Phenomenology of the Spheres
[Update: Phenomenology of the Spheres was published as my Master's Thesis. See Publications for more information on that. My present focus remains fixed upon the sphere. My dissertation is titled Universal Ontology of the Infinite Sphere. See Projects for more on that. --June 29, 2023] [Original Post: April 1, 2018] The phenomenology of the spheres is a new economy in phenomenology, but it is actually the old economy of metaphysical scientific philosophy. I like to call this new philosophy "ancient and perennial wisdom," because it isn't really new, just news to us moderns--unfamiliar. It is wisdom because it is an economy of thinking based on non-being, and perpetuating the context of non-being in its being-content. That the cosmological horizon is the horizon of the lifeworld is a thought that can be traced to the cosmogony of the Timaeus, but it is perhaps a more pervasive vision than modern myopia substantiates. Sloterdijk identifies the metaphysics of presence, also called ontotheology, with philosophical cosmology (Spheres, vol. II). By this he means the worldview encompassed by the greatest sphere and centered on the smallest sphere. This paradigm is that of metaphysics--the original theory of everything. I have been exploring the few phenomenologies that culminate in the greatest vision of the sphere--the morphological telos of the total cosmos. My teacher Peter Manchester became my guide in this course of study. This vision, I found, was shared by a student of Roman Ingarden named Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, who in turn received it from an early student of Edmund Husserl named Hedwig Conrad-Martius. In an essay Manchester wrote for the Neoplatonism scholar Hilary Armstrong, he identifies the religious experience of time and eternity with an original topos that he describes as follows: "What is the experience of 'coming down from eternity with time'? Since astronomy has provided so many key ideas in this connection, we try again a meditation on the sky. It is like the ecstatic apprehension in which, prostrate beneath the hemisphere of heaven which our vision is at any time restricted, as much by the one-sidedness of our gaze as by the earth that interposes between ascendent and descendent hemispheres, we suddenly complete the Sphere in imagination, surround ourselves with wholeness, intuit not just the Two of time but the One of eternity, and find ourselves concentric with its all-inclusiveness and finality. The heaven opens around us as an abyss into which we are falling; it is the dizzying abandon to this All At Once Now that is the true exaltation of the religious experience of eternity and time. "It is not just the doctrine but the experience of Plotinus that Presence There reaches presence here. Duration, once touched by this insight, is never again merely time, nor is it only eternity." - Peter Manchester, "The Religious Experience of Time and Eternity," 37 After the summer of 2015, when Peter passed away, I read his 2005 book The Syntax of Time, and reported on it for Ed Casey's seminar. The figura paradigmatica of this book opens Husserl's diagram of inner time-consciousness in both directions: toward the situation at the apex of the center, and out toward the boundless sphere beyond. Manchester's allusions to "the lost spherics" led me through Ancient Greek scholarship, the origins of mathematics and philosophy, and the history of ideas. This led me to conclude that not only are there numerous precursors to the elements of phenomenology, but an entire science of phenomena per se, set in relief against a science of the sphere. The foundations of these sciences lie in the ancient approaches to the 'apeiron' and 'mathesis universalis.' These foundations are needed today for a more cosmological phenomenological method of philosophical speculation. The thinking this mode leads to is a new approach to the dimensional continuum within which the phenomenal universe is disclosed. ... I recently uploaded my thesis defense video to YouTube:The first half of the thesis is introductory, and the second half focuses on the three phenomenologies of time and the cosmos in the work of Peter Manchester, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, and Hedwig Conrad-Martius. I made the first half available on Academia.edu. The second half will have to await the end of this semester, when I submit it for publication. Here's the link for the first half: https://www.academia.edu/36208417/Phenomenology_of_the_Spheres_Philosophical_Cosmology_and_the_Original_Phenomenology_of_the_Sphere_half_draft_
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