Primordial Sociality and Intersubjectivity

Exploring the Socius

Kent Palmer

kent@palmer.name
http://kdp.me
714-633-9508
Copyright 2017 KD Palmer1
All Rights Reserved. Not for Distribution.
Socius_01_20171016kdp01a
Started 2017.10.16-19 Unedited Draft Version 01;
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5298-4422
http://schematheory.net
Researcher ID O-4956-2015

I have always been interested in the concept of intersubjectivity in Husserl and its relation to Social
Theory and the philosophical underpinnings of Sociology. I did a BA 2 in Sociology (as well as
East Asian Studies) and then went on to London School of Economics3 to do a Ph.D. (1982) in
Sociology, with emphasis on Philosophy of Science which was popular at that time at the school.
My dissertation was called The Structure of Theoretical Systems in relation to Emergence4. Within
philosophy the question of What is Society? or What is the nature of the Social? is a long-standing
problem that remains unsolved and gets less attention than it should because we live within an
individualistic culture which is biased against Social realism, i.e. that the Social exists as a sui
generis reality beyond the individual. To me it has always seemed that this is a quintessential
question that is not considered often enough or deeply enough within our Western tradition. My

1 http://independent.academia.edu/KentPalmer See also http://kentpalmer.name

2 University of Kansas
3 University of London, UK

4 Palmer, Kent D. The Structure of Theoretical Systems in Relation to Emergence . LSE, 1982 http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/3174/

http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/63498/

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approach to this subject has always been through Reflexive Sociology5 of Alan Blum6, John
O’Malley7, Peter McHugh8, and Barry Sandywell9 which was a British and Canadian School of
Social Philosophy that existed in the early 1970s while I was doing my research for my first
dissertation. This school attempted to think through the philosophical roots and grounds of
Sociology as a discipline. It also connected well with Continental Philosophy which I was reading
as the basis of my research into the question of how discontinuities (emergent events) were
generated in the Western scientific and philosophical tradition. So, I have always considered
myself a Reflexive Sociologist10, i.e. a Sociologist who is concerned with the nature of Social

5 Raffel, Stanley, and Barry Sandywell. The Reflexive Initiative: On the Grounds and Prospects of Analytic Theorizing .
London : Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016. Ashmore, Malcolm. The Reflexive Thesis: Writing Sociology of Scientific
Knowledge. Chicago [u.a.: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989. Ashmore, Malcolm. A Question of Reflexivity: Wrighting Sociology
of Scientific Knowledge. Doctoral dissertation, University of York 1985. O'Neill, John. Sociology As a Skin Trade: Essays
Towards a Reflexive Sociology. Aldershot, Hampshire, England: Gregg Revivals, 1991. Szakolczai, Árpád. Reflexive
Historical Sociology. New York: Routledge, 2000. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc J. D. Wacquant. An Invitation to Reflexive
Sociology. Cambrige: Polity Press, 2013. Bourdieu, Pierre. In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology.
Cambridge: Polity Pr, 2007. Bojadžiev, Damjan. "Forms of Reflection." Zbornik 8. Mednarodne Multikonference
Informacijska Družba Is 2005, 11. Do 17. Oktober 2005. (2005): 5-8. Bojadziev, Damjan. Self-reference in Phenomenology
and Cognitive Science. Damjan Bojadziev, n.d.. Bojadžiev, Damjan. "Meaning, Understanding, Self-Reference." Informatica.
15 (1991): 1-5. Susen, Simon. The Foundations of the Social: Between Critical Theory and Reflexive Sociology . Oxford:
Bardwell Press, 2007. Archer, Margaret S. The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity . Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2012. Reynolds, Larry T. Self-analytical Sociology: Essays and Explorations in the Reflexive Mode . Rockport, Tex:
Magner Pub, 2000. McLain, R. Reflexivity and the Sociology of Practice. Sociological Practice (2002) 4: 249.
https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1020894826417. Reynolds, Larry T. Reflexive Sociology: Working Papers in Self-Critical Analysis.
Rockport (Tex.: Rockport Institute Press, 2001. Alvesson, Mats S. Reflexive Methodology: New Vistas for Qualitative
Research. Sage Publications, 2017. May, Tim, and Beth Perry. Reflexivity: The Essential Guide. London: Sage Publications,
2017. Crossley, Nick. Reflexive Embodiment in Contemporary Society: The Body in Late Modern Society . New York:
McGraw-Hill International (UK) Ltd, 2007.
6 Blum, Alan F. Theorizing. London: Heinemann, 1974. Blum, Alan F. Socrates: The Original and Its Images. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978.
7 O'Malley, John B. Sociology of Meaning. London: Human Context Books, 1973.
8 Peter McHugh Self-Reflection in the Arts and Sciences (Humanities Press, 1984); Friends, Enemies, and Strangers:
Theorizing in Art, Science, and Everyday Life, Alan Blum and Peter McHugh, eds., (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1979); On the
Beginning of Social Inquiry, McHUGH, Peter / RAFFEL, Stanley / FOSS, Daniel C. / BLUM, Alan F.: (London/Boston,
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974); Defining the Situation - The Organization of Meaning in Social Interaction (Bobbs-Merrill
1968)
9 Sandywell, Barry, and Barry Sandywell. Logological Investigations: The Beginnings of European Theorizing: Reflexivity in
the Archaic Age. London: Routledge, 1996. Sandywell, Barry. Presocratic Reflexivity: The Construction of Philosophical
Discourse C. 600-450 Bc. London: Routledge, 1996. Sandywell, Barry. Problems of Reflexivity and Dialectics in Sociological
Inquiry: Language Theorizing Difference. Oxfordshire, England ; New York, New York : Routledge, 2015. Sandywell,
Barry. Reflexivity and the Crisis of Western Reason, Volume 1: Logological Investigations: Volume One . London: Routledge,
1995. Beer, David, and Barry Sandywell. Examining Reflexivity: An Interview with Barry Sandywell . Kritikos. 2.2005.
10 https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Reflexivity_(social_theory)

