Plotinus, Special Systems Theory and Four-

Dimensional Time
An Interpretation of Ennead 1 Tractate 1 ‘The Animate and the Man’

Kent Palmer Ph.D.

kent@palmer.name
http://kdp.me
714-633-9508
Copyright 2017 KD Palmer1
All Rights Reserved. Not for Distribution.
Plotinus_01_20170405kdp03a
Started 2017.04.03-05; Unedited Draft Version 03;
Plotinus_01_20190605kdp04a
Edited 2019.06.05 Version 04;
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5298-4422
http://schematheory.net
Researcher ID O-4956-2015

Key Words: Plotinus, Plato, Special Systems Theory, Four-Dimensional Time, Heidegger

In writing the book Emergent Time images of Four-dimensional Time have come to light in the
Western tradition, in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and the Phaedrus of Plato. This produces a problem
of how such a tradition might have been passed down through the Western tradition to connect
these very distant dots to each other. And essentially the only candidate for such a connection
through time would be Neo-Platonism, and that is embodied most directly by Plotinus. Therefore,
I set about to try to see if I could find an image of four-dimensional time in Plotinus. And I was
reading various of the Tractates within the Enneads of Plotinus2 looking for some indication of it,
and not having much luck. So, I decided I needed to start at the beginning and read all the Tractates
within the Enneads in order including those I did not find interesting searching for some clue. This
lead me to read the Tractate 1 of Ennead 1 called ‘The Animate and the Man’. And when I read
this Tractate, I realized it contained not just an Image of the Special Systems but also perhaps an
image of the four timelines. So, this means that the very first Tractate of the first Ennead gives the

1
http://independent.academia.edu/KentPalmer See also http://kentpalmer.name
2
Plotinos, , Lloyd P. Gerson, G R. Boys-Stones, John M. Dillon, R A. H. King, Andrew Smith, and James Wilberding.
The Enneads. Cambridge, United Kingdom : Cambridge University Press, 2018.

1
fundamental template of the Special System and the Four Timelines found in Plato. This I think
shows that the NeoPlatonic Tradition was passing this knowledge down from Plato and this
became the Font by which it gets passed into the Western Tradition as a theme. It is not clear where
it was taken up and passed down after Plotinus, but certainly Hegel had some inkling as to the
nature of the Special Systems if not the Four Timelines. I have not yet found any image of the Four
Orthogonal Timelines in Hegel, but they are certainly there in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra3
(TSZ) as interpreted by Seung4. But at this point I am just happy to have one point between the
two disparate points in the tradition already mentioned. The fact that there are images of the four
timelines is extremely surprising. I was not expecting to find any even though I have analyzed in
Emergent Time5 how the Four Timelines are embedded in the structure of the Western Tradition.
I was satisfied with finding image of them in Sufism, in Sidi Ali al-Jamal’s The Meaning of Man6
and in Shaykh al-Naffari’s work 7 on Stayings 8 . In other words, I was prepared to accept that
knowledge of this four-dimensionality of experience was only known about by the Sufis. But my
own quest was to show how it is true of everyday experience and had always been true and thus it
is reflected in the structure of Western metaphysics because that structure is etched into the
bedrock of existence. But the fact that various key figures within the tradition were aware of this
four-dimensional structure of time changes the outlook on this theory considerably. I call the
understanding of Emergent Time (four-dimensional time) in the Western tradition the Homeward
Path, and thus we can see both Plato and Nietzsche who stand at either end of the Metaphysical
Era as indicating this Homeward Path as they understood it. But this raises the question whether
anyone in between these two endpoints understood it. And Plotinus as the most significant Neo-
Platonic philosopher is a prime candidate for the transmission of this tradition. But the fact that it
appears in the very first Tractate of the first Ennead shows that this was well understood to be the
essential knowledge that was being passed down within the Neo-Platonic strand of thought within
the Western Philosophical Tradition.
Here I will not give a line for line commentary on the first Tractate, but rather attempt to indicate
the gist of the correspondences. At this point I am still reading looking for other examples. But I
want to capture the general idea while I think I still understand it. Plotinus is very difficult to read.
His thought is very terse and extremely foreign to us today. But he is very significant for the

3
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spake Zarathustra. London: Dent, 1946.

4
Seung, T K. Goethe, Nietzsche, and Wagner: Their Spinozan Epics of Love and Power. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books,
2006. Seung, T K. Nietzsche's Epic of the Soul: Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Lanham, Md: Lexington Books, 2005.

5
Unpublished manuscript by the author
6
al-Jamal, ʻAlī, and ar-Rahman A. 'Abd. The Meaning of Man: The Foundations of the Science of Knowledge. Cape Town:
Madinah Press, 2005.
7
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Muhammad_ibn_Abd_al-Jabbar_ibn_al-Hasan_al-Niffari
8
Niffarí, Muḥammad I. A.-J, and Arthur J. Arberry. The Mawáqif and Muk̲h̲áṭabát of Muḥammad Ibn ʻabdi Aal-Jabbár Al-
Niffarí with Other Fragments. Cambridge, 1935.

