TWO WORLDS - SLEEPING WHEN KNOWING?
The problem that we have with the two worlds in which we live, is a problem of awareness of WHAT WE DO WHEN KNOWING.
It consists of a quadruple lack of awareness with the consequence that we behave in this regard as if we were sleeping: already Heraclitus (535-475 BCE) lamented a similar problem with the human understanding of the world, when he claimed that men:
"do not know better what they are doing when awake,
than are remembering what they do when they sleep."
- Heraclitus, Fragment B1
The four DOMAINS OF KNOWING in which we lack awareness are:
- SHARED PHYSICAL WORLD: we are not aware that the matter of our shared physical world is "formally indefinite" (does not have the "universal forms" that we unawarily attribute to it)
- DEFINITE THINGS: we are not aware that definite things are not given in the shared physical world but (individually) made by us by adding our individual forms to the indefinite matter. Forms that, although constructed in the course of a continuous social process of negotiation of meaning, preserve an individual foundation.
- INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENTIAL WORLD: we are not aware that each person integrates all her/his definite things into an individual system, which is her/his individual experiential world.
- TWO WORLDS: we are not aware of equilibrating the shared physical world and the individual experiential world, thus living in two worlds. Together they constitute a consistent dynamical system.
Immanuel Kant "confessed" of having also been like sleeping, until an objection that he found in Hume "interrupted my dogmatic slumber" (Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, 1783). After that he became aware of domain 1 and 2, probably also of 3.