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Phenomena at a fundamental philosophical level as the basis for Social Theory. My own specific
take on this came from my study of Plato’s Laws. This is a book that few people in the Western
tradition read and think about and it turns out to be not just the first book on Sociology but the first
book on Systems Theory. It is a book about creating laws for an imaginary city and is the
culmination of Plato’s work. What I noticed when I came to read it while I was working on my
book The Fragmentation of Being and the Path beyond the Void11 was that there were three
imaginary cities12 in Plato which were the Republic/Ancient Athens (Kallipolis13) and Atlantis14
but also the city of the Laws (Magnesia15). And what I noticed was that all these cities had unusual
properties that seemed to be in some way complementary to each other. Then at one point I decided
to look for the same pattern of complementarities in Mathematics, and found several candidate
types of mathematics16 that had a similar pattern of mutual relationship. I collected these various
forms of mathematics together and looked at them systematically as analogies for what was seen
in the Imaginary Cities of Plato. What I found was that there was a direct correspondence between
all these types of mathematics and the pattern of complementarities between the cities of Plato.
So, I conceived of Special Systems Theory17 as a type of Holonomics18 between the duality of
System and Meta-system (OpenScape)19. Then I proceeded to look for other examples and
precursors of this anomalous patterning in mathematics20 with a peculiar and particular specific
pattern and found several such precursors. And thus, was born my research project in trying to
understand Special Systems Theory that led to Schemas Theory21 and a theory of the structure of
the Western worldview22. There are three Special Systems called Dissipative Ordering
(Prigogine23), Autopoietic Symbiotic (Maturana and Varella) and Reflexive Social (Blum,
O’Malley, Sandywell). In a way we study the Dissipative Ordering and the Autopoietic Symbiotic
in order to prepare to try to understand the Reflexive Social Level24. We are concerned with the
necessary conditions for the possibility of Consciousness, Life and the Social as determined by
mathematical anomalies. These mathematical anomalies are the basis for physical anomalies such

11 https://works.bepress.com/kent_palmer/2/
12 Anderson, Darran. Imaginary Cities: A Tour of Dream Cities, Nightmare Cities, and Everywhere in between . Chicago
London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017.
13 https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Republic_(Plato)
14 https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Atlantis
15 https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Laws_(dialogue)
16 Non-orientable surfaces, Hyper Complex Algebras, Aliquot numbers as well as in physics solitons and breathers.
17 https://www.academia.edu/3795281/Special_Systems_Theory https://works.bepress.com/kent_palmer/4/

https://works.bepress.com/kent_palmer/3/
18 https://www.academia.edu/3795507/Holonomic_Alchemical_Science

https://www.academia.edu/3795498/Holonomic_Alchemy_
19 http://think.net/systems-and-openscapes-meta-systems/
20 https://www.academia.edu/31883291/Mathematical_Meaning_01_On_the_Meta-anomaly
21 http://schematheory.net
22 https://www.academia.edu/13194091/Meta-levels_of_Being

23 Prigogine, Ilya, and Isabelle Stengers. The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature . New York: Free

Press, 1997.
24 Strauss, Anselm L. Mirrors and Masks: The Search for Identity. Routledge, 2017.
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Social_mirror_theory https://neuroanthropology.net/ http://www.socialmirrors.org/en/

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as solitons, cooper pairs of superconductivity, and Bose-Einstein condensates, which are all hyper-
effective or hyper-efficient and thus ultra-efficacious and in turn make possible macro-emergent
anomalous phenomena like Consciousness, Life and the Social. Notice that the Social is considered
along with the phenomenal miracles of life and consciousness as a third miracle. And it turns out
that we as conscious social human creatures that are alive exemplify all these properties ourselves.
But many who study the nature of the possibility of Life or Consciousness ignore the question of
the social. For instance, Terrance Deacon25 who has formulated an approach to these subjects in
Incomplete Nature ignores the question of the social. He formulates morphodynamic and
teleodynamic systems but does not see that also we must consider sociodynamic systems as well.
His approach comes closest to what I have called Special Systems theory without the mathematical
or physical basis in anomalous structures and phenomena, nor the grounding in the Western
tradition through the precursors that I have found for these Special Systems which are Holonomic,
i.e. they are sets of holons (ala Koestler26) with different inherent ordering structures that
distinguish them from both Systems and Meta-systems and the rest of the Schemas. But we also
appeal to Continental Philosophy for support of this theory and especially to Deleuze and
Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus27 and Thousand Plateaus28 in which they define three levels which are the
Desiring Machines, the Individual and the Socius. Desiring Machines29 exist within a rhizomatic
network30 across bodies within the field of the social. These three levels that are seen to exist in
Wild Being as discovered by Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze form a very similar structure to that of
the Special Systems but without the mathematical and physical underpinning that we find in the
anomalies that have the same structure as the Special Systems and allow us to formulate a
Scientific Hypothesis concerning their structure and function that form the basis for
Consciousness, Life and the Social. The term Socius for the Reflexive Social field comes from
Deleuze and Guattari, and its dual which relates to the Dissipative Ordering Special System is the
desiring machine. We interpret desiring machines by saying that they are also absorbing, avoiding
and disseminating and that they are in fact better seen as machinations or practices rather than
“machines”. The term “machine” was unfortunate. Really, they meant the idea of automata. The
term ‘machination’ would have been better. The theory was not mean to be reductionist. The point
is that Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-Lacanian philosophy of the unconscious was intrinsically social
and rooted in Wild Being.