2
development of theology because he tries to synthesize Plato and Aristotle, leaning heavily toward
Plato whom he tries to systematize. That systematization can be seen as a kind of reification of
Plato’s ideas which does violence to the master. In general, I have always rejected NeoPlatonism
in favor of Plato himself. But to know that at least some of his followers understood the key point
of the Special Systems and Four Timelines is very significant especially if we want to follow this
thread up through the tradition to attempt to understand Nietzsche’s rendition of the Four
Timelines as we see them in Seung’s interpretation of TSZ. It is better to give a sketch of this
image of the Special Systems and the Four Timelines in Plotinus and then discuss its implications.
Body and Soul are seen as necessarily together. But Plotinus is in a difficult situation attempting
to explain how the unmoved Soul that participates in the One is related to the Body that appears
materially in nature and is subject to myriad changes. In order to try to solve this problem of the
relation of the unmoved to the moving he begins by producing a series of virtual quasi-entities
between them the first of which is the Animate or the Living Organism. The Animate uses the
body and takes sensation from the body. The Animate produces Desire and this causes the Soul to
attempt to mend desire by shining light on the Animate. But then Plotinus makes an unexpected
move of defining the Couplement which we take to be an image of the Autopoietic Symbiotic
Special System. From the Couplement he goes up to define the We (rather than Ours) which we
take to be an image of the Reflexive Social Special System which is a representation of Man and
is seen as one of the first ideas of the Cogito. The We mediates between the Soul and the Ideal
forms and this mediation is composed of Sense Knowledge, Discursive Reason and Intellection
(Understanding). Together with the Animate as the representation of Life as Organism these define
the four timelines. Then Plotinus defines what is below the Couplement which he talks about in
terms of Animals and eventually Groupment which are related to existences and Sin. The relation
between the images and sense perception on the one hand and the generation and growth on the
other is related to each other by what Plotinus calls Declension (a kind of devolution). The Animal
bodies engaged in generation and growth we relate to the Dissipative Ordering Special System.
And what we see is a hierarchy that goes from Groupment to Couplement to the We that mimics
the structure of the hierarchy of the Special Systems. This hierarchy is related by parallel to the
hierarchy of the Body, the Animate and the Soul. And their purpose is to explain how the Soul can
be unreceptive and unmoved yet related to the Body which is receptive and moving. But when it
comes to relating the Soul to the Ideal Forms then we get the other three timelines showing up as
proxies differentiating Sense Knowledge, Discursive Reason, and Intellection at the Reflexive
Level as comprehended as faculties of the We. Now this is a summary sketch and relating it to
what is said in the Tractate 1 would call for a complex interpretation. Here we merely want to
capture the pattern of thought that I believe is lying behind the text and the source of the description
we find in the text.
I have described in various other writings how I extracted the idea of the Special Systems from
Plato’s imaginary cities. Once I tried to treat the imaginary cities of Plato systematically I found
that they had all kinds of unexplained peculiarities. Then I had the idea of relating these to
mathematical anomalies like the Hyper complex algebras to which the pattern of the cities fit, and
this led to finding a whole series of mathematical anomalies to which the cities might be related

3
and calling these related anomalies the Special Systems. After that I started searching for
precursors and found them in Buddhism, Taoism, Dzogchen and other nondual spiritual traditions
with their associated traditional sciences like Medicine. But I found very few precursors in the
Western tradition. But then eventually I discovered that the Special System also have an image in
Herodotus in his description of Babylon in his Histories9. And we can see precursors of them in
Egyptian Mythology. We know that Herodotus went to Egypt and so it was not just Plato who was
trying to capture and pass on Egyptian wisdom in his Dialogues. But then the question becomes
whether these ideas were recognized and transmitted down through the Neo-Platonic thread within
the tradition, and we see in this Tractate of Plotinus possible signs of this transmission. And we
know that this tradition was probably transmitted to Europe by Gemistus Pletho10. But it is unclear
whether this nondual thread was lost or not. However, it seems to come back strongly with Hegel
whose philosophy can be seen as an ode to the Special Systems and the timelines appear to come
back to life in Nietzsche’s TSZ under the interpretation of Seung. A key place where we see this
tradition in the Renaissance is in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili 11 but that calls for extensive
hermeneutics to attempt to bring it back to life within that obscure text. It is clear that this is an
esoteric teaching within the NeoPlatonic strand of the Western tradition, and so we are quite lucky
that Plotinus presents it in such a clear and concise way in his first Tractate. Of course, if you do
not know this is an image of the Special Systems then it will seem to not make much sense why
he is saying the things he is saying in this text. It is because we can triangulate between the various
places in Plato where he describes things like the Special Systems, and Herodotus, and
mathematical analogies that we can read this obscure pattern within this Tractate of Plotinus. We
constantly have to go back to prototypes in Plato and compare them to what Plotinus says to see
how he is extending the ideas in Plato, synthesizing them with the ideas in Aristotle, and then
attempting to systematize them in a process of reification. But despite this reification process we
see that he is trying to explain here in the first Tractate the central idea within the Platonic texts
with regard to exemplifying the Special Systems and interesting going further and connecting the
Special Systems to the Four Orthogonal Timelines. We don’t see this explicitly in Plato. Plato
refers to the Four Timelines and the Special Systems separately and does not connect them as far
as we can see. But there is an inner relation between these two complexes of concepts in as much
as the Special System are the way in which the Four Timelines intersect and interrelate. We have
worked this out in detail in previous writings. Basically, the four timelines are the four Dissipative
Ordering Special Systems. The Autopoietic Symbiotic Special System conjuncts them in pairs,
and the Reflexive Social Special System conjuncts all four of them together. There are then six
pairs of the four timelines that appear as Autopoietic Symbiotic Special System that appears as a

9
Herodotus, , George Rawlinson, George Swayne, and H L. Havell. The Histories. , 2016.

10
Monfasani, John. Greek Scholars between East and West in the Fifteenth Century. Farnham, Surrey : Ashgate, 2016.
Woodhouse, C M. George Gemistos Plethon: The Last of the Hellenes. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. Hladký,
Vojtĕch. The Philosophy of Gemistos Plethon: Platonism in Late Byzantium, between Hellenism and Orthodoxy. Farnham:
Ashgate, 2013. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Gemistus_Pletho

11
Colonna, Francesco, and Joscelyn Godwin. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. London: Thames & Hudson, 2005.

