Prof. Dr. Erol Göka
Unfortunately, the valuable knowledge produced in certain academic fields often remains confined within those very fields. One of the most striking examples of this can be found in philosophical and social anthropological studies concerning the nature of human beings and human communities. The book The World: An Anthropological Study (Kapı Publishing), which Cabral prepared based on two of his previously written articles, is a remarkable work that summarizes the attempted answers to these questions and yields original conclusions. In this article, our aim is not only to introduce Cabral’s work, but more importantly, to present and accompany some of the very significant ideas put forth in this book.
We talk endlessly, day and night, about people’s worlds and worldviews, yet it would be hard to say that we reflect deeply on what these terms actually mean. Cabral seeks answers to the following questions: What do we mean when we speak of “the world”? How is the “world” related to human personality? Are the two interdependent, and if so, how does this interdependence function? Yes, these are the questions Cabral attempts to answer… Some of you might be surprised, thinking, “Are these even questions? Everyone already knows the answers,” while others may lament, “Why didn’t we ever think about this before? Aren’t the answers obvious to all of us?” But we must admit that this is a highly intricate domain, and without a solid foundational perspective on these matters, ideas developed about humanity are, to a large extent, nothing more than rhetorical flourishes.
What Is the World? The Multilayered Nature of the Concept
“What we are questioning here differs from the famous question ‘What is the world?’ posed by Martin Heidegger in his 1929/30 lecture. The difference lies in the fact that we are not asking about the essence or existence of the world; rather, we aim to identify the conditions of possibility for ethnographic behavior. Our inquiry concerns the ‘world at hand’ of the ethnographer. As Foucault expressed with a pragmatic perspective regarding Kant’s anthropology, our objective is ‘not to define what a human is, but to define what can be inferred from the human itself’… Therefore, as ethnographers, we do not ask ‘does the world exist?’ but rather, inspired by Wittgenstein, we ask ‘which world are we concerned with?’… As human beings, we are also animals, and this world in which we do nothing but reside is closely related to the world in which we sustain our existence as animals. Don’t dismiss it by saying we used to be animals—we still are. Since we possess the ability to speak, we must understand that we have tools to write about the things of the world that our fellow species do not possess. However, we still share many of these things with them, because animals too live in the world… Although the anthropological study of the world will always develop within language, it cannot be confined within the limits of language; because the world, as a condition, historically precedes language and remains beyond it… While this book is about the world of individuals, we cannot ignore or downplay the importance of what Heidegger called ‘comparative examination.’ In fact, Heidegger’s three theses (the stone has no world, the animal is powerless in this world, and man shapes the world) help us focus on a significant aspect of recent discussions that have strengthened the interdisciplinary understanding of human existence.” (pp. 19–23), Cabral begins to explain.
In short, since the human world operates as a shared activity at all three levels of emergence (matter, animal, human), Cabral notes that Heidegger paid attention to “the ambivalent character of the concept of world” when he began his inquiry—and that he too starts from there, but adds: “Like him, I do not aim to eliminate this ambivalence; I merely aim to contribute to its further clarification… You must assume that all humans, humanity, and animality share common paths, and that meaning is expressed only along those paths.”
Let us continue:
Today, we tend to use the word “world” more in the sense of “that which exists,” meaning everything. However, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, its primary meaning is the Earth. The etymological root of the word lies in the Old English word woruld, meaning “human existence, the course of life”; which itself derives from the Proto-Germanic weraldiz, a combination of the words for “human” (veraz, related to Latin vir) and “age” (aldiz, meaning era or generation), thus signifying “the age of humanity.” Furthermore, both the Latin word mundus and the Greek word kosmos carry etymological connotations of order, cleanliness, and regularity.
