FRAGMENTATION OF BEING and the Path Beyond the Void by Kent D. Palmer

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FRAGMENT 28 INTERTWINING IMMORTALITIES

Returning to the Laws, finally we feel like Odysseus must have felt when he arrived back on Ithica. In the interlude, we have explored the origins of utopianism in Homer, and the nearer origins of Communistic utopias in particular in Aristophanes. This has led to a deeper model of manifestation than the positive fourfold of Heidegger taken from the theogony of Aristophanes where he has made a parody of Hesiod. We have seen in it evidence of the wisdom Aristophanes claims in the fact that this model has been borne out by our interpretation of the Odyssey. So we return to Plato's Laws looking for a particular metaphysical pattern to support our contention that he is describing an autopoietic ring in his lower utopia. We have also explored the lower utopia in the Republic, presented in the first wave of Socrates' argument. We shall now see that the lower utopia on Crete is different from that in many ways, even though it is similar in making the sharing of property its main focus. Unlike the Republic, the Laws does not destroy the oikos, but instead makes it a central element in its structure. The city of the Laws, like Troy, falls between the savages that Odysseus visits and the ultra-polis, Schiera. It is a city of oikos, so the tension between polis and oikos is there from the beginning. The city of the Laws must deal with this tension in its institutions, accepting the family as part of human nature, not to be eliminated but built upon. In the Republic, this feature is brutally eliminated in a search for complete unity, and in order to destroy all diversity among citizens. When the family is accepted within the city, there is an implicit acceptance of some level of diversity.

We reenter the Laws at Book IV. There the three gentlemen have begun to discuss a particular colony and its proposed laws. The Stranger begins by asking about the surroundings of the colony. The book begins with a long rejection of the Sea by the Stranger. This is significant because it reminds us of Heidegger's rejection of the Sea in his positive fourfold. We note that Aristophanes describes the Ocean as one of the things created after the birds. It is the only thing of those that Aristophanes mentions that is not part of Heidegger's positive fourfold. This perhaps unwitting rejection by Heidegger aligns with the Ocean's association with the negative fourfold described by Aristophanes but forgotten by Heidegger. It is the negative of the image of Being. We associate it with the Essence of Manifestation described by Michael Henry. It is active covering, hiding, and oblivion associated with women in Greek culture which is the opposite of the positive fourfold associated with men. It is the underside of the underneath of the fused concept of Being. Plato, in rejecting the Sea, is carrying on this tradition of sweeping the negative fourfold under the carpet. Heidegger senses that something is withdrawing. But Aristophanes explicitly names that structure of withdrawal that is opposite the structure of the clearing in Being. The major thing that Plato has against the Sea is that it leads to cowardliness, as men will save themselves rather than fight on when the ships are near. The Sea stands against the code of honor of the Hoplite warrior -- the do or die spirit which is so evident in the Indo-European male culture, and which Odysseus exemplifies. The Sea is the place of hiding of Dionysus and Hephaestus, the rejected gods. The Sea brings danger to the polis, which is vulnerable to attack from pirates and mercenaries. The sea brings wealth, but even that is problematic as too much wealth corrupts. But under all these superficial reasons, we can see that the Sea represents the domination by women and the opposite of transcendence, an active immanence which hides and distorts like the unconscious, or reveals dangerous visions like Dionysus whose advent is from the Sea.

The rejection of the Sea by Plato in the Laws sets a completely different tone from the Republic where Socrates was visiting Pireaus to see a spectacle. There is a going down in the Republic which reminds us that the beautiful city described there is really the very image of a Kakatopia where the body and mind are separated and Ontological Monism enacted. On the other hand, the city described in the Laws is meant to realize the possibility of the autopoietic unity which appears before complete fusion into Conceptual Being. This is a possibility hidden between the extremes of Ontological Monism which only knows the positive fourfold, and Ontological Dualism which knows both the positive and negative fourfolds as two images of the same. It is a possibility wherein a balance is struck between these two extremes which pushes beyond the four meta-levels of Being. It is a possibility where the intime realm, where Being attempts to grasp things, intersects with the endlesstime realm which is exposed by the cancellation of Being with the Void. The autopoietic ring is one of those sources that simultaneously exist and don't exist. From one point of view, it is a paradox generated by the four meta-levels of Being folding back on themselves multidimensionally. From another point of view, it is only empty. But from both points of view, it is something left when Being and Emptiness cancel each other out, an image of the intersection of the intime and endlesstime. Ultimately, it is the ring by which the eternal recurrence of the same occurs. It is the ring of the waters of life circulating through the Primal Scene of the Indo-Europeans. It is the same as the non-nihilistic distinction represented by the marriage ring. It is that same non-nihilistic distinction as it occasionally and rarely appears as the intersubjective unity within society which embodies the structure of emergence within itself. When emergence is not something that comes from the outside, but is the very structure of the intersubjective unity itself, then the autopoietic unity of the UNI-verse has been internalized and realized as a social structure. Plato wants us to realize this possibility because it is the Wholeness around which all the Hollowness we experience revolves.