4
virtual structure that is synthesized into the Reflexive Social Special System with its four mirrors.
We are talking about mirroring relations with the Real System being one Mirror, the Dissipative
Ordering Special System being two facing mirrors, the Autopoietic Symbiotic Special System
being three facing mirrors, and the Reflexive Social Special System being four facing mirrors in
an inwardly mirrored Tetrahedron. Beyond that mirrors have to be separated or warped and this
gives us what Onar Aam12 calls the Mirrorhouse (Funhouse) of the Meta-system. This series of
mirror configurations mimics the structuring of the HyperComplex Algebras13. There are other
analogous series like the Aliquot numbers14, or the non-orientable surfaces15, or those related to
solitons 16 . There are various series in mathematics that correspond to the meta-theory of the
Special Systems and which together define it’s signature very precisely. We then take this model
and look for a similar series in Plotinus works which we find in the first Tractate in a fairly clear
way that surprisingly also connects the Special Systems to the four timelines. Interpreting what
Plotinus says is quite difficult, but when we attempt to do so with the Special Systems as a template
to go by, then the gist of what he is trying to say I believe becomes clearer. He is saying that the
central phenomena of our experience have a structure and that structure corresponds to a
conceptual version of the Special Systems. This comes out as an attempt to solve the problem of
the inactivity and unmoved nature of the soul with respect to the body. But to resolve this problem
he invent the series groupment, couplement, and We, and he gives three specific faculties to the
We in terms of its mediating between the Soul and the Intellectual principle. If we take these three
specific faculties and add them to the Animate then we have four specific faculties we can see as
following different timelines that are simultaneous in our experience which includes sense
knowledge, discursive reason and intellection (understanding the ideal forms). And beyond the
Ideal forms is the One which is beyond Being, i.e. is an existential to which the Soul is oriented.
In general, through the hypostasis Plotinus is attempting to frame a nondual argument but having
difficulty because his theory is reified. However, the Special Systems with their mathematical
analogies point to a nondual interpretation which we might use to disentangle the attempts to model
nonduality by Plotinus as a way to discuss the nature of the Divine. Plotinus is working with messy
conceptual models and thus having a hard time expressing nonduality. His philosophical system
falls into Monism due to its systematic nature. Once we have actual nondual mathematical models
we can see where his ideas of the nature of emanation from the One to the Nous to the Soul breaks
down. We have talked about this in a recent paper in terms of a theory of de-emanation that
produces anomalies as we get a collapse from infinity to one. An emanationist theory cannot

12
https://www.facebook.com/Onar.Aam/
13
Kantor, I L, and A S. Solodovnikov. Hypercomplex Numbers: An Elementary Introduction to Algebras. New York:
Springer-Verlag, 1989
14
http://djm.cc/amicable.html
15
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Orientability
16
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Soliton https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Breather

5
explain the existence of the set of anomalies in mathematics we call the meta-anomaly17. Only by
reversing the idea of emanation and playing it backwards are we able to account for the existence
of these anomalies. Thus, Plotinus’ systematization might be precisely backwards. This
emanationist theory is contrast to inner creation that is purely immanent (Spinoza, expressionism
of Herder) and outer creation that we understand in the Bible. Plotinus works out a mediation
between inward and outward creation in his theory of emanations. But the soul going towards the
Divine must reverse the emanationist path, and it is in this reversal that the anomalies of the
mathematical meta-anomaly appear. In a sense we can just say that the de-emanation of the soul
as it collapses into the nous and then the one is the only action that occurs, and the prior emanation
is as Plotinus says a non-event, only there to structure the de-emanationist approach to the divine.
But what we see is that nondual Special Systems Theory and its theory of the conjunction of the
four timelines gives us a basis for interpreting what Plotinus says and gives us a measure by which
to determine how far he falls astray from his goal of portraying the inner teaching of Plato. But the
key is that he is putting Special Systems and the Four Timelines as central to his interpretation.
And by using the theory of Special Systems as a guide we can then attempt to understand what
Plotinus is getting at when words and concepts fail him as they do when he tries to reify Plato’s
philosophy into a conceptual system with no loose ends. Plato’s philosophy is a meta-system and
thus the reduction to a restricted economy from the general economy does violence to subtlety and
nuance Plato’s thought. But Plotinus probably thought that Plato’s Dialogues were too subtle and
everyone was missing the point. So, he put the key points in the first Tractate of the first Ennead
which provides the framework for later analyses in which he tries to resolve problems in the overall
system by combining the ideas of Plato and Aristotle. But this does not particularly work very
well. But this hybrid philosophy was amazingly influential particularly in relation to theology,
proving to be the template for all subsequent theological thought.
The problem is as follows. Conceptual Structures are freeform. It is only if we constrain them by
mathematics that they take on a specific form and ordering such as we get in the Special Systems.
That specific form and ordering gives us a filter by which to judge the Conceptual Structures and
their associated meaning. We really need both the concepts and their associated meanings to be
right along with their mathematical structuring which should be mutually reflective and mutually
supporting. At the time of Plotinus much of the mathematics we rely on to describe the Special
Systems did not exist. It was unclear how to structure nondual concepts. And thus, ideas tended to
fall into monisms or dualisms. With Plotinus there is an attempt to explain nonduality with a
conceptual structure that collapses into a Monism because the mathematical and logical structures
that might prevent that collapse are unavailable. Today we are in a much better position to stake
out a different alternative than Monism or Dualism and thus approach a truly nondual option, such

17
https://www.academia.edu/31883291/Mathematical_Meaning_01_On_the_Meta-anomaly
https://www.academia.edu/37301276/An_Adventure_Exploring_the_Mathematical_Meta-
Anomaly_Realms_of_Experience_in_the_Confucian_Dao

