Karl Popper’s Three Worlds
In the first part of this work, I considered the gradual emergence and subsequent fragmentation of natural philosophy. This ‘long, broad, and deep conversation with its history’1 allows us to understand how earlier generations framed natural philosophy, what its benefits were understood to be, and why its vision faded. Natural philosophy does not emerge from this analysis as a static or fixed, but rather as an evolving discipline, developing capacities to engage new questions, while retaining an interest in older ones. While some readers might be surprised at the length of this genealogical analysis, it is essential to any informed attempt to learn from the past, and reflect on how we might renew and retrieve this enterprise. If wrong turns have been taken, it is clearly important to consider how things can be remedied.
In the second part of this study, I will make a case for the retrieval of a natural philosophy, and explore how this might be done. While there are good reasons for suggesting that this could be a productive and timely undertaking, it is not a new or original enterprise, in that such a process of critical reappropriation of earlier forms of natural philosophy can be instanced from the medieval, Renaissance, and early modern periods.2 Contemporary concerns about the interaction between humanity and the natural world, not least the urgent question of fostering human respect for nature in the light of environmental degradation, suggest the need for a conceptual space which is clearly comparable to that once associated with ‘natural philosophy’, as this was understood in the early modern period.
My concern in this book is with retrieving this conceptual space, developing an extended disciplinary imaginary which—like its classic predecessors—links attentiveness to the natural world to the quest for understanding, wisdom, and well-being. Yet critics will rightly point out that such a proposal faces significant challenges. It seems both pointless and impossible. ‘Natural philosophy’, such critics might reasonably suggest, is simply an obsolete form of natural science, and there would seem to be little to be gained from retrieving such an outdated way of thinking. In any case, the subsequent rise of multiple intellectual disciplines has led to an irreversible fragmentation of intellectual discourse and reflection. Both these criticisms are important, and need to be taken seriously. In the next two sections, I shall engage both these concerns.
In beginning this process, it is helpful to reflect on why engaging nature is so important and challenging. Nature designates something vast, unconstrained by the categories of the human mind and uncontrolled by instrumental reason, which demands we see it as it really is, rather than be satisfied by these imaginatively diminished partial accounts of its greater whole. Where instrumental reason seeks to reduce and control nature, natural philosophy is driven by the instinct to preserve, respect, and appreciate the complexity of nature, allowing itself to be mastered by nature, rather than imposing its controlling categories upon it. Nature is experienced as a conceptual immensity, which resists reduction to propositional language. This book is an exercise in the philosophy of retrieval, which sets out to explore what might be gained through a critical reappropriation of earlier forms of natural philosophy, particularly those that flourished during the remarkably creative period in which a scientific culture gradually emerged during the early modern era.
Although it is often suggested that natural philosophy is simply a transient formative episode in the emergence of the natural sciences, this judgement needs to be challenged. As Walter Lüthy points out, we need to explain why seventeenth-century science was seen as philosophical, and why the philosophy of this period was seen as scientific.3 It is, of course, entirely possible that this is an insight specific to the social and cultural specifics of that bygone age; yet it is also possible that these writers had grasped something that we need to recover.
Recent work on the emergence of disciplinarity in western academia has highlighted the historical situatedness and contingency of our own contemporary ‘disciplinary imaginary’,4 and the damage this has inflicted on attempts to create and maintain holistic accounts of the natural world. Yet the institutionalized disciplinary distinctions and divisions that seem permanent and natural are social creations—ways of imagining the intellectual geography and organization of human knowledge production. The ensuing ‘disciplinary ordering of knowledge production’ is a matter of contingency,5 and is open to reappraisal and reimagining. If the early modern imaginary—or group of imaginaries—that we call ‘natural philosophy’ is seen to offer benefits that are otherwise lost, it is possible to construct a new disciplinary imaginary that will retrieve these benefits.
