplatonism with the deduction of the spheres by means of logical

implication from the first principles of an indefinite many and an indefinite one, the latter being

an ontic indeterminateness, i.e. fullest being" (Merlan 1960, 1). The Platonic systematics of

Gaiser and Merlan could provide a modern precedent for Manchester's reference to an ancient

doctrine called the Spherics, and if their interpretations are correct, they could provide the

ancient context we are seeking. But the lost content remains subject to reconstruction outside the

strict jurisdiction of the archeology of sedimented historical fact. This task lies in the wider

domain of Husserl's reactivation of original intuitions.

An introductory chapter that was omitted from later drafts of The Syntax of Time begins

with a modern backward-turning perspective on this same ancient Platonic theme of time as the

image of eternity, a theme which Plato attributes to Pythagoras. In an unpublished version of the

introduction of The Syntax of Time, Manchester writes:

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Eternity and time relate as paradigm and image. Once you have seen the paradigm of

something you can then recognize its image, which might otherwise present the common

form in so degraded or misdirecting a way that you would not necessarily even note the

phenomenon that displays it... When something is characterized with regard to a

paradigm, thought is directed in a way more fundamental than by definition. Ahead of

definition is identification of the thing to be defined. (Manchester, n.d., 31)

He continues in this section to frame the ensuing project in the context of the philosophy of

science and the branching off of the traditional worldview with the development in Ancient

Greece of speculative logic. His explicit goal is to reanimate the imagination and experience of

eternity, lost to logical abstraction and transformed into its negative image of mere timelessness

since Boethius. The historical structure of this project of The Syntax of Time is anchored to the

paradigm-shifts represented in the figures of Boethius and Spinoza, as identified in his

encyclopedia entry on eternity:

A certain purely logical interest in the eternity/time contrast, detectable already in

Boethius (responding more to Porphyry than Plotinus) and Thomas Aquinas, was

amplified by the new mathematical spirit of the metaphysics of the seventeenth century,

resulting in the reduction of eternal presence to a kind of schematic simplicity illustrated

particularly clearly in the system of Spinoza. The effect was to dissociate the speculative

notion from its experiential basis, producing in the end the degraded conception of

eternity as lifeless stasis or logical tenselessness that has been the target of complaint in

historicist, existentialist, and process theologies of the past century. (Eliade, ed. 1987,

170)
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The contribution to the history of ideas represented by tracing and tying down the paradigm

shifts that transformed the experience of time and imagination of eternity aids in identifying the

ancient spherics, but Manchester's phenomenology of the disclosure space is created for the

purpose of reactivating the original intuition of the sphere and operationalization of the premise

that time is the life of the soul. Husserl was also concerned with reactivating the original

intuitions of mathematical insights in his project of the origin of geometry. Both Tymieniecka

and Manchester shared Husserl's concern to return to things themselves, and the sphere of being

in which the things themselves come to presence is the very thing itself that embodies this return.

For the disclosure of dimensions of truth beyond the given phenomenal universe, such as the

truth of mathematical intuition, this return means going beyond the iconic data of appearance

(the image) to discover the true reality of a non-imagistic model, or paradigm. In the case of the

self-referential nature of the Sphere of the Paradigm, the return is to the self itself which stands

as a referential background of equality and stasis against which the object or the other thing (the

hetero-referent object signified)stated in full: the world itselfstands in relief, disclosed. This

background state of disclosure space is the manifold of spatiotemporal continuity whose

phenomenological study Husserl initiated with the theory of formal manifolds in Formal and

Transcendental Logic.

