THE SPHERICAL SPACETIME - ALEXIS KARPOUZOS

I. The Question of a Spacetime without Centre

From Aristotle to Kant, Western philosophy approached space and time primarily as conditions of the possibility of experience or as properties of reality. In the Aristotelian tradition, space is defined topologically — as the place of bodies — and time arithmetically — as 'the number of motions with respect to before and after'. In Kantian critical philosophy, space and time become a priori forms of intuition, transcendental conditions of all phenomenal experience. Yet in both traditions a common assumption is preserved: space and time are structures that organise phenomena from a — however implicit — centre of reference. Alexis Karpouzos radically challenges this assumption. The Spherical Spacetime he introduces is neither place nor intuition; it is a dynamic ontological structure that refuses every privileged point of reference, every external centre, every principle that precedes the very movement of the world. The question posed from the outset is this: what does it mean to think a spacetime that does not 'contain' beings but is the very manner in which beings are? And what ontological consequences does this displacement carry for the understanding of existence, consciousness, and truth?

II. Pan-Centricity: The Overcoming of the Metaphysics of the Arché

The Tradition of the Arché

Western metaphysics was shaped in large measure as a search for a first principle — a privileged point of departure that explains and grounds all others. Thales declared water to be the arché, Anaximander the apeiron, Pythagoras number. In the great metaphysical tradition that followed, this principle assumed different names — God, Logos, Subject, Spirit, Will — but always preserved the structure of a privileged centre from which meaning radiates outward. Even where Western philosophy appears to abandon this model — as in Nietzsche's 'death of God' — it continues to define itself negatively in relation to it: the absence of a centre is experienced as loss, as nihilism, as a crisis of meaning. Karpouzos takes a different step: he does not mourn the absence of a centre, nor does he seek a new centre to replace the lost one — he proposes that the very structure of existence is pan-centric.

Pan-Centricity as an Ontological Position

For there to be no privileged centre does not mean there is no structure at all. It means that every point of existence is simultaneously centre and periphery — that every being, in its singularity, expresses a relation to the whole that cannot be reduced to any common denominator. This position appears, on first reading, paradoxical: how can every point be a centre if there is no centre? Karpouzos's answer is that the paradox arises from the insistence on the geometric image of the centre — a unique point from which all others are defined. If we relinquish this image, pan-centricity becomes intelligible as mutual constitution: each being is defined by its relation to every other, and none precedes ontologically the relations that constitute it.

The closest parallel position in the Western tradition is found in Spinoza: the Substantia as absolute totality expressing itself in infinite attributes and infinite modi, each of which expresses the single substance in its own manner. Yet in Spinoza the Substantia remains — at least stylistically — a privileged foundation. In Karpouzos there is no such foundation: the totality does not precede the relations, but is precisely those relations in their dynamic mutual constitution. The Heraclitean tradition offers a fertile convergence here. For Heraclitus, 'everything flows' — reality is flux, and flux has no fixed point of departure. The One that emerges through the Many is not a separate principle standing apart from the Many, but the very manner in which the Many sustain one another in their opposition. Spherical Spacetime takes up this intuition and gives it systematic ontological articulation.

III. Omni-Temporality: Towards an Ontology of Time without Linearity

The Linear Conception and Its Limits

The dominant conception of time in Western philosophy is linear: past, present, and future succeed one another in an irreversible sequence. This conception rests on a model of flow — time 'flows' from the past towards the future, and the present is the thin boundary between them. The Aristotelian view of time as the measure of motion, and the modern understanding that inherits it, both underwrite this model. Yet the linear conception faces profound philosophical difficulties. Augustine was the first to articulate them with sharpness: if the past no longer exists and the future does not yet exist, what exactly 'exists' in time? His answer — that time is 'distentio animi', a stretching of the soul, and that the present encompasses a 'present of the past', a 'present of the present', and a 'present of the future' — reveals that temporal experience is never a momentary presence, but always a synthesis. To be in time is always already to hold together what was and what is coming.

Omni-Temporality as an Ontological Horizon

Karpouzos moves far beyond this phenomenological observation. Omni-temporality does not concern only the structure of human experience, but the ontological structure of the world itself: all moments of time coexist, not successively, but as a web of mutual references. Each present 'carries' within itself the totality of time — not as memory or anticipation, but as ontological structure. This position brings Karpouzos close to Heidegger's analysis of temporality, but with a significant difference. Heidegger, in Being and Time, analyses the temporality of Dasein as 'ecstatic': human existence is always already 'extended' towards the past (as thrownness) and towards the future (as projection), and this ecstatic structure is the horizon within which Being discloses itself. Yet for Heidegger this temporality is primarily the structure of human existence — 'primordial temporality' is the temporality of Dasein.

Karpouzos detaches omni-temporality from its exclusive connection to human existence. The world is not temporal because a temporal being experiences it — it is temporal in the manner of omni-temporality, as the coexistence of all modes of time at every point of existence. This does not mean eternity in the theological sense — the atemporal presence of a God — but a temporality so dense that linearity proves to be a simplification, an abstraction from a richer, more interwoven reality. Plotinus, in the Enneads, offered an analogous intuition: for him, time is 'the life of the soul in its movement from one state to another', but the Intellect — the second hypostasis — simultaneously holds all modes of being. Karpouzos distances himself from the Neoplatonic hierarchical schema, yet retains the intuition that deeper reality does not 'move' linearly but holds simultaneously what surface perception experiences as sequence.