There are good reasons for suggesting that a critical retrieval and reappropriation of a natural philosophy in the twenty-first century is both timely and appropriate. Such a retrieval does not amount to an artificial resuscitation of past habits of thought and imagination, but is rather to be seen as a critical assessment of what was so important about natural philosophy in the past, and how this can be recaptured without trapping us in a bygone age. Five considerations may be noted, to which others might easily be added.
1. There is growing interest in recognizing the significance of early modern natural philosophy in stimulating the art of living well, particularly in terms of fostering ‘practical regimens and formative disciplines’ that help enact human wisdom.6 Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe (1719) describes how a shipwrecked sailor finds himself alone on a desert island, and is transformed by this ‘hermeneutic and therapeutic’ encounter with his untamed natural environment.7 At times, Crusoe seems to be portrayed as someone who stands in the tradition of Robert Boyle and Thomas Sprat, and sees the natural order of a desert island, unspoiled by human agency, as a means of enabling a transformation of life and a purification of thought.
There was a clear moral dimension to early modern natural philosophy, seen especially in its ‘capacity to serve as a practice that cultivates the moral person’.8 Classic Chinese natural philosophy similarly echoed the importance of living in harmony with the natural world.9 These perspectives may helpfully be set alongside the classical Stoic view that the ultimate human goal was to ‘live in conformity and harmony with nature’ (congruenter naturae convenienterque vivere).10 Yet this moral aspect of the engagement with nature is now largely absent from scientific reflection. Steven Weinberg is one of many to insist that the natural sciences have now abandoned any interest in the human quests for goodness, justice, or love, having outgrown such concerns.11 While this view is influential, it is clear that something of potential importance has been lost. The wisdom of our age may indeed be that natural philosophy is simply an older and outdated version of the natural sciences; an alternative judgement, however, is that the latter present a restricted and impoverished account of the broader vision of natural philosophy.
2. Engaging with the natural world was seen by many early modern natural philosophers as a means of correcting the deficiencies of approaches to philosophy based purely on human reasoning. These, some argued, were limited by human weakness or compromised by original sin, and needed recalibration against an external standard.12 While such attitudes can be found earlier, as in Bede’s meticulous attempt to use an evidence-based approach to the study of nature in eighth-century England,13 they are particularly evident in Francis Bacon’s war against the ‘Idols of the Mind’—that is, preconceived or culturally shaped attitudes which distort or impoverish our vision of the natural world.
Bacon thus advocated the practice of natural philosophy—especially the meticulous collection of observations of the natural world and the use of experimental procedures—as the best means of countering inbuilt human propensities to error and self-deception. Natural philosophy, he suggested, might expand our minds ‘to the amplitude of the world’ rather than reduce ‘the world to the narrowness of [our] minds’.14 This point is found in many recent reflections on the human encounter with an untamed nature, particularly through ‘wilderness experiences’. These seem to facilitate a receptive mode of existence, in which we become fully awake to the world around us, creating a heightened state of awareness of its beauty and unfathomed significance.15
3. Early modern forms of natural philosophy were not merely attempts to make sense of the natural world, but also means of enabling human beings to flourish within this world. Although the human proclivity to want to make sense of things is now perhaps the most familiar feature of this discursive space,16 this perception has been shaped by the tendency on the part of popular historians of science to assimilate ‘natural philosophy’ to ‘natural science’. Many early modern natural philosophers saw their task as including the cultivation of respect and reverence for the natural order, appreciating its affective impact on humanity, and understanding better the place of human beings within this realm and the patterns of behaviour that were appropriate to their location within nature.