Once the Sea has been rejected, we know we are in the realm of Ontological Monism. In that realm, we will see a picture of the coming-to-be of the new lower utopian city. Significantly, Plato's Stranger asks where the colonists were from. He notes that they might all be from one city and be moving like a swarm of bees. Or they might be from all different places, in which case there would take a lot of time and trouble for unity to be achieved, so they acted like a team of horses. Of course, the migration of bees reminds us of the bees in Odysseus' cave of nymphs, and the team of horses reminds us of the team of horses on Parmenides' wild ride. The bees are seen as a natural phenomenon which has a pregiven structure and unity, whereas the horses must be tamed to become part of a team. These two horns of our dilemma both make founding a new city difficult. This inherent difficulty for lawgivers makes the act of founding the most perfect test of manly virtues. It is a case where separation and gatheredness in the beginning are both problems. It is, in the end, only chance and luck that might make it possible for a lawgiver to succeed.

The Stranger goes on to describe the role played by luck, the gods and art in the work of founding cities. Real luck would be the coming together of a tyrant who is young, with good memory, a good learner, who is courageous, magnificent by nature, and moderate, who himself has good luck. The Tyrant's good luck would be to know a lawmaker that possesses the truth.

... the best city emerges out of tyranny with an eminent lawgiver and an orderly Tryrant. . .

All the Tyrant has to do is be a model himself, and others follow . . . out of fear . . . but this yields a change in society faster than any other way. After that, there are various orders of resistance from different regimes, ranging from monarchy, through democracy, to oligarcy which offers the most resistance. It is a rare event that there is a devine erotic passion for moderate and just practices in rulers. That event is naturally a particular type of emergent event which will transform the city which is always a mixture of regimes. Sparta has aspects of tyranny (ephors), monarchy (twin kings), oligarcy (the council), and democracy (the assembly). All real cities are far from being ideal types and are, in fact, mixtures of regimes. This is, in fact a significant point. The ideal regimes are glosses on the Real city. In there Real city some parts are enslaved to other parts, but not in a regular fashion. In fact, as Deleuze and Guattari remark, it is schizophrenia that is the foundation of all social forms. All the order is merely glosses on this fundamental chaotic regime of real cities. As mixtures, the real cities have all levels of susceptibility and resistance to the emergent event of founding justice at the same time. The city is producing the minimal erratic change of artificial emergence in order to maintain itself in visibility and in order to see its projected uni-verse.

In order to make the transition to the utopian city with perfect order and form from the chaotic Real city, the Stranger invokes a myth of the time of Kronos. In that time, he said that the jinn ruled men because Kronos recognized that they could never rule themselves with justice. Jinn were at a meta-level above men and could order men's affairs as men order the affairs of tamed animals. In those days, men had everything without stint and spontaneously, like the people of Schiera. Happiness was the result for men. "There can be no rest from evils and toils for those cities in which a mortal rules rather than a god." Thus, Plato makes the case explicitly that men have served the jinn who were the source of their laws since the time of Kronos. We know that this is no idle statement by Plato. Mesopotamian tablets such as the Atrahasis¹ attest to this view that men were created to serve the gods. So all the regimes and their mixture come from the abandonment of the rule of the gods. But this point is not made to suggest that men return to the rule of the jinn. Instead, the point is that "we should obey whatever within us partakes of immortality, given the name `law' to the distribution ordained by intelligence." So we shift from the so-called immortals who are other creatures in the pluriverse, to sets of admonitions made up by ourselves as the representatives of immortality. Immortality is no longer embodied by a living creature, albeit invisible, but written statements of injunctions. He concedes that there are as many laws as there are regimes, and that there is much trouble as people fight over offices and make law that serves their own interests. So he identifies what he means by laws as those which are for the whole city, not just some. And the rulers must serve the laws instead of the opposite. "Whoever is most obedient to established laws and wins victory in the city, we assert, be given the service dedicated to the gods." The survival of the city depends on it.

