Jonathan Rowson on the Threeness of Our World

Discussion

Jonathan Rowson:

"When I say we live in three worlds I mean something like this:

There is a world ‘out there’ - an objective exterior world of processes and events that can operate entirely independently of human perception and is mostly the concern of natural science.

There is a world ‘in here’ - a subjective interior world of consciousness, thoughts and feelings, full of meaning and mattering; the concern of philosophy, religions, and psychology.

There is (in most contexts) a shared world ‘between us’ and/or ‘for us’, an inter-subjective and inter-objective life of culture and ideas and institutions that forms a socially constructed reality and patterns of collective psychology; that world is of interest to social scientists and is the domain of politics broadly conceived.

These three worlds interact and are all part of the same world that is both one and many, but they are different kinds of things, known and valued and changeable in different ways; being aware of this underlying structure helps us to understand what we are doing here, what we can do, and what we should do.

...

This three-world perspective is foundational in a morphological rather than substantive sense. I like the word morphology. This quasi-architectural term means the study of form or forms - an inquiry into the shape, structure, and function of things. Threeness provides the meta-theoretical scaffolding to build particular theories and practices for specific purposes, i.e. it is not a theory as such, but it facilitates conversations between theories and therefore illuminates and informs practice.3

This three-world perspective need not always take sides in perennial philosophical debates about the nature of matter, consciousness or society. However, it does say that if you want to be intelligible about the world in a way that is expansive and inclusive enough to be helpful without being overwhelming, these three constitutive worlds are a good place to start, maybe the only place to start well, and probably the best place to start. What this distinction between worlds serves to highlight - and is essential for - is the varied ontology, epistemology, and axiology of different kinds of phenomena; how something is, how something is known and how something is valued is very different depending on which of the three worlds you are talking about.4

To illustrate, coming back to the metacrisis context, the three-world perspective helps us to distinguish between the world characterised by ecological collapse, exponential technology, economic and bio-precarity (‘systems’) with another kind of world that's characterised by misperception, confusion, anxiety, despair and hope (‘souls’) and another that's characterised by fragile democracies, misinformation, wars, and educational failure (‘society’). There is ultimately one world, and it's all happening simultaneously, but that one world contains three distinct elements of reality and three distinct ways of knowing and valuing it, and they all require different kinds of attention and action. The objective world may call for facts and empirical measurement, but the subjective world calls for meaning, mythos and hermeneutics; while the shared world calls for dialogue, ritual, art, collective agency and so on.5

If civil society wants to understand how everything fits together, what it means, and what we should try to do about it, we will benefit from talking in a way that elucidates the relationship between the three worlds; they are all real, and they all matter. We need an educational renaissance (‘the formation’) to create a generation that can move between these forms of existence and ways of knowing with discerning agility."

(https://jonathanrowson.substack.com/p/the-threeness-of-the-world-2)