Robert Boyle, for example, spoke of the natural philosopher as a ‘priest in the temple of nature’, encouraging an attitude of reverence towards the natural world, which in turn recognizes the beauty (and not merely the intelligibility) of nature.17 The nineteenth-century American wilderness authors Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau took a holistic view of humanity’s relation with the natural order, seeing this as saturated with moral and spiritual possibilities.18 It is clear that any attempt to encourage human respectfulness towards the natural order will have to go beyond—and against—the tendency within the natural sciences to think of a scientific instrumentality which is about achieving power and control over the natural world.19
4. According to the mathematician Marston Morse, ‘the urge to understand is the urge to embrace the world as a unity.’20 The psychologist Abraham Maslow expressed a similar point in his notion of a ‘peak experience’—a ‘clear perception (rather than a purely abstract and verbal philosophical acceptance) that the universe is all of a piece and that one has his place in it’.21 In the seventeenth century, natural philosophy provided a means of affirming the overall unity of the natural world while respecting its individual elements disclosed through observation—including the human observer of nature. Most forms of natural philosophy of this period were integrative, their fluid and porous boundaries loosely coordinating what we might today think of as the quite distinct disciplines of the natural sciences, philosophy, ethics, music, and theology. Goethe, for example, was often critical of philosophical abstractions, holding that nature had to be grasped as a coherent whole.22
With any given phenomenon in nature – and especially if it is significant or striking – we should not stop and dwell on it, cling to it, and view it as existing in isolation. Instead we should look about in the whole of nature to find where there is something similar, something related. For only when related elements are drawn together will a whole gradually emerge that speaks for itself and requires no further explanation.23
In comparing the roles of scientists and poets, the Irish Victorian poet William Allingham contrasted a scientific mentality which wanted to ‘break up the whole into little bits, for analysis’ with its poetic counterpart, which ‘reconstructs the shattered world, and shows it complete and beautiful’.24 Science thus concerned itself with the dissection of the natural world, breaking down its complexities into its core factual components; poetry brought these back together again, allowing us to discern their deeper significance. Both these elements were enfolded within older visions of natural philosophy; they are now needlessly seen as disconnected.25
5. Reflecting on older approaches to natural philosophy might stimulate the exploration of fresh ways of considering the relationship between philosophy and the natural sciences, which has become somewhat strained in recent years through the rise of strong forms of ‘scientism’, which see the natural sciences as being capable of answering all valid human questions, and thus displacing philosophy as the natural means of exploring issues such as value and meaning.26 This represents an important challenge to philosophy, and requires careful reflection. One way of responding to this is to return to a period when such dialogues were commonplace, and assumed to be grounded in some broader understanding of the natural world—a theme that was articulated in the concept of natural philosophy, particularly those approaches which emerged during the early modern period. There is no question of returning to those viewpoints; the intention is to bring them into critical and constructive conversation with the concerns of the twenty-first century, and see what illumination they might offer.
These concerns clearly provide a motivation for retrieving a viable form of natural philosophy to illuminate and inform some of the dilemmas and concerns of the twenty-first century. If a discipline called ‘natural philosophy’ had not existed in the past, we would need to invent it today. So can we, like Kepler and Newton, think of our universe as a coherent whole, capable of being represented by a single unified theory? Or is it so complex that the most we can hope for is to accumulate a series of fragmented insights that can only be partially integrated? And what is the role of the imagination in helping us to render this world, both in terms of visualizing its structures, while at the same time developing the ‘constitutive linkage of imagery with affect’,27 in order that our accounts of the world enfold the emotions, feelings, and desires which mark a proper human relationship with the world?
To begin to answer this question, we need to explore the consequences of a general trend towards disciplinary specificity, which now so often takes the form of disciplinary isolation.
The rapid growth of scientific disciplines has necessarily and legitimately led to an irreversible fragmentation of what was once seen as the single undertaking of ‘natural philosophy’. Any proposal to retrieve the category of natural philosophy would require a reversal of this historical process, which would seem to be quite unrealistic. This is a serious concern, and we shall explore it further in the next section.
The classic expressions of early modern natural philosophy—such as Kepler’s Harmonices Mundi (1619)—often seem to embody the ideal of the uomo universale, the Renaissance polymath who was able to master multiple disciplines and integrate them within a coherent worldview.28 The shape of professional academic culture of the twenty-first century, however, is characterized more by the phenomenon of the ‘disciplinary silo’ or ‘intellectual ghetto’ which is disconnected from other fields of academic endeavour. It is increasingly difficult to master the literature of even an academic sub-discipline, let alone make connections with others, particularly in different disciplinary domains. Harvey Graff rightly points out that we must avoid thinking of disciplinarity as a problem, or idealize the intellectual past as if it were a lost interdisciplinary paradise.