6
as was developed in Buddhist Logic by Nagarjuna18 and others. We can translate these advances
into Sufism and other nondual traditions in order to see how these nondual ideas need to be
structured in order to maintain their nonduality and to avoid the extremes of Monism and Dualism.
Plotinus did not have the means to do this but we can see his valiant attempt and try to get an idea
what he was pointing toward in the conceptual system he built based on Plato’s ideas which he
synthesized and then tried to systematize using ideas from Aristotle.
In order to understand what Plotinus is doing it is necessary to know Plato well. He is taking many
hints of Plato and making conceptual models from them in which concepts merely indicated in
Plato have specific structural relations to each other in Plotinus, and this in order to counter the
dualism of Aristotle. In a sense you can see Plotinus and Aristotle as two extremes in the
interpretation of the Platonic heritage. Aristotle in his Metaphysics specifically stands up against
the Buddhist Tetralemma (A, ~A, Both, Neither) and asserts dualism in the form of the Principle
of Non-contradiction and the Law of Excluded Middle. This position has been upheld by almost
the entire Western philosophical tradition making it utterly dualistic on almost all regards. To this
dualism we can contrast the transcendent monism of Plotinus and then later the immanent monism
of Spinoza. It is very difficult to specify the nondual alternative to these rigid metaphysical
positions. Eventually there is also the Pluralism of Leibniz with his theory of Monads that also
offers an alternative to the Dualism of Descartes. But all this traces back to Plato’s Republic and
the three analogies of the Sun, Divided Line and the Cave. And these in turn trace back to Egypt
and the difference between Aten, Ra, and Amun as different ways of looking at their Monotheistic
God beyond the Polytheistic surface phenomena. Aten is the Sun, Ra is manifestation in experience
of everything on earth you can see by the light of the Sun. Amun in the Hidden God, the Sun of
the Good, from which variety on Earth among the seen things springs, the cornucopia. This
monotheistic God of the Egyptians also appears as the creator god Ptah which is the Diamon of
Plato’s Timaeus. And eventually a Semite version of it appears as El, Yhwh, and Allah. And it is
this God that Plotinus talks about in terms of the Divine which is One beyond Being that then
emanates into the Intellectual Principle and then into the Soul. The idea of emanation is an attempt
to mediate between the idea of the isolated one and the obvious fact of creation of the world as
something in time and separate from the One giving rise to diversity and multiplicity. In Sufism
this is called the relation of Tanzih to Tashbih (Connection and Disconnection) in which from one
point of view Creation is God and from another point of view there is no relation between God
and Creation. These are vexed questions how this actually works and the source of much
intellectual torment. Plotinus offers a sophisticated answer which is emanation that allows these
two ideas to be connected. But that idea only appears because of the extreme duality between the
idea of internal creation, in which God creates in himself from himself, and external creation, in
which God Creates world external to himself which is even more problematic and which is the
canonical position in Christianity, Judaism and Islam setting up Dualism as the basis for
everything. We ourselves ascribe to the position as described in Sura Iklas in Quran, which we
take to be the logic of disconnection by which the Quran itself is structured. But even in Iklas there

18
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Nagarjuna

7
are different terms specified in the logic of disconnection that are like those of the analogies of
Plato in the Republic and ultimately analogues to Aten, Ra and Amun which we can relate to the
hypostasis of One, Intellect and Soul. Aten is the one source of everything in the world worth
having as the Sun and we can see that as like Tawhid or Oneness. Ra is the manifestation of the
things in the world through the sun light which is related to the Divided Line, the realm of
experience and related to the Sifat and Intellect as the realm of the experience of the idea forms
beyond sensation. Amun is the Hidden God like Yhwh of Moses and the sources of variety within
the things that gives rise to variety in experience that is similar to the Dhat (the inner coherence of
the sifat). Our point is that there is a very ancient structure here that we can see in Egypt, and in
Plato’s Republic and in Islamic theology among the Sufis and it is the same god we see as El,
Yhwh in the Semitic Torah. Plotinus merely calls this the Divine One beyond Being which is very
helpful and from which everything else emanates. In a sense knowing that we are dealing with one
primordial monotheistic God is more important than the differences in conceptualizing it because
we can see all these conceptualizations as approximations to something which is ultimately
nonconceptual and sublime.
But, Islamic Sufism provides us with the key idea to understand all this which is the idea of the
Barzak which is interspace and barrier at the same time. It gives us a way to comprehend
nonduality which otherwise cannot be indicated easily with conceptual structures. Two opposites
are separated by a barzak, a barrier that cannot be crossed and is thus supra-rational, like the two
seas in Sura Rahman which are salty and fresh water that have a barrier between them. But the
Barzak itself is an interspace and the different opposites can vanish if we are within that interspace.
Given three elements in a conceptual structure any of them can be the barzak between the other
two. Thus Mulk, Malikut and Jabrut we can construe any of them as the Barzak between the two
others. But the key is the Logic of Disconnection. We have the two opposites kept separate, and
thus we can have only one of them in any given time, or we have neither of them and find ourselves
in the Barzak between them. Tawhid is the closed door that permits us to only have one of the
three elements at any given time. This assures that nonduality remains nonconceptual. We see this
partially in the Antimonies of Kant which he says Reason produces when operating on its own
without grounding in sensation. Reason produces irreconcilable antinomies left to its own devices,
and thus metaphysics has no solution left to reason’s operations alone. But what Kant does not
notice is that these two antimonies are sealed away from each other in compartments that are
unbreachable and this defines the barrier between the antimonies. What he did not notice is that
this barrier is in fact itself a realm. And this is the realm that Plotinus and Plato want to indicate as
the realm of the Ideas that are approached through the dialectic. Hegel later tries to enter this realm
in his Logic through Aufhebung. He tries to produce new categories by the logical procedure of
negation, and negation of negation, and through the operation of the Notion that gives Universal,
Individual and Particular as moments of thought special prominence. These moments of the Notion
are much like the differences between Aten, Ra and Amun and the other threefold conceptual
schemes that attempt to indicate the nature of the One as Divine. The key is that the idea of the
Barzak is supra-rational. It is a way to embody that understanding without violating its terms. And
this is because it introduces modality saying that the Barzak is either barrier or interspace but not
both at the same time. And the two opposites kept apart from each other and preventing mixture
8
are also separated so that one can only have one of them at a time. Thus, we are really talking
about an exclusion principle. A or ~A or something different from both and neither, i.e. the barzak
itself which can be Barrier or Interspace. There is a logic of disconnection like that specified in
Sura Iklas as the Logic of Quran. And this allows us to think nonduality explicitly without
confusion. We can go back and apply these ideas to previous images of nondual extreme
monotheism and make sense of what they are saying from a supra-rational point of view. For
instance, there are the three hypostasizes: One, Intellect, Soul. Pick any one of them as the Barzak
for the other two. That one can either be Barrier or Interspace. They Hypostasis are a supra-rational
structure. They only exist to be held apart in non-mixture. You can only have one at a time. This
is the lesson of Tawhid (Oneness) from the perspective of Islamic Sufism. And if we read Plotinus
in that light his philosophy is transformed. It becomes more like the philosophy of Shaykh al-
Akbar, Ibn al-Arabi. We use the following notation <One || Soul> that can become <One | Intellect
| Soul> but the actual situation is < One || ?> or < ? || Soul> or <?| Intellect | ?>. Only one mode
of the configuration is available at any given moment: < ! || ! > both; < ? || ? > neither; < ! || ? >
A; < ? || ! > ~A; < ? | ! | ? > interspace. The interspace configuration goes beyond the Tetralemma.
The Tetra-lemma is all the logical possibilities. The nondual (Emptiness in this case) is what is
nonconceptual beyond the logical possibilities. The Barzak allows us to express through modality
something beyond the logical dualities expressed in the Tetralemma.