Thus, above all these other resonances, I propose that Peter Manchester intended his

work on syntax in the context of transcendental phenomenology to make its ultimate contribution

to the kind of work that Husserl was engaged in with the theory of possible syntactical unity, and

the formal theory of the manifold, as presented in Formal and Transcendental Logic. Here the

term syntax carries all its meaning from the formal analytics of universal judgment forms
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(formal apophantics, from Chrysippus' ancient On the Syntax of the Sayables to modern

linguistics and philosophy of language) to the domain of transcendental logic and

phenomenology. Syntax refers to the manner of synthesis, in the root sense of syn-taxis; the

cosmic order of operations. Taxis means order, and thesis means position, so in a root sense,

syntax and synthesis present the same abstract vision, and in the move from the phenomenologies

of life and time to the phenomenology of the spheres and the mathesis synthesis, each of these

two terms compliments the other. Manner of synthesis refers to something about the being or

event, such as its becoming or ceasing to be. But that is only the surface situation of something

about a being or event; its syntax. Beyond syntax is the synthesis of all the ways or manners of

being (the multiplicity of spheres), and that is the Sphere of the All. The Sphere of the All is the

outermost limit of being in the most encompassing sense: it is the total and solid omnipresence

and fullness of being. Just inside the outermost sphere is a penultimate sphere where just coming

to be and ceasing to be give way to duration and durability, like the memory of a simple

arithmetical operation in the electronic circuit of a calculator. This level is what appears to us as

time in the sense of a dimension of being. Without the addition of appearance or expression, time

in itself is in fact the very manner of being that we referred to before the crystallization of time

into duration, which in fact is the birth of space from time. This is the place in the Sphere of the

All where the intelligible categories of beingspace, time, and causality for Kant, whose

tradition of the manifold of intuition we are here following with Husserlconstitute the

continuity of a sphere, or a world.

It is important to recognize these connections because in Husserl's own development, we

can see that phenomenology was built from the ground up, upon the pure formal analytics of a

mathesis universalis in the classical sense that reaches through Leibniz and Descartes back to the
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ancient rationalist dream of the Greeks, the arithmetica universalis. It is upon the basis of the

order that already constitutes the flux of life that a first order of unity and then a second order of

variability emerges. This simplex of order is not apparent at once, but appears for the second

intentionality (intentio secunda) of the dianoetic act of thetic coherence, the sphere of images

that is the gnomonically projected layer of reality we know as the imagination. The timelike is,

writes Manchester, motion taken twice, in comparison to itself (spanned) and hence already in

comparison to all other motions (Manchester 2005, 97). This not once of order is the not

once of time. The emergence of ordered thought or coherence (and any hypostatized first

thought, first order, or first time) repeats the order of eternal dynamics, according to the syntax of

time. The idea of syntax implies time, but also space, and finally space-time coordination or

continuity. Building on the notion of the syntax of time, a synthetic and metric mathesis

universalis develops in the vision of the sphere.

Leibniz sought a common or universal characteristic in the structural core of the

phenomenal universe. In their introduction to Kant's Logic, Hartman and Schwarz give an

extensive overview of the modern conception of the mathesis universalis as established by

Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant. They describe the end of analysis sought by Leibniz as the

primitive or primary concept "from whose combination all the rest are made (Kant 1974, lxxvi).

He never reached this final term of analysis, but if he had he would have discovered the first

term of the progressive synthetic method. What is suggested by Archytas' Semeion is a

fundamental operation of crossing that characterizes disclosure. I would like to suggest that this

fundamental operation of crossing is, in the context of the mathesis universalis, Descartes ideal

of a simple nature, which Hartman and Schwarz describe as the identification [and

distinction] of analysis and synthesis, the result of analysis and the beginning of synthesis (lx).
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Husserl's pure analytics sought just this in a theory of forms as a systematic theory of syntactical

structures or form-laws of possible coexistence or, equivalently stated, laws of possible

syntactical unity (Husserl 1969, 335). This project of a "higher theory of forms" or of eidetic

universalities or eidetic lawsall formulations of the pure analytics of the hypothesized

mathesis universalis (336)is precisely what is achieved in the pure mathematics of Spencer-

Brown's Laws of Form, where the unity of mathematics is expressed according to a rigorous

deductive system of the consequences of the act of crossing called the first distinction. The

ontology of Laws of Form is a meontology, an ontology of the consequences of there being

nothing. This most economical unity of mathematics deserves to be interpreted as the mathesis

universalis because it seems to satisfy all the requirements offered by the ancient and modern

philosophers. A unified mathesis is necessary to confirm the metrological connections of the

phenomenologies of Manchester and Tymieniecka in a way that establishes the synthetic method

of the spheres.