And Yet, There Is Only One “World”
Despite being frequently used not only in popular discourse but also within anthropology itself, the term “world” is ambiguous and highly polysemous. Anthropologists, in line with the scientific tradition they inherit, sometimes use the word to refer to the physical planet, sometimes to social order, and sometimes to the realm of human meaning. However, because the word carries different connotations for different thinkers, it often leads to confusion. Cabral seeks to overcome these interpretations that spread uncertainty about the meaning of “world.” According to him, “We must set aside the dualistic doubts about the reality of the world, which characterize both Christian and Buddhist traditions and are based on a systematic distrust of the senses, because they were victims of the everything-or-nothing fallacy” (p. 29). Thus, like Connolly, he argues that the world exists and is immanent—that is, it imposes itself upon us—and therefore, the world precedes language and is a condition for it both ontogenetically and phylogenetically.
According to Cabral, the concept of “world” has three fundamental aspects—three axes along which the concept is shaped:
- Cosmic world: The great whole in which everything exists; what Heidegger called “the manifestation of all beings.”
- Perspectival world: The center where the individual human being situates themselves—home, self, local environment.
- Material/physical world: The physical entity that comes into contact with the body, both limiting the human being and creating possibilities.
When we use the term “world,” these three vectors are generally not in opposition to one another but operate in a constant state of interweaving. Perhaps because people experience the world along all three lines simultaneously, they cannot fully conceptualize it in a complete, consumable way in their minds, and thus tend to dismiss it as a “false world.” In this sense, the world resembles death; just as everyone dies their own death, we each have our own conception of the world. The world is constructed by the individual—but the individual is also shaped by the world. This mutual determination stems from the fact that humans are both physical beings and creatures with propositional (linguistic/reflective) thinking capabilities. Therefore, personality occupies a central place in a person’s world; our world is relative to ourselves.
People do not merely react instinctively; they think about, evaluate, and make sense of the world. Since the human mind develops through language and social relationships, sociality is a prerequisite for personality. Undoubtedly, in the psychological sciences, the concept of “personality” is based on defining, determining, persistent, and resistant traits that describe the individual human being. Still, personality is not fixed—it is constantly in a state of formation (ontogenesis).
Therefore, there is a reciprocal relationship of openness and resistance between the world and the individual: the world imposes itself on us not only through our eyes but also through our minds, as long as our doors of perception remain open; we continuously experience the world within a context of materiality and finitude. We also “worldify” it by adding narratives, concepts, beliefs, and meanings to the world. Just as when we play a “game,” the game also plays with us, the emergence of the world takes place through personality—but at that moment, personality also constructs itself within the world.
Do people have different worlds, or is there one world with multiple worldviews? Cabral attempts to position this debate between “ontological pluralism” (each culture constructs a different world) and “single-world realism” (the world is one; interpretations are plural) in anthropology. Indeed, if ontological pluralism is true—meaning every culture and language constructs its own world—this would make it nearly impossible for people to fully understand one another, thereby rendering anthropology itself almost impossible. The ethnographer shares the same planet, the same material conditions, and the same cognitive infrastructure as the society being studied. Understanding the world of others is only possible through “triangulation” on this shared ground. The claim of radical discontinuity renders mutual understanding impossible. In other words, communication and ethnography are only possible within a shared material-common world—and such a world exists, no matter what anyone says. The fundamental structures of the human mind are common. There are no radical disconnections between people; there are only different modes of interpretation. There is only one world; however, people live, interpret, and make sense of this world in different ways. These differences are the product of cultures, beliefs, lifestyles, and environmental conditions—but all of them emerge within the same cosmos.
As human beings, we are compelled to orient ourselves toward the world in order to live, to confront the world in a formative way through our thoughts; this is a fundamental feature of our minds. Humans live in the world through both orientational and propositional means. This means that humans are constantly in a state of ontogenesis—that is, they reflexively work on the production of their own singularity. However, propositional thought is not limited to “conscious/linguistic” thought. The world continually feeds back on our ontogenetic actions in ways we do not anticipate—that is, the world also intervenes in our minds. In this context, it would be appropriate to mention the concept of the “framework of the mind,” in the sense of the mind being in constant construction, alongside the fundamental mind.