Figure 1. Divided Line

It should be noted that the Divided Line is set up to express this movement toward the supra-
rational from mixture. The lower boundary of the Divided Line is Metis or Mixture. We can see it
as contradiction, paradox, absurdity or impossibility. Divided Line expresses the differences
between Knowledge and Belief. Belief as Doxa is divided into Grounded (Techne of Poiesis) and
Ungrounded (Phronesis of Praxis). Knowledge as Ratio is divided into Representable (Episteme
of Science) and Non-Representable (Sophia of Virtues). These divisions of crossing lines indicate
the nondual. The division of Doxa is Void of Taoism and the division of Ratio is Emptiness of
Buddhism. These are dual nonduals. For the utterly nondual is the central crossing line between

9
Ratio and Doxa indicating Manifestation, i.e. tajalliyat of the sifat. Crossing lines are neither
immanent nor transcendent. The other limit at the higher end is supra-rational identified with Nous.
Supra-rational means two things are aspectual at the same time without mixture or interference.
Aspectual means related to the Aspects of Being which are Identity and Presence as well as Truth
and Reality. These aspects are associated with Doxa. Associated with Ratio are the nonduals of
Being which are Order and Right as well as Good or Fate. Beyond the limit of the Supra-ration is
Source and Root. The Divided Line takes us from Belief to Knowledge. Knowledge has the strange
characteristic that it perdures unlike anything else in experience in which all else is fleeting.
Knowledge is congealed information that is potentized beyond True Belief. Information comes
from comparing Data streams and finding patterns that hold surprises. Knowledge comes from
comparing Information sources and finding deeper patterns that do not change and seem to
perdure. When we say pattern we may in fact use any schematization (http://schematheory.net)
like Form, System, Meta-system, Domain, World etc. Wisdom comes from the comparison of
Knowledge sources in relation to Experience. This Divided Line is the Core of the Western
Worldview. It is the fundamental differentiation of Experience into kinds of knowledge. And the
point of it is that it takes us from the mixture of metis to the supra-rational non-mixture of nous. It
takes us from the Aspects to the nonduals of Being. For Plotinus built on the stream of life within
the living organism (Animate) there are three other streams associated with sense knowledge,
discursive rationality (logos) and intellection. Associated with life is ungrounded belief or
appearance. Then when that Doxa is grounded it can become sensory knowledge which is
receptive. Then at the level of Ratio there is the Logical application of Logos in discursion that
produces representations from experience. Then there is intellection which goes beyond to non-
representable uses of ratio as in the Dialectic, i.e. which homes in on non-representables like the
Virtues. Courage is associated with the first phase of the Divided Line, Temperance with the
Second Stage, Justice with the third Stage and Wisdom with the fourth stage. These concepts are
horizons rather than definitive nexes and thus always remain nebulous, but we need them in order
to orient our lives. Life cannot be guided by definitive concepts but only the gist taken from Ideas
as problematics which are indefinite, ambiguous, vague, amorphous as dealt with by the Dialectic.
We must take as our star the limits of all possible definitive accounts instead of the definitive
accounts themselves because Reason produces antimonies when operating on its own inventions.
But according to Hegel we can use aufhebung to rise above these antimonies and produce a series
of categories that encompass each other surpassing, maintaining the contradictions, but moving on
to the next level of understanding in a dynamic production of categorical synthesis. Husserl would
talk about this in terms of Essence Perception (eidetic intuition) that breaks free of mere abstraction
and is rooted in Process Being rather than merely Pure Being. From Hegel’s point of view, it is no
good merely creating formal distinctions, but those distinctions must comprehend the material that
they encompass. This is the great challenge that leads to Structuralism from Formalism. Forms
have essences that allow the participation of copies in those forms. The essences are the inner
coherences of the categories as opposed to the outward coherences of the noematic nucleus.
Essences are constraints on the material that can appear within the Form. Intellection should be
able to apprehend these essences that reconcile outward form and inward material that inhabits
that form by right. Plotinus based on the philosophy of Plato is attempting to discern these

