Many worlds, four worlds

There are many worlds. Continually experiencing a ‘world inside my head’, I charitably concede that there is another, somewhat different world in your head and, by extension, everyone else’s. If we abandon this subjective sense of many worlds, and the strict philosophical idealism that this way of thinking implies, there are still many worlds.

Seen from the inside, worlds have horizons. Visualized from the outside, worlds are wholes composed of many parts, including people who see the world (the world in their heads) more or less the same way. Society becomes the background condition for all the things or objects that members of society talk about. Broadly speaking, this is a phenomenological conception of world as worlds, and one that I subscribe to myself.

There is, of course, a contrary claim, to the effect that there is only one world— the real world consisting of all things. Most of us are philosophical realists, for whom this claim seems indisputably right. In such a world, no society (with the possible exception of some hunter-gatherer societies) is ever wholly self-contained; all things in the world are caught up in a web of (causal, functional, constitutive) relations. This is an Aristotelian formula— every whole is a part of some larger whole. We who live in what we call, somewhat paradoxically, the modern or Western world depart from this formula when we insist that the world we live in is the only world there is— the sum of all things.

Indeed, we have it both ways. There is our objectively discernible, subjectively valorized modern world. There is another objectively discernible world of many worlds, or, as we are inclined to say, the rest of the world. Taken together, these two worlds— the modern world and the rest of the world— constitute an ostensible objective reality (ostensibly objective, ostensibly real) we also call the earth, planet or globe.

Here I am concerned with the three worlds that members of the modern world think they see: our world, the rest of the world, and the world as the largest possible whole. I am also concerned with the possibility of a fourth world. This is not the world so many of us see at hand— one in which, thanks to globalization, all has become modern, or indeed, postmodern.