Consider claims made for the classical era in Greece, the Renaissance, or the Enlightenment in relationship to disciplines and interdisciplines. Plato cannot be claimed as the first interdisciplinary thinker if there were no disciplines. Nor can Aristotle. This assertion is anachronistic, indeed ahistorical. Although equating major intellectual movements before the nineteenth century with interdisciplinarity can be a powerful force rhetorically and a rhetorical reach for precedent and genealogy, it distorts more than it clarifies.29
Disciplinarity evolved for good reasons. It is not an intellectual aberration, but a legitimate and arguably necessary development, which nevertheless has clear disadvantages—above all, a tendency towards an impoverishing compartmentalization of intellectual discussion, and a fragmentation of our vision of reality. While the practical challenges of mastering a substantial body of information across disciplines must be given due weight,30 there are other disciplinary factors that underlie the potential fragmentation of human knowledge. Perhaps the most significant of these relates to methodological diversity: each intellectual discipline offers its own angle of approach to the study of the natural world, developing research methods which are adapted to its specific objects of study. ‘It is the nature of the object that determines the form of its possible science.’31
Although I have used the language of perspectives or angles of approach thus far to point to the need for multiple investigative and representational approaches to the natural world, others prefer to speak of ‘levels’. For example, in their influential 1958 paper ‘The Unity of Science as a Working Hypothesis’,32 Peter Oppenheim and Hilary Putnam argued for a stratified ‘layer-cake’ model of reality, consisting of a series of layers or levels within the natural world.33 For each such layer or level in nature, there is a corresponding form of science, adapted to the specific identity of that particular level or stratum. The methods and concepts of that form of science are determined by the object under study in that specific stratum, rather than by methods of investigation which are applicable to other levels. The nature of the object under consideration thus determines the form which its study should take. Although Oppenheim and Putnam suggest that laws of the sciences are in principle formally derivable from lower-level laws, which many argue are ultimately those of physics, others (such as John Dupré) argue this model needs to be reframed to retain its stratified approach without apparently entailing such a reductionist metaphysic.34
Yet there is no good reason why such multiple insights, arising from different disciplines and their associated methodologies, should not be held together in some broader vision of reality. While the term ‘natural philosopher’ has now fallen out of general use, many would point to Albert Einstein as the twentieth century’s nearest equivalent. Widely acclaimed, like Newton before him, as a scientific ‘genius’, Einstein was noted for his commitment to the quest for intellectual unification.35 Many were impressed by Einstein’s willingness, as a scientist, to articulate an ethical and political vision, particularly in the aftermath of the Second World War. Einstein often spoke of the importance of ‘striving after the rational unification of the manifold’.36 Where some would argue that, since science, ethics, and religion use different intellectual methods, they are for that reason incompatible, Einstein simply treated them as different.37
Yet although Einstein presented himself as aiming for unity, harmony, and simplicity in both scientific and non-scientific matters, the basis of that unity and harmony is ultimately somewhat elusive. Einstein in effect offers a bricolage of unintegrated insights and perceptions,38 all of which are treated with respect, even if it remains unclear what methods he used to bring them together as a ‘big picture’ or ‘unified theory’. Richard Crockatt points out there is ‘a radical disjunction between the mental processes [Einstein] used to address scientific problems and those he employed to deal with moral, social, and political issues’.39 It seemed as if Einstein was a ‘compartmentalized individual whose separate selves operated almost independently of each other’.40
One possible explanation of this observation lies in Einstein’s emphasis on the importance of intuition (Anschauung) in scientific thinking, which first became prominent in his 1909 paper ‘On the Development of Our Intuition of the Existence and Constitution of Radiation’.41 This idea, of course, is evident in earlier natural philosophers such as Goethe, who had a strong sense of the role of intuitive understanding in the human engagement with nature. ‘The mind may perceive the seed, so to speak, of a relation which would have a harmony beyond the mind’s power to comprehend or experience once the relation is fully developed.’42
More recently, the palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, noted for his informed immersion in the humanities, set out an intellectual vision of ‘quilting a diverse collection of separate patches into a beautiful and integrated coat of many colors’.43 For Gould, the multiple disciplines enfolded within the natural sciences and humanities were all to be respected and valued for what they were—yet also on account of the greater vision of reality that they yielded when woven together. Gould thus resisted E. O. Wilson’s account of the unity of human knowledge, which privileges the natural sciences,44 arguing for
a consilience, a “jumping together” of science and the humanities into far greater and more fruitful contact and coherence – but a consilience of equal regard that respects the inherent differences, acknowledges the comparable but distinct worthiness, understands the absolute necessity of both domains to any life deemed intellectually and spiritually “full,” and seeks to emphasize and nurture the numerous regions of actual overlap and common concern.45
Gould does not offer a rigorous theoretical account of this process of ‘jumping together’; his approach is rather to affirm that this can and should be done, and to point to an imaginative framework—such as ‘quilting’—which enables his readers to visualize how this process of bringing and holding together multiple insights might work.
