The World And The Worlds

Down the centuries, rivers of ink and blood have been spilled over this question : do we human beings inhabit one world or many worlds? The standard answer, until even fifty years ago, was that we do live in one world, no matter how this 'world' was understood, but nowadays we are told to believe that there are as many worlds as there are human beings. As a matter of fact, there is something to be said for both types of responses.

To begin with, there remains a fundamental sense in which we humans do live in the same world : we have to deal with the existential facts of suffering and death; cope with hunger, thirst and disease; develop certain ways of responding to the bio-physical environment; struggle with the basic realities of our physiological constitution; try to make sense of our temporal experiences; establish modes of communicating with others around us and of transmitting our concepts to those who shall come after us. In all of these, the external world is just the way it is irrespective of what our beliefs about it may happen to be, so that if you cut off a person's left finger she will feel pain, no matter which time-zone she is living in. Moreover, everytime we send foreign aid to other countries; relocate and outsource our businesses to other parts of the globe; promote student-exchange programmes between different countries; find out our prospects in distant markets; try to learn different languages; assert that gender discrimination should be brought to an immediate end internationally; enforce certain conventions regarding war-time and peace-time practices on people of all nations; read novels and poetry in other languages; demand that other political regimes improve their human rights record; try to bring together heads of nations on common issues such as genocide and environmental pollution, we are claiming, implicitly or explicitly, that we human beings do live in One World.

Secondly, however, there is a bewildering range of views regarding what this world is really like, so that despite certain superficial similarities across cultures there lie deep subterannean divergences. For instance, on the one hand, we may say that both an American Marxist and a Thai Buddhist live in the same world in the sense that both of them undergo similar experiences of hunger and thirst; to give a blunt example, both will die within minutes if bitten by a poisonous snake. On the other hand, they do not quite live in the same world; the Marxist lives in that world whose temporal horizons are limited to this one life, whereas for the Buddhist the world includes several life-times in the past and several more in the future until final liberation is attained. Therefore, whereas the Marxist strives for a state of affairs in which a perfect classless society will be established on earth (this is what the Marxist's 'world' is), the Buddhist would ultimately reject such a society and strain towards a Nirvana (the 'true world') that is beyond space and time.