Based on the analytic logistic of Laws of Form, my proposal for a reconstructed general

spherics is the unified and two-fold mathesis of the phenomenology of the spheres discussed

earlier, called the mathesis synthesis. It may be more or less identified with the convergence of

the phenomenologies of time and life, because unlike the familiar phenomenology that is limited

to the phenomenal universe given to the senses (the phenomenology of sense), it is not distinct

from transcendental logic. This is because a phenomenology of the spheres concerns itself with

the form of the path (the hodos, of this new method, or meta-hodos) common to both the order of

derivation of transcendental logic and the order of operations of constructive synthesis. As a

reconstruction of ancient doctrine, it might be the reconstituted coherence of the noetic doctrine

of the geometricals. In Proclus commentary on the Timaeus, he employs the graphic

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representation of the center of a circle and its periphery to express the relation of time and

eternity, but this image suggests that the circle is constituted by the revolution that draws the line.

Instead, the sphericity of the total and complete sphere itself produce world order analogous to

the way black holes reduce world order. The parameters of the disclosure space are gnomonically

projected onto the perimeter through a centripetal force of intentionality radiating through the

center, much like how the reference beams of laser holography create stereometric resonances in

interference patterns. For every parametric point of reference that develops in such techniques,

there is a whole sphere of circumstantial interference that contains and constitutes it through

coherent superposition. As the self-referential frame of reference for the disclosure space, the

unmarked sphere provides the frame of reference for the marked state of the phenomenal

universe (a derivative sphere), positioning it in relation to the Sphere of the All. In the mathesis

synthesis, every mark is also the arc of a sphere of being co-original with phenomenal forms, and

produced by what might be called circumferential inference. The logical construction of

metrological form produces the given phenomenal universe as an image of its sphere of Being,

an image of the All.

In an unpublished introduction to The Syntax of Time, Peter Manchester writes, "I must

now turn about and admit that our title itself, 'the syntax of time,' is meant to suggest a

convergence of linguistics and physics" (19). He accomplishes this by "[making] Plotinus

available as a channel for recovering the phenomenological dimension of the Greek physics of

time as it is forever made important in Aristotle... The goal of this study is to reanimate the old

identification" (18-9), against the reductive identification of modern analytic geometry. He does

this to bring physics through phenomenology back from what is merely evident to us. His goal is

to return physics to its original Aristotelian aim towards what is evident by nature. In
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Manchester's view, Heraclitus Logos anticipates a "logic of natural necessity" in Aristotle, which

in turn is a gloss on Anaximander's protean proposition that things find cosmic justice, resolve

their differences, and arrange themselves according to "the syntax of time (he tou chronou taxis)

(26). The Greek taxis is rendered as syntax because in Anaximander it is not a serial ordering in

succession by which things arrange themselves to resolve their differences; it is a patterning or

structuring of affairs, more like the syntax of speech and listening than the conventions of

writing. The syntax of expression and spontaneous interpretation follows the logic of natural

necessity, the Logos. Thus the syntax of time is not the logic of words and deeds (the opinions of

mortals), but the Logos of nature and cosmos. By manipulating language to modulate the power

of the Logos through language, Heraclitus invents speculative logic: "Most precisely, he

anticipates what comes to flower in Parmenides and Plotinus: the practice of speculative logic as

physics. The same procedure in our time is called transcendental phenomenology" (n. d., 27).