A person is born as a member of the human species, but not fully human; because it is only through the process of ontogenesis that one steps into humanity. Neurologically, we are equipped with a tendency to enter the world of human communication and to remain in this world through our memory. However, in order to enter the world of human communication (to acquire a sound mind), we must first be drawn into humanity by other people who were themselves drawn in by others—and this continues recursively, taking us back to the gradual and discrete origins of the human species.
We can only think to the extent that we are willing to enter into sociality, and this is a communicative process that must occur in a specific historical location, in a world of becoming. The very idea that it is possible to live alone in the world is laughable; as Davidson famously put it, “the possibility of thought brings with it the possibility of friendship.”
Two important conclusions can be drawn from all of this: First, we are subject to the indeterminacy of interpretation, meaning that no meaning can ever be fixed or permanently determined. Second, we are subject to uncertainty, meaning that there will never be absolute certainty in knowledge. This is what Davidson meant when he claimed that he was a “monist” (there is only one ontology), but that his monism was “abnormal”; because the world will always be and remain ambiguous—that is, historically diverse and plural.
Starting from this perspective, Cabral concludes that “the notion of a reality that could exist outside of human interaction in history is absurd. Reality is a feature of the mind, and ‘the mind is a function of the individual that develops over time in intersubjective relationships with others in the world that surrounds us’ (Toren 2002:122).” He continues: “For this reason, we cannot fully agree with thinkers such as Jadish Hattiangadi and Daniel Siegel, who, due to their interest in psychology and psychotherapy, generally treat the mind as an emerged entity. According to anthropologists, who necessarily take a more holistic view of humanity, emergence does not occur in general, but, as Christine Toren insists, in each historical individual animal and each historical individual human being. In humans, the mind is a historically determinable event: the ontogeny of each person is the moment when a new level of connectedness emerges; it is the ‘anomaly’ that occurs when an individual enters personal ontogeny. Therefore, the world is not a function of the mind in general, but a function of the emergence of the mind in specific humans and animals” (pp. 55–56).
Although it may seem complex, Cabral’s serious critique of perspectives in the psychological sciences, philosophy, and theology that fail to recognize the constant change in the structure of humans and the mind is quite thought-provoking. Evaluations made without sufficiently understanding humans and the mind, their relationship with the world, and by ignoring change and historicity, run the risk of being flawed from the outset.
In Conclusion
“Human beings belong to the world, but they also resist it. Some balance must be possible between the world into which we are thrown without our consent and the world we imagine we can bring into being through the power of our words and actions. This is precisely what the existential struggle is about.” Cabral quotes this from Jackson and notes that demonstrating this very point is the fundamental aim of his book (p. 43).
Cabral also draws attention to globalization, which began with modernization and became increasingly pronounced in its later stages. “Clifford Geertz declared in 1988: ‘Another thing that is needed is to expand the possibility of a comprehensible discourse among people who are quite different from each other but who, nevertheless, are so tightly entangled in an infinite network of connections that it is becoming increasingly difficult for them to get out of each other’s way.’” This quote from Geertz is relayed by Hannerz, who then cites Fei Xiaodong’s statement from 1992: “People shaped by different cultures with different attitudes toward life are crammed into a small world in which they must live in complete and absolute interdependence.”
Through these words from leading anthropologists, Cabral emphasizes that the feeling of being confronted with the shrinking of the world due to globalization—and the burning need to construct the plurality of the world—should be what guides efforts to carry anthropology into the next century (pp. 48–49). I fully understand his unease, as an anthropologist, in the face of the human mind being forced into uniformity through globalization. But I also expect—and hope—that he will take a firm stance against the way this entire process operates: the way technology prioritizes and imposes ontology, forcing both human beings and nature into transformation.