This whole argument for the immortality of the laws is contrast with the first law that the Stranger lays down about marriage toward the end of the book. In that law, all men who do not marry between 30 and 35 are fined and cannot gain honor within the city. Here it is argued that the "human species has, by a certain nature, a share in immortality." Through marriage this immortality of the species over against the mortality of individuals is realized. This is a second type of immortality based on reproduction rather than rules written on parchment or cut into stone. It is the type of immortality of which Dionysus reminds us, whereas the immortality of law is closer to Apollo in nature. Apollo makes oracular statements like "know thyself" and "nothing to excess" which are like laws glosses on experience which guide praxis. So we see, here a reiteration of the structure of the choruses. Each god from the chorus has its principle of immortality. These principles are different in nature, as the immortality of the species involves constant experience of death, just like Dionysus himself dies by the hand of the Titans. In the myth of Atrahasis, a god is killed and mixed with clay to become men. The immortality of the species is an ever arising out of death and an ongoing immortality within the flux of life. On the other hand, the immortality of the law is of frozen and preserved words that appeal to the common reason and experience. As writing these words are always open to interpretation, so arises the legal profession along with them. The words describe a theory of ideal behavior and a set of rules for applying punishments. The Stranger argues that the rules should also always contain a positive element of persuasion as well as the negative enumeration of punishments. However, as laws, we are talking of something abstracted from human experience even further than the common laws which are basically socially accepted practices. In fact we are talking of two extremes of gloss which are divorced from direct experience. Humans do not experience the immortality of the species; they only experience their own families as a social context and their own death within that context. Humans do not experience ideal behavior, but only their own lives and behavior that they only have partial control over, depending on the programming of their desiring machines. Both of these types of immortality are abstractions from the lifeworld which are applied back onto it. On the on hand, it is the Apollian imposition of order and law, while on the other, it is the imposition of the chaotic immersion in the flow of life through Dionysian ecstasy. Nietzsche has explored this opposition already. We are drawn toward the order of the Apollian, but continually fall back into the affirmation of negation represented by Dionysus. These are, of course, nihilistic opposites -- too light and too dark, and both abstracted from normal human experience.

However, these two types of immortality are fused in Plato's lower utopia. And this is my proof that we are dealing with an autopoietic unity. The fusion of these two types of immortality give us a peculiar conceptual structure that is not all order and law, but is at the same time, embodied. In particular, it presents to us a living paradox, which life itself can be seen as embodying. In fact, this is the origin of the autopoietic model. Life is defined as self-organizing. Anything that is self-organizing is alive. And what is law but self-organization? Man makes laws for himself to guide his behavior. But the autopoietic must also make this self-organization occur in spacetime. What is the immortality of the species, but the flow of individuals through spacetime, engendering more individuals to carry on the flow of life beyond the lives of the mortal parents. These parents are living, and they give rise to the living. This is a lower level of autopoiesis already achieved. However, in the case of humans, like bees, there is a social dimension to the organism that is part of its own definition of life. In that social dimension, abstract laws form the basis of community which protects and fosters the reproductive unit. In the case of Greek culture, there are two separate structures, the oikos and the polis. The laws apply to all the oikos within the polis and come from the polis. The oikos is the locus of the reproductive unit. So, the two types of immortality arise through these specific social structures to intermingle in the kind of life, the life form, the lifeworld of the human beings.