10
categories and their coherent or essential relations to each other that appear in supra-rational Nous.
He apprehends three hypostases which are One, Intelligible and Soul. And he recognizes that One
goes beyond Being, i.e. is rooted in existence or some higher nondual. He sees these as emanating
as a descent from One to Intelligible to Soul as the basis of a de-emanation by which the Soul
knows God going back up through the intellection to the immersion in the One in which we are
alone with the alone. The soul which is the emanation of the One perceives the intelligibles on the
way back to immersion in the One. This is assuming that the greater initiation is into the Pure
Being of Parmenides and the lesser initiation is into the Process Being of Heraclitus. Parmenides
says that there are three ways which are appearance and non-being as well as that of Being which
is frozen and static. Appearance is the intimations of Process or Becoming, while non-being is
everything else in existence banished under the taboo of all else but Being. Plotinus is assuming
that we must be wanting to return to Pure Being from Process Being and that everything is a
devolution from Process Being. But the return takes us beyond Being into the One as an Absolute
Existent which is the Divine. We know it through the myriad approximations offered by the
Intellect. And we know ourselves as it through the Soul which is the unmoved mover at the core
of the self, i.e. apperception as different from the ‘We’ of the Cogito.
What is interesting is the relations between the faculties described by Plotinus and the Existentials
of Heidegger in Being and Time19. In Being and Time Pure Being is related to present-at-hand
which is the Episteme of Science in the Representable Intelligibles within the Ratio phase of the
Divided Line. Process Being is related to the ready-to-hand which is the Techne of Poiesis in the
Grounded Appearances/Opinions within the Doxa phase of the Divided Line. Dasein itself is
rooted in the Phronesis of Praxis which is Ungrounded Appearances/Opinions within the Doxa
phase of the Divided Line. Heidegger ignores Sophia considering it a priori and thus artificially
frozen from the point of view of Dasein which is the projecting process within the Human
Existence. This ignoring of Sophia by Heidegger we consider his fatal error20. Dasein is what
Husserl in Cartesian Meditations called the Monad using Leibniz Terminology for what later
Merleau-Pointy 21 and Deleuze 22 called the Transcendental Field 23 , i.e. the anonymous pre-
personal basis within the body produced by passive synthesis, i.e. the unconscious basis of

19
Heidegger, Martin, John Macquarrie, and Edward Robinson. Being and Time. Malden: Blackwell, 2013.

20
Besides accepting Nazism.
https://www.academia.edu/35704153/Heideggers_Error_Philosophy_without_Sophia
21
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, and Claude Lefort. The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes. Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1997.
22
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. London : Bloomsbury, 2014. Bryant, Levi R. Difference and
Givenness: Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University
Press, 2008.

23
Beistegui, Miguel . Truth and Genesis: Philosophy As Differential Ontology. Bloomington (Indiana: Indiana University
Press, 2004.

11
phenomenality within the human being. This is what Fink24 called the third ego. And it can be seen
as a meniscus or separation between the Mundane Ego or Cogito and the Transcendental Ego of
apperception in Kant. Interestingly it is Cassirer25 that develops the phase of Sophia by showing
that the a priori’s can change as Friedman26 recounts. Cassirer talks about the level of Dasein or
Phronesis as being the Mythic phase of symbolization. He talks about the relation between present-
at-hand and ready-to-hand as Techne and Episteme together in terms of Representation within
Science prior to the shift in the A Priori that he discusses in the third volume of Philosophy of
Symbolic Forms 27 . So, what Heidegger ignores in the Divided Line which is Sophia Cassirer
develops and together28 they call us back to reclaiming the whole of the Divided Line within our
contemporary experience instead of just living for Techne and Episteme which together is the basis
for Science. Religion can be seen as a combination of Sophia and Phronesis instead. And thus the
balance between Religion and Science within the tradition can be seen as holding onto different
parts of the Divided Line.

Figure 2. Reclaiming the Divided Line

24
Fink, Eugen, and Edmund Husserl. Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Bruzina, Ronald. Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink: Beginnings and Ends in
Phenomenology, 1928-1938. Place of publication not identified: Yale University Press, 2011.

25
Cassirer, Ernst, and Ernst Cassirer. Substance and Function and Einstein's Theory of Relativity. London: Forgotten
Books, 2015.
26
Friedman, Michael. Dynamics of Reason. Stanford, Calif: CSLI Publications, 2001.

27
Cassirer, Ernst, and Ralph Manheim. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Place of publication not identified: Yale
University Press, 1975.
28
Gordon, Peter E. Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2012.

12
Heidegger identifies three existentials which are befindlichkeit (foundness), verstehen
(understanding) and rede (talk, discourse). Over the years I have suggested many possible
sources29 within the tradition for these existentials. He does not explain where they came from but
merely posits them as the core of the human being that together in their overlap give rise to the
kernel of the human being as Sorge (care). But another possible source is the faculties that Plotinus
mentions in which Sense Knowledge can be taken to be like Befindlichkeit, Discursive Reason
can be seen to be like Rede, and Intellection can be seen to be like Verstehen. These all appear
with the advent of the We which Plotinus distinguishes from the Our, and this difference between
the We and Our could be seen as a way of distinguishing the Mitsein (Ultimate Ego) from Das
Mann (Absolute Ego). Dasein distinguishes itself from the Absolute Ego (Das Mann) by becoming
authentic. And as we have said elsewhere Dasein is like the leader of the Chorus in relation to the
rest of the chorus (Mass) and the Actors (Set) within Tragedy. This mapping of the existentials of
Dasein onto the faculties that appear with regard to the We gives us some insight into the relation
of Plotinus to the modern problematics of Existentialism as expressed by Heidegger in Being and
Time. These faculties that we associate with different time arrows appear in the contemplation of
the ideal forms by the Soul and in relation to the Reflexive Social Special System. There is an
interesting problem with regard to the assignment to moments of time of the Existentials that
appears at the end of Being and Time. There is an asymmetry that goes unexplained. Befindlichkeit
as Thrownness is assigned the Past moment of time within Existenital Time. Verstehen as
Projection is assigned the Future moment of time within Existenital Time. But the Present is not
associated with Rede, but rather Verfallen. Verfallen (Fallenness, Entropy) is seen as the
combination of the anti-existentials (Ambiguity, Curiosity and Idle-talk). Rede is left unassigned
to a moment of time by Heidegger without explanation. Verfallen can be seen in Plotinus as the
Fall to Process Being from Pure Being which the Soul refuses but to which the Body succumbs.
We assign Rede to the fourth moment of time that is hidden within our tradition which we call the
virtual mythic co-now.
In Plotinus existentials are related to each other in a completely different way in as much the fourth
timeline for him is related to the Animate, i.e. the living organism that would be associated in
Heidegger with Verfallen. In Cassirer this would be associated with the Basis that is unanalyzable
which he associates in the fourth unfinished volume 30 of Philosophy of Symbolic Forms with
Work, Life, Self. Cassirer was influenced by Carnap who in Logical Structure of the World31
differentiates the unanalyzable basis from the Logical Levels that are built upon the Basis. Carnap
took this idea from Husserl who was his other influence besides Russell and Cassirer. We can see

