World

The world is not the a priori container that pre-exists the things it contains, nor the a posteriori mental construction of the fictional set of all things. The world is strictly contemporaneous with things, or, more precisely, with each thing. If things exist, then a world exists.

Now, things exist, and therefore a world exists.

Some represent the world as the physical universe, the primary, material world. Others reflexively represent a secondary representation or a mental construction to totalise and unify the set of existent things.

But these representations only apply to determinate worlds: the world of matter (which for the materialist is the only world, the limit-world) and the world of mind (the world constructed by intentionality, the lifeworld). These worlds are not the world of things. They are the world of material things, the world of mental things, the Husserlian Lebenswelt or lifeworld, or the world of thought, language, or conscious life.

Every determinate world is in fact a universe, a 'big thing' – a set (as large as it may be) of composite things. Each determinate world embodies a thing. A determinate world is a thing that other things are, and that is thus something: nothing other than a stable milieu between the things that compose it and the thing that it composes. Every determinate world is the world that we represent as a physical, expanding, finite or infinite universe, and is itself a cosmological object that has particular qualities (speed of expansion, cosmological constant, structure formation, and so on). It is the world that we also represent as a mere mentally constructed universal concept, which unifies our experiences and itself has a unity – the unity of a product of our understanding or of our mental functioning, a transcendental condition, or a result of evolutionary processes.