Thus we come to the idea that Special Systems Theory as an approach toward understanding the
necessary conditions for the possibility of the Social philosophically, i.e. as part of a hierarchy of
anomalous phenomena that includes life and consciousness that has a particular mathematical
structure as a set of Holons, i.e. partial systems and partial meta-systems between the extremes of

25 Deacon, Terrence W. Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter . New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013.
26 Koestler, Arthur. Janus: A Summing Up. London: Pan, 1983.
27 Deleuze, Gilles, Félix Guattari, and Bernd Schwibs. Anti-ödipus. Frankfurt am Main Suhrkamp, 2016.
28 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London : Continuum, 2009.
29 https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Desiring-production
30 https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Rhizome_(philosophy)

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Systems and Meta-systems within the context of all the different schemas
(http://schematheory.net). There is to my knowledge any other theory of social phenomena like
this one that connects the phenomena of Sociality to the phenomena of Life and Consciousness in
a formal mathematical manner and based on the example similarly structured physical anomalies.
This takes the problem of sociality out of the backwater and makes it part of an important ongoing
debate as to the possibility and origin of life and consciousness. But it is also a scientific theory
because it posits that there is a particular mathematical form that structures the possibility of all
such anomalous phenomena such as these. Thus, it puts Sociology with respect to its reflexive
roots on the map in terms of positing a scientific theory about how Sociality can arise. It posits
that Life, Consciousness and Sociality all arise together as we see them in ourselves. This in
Buddhism is called co-dependent co-arising. The Special Systems as Holons mutually entail each
other and are strikingly different from Systems or Meta-systems (OpenScapes) and all other
Schemas.

But seeing this as a possibility means having an overview of Western philosophy and its relation
to other types of Philosophy which we will call Nondual (See http://nondual.net) and associate
with Buddhism, Taoism, Advaita Vedanta, and Islamic Sufism. In my undergraduate degree I did
not just Sociology but also East Asian studies. And thus, I took over 60 hours of courses on Oriental
Traditions including Oriental Philosophy courses. I have always been extremely interested in
Oriental Philosophy and have used that as a viewpoint for understanding Western philosophy. I
always considered Oriental Philosophy more sophisticated than Western philosophy and
appreciated that it was based for the most part on meditative experience rather than merely
mundane experience. If you look for a thread running through Oriental philosophy then you will
see it is the idea of Nonduality. Thus, we can take a Nondual perspective on Dualistic Western
Philosophy. And that perspective begins to reveal things about the Western tradition that are
normally not appreciated. Part of that is the rootedness of Holonomics in nonduality. But beyond
that there are threads of nonduality even within the Western tradition such as we see in Plato who
defines the Special Systems. We also find that definition alluded to in Herodotus in his fantastical
description of the city of Babylon. Thus, we can see that the Special Systems are not just a product
of Plato’s individual imagination but is shared with Herodotus who we know went to Egypt. And
when we look back at Egyptian Mythology we see that the Special Systems have precursors in that
mythology. Thus, we posit that the Special Systems were a wisdom that came from Egypt and was
being passed on by Plato and became a central part of Neo-Platonism because we see them in
Plotinus as well. And through Plotinus we see that they influenced Spinoza and through him
surprisingly Nietzsche. Also, there are traces of the Special Systems in Western Alchemy for
instance in Bolos of Mendes. Thus, understanding of the Special Systems has always been an
esoteric and underground tradition within the dualistic Western tradition which was always treated
as a heresy and everything possible was done to stamp it out. But there is still traces of this tradition
of understanding the Special Systems that shows up now and again within the Western
philosophical and proto-scientific tradition as well in Western Science when it runs into
inexplicable counterintuitive anomalous phenomena that cannot be explained by dualistic models.

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We posit that Special Systems is a part of a possible Nondual Science that runs counter to Western
dualistic Science and Philosophy which then connects with other traditions that are based on
Nondual philosophies. Thus, there are traditional sciences such as Homeopathy and Acupuncture
that are based on the Special systems and thus give us an idea what a Nondual Science might be
like.

In order to understand Special Systems as Holonomics which are the necessary basis for the
possibility of Consciousness, Life and Sociality as emergent phenomena of which we are an
example we must understand that they are all fused into our very existence as rational and affective
human animals within the ecosystem of Earth. Theorists will never understand Life without
Consciousness and the Social, nor Consciousness without Life and the Social, nor the Social
without Life and Consciousness. In other words, these three ultra-efficacious anomalous
phenomena arise together and exist together and are mutually informing because they abide by the
mathematical pattern of the Special Systems and the pattern of other anomalies that we find in
Physics that have the same structure. So, considering the origins of life without understanding that
living things are autopoietic, thus according to Maturana and Varella in their existential biology
of viability, a fusion of cognition and living functions, is not going to be possible. Similarly,
Maturana and Varella do not consider social phenomena as part of their biology. Luhmann31 tries
to reduce social structure as communitive function to autopoiesis. But this is a mistake. Rather we
must think of the social function as another emergent level beyond the Dissipative Structures of
Prigogine and the Autopoietic Structures of Maturana and Varella. Terence Deacon also forgets
the social level of emergence when he considers the emergence of life from the point of view of
morphodynamic and teleodynamic systems. The level of sociodynamic systems is forgotten in
most cases. And thus, the significance of the miracle of sociality is not recognized as we have
recognized the miracles of life and consciousness with the attention that they have garnered in our
sciences. The understanding that Sociology is a necessary discipline from a philosophical point of
view that needs to be considered along with these other foundational phenomena has been
neglected. Unfortunately, Sociologists do not seem to be aware of the significance of their
discipline for comprehending these foundational issues either. Social Philosophy has been more
or less neglected in its foundational role.