Gould’s approach can be located within the growing interest within the philosophy of science at that time in conceptualizing unity as ‘interconnection’ rather than as reduction.46 This approach was developed during the nineteenth century by the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce. In his discussion of the nature of theoretical explanation, Peirce points out that a good theory ‘adds something to [observations]…because the addition serves to render intelligible what without it, is unintelligible’.47 The philosophical enterprise is that of creating connections between seemingly disconnected observations, giving rise to a larger vision of the world. Where earlier rationalist accounts of nature often displayed intolerance of complexity and a fixation on reductive approaches to explanation,48 there is growing sympathy for celebrating complexity, and finding ways of enfolding this within a more capacious vision of the world.
This point is integral to Mary Midgley’s philosophical critique of reductionism, which is helpful in recapturing something of the ethos of what was once known as ‘natural philosophy’. She argues that, while there is only one world, it is ‘a big one’—and thus demands developing multiple methods of investigation and representation that are appropriate to its complexity.49 ‘For most important questions in human life, a number of different conceptual tool-boxes always have to be used together.’50 Science is part of this ‘one world’, and cannot cut itself off from other forms of knowledge within that world—many of which are not ‘scientific’ in nature. Science is thus interconnected with, and to some extent dependent upon, other forms of human knowledge production.51
This basic principle of intellectual respect for the complexity of the world leads Midgley to argue for multiple ways of engaging it, in order to grasp and capture that complexity.
On the one hand, I want to emphasize that there really is only one world, but also – on the other – that this world is so complex, so various that we need dozens of distinct thought-patterns to understand it. We can’t reduce all these ways of thinking to any single model. Instead, we have to use all our philosophical tools to bring these distinct kinds of thought together.52
Midgley’s approach, taken alongside the other points made in this section, allows us to respond to this important concern about disciplinary proliferation and the ensuing intellectual fragmentation. On the one hand, these multiple disciples are to be seen as necessary and proper; yet on the other, each disciplinary approach (or ensemble of approaches) has to be recognized as incomplete, offering only a partial account of a complex world. Each such approach is to be respected; it is, however, to be seen as illuminating only certain aspects of nature, not its totality. We need, as Gould points out, to recognize the ‘different light that each [discipline] can shine upon a common quest for deeper understanding of our lives and surroundings in all their complexity and variety’,53 and thus work towards a ‘consilience of equal regard’.
Midgley championed philosophical resistance to the constriction of our mental visions of reality, stressing that the quality of our thinking ought to be as deep and complex as the world that we hope to understand. To retrieve a natural philosophy is thus to map an intellectual domain enfolding many local territories of rationality, each with its own distinct identity and approach, yet which contributes towards a greater overall account of what Midgley terms our ‘big world’. Each intellectual microcosm needs to be affirmed and respected for what it is, yet also seen as part of a greater vision that can properly be described as ‘natural philosophy’.