29
https://www.academia.edu/39358257/Anamorphic_Temporality
30
Cassirer, Ernst, John M. Krois, and Donald P. Verene. The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms: Including the Text of
Cassirer's Manuscript on Basis Phenomena. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Verene, Donald P. The Origins of the
Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Kant, Hegel, and Cassirer. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011.
31
Carnap, Rudolf. The Logical Structure of the World: Pseudoproblems in Philophy. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1969. Richardson, Alan W. Carnap's Construction of the World: The Aufbau and the Emergence of Logical
Empiricism. Cambridge, U.K: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

13
how Verfallen could relate to the Unanalyzable Basis in Life which is suffused with the
Unconscious. And for us it is necessary to see how the Living Organism has its own Timestream,
and how it is as the Animate represented by the Couplement as Autopoietic Symbiotic Special
System. In effect, however, this is related to the Body as the Groupment as myriad Dissipative
Ordering Special systems. There are at least two Dissipative Ordering Special Systems that are
conjuncted to give the Autopoietic Symbiotic Special System as the closure of the organism with
a singular life and the many underlying timstreams within the cells of the body are forged into a
single timestream of life through the mysterious operations of the unconscious that give rise to
consciousness of the living organism. According to Plotinus this living organism in Man has a
Soul which is like an unmoved mover, i.e. that is unaffected by time and participates in Paramedian
Pure Being regardless of its immersion in Process Being or Heraclitan Becoming. When the Soul
contemplates the Ideal Forms within the Intellect that has emanated from the One then within it is
forged the We (as opposed to the Our) which then manifests the three faculties we have associated
with the Existentials. And the key is that these are three other timestreams orthogonal to the
timestream of the Animate, or the living organism. The first of these is Sensory Knowledge which
is what we receive from Passive Synthesis as sensation that becomes perception. Because sensation
gives rise to appearance which many not be objectively correct and can be illusory this is different
from the timeline of life within which it appears. Appearances are phenomena that appear to
consciousness and is torn away from the unconscious processes of the living organism that
constitute it. We subscribe to the interesting theory that consciousness is broadcast 32. That means
that different parts of the brain process different parts of the images of sensation. And it is the
broadcast of these results from the various independent processors that is consciousness. That
means if they overlap to produce objects with unity then those objects are a faithful representation
of what appears in the real world33. This is a way that the body confirms that it has an accurate
representation in consciousness of what is within its environment that is needed for its survival.
Unity is not posited in the projection process as has been thought by Idealism, but rather Unity is
a result of the overlapping of different processors of sensate experience that verifies that this
processing is faithful to what exists in the environment. We receive these unities of objects as a
passive synthesis. Perception becomes the recognition of this unity of phenomena broadcast by
separate unconscious processors in different regions of the brain. In other words, perception is not
the positing of unity, but the reception of passive synthesizes given to consciousness as unities by
the unconscious processes within the body. What Merleau-Ponty recognizes is that this process
does not just produce presences, but also intrinsic absences and thus we have a transcendental field
rather than a purely phenomenal field that Husserl thought was possible to elucidate with
Phenomenology. Thus, Deleuze develops Transcendental Empiricism as a way of exploring the
Transcendental Field, i.e. Dasein. But for Merleau-Ponty the perceptual field that was given by
passive synthesis is the template for understanding other similar fields such as the social field that
is reified into intersubjectivity. But Consciousness of Phenomena becomes a virtual world with its

32
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Global_workspace_theory
33
Sider, Theodore. Writing the Book of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press USA - OSO, 2013.

14
own time which Bergson34 described as a time separated from spatialization, and which Husserl
described in terms of Internal Time Consciousness35 as successive strata being laid down moment
by movement within experience. Husserl originally developed the idea of Existential Time in his
Genetic Phenomenology36 that was taken over and made central by Heidegger in Being and Time.
All the Moments of time form an organic unity and are mutually implicating in each moment.
Sensory Knowledge as its separate timeline based on passive synthesis given from the living body
has its own timeline different from that of life processes in the body, which are much more complex
than what is given in appearances to consciousness, yet also unknown. But within consciousness
there is a transformation brought about by socialization which is the reception of language and the
production of internal dialogue giving the illusion of mind as separate from the sensory manifold
presented by the body in consciousness. This Discursive Reasoning that appears within Logos as
constrained by logic and applied to experience again has its own timeline independent of the
sensations appearing in the body. It gives us what Lawrence Durrell calls the word continuum37
and of course is associated with Rede (talk, discourse). It appears in speech and in thought, but
also leaves traces in writing that is the basis of culture. As Literature shows it produces its own
virtual world within consciousness with which we are obsessed as we cannot get those voices in
our heads to stop most of the time. But as Plotinus is aware just having words running through our
brains can be madness, and there is something separate from those words which he calls
Intellection, which is Understanding and the comprehension of meaning beyond what the words
say to us and others. This again has its own timeline that is caught up in our self-consciousness as
it relates to consciousness. For Plotinus, it is this intellection that through the dialectic can know
the Ideal Forms discussed by Plato. And they intimate the vision of the One beyond Being from
which they have emanated. The Soul as emanated from the Intellect which emanated from the One.
These are the three Hypostasis. For Plotinus we have within ourselves a spark of Pure Being
unencumbered by the Process Becoming that the Body is caught up in and it is through that Soul
that we can comprehend the Vision of the Intellectual Sphere which is a shadow of the One. This
is an image of the upper reaches of the Divided Line. The realm of Intellection is what is
approached in the Sophia phase of the Ratio which allows one to approach nonrepresentable
intelligibles through the Dialectic. But the limit of this realm is Nous by which one cognizes what
goes beyond experience completely which is the realm beyond Being where for Plotinus exists the
One. The approach to this line is described in the Phaedrus which as a dialogue traverses the whole
of the Divided Line. And, in the Phaedrus we have a subtle indication of the four different
timelines. Plotinus reads these subtle indications and turns them into faculties that appear within

34
Bergson, Henri, and Frank L. Pogson. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. London:
Routledge, 2014.
35
Husserl, Edmund. Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness. S.l.: Indiana University Press, 2019.