Even in Continental Philosophy the consideration of the Social Foundations has been neglected.
Heidegger includes as an existential Mitsein, Being-With in Being and Time32. However, the
consideration of Mitsein what we call the Ultimate Ego, has not been well developed. But we can
point to the fused group in Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason33, or the Pack in Cannetti’s
Crowds and Power34, or Magma in Cornelius Castoriadis’ Imaginary Institution of Society35. In

31 Luhmann, Niklas, and John Bednarz. Social Systems. Stanford, Calif: Stanford Univ. Press, 2005.
32 Heidegger, Martin, John Macquarrie, and Edward Robinson. Being and Time. Malden: Blackwell, 2013.
33 Sartre, Jean-Paul, and Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre. Critique of Dialectical Reason. London: Verso, 2006.
34 Canetti, Elias. Crowds and Power. London: Phoenix, 2000.
35 Castoriadis, Cornelius. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005.

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other words, there is lip service given to primordial sociality within Continental Philosophy. But
at least it is not totally ignored as happens for the most part in Analytical Philosophy. The
problematic of sociality has been brought to the foreground by Husserl in his works especially
Cartesian Meditations36. Reading Mohanty’s summary of Husserl’s Freiburg Years37 brought that
back to me the importance that Husserl gave the problem of intersubjectivity and made me realize
that the idea of Emergent Time38 might help to solve the riddle of Intersubjectivity as it was posed
by Husserl. Husserl’s account of Intersubjectivity as a problem of Solipsism of the Transcendental
Ego is the bedrock for considering the problem of primordial sociality within the Continental
philosophical tradition. But clearly Husserl never escaped a present-at-hand or Pure Being
approach to his problems, and this is particularly problematic when it comes to Sociality. Just
saying that the problem is intersubjectivity already assumes that we have subjects and we are trying
to glue them together. Heidegger expands his philosophy by defining the difference between the
present-at-had or Pure Being of pointing at things already constituted and ready-to-hand or Process
Being of equipment and use that arises in the process of constitution. Heidegger expands to a
second meta-level of Being which recognizes disclosure as something beyond verification nature
of truth, or showing and hiding as something beyond pure static presentation. In other words,
Heidegger introduces a certain pragmatism which he took from Emil Lask39 who had studied both
Husserl and Peirce and attempted to produce a dynamic philosophy that went beyond the static
philosophy of Husserl. But we must admit that Husserl was already going in this direction with his
Genetic Phenomenology40 found in Experience and Judgement41 and his courses especially
Analysis of Passive and Active Synthesis42. And in fact, we find that both Heidegger and Merleau-
Ponty were basically mining these seminars for their own insights that appeared radical departures
when they were in fact based on progress Husserl had made in explicating Genetic Phenomenology
but for the most part he had not published. It is this strand of Genetic Phenomenology that was

36 Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology . Lexington KY: Kluwer Academic Publishers,
2013.
37 Mohanty, Jitendranath. Edmund Husserl's Freiburg Years, 1916-1938. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.
38 https://independent.academia.edu/KentPalmer/Heterochronic-Era Working papers on Emergent Time as yet unpublished.
39 Lask, Emil. The Logic of Philosophy and the Doctrine of Categories . London: Free Association, 1999. This book is
unavailable. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Emil_Lask “Two Idealisms: Lask and Husserl” Karl Schuhmann and Barry Smith
from: Kant-Studien, 83 (1993), 448–466 .
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/83a0/8468ed84fd38dbda60ae8809ae70b7769b2e.pdf
40 Larrabee, Mary J. Static and Genetic Phenomenology: A Study of Two Methods in Edmund Husserl's Philosophy.
Toronto: University of Toronto, dissertation,1974.
41 Husserl, Edmund, Karl AMERIKS, James S. CHURCHILL, Lothar Eley, Edmund Husserl, and Ludwig
Landgrebe. Experience and Judgement. Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic ... Revised and Edited by Ludwig
Landgrebe. Translated by James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks. Introduction by James S. Churchill. Afterword by Lothar
Eley. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973.
42 Husserl, Edmund. Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic . Dordrecht:
Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2013.

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brought out in Donn Walton’s book The Other Husserl43 that I became fascinated with in a recent
rereading of the major works in Continental Philosophy as part of a study group which the author
participated in with others. It turns out that there is a theme of Genetic Phenomenology running
though the major philosophers in the Continental tradition stretching from Husserl, to Heidegger44,
to Merleau-Ponty45, to Derrida46 and finally to Deleuze47. Genetic Phenomenology attempts to
focus on the problem of Time and Passive Synthesis, i.e. what is given in experience as already
synthesized by the unconscious. Heidegger’s Existential Time we find in the end of Being and
Time reflects this new emphasis on how the moments of time entail each other. But this is already
seen in Nietzsche in his idea of Eternal Return in which time is seen as a spiral rather than a circle
as it was in the Mythopoetic Era or a line as seen in the Metaphysical Era. The spiral combines the
moments of line and circle as analogies for time into a different structure that is three dimensional
rather than either one or two dimensional. If we are no longer trapped on the mythopoetic circle of
time nor on the metaphysical line of time then there is a radically different kind of time that we
must struggle to define. I call it the moment of the coNow. It is a point not on the line or the circle
but on the spiral that is the direct sum of these two previous models of time. Having a fourth
moment of time beyond the normal Past, Present and Future, changes our view of time
fundamentally and introduces us into Four-Dimensional Time48 which I call Emergent Time and
it ushers us into the Heterochronic Era in which time is intrinsically four dimensional, and always
has been. We find hints of this when we transform the Kantian Episteme into a Meta-Episteme
based on Category Theory. Hidden in the Meta-episteme we find a fourth moment of time. But
more significantly we find this fourth moment of time hinted at by an asymmetry in Being and
Time in which the existentials of Dasein are assigned to the moments of time. There is an
existential left over (Rede) which is unassigned. We can assign this unassigned Existential ‘Rede’