In recent years, there has been growing interest in the use of ‘spatialization metaphors’ in making sense of our world,54 in that these allow the visualization of complex domains of knowledge, enabling their distinct identities to be respected while at the same time disclosing ways in which they may be correlated.55 Aware of the importance of such metaphors, Midgley developed the idea of using multiple maps of the world as a means of simultaneously affirming its fundamental unity, while being attentive to its complexity. For Midgley, the natural sciences have ‘shown us the enormous complexity of the real world’, and in doing so have made ‘the idea of a single, convergent, reductive explanation out of date’. In trying to do justice to this complex world, we need to develop not a single map, but ‘a collection of maps, all of them incomplete, which together gradually shape our understanding of a new piece of country’.56 Philosophy, Midgley suggests, is ‘always looking for helpful connections’;57 the metaphor of mapping allows the interconnectedness yet distinctiveness of individual disciplines to be affirmed, while insisting that they are to be seen as compatible and complementary accounts of a greater reality.
For Midgley, we thus have to use multiple maps, each of which is incomplete in itself, if we are to do intellectual and imaginative justice to our vast and complex natural world.58 For example, a physical map of Europe shows us the features of its landscapes. A political map shows the borders of its nation states. The first might be useful to a tourist interested in mountain scenes, the second to a refugee seeking asylum. Different maps provide specific information about the same reality. We need multiple mappings of reality because each such mapping is incomplete.
No map shows everything. Each map concentrates on answering a particular set of questions. Each map “explains” the whole only in the sense of answering certain given questions about it – not others. Each set of questions arises out of its own particular background in life – out of its own specific set of problems, and needs answers relevant to those problems.59
Midgley’s mapping metaphor has an obvious application in retrieving the domain of a natural philosophy. Each individual discipline uses its own specific methods to develop its own map of the world. While each of these is adequate for its own purposes, it is incomplete. Natural philosophy could be conceived as the coordinating intellectual domain, a disciplinary imaginary which allows these maps to be superimposed, and their insights and information to be woven together into a grander vision of the natural world than any single discipline can achieve individually. Midgley’s visual image thus invites us to see or imagine natural philosophy as a grand map of the natural world, an imagined spatial domain resulting from the overlay of multiple disciplinary maps, bringing together separate disciplines such as philosophy and physics.60 They may be distinct in practice; they can, however, be brought together imaginatively, by inviting us to decide to see them as interconnected, and experience them accordingly.
Yet this form of integration is not limited to the correlation of academic disciplines—such as philosophy, physics, biology, theology, aesthetics, or ethics. It also extends to broader domains of knowledge, as we shall see in the next section.
How can we map our complex world, ensuring we are attentive to its cognitive and affective significance? One of the more important aspects of early modern natural philosophy is its ability to connect with the affective and contemplative aspects of life, enfolding both the subjective and the objective aspects of the human encounter with the natural world. This suggests that Karl Popper’s concept of the ‘three worlds’—objective, subjective, and theoretical—might offer a suitable conceptual framework within which a retrieved vision of natural philosophy might hold together. Popper set out this framework in a paper entitled ‘Epistemology without a Knowing Subject’:
Without taking the words “world” or “universe” too seriously, we may distinguish the following three worlds or universes: first, that world of physical objects or of physical states; secondly, the world of states of consciousness or of mental states, or perhaps of behavioral dispositions to act; and thirdly, the world of objective contents of thought, especially of scientific and poetic thoughts and of works of art.61
These three worlds, Popper argues, are not isolated and disconnected realms, in that they interact with each other. Popper holds that the third of these worlds ‘is a natural product of the human animal, comparable to a spider’s web’,62 thus distinguishing himself from Plato’s belief that such ideas have an independent existence.
Popper’s approach was not well received,63 with particular criticism being directed against the third of these proposed worlds, which was seen as being imprecise and incoherent.64 Popper’s ontology seemed to his critics to be an unstable hybrid, drawing both on Plato and Frege on the one hand, and the natural sciences on the other. Yet while Popper’s derivation of his three worlds is not entirely satisfactory, the framework he offers has a certain intuitive plausibility, particularly in relation to cultural issues.
