A reader asked whether the concept world in the transcendental-phenomenological sense is a limit concept. Before addressing that question, and continuing the series on limit concepts, a survey of the several senses of 'world ' is in order, or at least those senses with some philosophical or proto-philosophical relevance.
1) In the planetary sense, the world is the planet Earth or some other planet such as Mars, as in H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds.
2) In the cosmological sense, the world is the cosmos, the physical universe, the object of cosmology, a branch of physics. It is space-time together with whatever physicists discover within it: particles, fields, strings, vacuum fluctuations . . . .
3) In the theological sense, the world is the totality of creatures, where a creature is anything created ex nihilo by God, anything dependent on God for its existence (and presumably also dependent on God for its nature, intelligibility, and value). This includes all contingent beings and arguably also all necessary beings with the exception of God. I am alluding to Aquinas' distinction between God, the necessary being whose necessity is from himself, and the rest of the necessary beings that have their necessity from another, namely, from God. The latter are creatures, as strange as that might sound. They are creatures in that they depend on God for their existence despite the impossibility of their non-existence. For if, per impossibile, God did not exist, they would not exist either.
4) In the referential sense, for want of a better name, the world is the totality of extra-linguistic and extra-mental items. Thus daggers are 'in the world' in this sense, but not Macbeth's dagger or any other objects of hallucination, all such items being 'in the mind.' 'World' in the referential sense is a contrastive term and denotes what exists in itself, in reality, as opposed to what exists only in and for minds. For example, philosophers of language typically tell us that reference is a word-world relation. The world in the referential sense is the totality of objects of primary reference, whether the reference be what Hector-Neri Castaneda calls thinking reference, which does not require linguistic expression, or linguistic reference via proper names, indexicals, demonstratives, definite descriptions, etc.
NOTE: Although 'world' carries a suggestion of maximality and all-inclusiveness, (2), (3) and (4) describe senses of 'world' which are non-maximal and contrastive. Thus in (2) the world does not include so-called abstract objects or purely spiritual beings such as God, angels, and unembodied souls. In (3) the world does not encompass or contain or include God, and is thus other than God, but it does include abstract objects if there are any. Similarly with (4): the objects of primary reference form a totality that excludes the semantic and intentional apparatus in the mind whereby the items in the world are referenced, although the items in the referential apparatus exist and can be referred to in reflection and therefore can also claim to be in the world in a wider sense. For example, consider the intentional or object-directed state one is in when one veridically sees a tree. Is this state not in the world? Or what about the words, whether tokens or types, used to refer to things in the world and to the world itself? Are they not in the world in a suitably maximalist sense of the term? John Searle is in the world, but a token of the proper name 'John Searle' is not? This is a problem for (4), but not one that can detain us. There are in fact a number of gnarly problems one can pose about (2), (3) and (4), but they are not my problems, at least not now when I am merely cataloging the different philosophically relevant senses of 'world.'
5) In the Christian-existential (existenziell) sense, 'world' refers to a certain attitude or mentality. My reader well describes it as follows:
But there is another sense of the term 'world' — Christians talk of dying to the world and being in the world but not of it. This world they speak of could not be reduced to the world of black holes and dark matter, of collapsing stars and expanding nebulae. This is the social and moral world that they want to die to. It is the world of spiritual distraction and moral fog, the world of status-seeking and reputation.
To which wonderful formulation I add that worldlings or the worldly live for the here and now alone with its fleeting pleasures and precarious perquisites. They worship idolatrously at the shrine of the Mighty Tetrad: money, power, sex, and recognition. They are blind to the Unseen Order and speak of it only to deny it. They are the Cave dwellers of Plato who take shadow for substance, and the dimly descried for the optimally illuminated. They do not seek, nor do they find. They are not questers. They live as if they will live forever in a world they regard as the ne plus ultra of reality, repeating the same paltry pleasures and believing them to be the summum bonum.