43 Welton, Donn. The Other Husserl: The Horizons of Transcendental Phenomenology . Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2000.
44 Kisiel, Theodore J. The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
45 Low, Douglas B. Merleau-ponty's Last Vision: A Proposal for the Completion of the Visible and the Invisible . Evanston, Ill:
Northwestern University Press, 2000. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Claude Lefort, and Alphonso Lingis. The Visible and the
Invisible: Followed by Working Notes. Evanston [Illinois] : Northwestern University Press, 2000. Barbaras, Renaud. The
Being of the Phenomenon: Merleau-ponty's Ontology. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004.
46 Derrida, Jacques, and Marian Hobson. The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy . Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2011. Marrati, Paola. Genesis and Trace: Derrida Reading Husserl and Heidegger. Stanford, Calif: Stanford
University Press, 2005. Kates, Joshua. Essential History: Jacques Derrida and the Development of Deconstruction .
Evanston (Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2005.
47 Hughes, Joe. Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation. London : Continuum,, 2011. Deleuze, Gilles, and Gilles
Deleuze. Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Bryant, Levi R. Difference and Givenness:
Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence . Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 2008.
48 Sampath, Rajesh. Four-dimensional Time: Twentieth Century Philosophies of History in Europe. San Francisco:
International Scholars Publications, 1999. Heidegger, Martin. On Time and Being. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2002.

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(talk, discourse) to mythic virtual moment of time we call the coNow. And then suddenly we have
a resource for attempting to solve the problem of intersubjectivity that we did not have previously.

When we read Mohanty on Husserl’s Frieberg Years we find in his struggles to understand
Intersubjectivity the idea of the Pair, and the idea of co-existence and co-presence. In effect this
‘pair’ is the reflexive special system, metaphorically represented by marriage, of two autopoietic
living organisms with consciousness, i.e. finitely humans as male and female that can enter into
marriage social bonds. Notice that when Husserl beings up the idea of the pair with co-existence
and co-presence he is precisely even if inadvertently pointing to the Reflexive Social Special
System that is made up of the Autopoietic Symbiotic Special Systems as organisms but these are
made of conjunctions of the Dissipative Ordering Special Systems as we can see in the fusion of
life and consciousness as separate realms. In Husserl’s Ideas II49 he distinguishes the material,
living, and conscious realms as ontological regions. Thus, we can see in Husserl at transition from
the Dissipative Ordering Special System that is an anomaly in the Materialistic realm into the
Autopoietic Symbiotic realm of the viable living existential organism, which then has
consciousness that Phenomenology explores. And in that exploration, he runs into the problem of
Intersubjectivity that threatens his phenomenological philosophy with solipsism as an unwanted
outcome of his reductions or bracketing methodology. He struggles in understanding that
problematic of intersubjectivity in various ways one of which is to consider the significance of the
pair of organisms that is the most basic social unity, mother and child or husband and wife. And
this is the basic Reflexive social unit at the next emergent level up from the Autopoietic organism
and through reproduction implicated within the organism. Sociality is fundamental to human life
because separated from human society mere humanoid organisms cannot become fully human
because they cannot acquire language on their own and language is the basis of rationality. If we
are to be “Rational Animals” then we are intrinsically social. Only organisms like amoebas
reproduce on their own. We as are so many higher animals are dependent on exchange of DNA in
our gendered reproductive functioning that is the basis of the Social.

And the point that we want to make in this paper is that the idea of the coNow as an extra moment
of time is one way to help Husserl solve the problem of Intersubjectivity based on his idea of pairs
of subjects and their co-existence and co-presence. The primary problem for Husserl is that we do
not experience exactly the same phenomena as anther subject or alter ego. However, G.H. Mead
in his Symbolic Interactionism that I was taught by C.K. Warriner50 at Kansas University in
Sociology courses has solved this problem by showing that the sound of my speech is heard by me
in the same way it is heard by the other ego and at the same time. So, we can appeal to speech as
the phenomena that we do hear exactly the same way that it is heard by the other. Husserl does not
seem to have thought of that because his metaphors for phenomenology are primarily visual. And
this is a problem with existentialism and phenomenology in general that there is a bias toward
visual phenomena and sound is forgotten and its importance down played where it should be the

49 Ideas, Part II - Edmund Husserl (London: Kulwer 1989)

50 Warriner, Charles K. The Emergence of Society. Homewood, Ill: Dorsey, 1970.

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preeminent sense because it supports language directly and it is as G.H. Mead51 says the one thing
that his heard exactly the same way by both ego and alter ego as two interlocuters. But what we
are saying in our extension to Genetic Phenomenology by the introduction of a fourth moment of
time is that the co-existence and co-presence of the ego and alter ego in the pair is a temporal
conjunction as well. In other words, each is in the coNow of the other. And it is the parallelism
between Now and coNow that makes it possible for self and other to enter into a synchronistic
bond such as we see in the discovery of mirror neurons and which is brought out in the theory of
mind experiments concerning the advent of a recognition of what the other knows that occurs in a
specific point in childhood. In fact, we posit as a hypothesis that it is the Now/coNow structure of
time that allows Sociality to arise and thus sociality becomes a stage in the unfolding of genetic
phenomenology that has not been fully appreciated up till now.