These two types of immortality together from a paradoxical knot which is exactly like that formed by transcendence grounding itself in Ontological Monism. In this knot, the two types of immortality are like the two sides of a mobius strip. In the knot they braid together to become indistinguishable. In the knot, they form a conceptual structure which is at once precise in form, and a lattice which arises from oneness and falls back into onenenss. In the knot, they form a ring structure which appears to support a continuity like that of endlesstime. The autopoietic ring reaches beyond Being to be enveloped by emptiness and expresses the intersection of the intime and endlesstime realms. Immortality, ascribed by the jinn to themselves, means never dying. But if the whole universe is created and destroyed, then every eventity within it must have a limit. All worldlines have beginnings and come to an end. So immortality is a gloss on the opposite of the intime realm which is endlesstime. We know endlesstime by imagining the opposite of the realm we are stuck in now. It is not no-time. But instead, a realm where time goes on forever, where worldlines have no beginnings or ends. In fact, our worldlines, which are linear in this realm, must be circular in the next world. Eternal return of the same. Not cessation. Cessation, or pari-nirvana, is the Buddhist ideal. It is out of cessation that the concept of emptiness arises when it is realized that the whole spacetime nexus of in-time and its opposite circular endlesstime realm is ultimately empty. They vanish before the overpowering out-of-time single source. However, if we are attempting to model the intersection of the in-time and the endlesstime, then we would imagine circular worldlines within the in-time realm. The eternal recurrence of the same gives us this double vision which allows us to see the intime linearity fold back through itself to become simultaneously an endlesstime reality. The autopoietic ring is such a structure. It is closed, like a singularity. It exists within the spacetime nexus. But within its closure, there is the circulation of information between the different nodes of the network which is circular and goes on as long as it is alive. Every autopoietic system exists as an intersection of the circulating information within the envelope of the system and the information that comes from the outside as perturbations. The autopoietic unity always returns to homeostasis, but generates a dynamic which, because of its own internal information flows, may be completely different in each case. The autopoietic unity is inherently non-predictable on the basis of inputs and outputs. Inputs and outputs do not effect its own internal processing except as perturbations to be adapted to, depending on its own internal states. The two types of immortality represent the functional and autonomous aspects which are separated by the autopoietic theorists concentrating on describing life. But the intersubjective unity combines the cognitive and the autonomous together in a special way which allows them to form a higher unity than the life of individual organisms allow. The intersubjective unity observes itself and projects the world. For it the world, is a closed system, and the emergent event is a perturbation. The regimes of the world are the adaptations to the perturbations which are independent of the inputs and outputs that are rigorously filtered. Within the world, the organisms of the society are eventities to be observed. The society observes itself and projects norms and a culture. The immortality of the law is merely a functional projection across the entire society by which it attempts to organize itself. The immortality is achieved through the freezing of language into writing, which then can be preserved. Language is the basis of the cognitive facility of the observer. By taking language beyond its natural mode into the realm of traces as writing, an illusion of immortality as lasting social patterning is achieved. On the other hand, autonomy exists as individual organisms are produced. But these, for humans, can only be produced in a social context. Wolf children do not achieve the full capacities we expect of humans. So the immortality of the species is also a projection from the sexual reproduction of these two specific parents. Their offspring may die, but statistically, if enough children are produced, the species as a whole might appear to have some measure of immortality. But that is only really seen by extending the sexual reproduction of specific pairs out to the whole community and species beyond their own experience. So both kinds of immortality are glosses. The second type is an imposition of a pattern also. It is the pattern ensconced in the form of the humans themselves as a form of life. Reproduction repeats that primal pattern in our genes. It occurs between individuals, and is thus also social. It occurs in multiple households as well, and so is a general normal way of life supported by powerful drives within each creature. So the autopoietic form combines these two types of patterning into a single weave. Like the cloth produced by the nymphs of the cave which has warp and woof, which is a wonder to behold, so to the autopoietic unity of the intersubjective is a wonder to behold. It has the warp of the Dionysian will to life idealized as the survival of the species, and the woof of the Apollian social patterning which projects a specific world idealized as law. Together, these ideal structures wrap around the couple who lives together and has children, following the social pattern of their own parents. Two arms of transcendence spring out from this simple social situation within the family to embrace the whole community with law, and the whole species with the ideal of everflowing life. This transcendence grounds itself because on the one hand, it produces the stability necessary for the oikos to survive within a hostile world by projecting the city as its protector. On the other hand, the men of the city are produced by the reproductive fertility of the oikos which nurtures, educates, and shapes them into those who would want to protect and engender others like themselves. Thus, the oikos and the polis need each other and provide the environment where they can flourish together. Without the polis, the oikos is weak and exposed. Without the oikos, there is no reproductive center to protect. The only other possibility is to make the polis and oikos one identical unity by rigorously surpressing diversity. When diversity takes over completely, we have the schizophrenic situation of the real city with multiple political regimes holding sway simultaneously, and where each family is a law unto itself, and where different parts of the city are enslaved to itself. What Plato seeks in The Laws is a special middle ground where both the polis and the oikos have their own clearest form which occurs when the form of self-grounding is clearest. This occurs at the stage just before the collapse into fused Conceptual Being when the trigrams of Primordial Being have partially collapsed to form the minimal system of concepts that allows the autopoietic paradox, knot, ring, lattice to be defined.