I seem to have strayed from description to evaluation. In any case:
6) In the all-inclusive tenselessly ontological sense, the world is the totality of everything that is or exists, of whatever category, whether mental, material, or ideal (abstract), whether past, present, or future, whether in time or outside of time.
7) In the presentist ontological sense, the world is the totality of everything that is or exists, at temporal present, of whatever category, whether mental, material, or ideal (abstract). This is close to Quentin Smith's (may peace be upon him) notion of the world-whole in The Felt Meanings of the World (Purdue 1986).
8) In the Tractarianly factualist sense, the world is all that is the case; it it is the totality of facts, not of things. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus, 1, 1.1:
Die Welt ist alles was der Fall ist. Die Welt is die Gesamtheit der Tatsachen, nicht der Dinge.
9) On Armstrongian naturalistic factualism, there is only the space-time world and it "is a huge and organized net of states of affairs [concrete facts]" (Sketch for a Systematic Metaphysics, Oxford 2010, p. 26). Since thin particulars, properties, and relations are constituents of states of affairs, the world for Armstrong is a totality of facts AND of things .
David Armstrong offers a useful comment on Wittgenstein (ibid., p. 34):
Wittgenstein said at 1.1 in his Tractatus that the world is the totality of facts, not of things. I think he was echoing here (in a striking way) Russell's idea that the world is a world of facts. I put the same point by saying that the world is a world of states of affairs. To say that the world is a world of things seems to leave out an obvious point: how these things hang together, which must be part of reality. Interestingly, my own teacher in Sydney, John Anderson, used to argue that reality was 'propositional' and appeared to mean much the same as Russell and Wittgenstein. One could say metaphorically that reality was best grasped as sentence-like rather than list-like. (Hyperlink added!)
10) In the modal-abstractist sense, a possible world is a maximal Fregean proposition where a maximal such proposition is one that entails every proposition with which it is consistent; the actual world is the true maximal proposition; a merely possible world is a maximal proposition that is false, but contingently so. Note that while the worlds in question are maximal, this conception of worlds is not maximalist. For on this scheme, the possible world that happens to be actual is the maximal proposition that happens to be true. True of what? True of the concrete universe that serves as its truthmaker. The actual world is an abstract object that excludes the concrete universe.
11) In the modal-concretist sense, a possible world is a maximal mereological sum of concreta; every world is actual at itself, which implies that no world is actual absolutely or simpliciter; there are no merely possible worlds given that every world is actual at itself. This is a maximalist conception of worlds. (See David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds, Basil Blackwell, 1986) Finally,
12) In the transcendental-phenomenological sense, the world is, first of all, none of the above. Let's take a stroll down the via negativa. The world is not the planet Earth, and not just because there are other physical entities: Earth appears within the world and is therefore not the same as the world. The world is not the physical cosmos; the cosmos appears within the world, and is therefore not the same as the world. Creatures are not the world; they too appear within the world. God is not the world; if God is, then God is either a being (a being among beings) or the being, the one and only being. Either way, God is seiend, ens, being, not reines Sein, esse, pure Be-ing (To Be). Now the world in the transcendental-phenomenological sense is the ultimate context within which alone beings appear or show themselves as beings. It follows that God, if he is ein Seiendes (a being) or das Seiende (the being), is not the world but is within the world.
The world is not itself a being as if it were a sort of ontic container, but the ultimate transcendental condition -- although 'condition' is not quite the right word -- that allows beings to be. So if God is either a being or the being, then he is within the world, in which case God cannot be the world. The world in the transcendental-phenomenological sense is transcendentally prior to every being including God who, despite his marvellous attributes, is but the highest being. God may be ontically that than which no greater can be conceived (Anselm), but transcendentally there is a greater, namely, the clearing or Lichtung (Heidegger) within which alone beings show themselves as beings. Every being, including the highest being, God, is subject to the ultimate transcendental condition of manifestation.