In Volume 100 of the Analecta Husserliana, the primordial feature of life, the logos of

life, is recognized as sentience in the sense of the operative sentential computation of a universal

calculus ratiocinator (Leibniz' counterpart to the characteristica universalis). In this context we

get a direct sentential sense of the logos, in the context of the mathesis universalis, which here is

called the "common modality of all differentiation" (Tymieniecka 2010, 12). In the prologue to

this volume she refers to phenomenological life as "the sentence of the logos of lifea thread

running through the divine script" (Tymieniecka 2009, xxix). Here the complete sentence of life,

"logoic sentience" (xxix), like a continuous contour drawing, indicates that the innumerable rays

of differentiation all come from the same elemental operation and proceed with the order of a

sentence complete with a universal alphabet and a universal syntax. Here, as well as in Volume

105, the ontopoietic process of life is described as "laying down the flesh and cornerstones of the
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ultimate and primary mathesis universalis," fleshing out the architectonics implied by the idea of

a language of universal manifestation, as conceived by Kant, Leibniz and Descartes, but also the

long-standing geometrical tradition initiated by Archytas, Diophantus, Euclid, and others, at the

root of the theory of manifolds and the universal world-order. As the following quote makes

clear, she recognizes in this universal language both an alphabet and a syntax:

In its universal alphabet are signs ciphered by the infinitely versatile transformability of

the constructive processes of individualizing beingness. In its syntax are the laws of the

modality of life together with its arsenal of constructive devicesall of which remind

one of a spider's spinning its web, for even so, life spins its sense along the track of its

life-timing and -spacing. Suspended upon its existential becominglike a spider upon its

webthe self-individualizing in the ontopoiesis of beingness differentiates through a

sequence. (Tymieniecka 2010, 14; 2009, xxvii-xxviii)

As we just saw, the syntax of time is not like the syntax of written language precisely in that it is

not like a serial ordering in succession, but a logic of natural necessity. Manchester's thesis is that

time is more than the sequence whose representation is the domain of the variable 't' in Cartesian

analytic geometry, but instead is a sphere in its vertical descent from the eternal presence of the

Logos. Having reached the Archimedean point of life's universality, Tymieniecka's

phenomenology of the Logos connects the given to the immediate source of its articulation in the

life that constitutes it, the Logos of Life. What is most immediate is the inherent cosmic position

that is taken for granted in the classical undertaking of the transcendental constitution of

experience, in the very folding action of the manifold. This activity of passive synthesis with its

totality of external horizons flows around all things, and all things are sedimentations of this
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universal flux and original spring of life. We experience the sediment at the bottom of a river in

the inimitable way we do, in virtue of this flux, and the flux itself remains hidden by its

multiplications and additions of constitutive construction within the transparency and silence of

its continuity. Tymieniecka recognizes intelligible calculation in the natural ordering of the flux,

and recognizes the all-encompassing continuity of expression. The classical conception of the

mathesis universalis still holds, even if we pursue the direction of the mathesis synthesis, and

there is no better metaphor for the resonant computations and communications within the

continuum of life-worlds than a universal mathematical language.

For Tymieniecka, the articulations of this universal language are the articulations of life's

inner workings and constructive progress. She writes that "life spaces and times itself"

(Tymieniecka 2010, 107) along what she also calls the spacing/scanning axis (107). These

functional terms express the hidden articulations of life which inhere in all experience,

structuring individualization. To make sense of the birth of my own subjective experience from

the span between the cosmological singularity and the totality of the relevant sphere of Being

within the Sphere of the All, the birth is visualized as being a sum and product of the operations

of differentiation. Life times itself, and in so doing is a product issuing from itself in its

indefinite yet structured analysis of pure self-referencelife squared, cubed, etc.and I would

add that life adds to itself, spatializing the fullness of the thetic Sum in the indefinite synthesis of

its creation, the poiesis of its radical novum. These mathematical operations are concatenated in

vital constraint that self-reference places on the surplus of possibilities, whose remainder

accounts for the unfolding of life. The logos of life speaks and observes through the aperture of

the soul, which in the phenomenology of time is called the disclosure space.
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In Manchester's phenomenology, the spanning of the disclosure space is the fundamental