The fusion of these two types of immortality, Apollian and Dionysian, into a single dynamic form which takes hold of the intersubjective social structure, is my proof that Plato is describing a specifically autopoietic form in the lower utopia. By producing the image of the fused social structure in the Republic, he has prevented our confusing the lower utopia with the higher kakatopia. The kakatopia occurs where there is no longer any difference between the oikos and polis. It lacks the play between these two limits of human experience. It lacks enough internal variety to produce the autopoietic structure. It lacks requisite complexity, and so is defective in spite of being more ideal. That very close approach to the ideal is its flaw. It is this flawed model that the West has taken as its own ideal instead of the autopoietic social unity, and this is why it has realized the worst which Plato had explicitly warned us against. We made the error of taking Plato's utopia, where mind and body are split, to be a real utopia instead of a hell on earth. By going down that path, we have realized a hell on earth in our own cities and lives. A hell on earth not just for ourselves, no matter how pleasant it may seem on the surface, but a hell on earth for every living creature and the entire planet. Plato shows us the difference between the holoidal lower utopia and the nihilistic higher utopia where everything has collapsed into the pit of Conceptual Being. In the higher utopia, Gyge's ancestor uses the ring of invisibility to break all the internal barriers within the city to gain power. The ring of the autopoietic unity is turned into the ring of political power.

In the next scene, the colonists arrive, and the Stranger begins to address them. He says, "God holds the beginning, middle, and end of all things and completes the straight course by revolving according to nature." This is again the very image of the intersection of the intime with the endlesstime realms, of mortality with immortality. The immortal holds the beginning, middle and end of the mortal. The straight course intime is completed by the revolving within endlesstime according to nature. Here nature is the structure of things which makes them fated. "Following him is Justice avenger of those forsaken by divine law." Here we see again that Plato has some inkling of what Anaxamander understood. In the revolving of the eternal recurrence of the Same, there is justice where the wronged are repaid. The immortal law within the city has as its sole reason for being, the rendering of justice intime to avoid retribution outside time. So we see the two types of immortality really connect the intime with the endlesstime realms. The reproductive immortality is rooted in time. The immortality of the law is rooted in endlesstime as it constantly points to the retribution that will occur there if justice is not done within the city on a day to day basis. "The happy follows her in humility and orderliness, while the unhappy are abandoned by god and leap around overturning everything." Here Plato is speaking of the ultimately happy and unhappy. Retribution will happen in endlesstime. The happy follow willingly and do justice here and now to avoid having to requite the wronged at the ultimate end. The ultimately unhappy are abandoned because they have abandoned the guiding principle of justice by which all the worlds work. They leap about, overturning everything, thinking that oblivion will cover up the atrocities they commit.

Plato says, "like is dear to like if it is measured," but the unmeasured is dear to neither liken or different. He goes on to say that god is the measure of all things, not man, as some hold. The good men sacrifice to the gods. They only accept what is pure. The bad men waste their time sacrificing because the gods only accept the pure because they themselves are pure. He goes on to say that sacrifices are due to the Olympians, the Underworld deities, the demons, the heros, the ancestral gods, and parents. He concentrates on the debt owed to the parents the center of the two transcendent wings of immortality. These wings are represented again by the nihilistically opposite Olympians and Underworld gods. Demons, heros, and ancestral gods inhabit the spectrum between these two extremes.

