The World

The World

The word “world” is a slippery customer. It seems to have two meanings, ordinary and philosophical. In one use it refers to one’s world-view or world of activity, as in “the tortoise’s world” or “How are things in your world?” Here the word is qualified by “of”—the world of X. There are many such worlds, as many as there are creatures with lives and a “point of view”. But the other use is quite different: it refers to something called theworld—that world which encompasses everything. This is the philosophical use: “the world is the totality of facts” etc. It is not a world for anyone but something quite independent of a life, a consciousness, a point of view, a perspective. Can it be paraphrased? The nearest synonym appears to be “reality”, but that word too has its ambiguities. The OED gives us “existence that is absolute or objective and not subject to human decision or convention” (so decisions and conventions are not part of reality). Evidently, these words are hard to pin down in their philosophical use, though they have an intelligible ordinary use. It is difficult to avoid the impression that the philosophical use corresponds to something like “the scientist’s world” or “God’s world” (the world of an omniscient being). That is, the ordinary use has been recruited into a special sort of subject—the world-of use. For what else can it mean? There is not my world and your world and the tortoise’s world and then the world, as if the last is just another world in the ordinary sense except that a special sort of being is invoked. The idea is to prescind from any subject, but then the meaning of the phrase becomes obscure. It’s like speaking of a point of view from no point of view—there can be no such thing. Even the absolute conception is a conception by someone, even if only a possible being. When we hear the phrase “the world” we conjure a suitable being whose world it is, or else we don’t know whereof we speak. That is the suspicion anyway—we have strayed into nonsense, invented a pseudo concept. There is really no such thing as the world—there are only the worlds of this or that conscious being (or unconscious being—“the world of the worm”). We have appropriated a word in ordinary use and bent its meaning to express a philosophical concept—but that concept remains elusive. You know what Wittgenstein would say.

We evidently feel a need to express such a concept, but no word suggests itself. So, there is either no such concept or we are unable to express it in language (and we have no way to show it). The suspicion arises that there is no such thing as “the world” in the intended sense, whatever that may be. It is a philosopher’s fiction, or fantasy. There are the worlds of conscious beings, but no world in addition to these. What is called “the physical world” is really the world of the physicist. Of course, there are physical objects and properties, but not physical worlds as additional entities. Nor are there “possible worlds” in some sense independent of the worlds of people and animals; this is just so much illicit babble. Dare I say it: meaningless verbiage. There is the theater world and the fashion world and the academic world, but there are no worlds tout court. We have no concept of all there is that is somehow analogous to the concept we have of specific human and animal worlds. The putative idea of the world is not the idea of a kind of super-world in the ordinary sense—as it might be, God’s world or the world of a super-scientist. It is really an empty abstraction. Thus, the concept of the “noumenal world” is actually contradictory: for the intended referent is not supposed to be a world for anyone, even God. The phrase conjoins incompatible meanings, because what is noumenal cannot be a world in the only legitimate sense of that word. The world is not a world, if I may put it so. Perhaps the best we can do is speak of existence, but that is devoid of descriptive content; the word “world” was supposed to fill the conceptual gap, because we are familiar with the idea of worlds. I know what I mean by “my world”; well, theworld is like that except that I am deleted from the picture. But worlds are always someone’s world; it is a misuse of the word to suppose otherwise. There is always a plurality of worlds in the proper sense; the idea of a single all-inclusive world is a chimera. Nonsense on stilts, as someone once said. The phrase should be banned. It gives us a false sense of security.[1]

[1] We think we have brought an elusive (or meaningless) idea under control by using the word “world” in its usual sense, but this use is precisely not what is wanted. We fool ourselves if we think we have hold of an intelligible concept, rather in the way Hume and the positivists maintain, though for different reasons. Nonsense is not always transparent. The word “world”, as philosophers use it, is an “abstract idea” in Berkeley’s sense, and as such empty of descriptive content. It is like “the negative” or “the True” or “the most perfect being”.