36
Welton, Donn. Other Husserl: The Horizons of Transcendental Phenomenology. Bloomington, Ind: Indiana U.P, 2002.

37
https://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/bitstream/10603/15826/11/11_chapter%204.pdf

15
the We as the Soul contemplates the ideal forms and attempts to look past them, see through them
to the One. In this sense the One is the Good or the source of variety in all things within experience.
This powerful connection between the framework set up by Plotinus in the first Tractate of the
first Ennead and the Existentials of Heidegger, and beyond that to the four moments of time38
provides the possibility of inter-transforming between the Platonic System of Plotinus and Modern
Western Philosophy. Essentially, we can see Plotinus as transforming a fourth moment of time
from the continuum of Life given by the living organism, to a reference point outside of Time and
Being which is the One. In other words, the Now that would be associated with Verfallen gets
transformed into a reference point outside of time and thus allows us to gage the flow of time by
establishing that the Now is indeed frozen Being with no past or future. Plotinus wants to bring
this frozen reference into relation with the other timelines in order to gage the flow of time within
experience. Once we see that this is what Plotinus has in mind then it is easier to understand his
philosophy and its systematization of Platonic themes. The very same existentials that Heidegger
identifies have to be identified by Plotinus in order to produce this transformation. The Animate
is the living organism which appears between Body and Soul. Soul has emanated from the
Intellectual World and then from the One to take a stand in the midst of life as the representation
of Pure Being within the stream of Process Becoming. The Body is seen as a groupment of
Dissipative Ordering Special Systems. But the Animate is seen as a couplement of an Autopoietic
Symbiotic Special System. This progression gives rise to the Reflexive Social Special System that
appears as a We (Mitsein, Ultimate Ego), as opposed to Our (Das Mann, Absolute Ego, Big Other
of Lacan). But in the Reflexive Ordering Special System there appears due to its three other mirrors
the various faculties that have their own vector timelines and associated moments. Life processes
in the moment are associated with Verfallen, entropy, and are negatively entropic in relation to
that background within the material world of the Inanimate. Sensory Knowledge produced by the
Passive Synthesis is related to Befindlichkeit and Thrown-ness and thus is related to the Past
Moment. Rede (talk, discourse) is related to Logos which appears within consciousness as an
infiltration or contamination by the social, we mirror outward speech with our thoughts
involuntarily all the time producing the word continuum in our heads when we are not talking with
others outwardly. This is associated with the Virtual Mythic Moment of the Co-now. And like
Hegel says we can say Now, Here, I interchangeably giving rise to Perception from Sense
Certainty. The CoNow becomes the timeline of the Cogito who merely witnesses the upsurge of
thought and recognizes that he/she exists. Now is the living moment. And as Bergson says this is
mediated to us by our knowledge of the Past by which we know the present. But, actually,
understanding internal time is something different from spatialized time according to Bergson.
And thus, there is a different timelines that actual Understanding of Meaning appears within that
cannot be captured by the words alone, which Plotinus calls Intellection. This understanding is
associated with Projection and the Future in Heidegger. For Heidegger it is the Future which is the

38

https://www.academia.edu/35853850/How_Simultaneous_Multiple_Independent_Times_Impact_Our_Ways_of_
Being

16
most important moment of time rather than the Past as it is in Bergson. There is a conceptual realm
beyond the mere words as we know from the fact that the same concept may appear in different
languages. But, of course, that realm of concepts or ideal forms is very evanescent. But Plato
makes it what is most real positing it as existing outside time in Pure Being. For Plotinus we use
the Intellect to look at the Intellectual World that emanates from the One beyond Being. The
reference point of Verfallen gets projected out toward the One which is the anchor point for the
Intellect and the Soul beyond time. The moment of presence becomes pure Being without past and
future that never changes. It is by contemplating this stasis in the midst of life we come to know
the Divine.
What this shows is that there is a continuity to the Western tradition that allows us to comprehend
Plotinus in relation to Heidegger and Heidegger in relation to Plotinus. Plotinus is another possible
source of the Existentials of Dasein. But more to the point Plotinus gives us in the First Tractate
of the First Ennead a model of the Special Systems and how they mediate between Soul and Body
as a separate nondual holonomic structure and how that structure gives rise to the three faculties
that we can interpret as existentials in the sense that Heidegger gives them in Being and Time. But
the structure itself has an implicit fourth moment that is rooted in the life of the living organism as
the present. Within the virtual realm produced in relation to the We (Reflexive Social Special
System) that arises out of the couplement of the related to the Animate which then is related to the
Body and its groupment (Dissipative Ordering Special Systems). One of the faculties that are
existentials relates to the past, and another relates to the future, and between them is a co-Now
related to Logos running through the mind. In this model the Mundane Ego (Cogito) is connected
to the CoNow. In Heidegger Rede goes unassigned to a moment in time and thus we relate it to
the CoNow which is mythic and virtual. But it makes perfect sense for the Cogito to be based in
the CoNow. And so, this correspondence that we uncover between Plotinus and Heidegger actually
gives us information we would not have known otherwise about the Cogito. Cogito is an illusion
based on the unfolding within us of thoughts and speech related therefore to Logos and its core
Logic, and furthermore to Reason. But this whole interpretation is made possible by the
recognition within Plotinus of the Special Systems and the Four Timelines. This suggests that the
hidden fourth moment of time that we see in the Kantian Meta-episteme has always been with us.
By shifting the Present from Becoming to Being we get the essential transformation that is called
for in Plotinus by which we follow our souls by a kind of de-emanation back to the Intellectual
World and then finally to the One.

17