So, what we realize is that we are interested in founding a Social Genetic Phenomenology on the
concept of multi-dimensional time. Genetic Phenomenology traditionally assumes that there are
three syntheses related to the three traditional moments of time. Social Genetic Phenomenology
recognizes that there is a fourth moment of time the coNow and that is what makes the genesis of
the social possible through the advent of Primordial Sociality as its own temporality. We associate
that fourth moment of time with the Quadralectic that was developed in my second dissertation on
Emergent Design52. The Quadralectic was based on the idea of the Emergent Meta-system and the
kinds of Being. The Emergent Meta-system is produced from the three Special Systems conjuncted
with a normal System to give a Meta-systemic structure. But that structure is also articulated by
the Kinds of Being that appear as meta-levels in Fundamental Ontology as developed in the
Continental philosophical tradition. Husserl’s Phenomenological philosophy is rooted in Pure
Being (present-at-hand). Heidegger attempts to solve the problems of phenomenology by
extending into Process Being (ready-to-hand). In the history of Fundamental Ontology Heidegger
goes on to discover Being (crossed out53) as a third kind of Being. Lacan and then Derrida take
this up, and eventually Derrida discovers that Plato has a third kind of Being54 in the Timaeus so
that his differance (differing and deferring) is ultimately rooted deeply in the tradition. Merleau-
Ponty then also discovers in the Phenomenology of Perception55 Hyper Being as the expansion of
being-in-the-world as with the musician or the blind man and his stick in which one comes to
expand ones being to include the use of the instruments that one has mastered and which connect
you to the world. Merleau-Ponty calls this Hyper Being and in The Visible and the Invisible56 he
defines its opposite which is Wild Being as a contraction of being-in-the-world. Deleuze creates

51 Mead, G H, and A E. Murphy. Philosophy of the Present George Herbert Mead. Place of publication not identified: Open
Court Pub Co Chicago, 1959.
52 https://www.academia.edu/34831961/EMERGENT_DESIGN
53 https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Sous_rature
54 https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Kh%C3%B4ra Sallis, John. Chorology: On Beginning in Plato's Timaeus. Bloomington, IN:

Indiana University Press, 2002.

55 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Forgotten Books, 2015.
56 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Visible and the Invisible. Northwestern U. Pr, 1969.

10
the idea of Transcendental Empiricism which was defined originally by Merleau-Ponty in terms
of the transcendental field. This transcendental field includes invisiblities within the visible field.
It is defined in terms of touch touching itself as a chiasmic reversibility. The transcendental field
is the same as Heidegger’s Dasein (Being There) in Being and Time and Husserl’s Monad which
we see in Cartesian Meditations. As Joe Hughes shows Deleuze specifically picks up on Genetic
Phenomenology of Husserl. But he also starts from the working notes of Merleau-Ponty in The
Visible and the Invisible and decides to build a philosophy at the level of Wild Being. Beyond that
is the Ultra Being explored by Badiou57 and Zizek58 under the rubric of Lacan’s semiotic structural
unconscious59. Zizek and Badiou reject Wild Being of Deleuze and Hyper Being of Derrida and
try to return to Lacan. But in fact, their project owes a lot to both Deleuze and Derrida which goes
unacknowledged. In the Quadrlectic that is modeled on the Emergent Meta-system cycle each
moment is articulated according to the various kinds of Being. The Quadralectic gives us a model
for the understanding of the unfolding of a fourfold temporality as an elaboration of the Dialectic
and Trialectic of Hegel (related to mediation of work). In the dissertation we go on to explore the
next level beyond the Quadralectic which is the Pentalectic. If we associate a moment of the
Quadralectic with each moment of time considered fourfold then the fifth moment is related to the
person in time who is a passive bystander experiencing it as a passive synthesis.

We cannot just add the coNow to the mix at the level of Pure Being to solve the problems of
Husserl’s solipsism. Rather we have to try to reach back to a Primordial Time prior to the
differentiation of the intersubjective. We need instead a Socius which is rooted in Primordial time
at the level of Wild Being which Deleuze has worked to build a philosophy in. But still Deleuze is
assuming that time only has three moments. Recognizing that time has four moments and that
these four moments found intersubjectivity on primordial time at the level of Wild Being and
ultimately in Ultra Being is a significant addition to our understanding of the human condition in
the Heterochronic Era. Thus, we must modify the assumptions of Deleuze in Difference and
Repetition60 and Logic of Sense61 to place them within the context of four-dimensional time in
order to reap the rewards of a grounded Social Phenomenology that we achieve by extending
Genetic Phenomenology to a fourth moment of time. This means we must move outside the
Metaphysical Era and enter the Heterochronic Era where time is naturally multi-dimensional from
the beginning of time.

Our argument can be stated succinctly as follows: As with Heidegger who tries to get to a place
prior to the differentiation of subject and object when he posits Dasein, so too we much get to a
primordial level prior to the differentiation of time into four moments. We call this primordial
time. Primordial time is inherently social. Out of it comes Existential Time related to Dasein. We

57 https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Alain_Badiou
58 https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek
59 https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Jacques_Lacan

60 Deleuze, Gilles, and Gilles Deleuze. Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

61 Deleuze, Gilles. Logic of Sense. Place of publication not identified: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.

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associate Rede with the coNow and thus make use of the asymmetry introduced by Heidegger in
the existentials and their assignment to time. Past is thrownness or Befindlichkeit. Future is
projection or Verstehen. Present is Verfallen which is the combination of the anti-existentials
(curiosity, idle-talk, ambiguity or confoundedness). This leaves Rede which is based on the
Mitsein as the existential associated with the coNow. The Mitsein comes first prior to the
individual Dasein that individuates itself seeking authenticity. Levinas sees this as the mutual
bearing of mother and child that shows up in Hyper Being. Merleau-Ponty notices that present-at-
hand is pointing, and ready-to-hand is grasping. The in-hand of Hyper Being is bearing, the mutual
bearing of mother and child ala Levinas62. The out-of-hand of Wild Being is encompassing in
which Dasein loses control. Wild Being as Deleuze says is a surface phenomena of sense at the
threshold between sense and non-sense. Ultra Being goes beyond that into the depths of
unconscious distance from oneself for example where one is dominated by unconscious drives.
Zizek and Badiou see society and culture as well as ideology as exemplifying this unconscious at
work in mundane, usually artistic, artifacts not to mention marketing materials of corporations.