This intuitive plausibility may help explain the impact of the ‘three worlds’ and why it has been so widely used, especially as a framework of cultural analysis. For example, the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa used Popper’s framework in a literary context,65 arguing that this categorization of the ‘three worlds’ offered a helpful framework for coordinating the wide range of human responses to the world.
In the almost infinite series of nomenclatures and classifications that the wise and the mad have proposed to describe reality, Karl Popper’s categories are the most transparent: the first world comprises material things or objects, the second the subjective and private precincts of the mind, and the third the products of the spirit.66
In clarifying the difference between the second and the third of Popper’s worlds, Vargas Llosa suggested that the second world consisted of ‘the entire private subjectivity of each individual, the non-transferable ideas, images, sensations, and feelings of each person’. The human constructions which make up the third world, ‘although born in the individual subjectivity, have become public’. These include scientific theories, ethical principles, literary works, religious ideas, and other cultural notions.
The cultural importance of Popper’s approach has been explored by Louise DeSalvo, who notes that literary works exist as physical objects (World One, in terms of Popper’s categories); in subjective, conscious experience (World Two); and, by virtue of their contents, as conceptual objects that can interact with worlds One and Two (World Three).67 This framework allows her to identify some problems with contemporary literary criticism, as well as suggest some solutions. The problem, she suggests, is that literary criticism has veered between taking ‘an extreme objective stance toward a literary text’ that aims to determine its essential qualities, and ‘an extreme subjective stance’ which focuses ‘exclusively on the experience of the reader’.68
DeSalvo points to ways of resolving this tension within a Popperian framework, seeing literature as ‘an interacting set of events or processes’ through which we try to make sense of our environment,69 recognizing these three different worlds and forging connections between them. More importantly, she highlights the importance of subjecting ‘individual views of the world to the critical scrutiny of other people’, and ‘testing one’s vision of the world against others’ visions of the world and readjusting one’s own view in light of what one learns’.70 What way of visualizing, of imagining, can be developed, which offers the most satisfactory rendering of objective and subjective worlds? And what can be learned from the history of such imaginings of the natural world, which we considered in some detail in the first section of this study?
In my view, Popper’s broad-brush depiction of three ‘worlds’ can be understood and used in an essentially heuristic manner, seeing them as mapping three distinct yet interconnected aspects of the human engagement with the natural world without making ontological assumptions concerning their nature, or the precise nature of their interconnections. Like DeSalvo, I am dissatisfied with the extreme objectivism of some scientific accounts of nature, and the extreme subjectivism of other approaches. Just as DeSalvo finds Popper’s account of theoretical constructions helpful in retrieving more integrated approaches to literary engagement, his framework of the ‘three worlds’ also provides a framework for the reconstruction of natural philosophy as a way of imagining the natural world that both preserves and integrates its objective and subjective aspects.
Such a framework, it must be stressed, is not observed; like a scientific theory, it is inferred and constructed by the human interpretative agent in order to make sense of what is observed and experienced—to allow us to see or imagine our world so that its complexity and coherence can be grasped.71 This naturally leads us to reflect on whether natural philosophy could now be helpfully seen as an ‘imaginary’—‘an enabling but not fully explicable symbolic matrix within which a people imagine and act as world-making collective Agents’.72 We shall discuss this point further in the following chapter.
We are now in a position to consider how a retrieved natural philosophy can connect with and hold together each of Popper’s ‘three worlds’. The issues are best discussed if we begin by considering his theoretical world and then move on to deal with his objective and subjective worlds. Although this involves looking at Popper’s ‘World Three’ before his two other worlds, it allows a smoother presentation of the overall argument for the retrieval of a viable natural philosophy. We begin by considering a way of conceiving and retrieving a way of envisaging natural philosophy (World Three), and then proceed to explore how this connects up with the objective natural realm (World One) on the one hand, and our subjective experience of nature (World Two) on the other.