Finally, the Stranger contrasts the Lawgiver and the Poet. The Poet has many speeches on the same subject, praising, depending on the audience he is tying to please. The lawgiver has only one speech on every subject, yet he must persuade as well as proscribe violence. Thus his laws must have a part that attempts to lead reason -- a prelude, and a somber part that dictates rewards and punishments. He likens this to the way a slave doctor treats, as opposed to the free doctor. The slave doctor commands his patients like a tyrant based on his opinions, then hurries off, much like most aleopathic physicians treat their patients today. The free doctor acts completely differently, more like a homeopathic physician, who investigates from the beginning, talks with both patients and friends, and teaches the sick one, persuading before giving orders. Thus, the Stranger discovers among the first four books the form his laws should take, and applies this form in much of what follows in his enunciating of the laws with persuasive preludes. It reminds us that Peitho both persuades and constrains. The laws, in fact, have all the aspects of Peitho. They persuade and constrain, but also they embody Justice and express a fate for those who transgress the laws and are found guilty. So the aspects of Peitho are still very much with us embodied in Plato's Laws. This is only right since they represent the differentiation hidden by Conceptual Being. This minimal system which Peitho represents is the face of the of difference beyond the identity of Being with itself. Here it is turned into the law which is one of the wings of transcendence grounding itself. But we can equally see it in the other wing where there is accommodation between man and woman in marriage and the agreement to have children. Here, there is fate in the coming together of just these two at this moment, with their respective genetic codes, so this particular sperm hits that specific egg. There is constraint in pregnancy and child rearing as in the work that allows a man to provide for his family. Each accepts their portion of that constraint. There is the persuasion which is constant throughout the relationship on both sides. Each modifies their behavior based on the requests, admonishments and cajoling of the other. Finally, there is justice because each is expected to be only themselves. Justice is getting what is best for one's self, not some false ideal of equality. Justice is that sometimes the man is stronger, and the woman seeks protection and help within his arms; other times it is the woman who is stronger, and the man seeks solace in her arms. As the Quran says, beautifully, they are a garment for each other. So each of the aspects of Peitho apply to both wings of transcendence. It is Constraint that makes us male and female; it is fate that gives our species the life it has had and will have. The fitness of the individual that allows it to survive has an inkling of persuasion. The individual organism adapts as best it can to its environment, pushing its own plasticity as far as possible in order to fit into its niche. It is justice that each species has its own form that complements all the other species in other ecological niches around it so that each has its own food and degrees of freedom. Out of the application of peitho to the reproductive couple comes the application to the life of the species. It mirrors the application to the law within the society. These two clusters complement each other and form the knot of autopoietic unity. Dual projections of Peitho as transcendence projects away from the nuclear family, yet applies back to the nuclear family as well. The dual transcendent wings of this strange attractor provide the support for each other as this worldly flow of reproduction reaches toward the avoidance of retribution in the next world. And in the life world between the two wings, we see peitho at work between the couple that is the heart of the household. The two wings rooted in the life world extend out to form the wings of autopoietic paradox around the family, thus generating the autopoietic intersubjective unity that is the projection of the harmony of marriage within the city.

But Peitho is only one of the faces of Aprhodite. The others are longing, desire, eros and action. So Aphrodite, enclosed in her shell, appears in this instance as Peitho, persuasion, and at other times as one of these other faces. The autopoietic ring is really the sum of these different manifestations at different times. The closed windegg (stone amphora) is the essence of manifestation, pure immanence, the unconscious within manifestation or consciousness. Within the social realm, different aspects of what lies within the closed system break out because of perturbations, and at each epiphany we discover a different face. When we take these together, we discover the five phases of the autopoietic unity beyond its external form as a minimal system. The pentahedron of four dimensional space lurks behind the tetrahedron of three dimensional space. The pentahedron is really five tetrahedrons bound together. We see only one tetrahedron at a time. But all are there folded together. The birds (bees) are the specific nodes of the autopoietic system which is self-organizing. In the case of the city, it is the oikos. The birds in flocks and the bees in combs and swarms are parts of a larger social organism. The oikos are part of the larger organism of the polis. These organisms are by definition partial, not completely viable on their own. Partial means social, and social means open to emergence. In the case of the autopoietic social organization, the group within the city has taken on the structure of emergence itself. But where the group shuns this form and attempts to attain the idealized unity of embodying conceptual being, self-grounding transcendence, directly then emergence is something that happens to the real city and the higher utopian city. In the real city, it is a change of regimes, a change of face. The real city, as we have seen, has all regimes mixed in itself, like the proto-gestalt. In the real city, one gestalt within the overarching proto-gestalt is emphasized. The higher ideal city, emergence is a shattering. In the higher ideal city everything is frozen into a single ideology or form. When the emergent event occurs, there is an utter revolution where everything melts away and has to be built up from the beginning. The ideal city is the intersubjective unity's cognitive projection of itself, the holoidal image separated and reified. The real city is the intersubjective unity's schizophrenic reality, the ephemeron. Both of these revolve around the lifeworld of individuals intersecting it and determining it in multiple ways that cannot be controlled by the inherently fragmented, and perspectival, technological systems. The true holoidal unreified image of the city is between the extremes of the real city and the extreme ideal city. It is written in the functioning of the self-organizing intersubjective cohort which embodies the form of emergence and therefore does not experience emergence. This is a rare possibility, only attained by luck and the help of the gods as well as art. There the real city and the ideal city find their point of contact; where the holoidal and the emphemeron are not cut off from one another, but still form a unity which has a clear form. That form is the autopoietic ring as manifest as a network of self-reproducing, self-organizing, self-cognizing nodes which manifest an utterly unmanifest, unconscious and completely closed system floating within manifestation. The perturbations of this closed system appear as the separate faces of the autopoietic ring, as internal states of the closed system become manifest through the alterations of the open system which do not correspond to reactions to inputs alone.