We call this Primordial Social level Mitsein of Heidegger which is also the fused group of Sartre
in Critique of Dialectical Reason or Pack of Cannetti in Crowds and Power held together by the
Magma of Cornelius Castoriadis in the Imaginary Institution of Society and posit it at the level of
Wild Being as something that encompasses the individual Dasein. Another philosophy at this Wild
Being level is James S. Hans The Play of the World63. We call this the ‘Ultimate Ego’ and contrast
it with the Absolute Ego of Hegel (Big Other of Lacan and Das Mann of Heidegger) as discussed
by Zizek in Sublime Object of Ideology64. In that book Zizek reviews Hegel’s types of reflection
which are Determining, External and Positing65. If we combine this categorization of reflection
with the steps of Berger and Luckmann’s Dialectic in Social Construction of Reality66, then we
get a cycle:

• Absolute Ego (Big Other, Das Mann)

o Determinate reflection
• Ultimate Ego (Mitsein, Fused Group, Magma)
o Refraction/diffusion
• Transcendental Ego (Apperception)
o Positing reflection
• Cogito or Mundane Ego (Thought)

62 Wachterhauser, Brice R. Beyond Being: Gadamer's Post-Platonic Hermeneutical Ontology. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern
University Press, 1999.
63 Hans, James S. The Play of the World. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981.
64 Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 2009.
65 https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/txt/reflect2.htm
66 Berger, Peter L, and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. ,
2011.

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 o External reflection

The key point here is that Hegel has only three kinds of Reflection but four kinds of Judgement67.
It appears that a kind of reflection is missing. But perhaps this signals a phase change from
reflection to refraction or diffusion as seen in Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway68. And this
makes sense that the ultimate ego is a refraction or diffraction instead of a reflection because it is
fused like magma as a social glue in which the individual Dasein’s are encompassed and lost in
their immersion utterly inauthentic. Primordial Sociality, this encompassment by Dasein in Wild
Being which appears as a mythological stage in human symbolic formation as seen by Cassirer in
Philosophy of Symbolic Forms69 volume 1, is founded on Primordial Four-Dimensional Time.
When this time differentiates it produces the coNow which then supports having parallel
synchronized Dasein each in their own timestreams but entangled with each other such that their
grouping is like a Bose-Einstein Condensate70. Out of that condensate pairs like Cooper pairs71
that are superconducting arise, and these differentiate into breathers72 that are solitonic73. Thus, we
can use physical analogies to talk about the kind of Holonomic structures that arise as primordial
time give rise to separate time streams that are conjuncted and juxtaposed to form a pair both of
which have a shared present, past and future together. We invoke here at the Hyper Being level
the idea of K. Lewin74 of a field social theory and within it Tendencies-in-Situations (TINSIT) of
Coutu75. To define tendency or disposition we use the propensity theory of Watanabe76. Thus, the
Pure Being has Determinate functions such as we see in Calculus. Process Being has Probability
Theory. Hyper Being has Rough Fuzzy Theory. Wild Being has Propensities that determine lines
of flight. The model for this is the Mandelbrot Set and the lines of flight of the iterations that are
colored based on their accelerations. The Desiring/Avoiding//Absorbing/Disseminating
Machinations or Practices appear in Wild Being at a pattern level that is made up of values and
signs or fluxes and structures of sense that play on the event horizon surface of the black hole of
Ultra Being, what Deleuze calls the depths of madness. It is these surface affects that Zizek misses
when he plunges like Empedocles into the Volcano of Ultra Being along with Badiou. If we want
to make sense of the world we must stick to the level at which sense and nonsense differentiate at

67 Žižek, Slavoj. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment As a Political Factor. London: Verso, 2008.
68 Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham,
N.C: Duke University Press, 2007.
69 Cassirer, Ernst, and Ralph Manheim. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Place of publication not identified: Yale
University Press, 1975.
70 https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Bose%E2%80%93Einstein_condensate
71 https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Cooper_pair
72 https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Breather
73 https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Soliton

74 Lewin, Kurt, and Dorwin Cartwright. Field Theory in Social Science. New York: Harper and Row, 1990.

75 Coutu, Walter. Emergent Human Nature: A Symbolic Field Interpretation. Washington, DC: American Psychological
Association, 2009.
76 Watanabé, Satosi. "Theory of Propensity: a New Foundation of Logic." Language, Logic, and Method / Edited by Robert
S. Cohen and Marx W. Wartofsky. (n.d.).