IV. Non-Locality: Interconnectedness and Holomerism as Ontological Categories

Beyond the Ontology of Exteriority

The dominant ontology of modernity is an ontology of exteriority: beings are defined primarily through their spatial distance, their self-sufficiency, their capacity to exist independently of others. This model, which reaches its fullest philosophical expression in Locke and Hume, treats relations between beings as external — as bonds contracted between pre-existing, self-contained entities. Karpouzos counters this with an ontology of interiority and interconnectedness: beings do not first exist and then relate — rather, relation is constitutive of their very existence. This does not mean that beings lose their singularity; it means that their singularity is itself the expression of their relation to the whole. To be is always already to be in relation — not as an accidental feature, but as the very mode of ontological constitution.

Holomerism: The Part as Expression of the Whole

The concept of holomerism — that every part carries information about the whole and expresses it — has deep roots in the philosophical tradition. In Plato's Timaeus, the Demiurge fashions the world as a living organism in which every part reflects the structure of the whole. The Neoplatonic tradition deepened this intuition: in Plotinus, every level of reality 'proceeds' from the higher and reflects it — the One is present in every being. Karpouzos detaches this intuition from the hierarchical framework of Neoplatonic procession. There is no 'higher' from which a 'lower' proceeds; there is only the whole that expresses itself — in different ways, but with equal dignity — in each of its constituents. This recalls certain aspects of the Hegelian dialectic — particularly the idea that the Absolute is not something separate from the finite but expresses itself through it — yet without the teleological schema of development towards an End. The whole is not a destination reached at the close of a process; it is present, in its entirety, at every point of the process itself.

Relational Ontology and the Problem of Identity

A possible philosophical objection to Karpouzos's non-local, relational ontology concerns the problem of identity: if each being is defined entirely by its relations, how does it retain any identity at all? Does it not dissolve into an undifferentiated whole? Karpouzos meets this objection with a careful ontological distinction: relational constitution does not amount to identification. Each being expresses the whole from a specific and irreplaceable point of view — its own unique position within the pan-centric structure. Its identity is not something behind or beyond its relations, but the very particular and concentrating manner of its expression. It is, one might say, the unique way in which the whole folds itself into a singular point — gathering the entirety of relations into a specific, unrepeatable mode of being.

V. Meta-Ontology: Beyond the Metaphysics of Opposition

The analytical presentation of the three ontological properties of Spherical Spacetime now permits a synthetic understanding of the philosophical innovation it represents. All three properties — pan-centricity, omni-temporality, non-locality — systematically overcome a foundational metaphysical opposition. Pan-centricity overcomes the opposition of centre and periphery, which always implies hierarchy — certain beings, certain principles, certain truths are 'more central' than others. With pan-centricity, every being is equally central — not because it is equated with others, but because the very structure of centricity now receives universal application. The centre is everywhere, and therefore nowhere in particular.

Omni-temporality overcomes the opposition of the permanent and the transient, which has dominated the history of metaphysics from Parmenides to Hegel. Parmenides set the eternal, unchanging Being against the flux of becoming. Hegel consummated the permanent at the conclusion of dialectical movement. Karpouzos does not choose between them: movement and permanence are not opposed categories but mutually interwoven dimensions of the same ontological structure. The flux does not tend towards a permanent terminus; permanence is not a refuge from flux. Both are aspects of a single, irreducible dynamism. Non-locality overcomes the opposition of identity and relation — the assumption that beings first 'are' and subsequently 'relate'. Relation is not external to beings — it is what constitutes them as what they are. And yet, precisely because every being expresses the whole from its singular vantage point, differentiation is not abolished but deepened: the more fully a being is what it is, the more fully it expresses the whole from which it is inseparable. These three overcomings do not merely accumulate — together they constitute a new ontological paradigm that Karpouzos calls, or that may be called, meta-ontology: a mode of thought that does not ask 'what are beings' but 'what is the manner of Being' — in a way that surpasses every prior ontological framework without abolishing the questions those frameworks raised.

VI. Spherical Spacetime as Philosophical Undertaking

The philosophy of Alexis Karpouzos, and in particular the concept of Spherical Spacetime, represents a rare philosophical undertaking: the attempt to think the totality of existence — space, time, consciousness, nothingness — as a unified dynamic structure, without reducing it to any partial principle and without surrendering philosophical rigour. This undertaking does not move in a vacuum: it enters into critical dialogue with the entire history of Western philosophy — from Heraclitean flux to Heideggerian temporality, from Plotinian holomerism to Spinozian Substantia. Yet it is neither eclectic synthesis nor comparative compilation — it is original philosophical thought that uses these traditions as launching points from which to move beyond them.

The philosophical stakes are not abstract. Our age is characterised by a profound fragmentation — of knowledge into impenetrable specialisations, of society into incommensurable fragments, of human existence into disconnected instants. Spherical Spacetime does not offer a solution — it is not a prescription. It offers a philosophical framework within which this fragmentation becomes visible for what it is: not the 'natural' condition of things, but the consequence of a partial, abstractive mode of thought that has forgotten the whole. Philosophy, for Karpouzos, does not resolve these problems — it confronts them radically, opening space for a different understanding of existence. And this, in the end, may be the most authentic vocation of philosophy: not to answer, but to question in a manner that transforms.