As we have seen, what is within the closed system has been called Aphrodite. When the distinction between the closed and the open aspects of the system were created, the difference between Uranus and Gaia appeared. Uranus (the heavens) arose out of the earth as a kind of multidimensional supplement to the earth. Earth had to have folded over itself to create the space in which that multi-dimensional supplement could appear. When a piece of that conduit in which earth differed from itself broke off, as the penis of Uranus, and closed in on itself becoming a ring, then the trapped flow of the multidimensional supplement came to have a quality of its own called Aphrodite because it came from the attraction between Uranus and Gaia. That ring droplet of self-enclosed multi-dimensional flow is a closed system that does not recognize anything beyond itself. However, it appears within manifestation as an open system, because it has the attributes of life; it is self-organizing. Next, the closed system begins to speak. Its life-like animation is taken as a sign of what is beyond manifestation. The rustle of the leaves of Zeus' oak is taken as a sign. So as desire differentiates forming the regime of Kronos and Rhea, then Zeus and Hera, these are perturbations in the action of the closed system which does not react directly to inputs. The difference in the reaction from the inputs is seen as a sign of what lies beyond the event horizon of the closed system. This is the speaking of the oracle. In this epoch, the closed system becomes the center of the world. Finally, the multi-dimensional supplement, becomes separated and closed in on itself, and then becomes seen as oracular and the center of the world, appears as the possibility of a city/oikos structure which welds together ideal wholeness and hollowness into a single form within the meshed interconnected perspectives of the intersubjective cohort. The center of the world becomes the whole world. The closed system becomes the one world, the uni-verse. That world is one where Ontological Monism holds sway. The Sea, or negative fourfold, has been banished so we can see the form of autopoiesis clearly. There, transcendence grounds itself as two mutually self-supporting wings of immortality. They reach out from the lifeworld of the human form of life. They mesh to form the knot, ring, lattice, mobius strip of the autopoietic unity. Here, it appears as Peitho projected as immortal law or immortality of species, or as the marriage contract itself which is a non-nihilistic distinction. When that non-nihilistic distinction is embodied by the intersubjective cohort, it is the autopoietic unity of the city, normally only achieved under threat, if at all.

The autopoietic unity is a form of formlessness. It is empty, like the marriage contract. It is emptiness that is a difference, a difference arrayed against all Being and thus crucial to everything. In that empty form, we go slightly beyond Being, arching out into the emptiness, because the emptiness is as close as the intime comes to the endlesstime. The intersection of the intime and the endlesstime is an illusion. Such an intersection is by definition impossible. But through the illusion of the intersection, the primal scene is embodied completely. We walk in and live the primal scene. The circulating of the waters of life have been appropriated by Being and turned into the means of clinging and craving, turned into Aphrodite limited to a certain small segment of spacetime instead of flowing through the whole of space and time. This limitation, the attempt to contain the waters of life, is known as the fountain of youth, the philosophers stone, the tree of life, as if there could be one place in spacetime where these powers are gathered, which isn't where you are right now. This limitation is a prerequisite to the attempt to cling and crave, holding onto these sources of life and wisdom. But when one realizes that the primal scene is everywhere/nowhere, and that it is an image of the relation/non-relation between the intime and endlesstime, and this pair to the out of time, then one realizes that everything is empty and the antidote to Being, that subtle clinging, is applied. Homeopathically, the least cures the most. So all of Being, that miasma that overpowers and engulfs us, vanishes by the application of potentized of emptiness. This was the Buddha's wonderful discovery. Forms do not vanish. But BEING as clinging and craving does. The mantra of Being that lives inside our language is nullified, and we get a chance to see what is beyond the void.

¹MYTHS FROM MESOPOTAMIA translated by Stephanie Dalley [Oxford U.P. 1989]

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