13
the horizon of Ultra Being in the realm of Wild Being. And it is here that the moments in time fist
differentiate into a fourfold giving rise to now and coNow that allows the reflexive social pair to
be realized as a juxtaposition made possible by language and mirror neurons77 as well as the theory
of the mind of the other. As we reify the four moments and go down the meta-levels of Being we
lose parts of time. In Ultra Being time is all fused together. In Wild Being there arise four moments
and so this is where the Socius if founded as a field for the Desiring/Avoiding//
Absorbing/Disseminating machinations. Then at the level of Hyper Being Aion (past and future)
is differentiated from Cronos (Present) and the fourth moment of time as coNow is lost78. Then at
the level of Process Being we find that Heraclitan Flux which is based on conflict. Then at the
Pure Being level we have Paramedian Stasis where no side in the civil war can win and so there is
a peace based on attrition in which everyone is ground down until there is no will to struggle any
longer and the social structure seizes up producing institutions as described by Sartre which is the
reification of the practico-inert79. In other words, Primordial Time differentiates itself in stages
producing the meta-levels of Being starting from Ultra Being and working back toward Pure Being
via Wild, Hyper and Process Being. The coNow only really appears at the level of Wild Being and
is lost at the level of Hyper Being. Therefore, we can only solve the problem of intersubjectivity
at the level of Wild Being. Positing the coNow is not enough. But when we combine the coNow
with the idea of the Meta-levels of Being and posit it at the level of Wild Being then we get over
the problem that Husserl had with solipsism that definitely could not be solved in Pure Being
where he was trying to solve it. Not even Process Being nor Hyper Being lend themselves to
solving the problem of solipsism. It is only at the level of Wild Being that it can be seen to be
solved. This is because it is at this level that the surface of sense differentiated from nonsense is
defined. We can think of this surface as separating the two Daseins that form a pair. The two
Daseins are encompassed by Primordial Social Time immersed in the Ultimate Ego, i.e. Mitsein.
The Ultimate Ego is the group because without the group, like the family the individual as human
being cannot exist. Many cultures keep this Ultimate Ego as the Ego of the Group and dispense
with individual egos as independent persons. Japanese society is famous for this with their person
being the IE (家, household) which is a group of the Father, Mother, Oldest Son and his wife80.
Individual persons in premodern times had no independence nor autonomy. It is Western society
that over emphasizes individuation compared to the rest of the world. In other non-Western
societies it is the Mitsein that operates as an individual not the biologically separate human beings.
In such societies that discourage individuation Mitsein has more reality that Dasein which is a
biological epiphenomena. In such a case operating in tandem with synchroneity is the norm and
that is made possible by the coNow, i.e. juxtaposed presents that are opposites of each other with
shared past and future. In our society we approximate this condition in the mother-child mutual
bearing situation described by Levinas in which Metaphysics and Ethics have collapsed together.

77 Bråten, Stein. On Being Moved: From Mirror Neurons to Empathy. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Pub, 2007.
78 See Deleuze Logic of Sense for distinction between Aion and Cronos time.
79 See Sartre Critique of Dialectical reason for definition of practico-inert
80 https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Ie_(Japanese_family_system)

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We also approximate it in the Marriage that embodies mutual love (I-Thou relations reciprocated
ala Buber).

Primordial Sociality is founded in four-dimensional time. It provides a field in Wild Being in which
the ego has not fully individuated as yet through the crystallization of Being into the Pure Being
of Parmenides. At this level Dasein operates as a TENSIT, a tendency in situations, based on
dispositions, propensities and tendencies. And at that level there is what has been called animal
magnetism, i.e. mutual trances such as we enter into in Sex, or Conversation or as we Eat or Read
associated with our finitude. This level of connection is associated with hypnotism as we see in
Milton Erickson’s work in developing hypnotherapy81. It also appears in other therapies like
Metaphor Therapy82 of David Grove and Cei Davies Linn and Somatic Experiencing83 of Peter
Levine or the Alchemical Dreamwork of Robert Bosnak84. In these therapies the patient and
therapist form a bond which is called transference in which healing is hoped for in the Patient
through the interventions of the therapist. These various forms of therapy have been considered
together in my work on Emergent Worlds about Being, Existence and Manifestation85.

What we notice is that the Special Systems are the means by which the four independent timelines
of four-dimensional time are conjuncted. The timelines are Dissipative Structures and they are
conjuncted by pairs into two Autopoietic Symbiotic Systems that then are juxtaposed as a
Reflexive Special System. But also, we see them as the means by which Husserl’s intersubjective
pairs are conjuncted between now and coNow. Each Autopoietic organism in the pair supports a
Reflexive Social Special System that encompasses them. For the autopoietic organism there is the
dissipative structure of the body in relation to the dissipative structure of consciousness that
together form a solitonic breather or hyper-Kleinian bottle formation. However, we should note
that there is an emergent transformation at the Reflexive Social level in which the octonion
imaginaries become a Fano Projective Plane which is the non-orientable surface proper to the
Reflexive level. And it is the Fano Plane that has seven points and seven lines with three points
per line and three lines intersecting in a point. That Fano Plane has a central point that could be

81 Erickson, Milton H, and Ernest L. Rossi. The Collected Papers of Milton H. Erickson on Hypnosis. New York: Irvington
Publishers, 1989.
82 rove, David J, and B I. Panzer. Resolving Traumatic Memories: Metaphors and Symbols in Psychotherapy. New York:
Irvington Publishers, 1991. Lawley, James, and Penny Tompkins. Metaphors in Mind: Transformation Through Symbolic
Modelling. London: The Developing Company Press, 2013. Healing the Wounded Child Within. Edwardsville, IL: David
Grove Seminars, 1989.
83 Levine, Peter A. Trauma and Memory: Brain and Body in a Search for the Living Past ; a Practical Guide for
Understanding and Working with Traumatic Memory. Berkeley, California North Atlantic Books, 2015. Levine, Peter
A. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma : the Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences. Berkeley, Calif: North
Atlantic Books, 1997.
84 Bosnak, Robert. A Little Course in Dreams. Boston: Shambhala, 1998. http://cyberdreamwork.com
85 https://independent.academia.edu/KentPalmer/Emergent-Worlds:-Being,-Existence,-Manifestation

15
seen as the position of the CoNow off the lines that define metaphysical succession of the standard
three moments of time.

Fano Projective Plane PG(2,2)

Like the spiral the Fano Projective Plane combines the circle and the line and posits a coNow point
that is not on either. The metaphysical line is repeated three times forming a triangle. The
mythopoetic cycle appears once. The center of the circle and the triangle is the coNow point.

We were not expecting the coNow moment to be a means of solving the problem of
intersubjectivity in Husserl. But then again, we did not remember Husserl’s mention of pairing of
egos in the intersubjective relation that points to the Reflexive Special System encompassing two
Autopoietic Systems. The concept of the four moments of time can be seen in the four Dissipative
Ordering Special Systems that make up the Reflexive Social Special System. This is a fortuitous
outcome.

16