unit, but the spans are scaled in the harmonic sense, and framed by the form of the sphere, whose

telos is the Sphere of the All. In the logic of natural necessity, life as the unfurling of experience

and as the totality of the lifetime is a spanned, Cosmetic Array (Manchester 2005, 49), scaled

according to the syntax of time in the perimeter of the sphere where the array is synthesized as

the unity of a cosmos. In the synthetic method of a phenomenology of the spheres, finally, this

unity is placed, positioned, in the framework of the spheres whose ultimate frame, the outermost

frame, is the Sphere of the All. Tymieniecka writes that this elemental ray of the logos of life

proceeds in its constructive advance according to "a dianoiac thread" (Tymieniecka 2009, 31),

the very same dianoia which Peter Manchester names syntax. Tymieniecka finally does employ

the construction "the cosmic sphere of the all," in the summary on the back of Analecta

Husserliana Volume 114, Phenomenology and the Human Positioning in the Cosmos. The Life-

World, Nature, Earth: Book Two, but the allusion to the Stoic formula is incidental (2013 [2]).

With such convergences and coalescences, the continued project of Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka's

phenomenological cosmology can only be deepened and enriched by adding to this great vision

of individualization, the visualization of Peter Manchester's synthetic, syntactical sphere.

Rounding off the cosmic architectonics, and grounding its method in the figura paradigmatica of

The Syntax of Time, we are tempted to note that, like eternity itself, nothing coheres like the

spheres.

Randolph Dible

Stony Brook University, New York

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i 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). In my own reception of this notion, the world order is the dimensional order or continuum at
which an individuals world manifests. The notion of the world order presents a distinction between a
continuum and a continuum of continua. This distinction is implied in the distinction of a particular
universe from the more encompassing universality of which it is a part. Tymienieckas description
highlights the role this notion plays in her functional framework by recognizing the indicative nature of
structural relations. Her notion of the world order as an index of the indexical universe also lets us
interpret her system in terms of Spencer-Browns calculus of indications.

ii Sir Thomas Heath argues convincingly for the existence of a lost textbook on spherics by an
unknown pre-Euclidean author, where the proofs and propositions used later by Autolycus, Eudoxus,
Theodosius, and Euclid, were first written down in Greek, in the third century BC (Heath 1981, 348-
53). Hofmann also mentions the spherics beginning with Euclid (Hofmann 1957, 25), continuing
through Menelaus and Theodosius (60), and later through the Sphaera of Johannes of Sacrobosco (58),
which came to be influential on Leibniz. Pierre Beaudry, drawing on the work of Lyndon LaRouche,
suggests that the ancient spherics came to the early pre-Socratics Thales and Pythagoras from Egyptian
constructive geometry (Beaudry 2004, 59), but intuitive knowledge, this crucial paradox of cognition
(54), of the divine proportionality between linearity and sphericity, has been suppressed by the Masonic
cult and other Gnostic-Cabalistic fraternities of Europe (65), and, in particular, the Venetian school of
the Satanist Zorzi, Francesco Giorgi.

iii The technical details of the mathesis synthesis are inspired by two systems: George Spencer-Brown's
Laws of Form and Johann Gottlieb Fichtes 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 yields 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.

iv 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, 66), but it could also
be translated unending angle, comparable to the notion of an allmittelpunkt. Based on this construction
and the intuition that the sphere is the most original [entity] (202), Fichtes 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 worldsthe other spheres of being.

v Manchesters work on the noetic triad (Manchester 1992) and his work on the noetic circle in The
Syntax of Time (Manchester 2005, 149), should be read together, yielding a real engine of
participation (134; Manchester 2002, 81). The metaphor of an engine suggests that this is the engine
of what is called the vehicle of the soul, the ochema pneuma. For my own part, triangles and circles are
never alone, always dynamic and interdependent, and the schema ochema is the circular activity of the
original angle, which 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.

vi For an overview of this doctrine with original sources, see Hans Krmers 1990 Plato and the
Foundations of Metaphysics.