And of course the world in the transcendental-phenomenological sense is not the realm of primary referents or the attitude of worldly people that Christians qua Christians oppose. Nor is the world a totality in any innerworldly (intramundane) sense of 'totality.' The world is not an ontic whole. It cannot be pieced together out of parts. It is not a collection the existence of which presupposes the items collected. It is not a set, or the extension of a set, a mereological sum or the extension of a mereological sum -- if you care to distinguish a sum from its membership/extension. The world is not a scattered object, an aggregate of any kind, a maximal conjunction of propositions, a maximal conjunctive fact. The world has no adequate ontic model. It is not an instance of a category instantiated within the world. It cannot be assimilated to any abstract item such as a set or a proposition. It cannot be assimilated to any concrete items such as a concrete fact or a concrete individual or an aggregate.
The world is unique. "The world . . . does not exist as an entity, as an object, but exists with such uniqueness that the plural makes no sense when applied to it. Every plural, and every singular drawn from it, presupposes the world-horizon." (Crisis, Carr tr. 143) I'll have more to say later.
This is a very good post. You make many intricate distinctions in this above outline. Since there is so much to be pondered here, I will have to limit myself to a few probing questions and statements.
I. I am not sure it is exactly correct to say, as you do in sense (3) of the term world, that God is not included in the world. If the theology that we are speaking of is Christian theology, and if the Christian theology that we are talking about is the classical theology founded by the early fathers and developed systematically in the medieval period, then I think a case can be made that God is indeed part of the world. Since (1) God is the immanent sustainer of created being, and (2) this sustaining activity can interpreted as the continuous activity of the third person of the Trinity( the Holy Spirit). This also depends upon how much you want to emphasize the Neoplatonic aspects of Christian theology in contradistinction to some of the Aristotelian ideas of, say, Aquinas (for many would say that God is neither a being, or the being, but beyond being, super-essential and so on). God, in short, may not be reducible to his worldly activity, but nonetheless be part of the world too as the sustaining cause of things or( in the Neoplatonic language) the persisting divine energy that gives all existents their being and configuration.
II As regards to your discussion of modality, there is of course sense of this use of world--the one used by Leibniz, but this does not seem to fall under either the modal-abstractist, or the modal-concretist sense. In the way that you talk of the modal-abstractist form, it seems to be connected to propositional formulations connected to the philosophy of language, whereas Leibniz's was an onto-theological formulation connected to the theory, shared by Aquinas as well, that ideas, in the Platonic sense, subsisted within the mind of God( of course this meant different things for both of them but that's not at issue here).
III Sense (7) of the way that you talk of World is very similar to ideas that the stoics formulated. However, it could be said(as was customary for ancient philosophers) that they mixed the ontological with the existential, and the focus on the present was a way of training the soul and managing impressions, but I am not sure if they actually took up this view as an explicit ontology or if they simply attempted to inhabit perspective that such an ontology might make easier.
IV There are a lot of other questions and observations that I have, but I will end with this for now: The world horizon, for Husserl, factually speaking also has within it our world-pictures or conceptions of the world. These conceptions condition the way that we move through the world to a great extent. The live-world, for the contemporary American or the Japanese citizen from 500 years ago, will be very similar insofar as the grass will appear green for them and the sun a tiny dot in the sky, but at the same time the general world-conception that one has (or perhaps more importantly, that is dominant in one's age) will also circumscribe one’s existential sense of being in-the-world. We speak of the worldlings being caught up in the passions and pleasures of mundane existence, but this could be a matter of lack of spiritual attunement or it could be a matter of the dominant naturalistic world-conception( which Husserl, rightly, criticized as physicalism) limiting his ability to express a spiritual dimension that is unseen because the ( "concrete-possibility", as they say) is not open to him. Some men may be born wordings--other may have been made that way but their world. Just as one may have the genetic predisposition for tall height but because of malnutrition it never manifested, so there may be worldlings now who in past age would have been great saints or spiritual masters.
Posted by: Eriugena | Saturday, January 09, 2021 at 04:53 PM