The Threeness of the World (1/6)

A gentle introduction to a metaphysical adventure

It has not escaped my attention that the news cycle is distressing. Whether it’s the latest destabilising pronouncement of the orange one, the gratuitous body language of the techno-cultural arsonist at large, the aftershock of real fires in Los Angeles, or the plight of Gaza and Ukraine, I feel it with you, and I will return to it. For now, though, I seek to escape into relatively abstract and philosophical realms. If you’re wondering why the disquisition that follows matters, it’s about why you can’t buy love, why technical solutions fail, why money is ultimately a confidence trick, why it sometimes feels like culture is running on empty, why we should not seek to understand an individual in the way we understand a group, why there are limits to systems thinking, why spiritual bypassing is a problem, why it’s not enough to have a better conversation, why we need different kinds of power, and more. I will get to those applications, but we need to begin in a more conceptual place. If your philosophical appetite is not particularly keen, be patient please, and trust me when I suggest it might be worth your time…

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When I was younger I ate a lot of Neapolitan ice cream. It is pleasing to the eyes as well as the taste buds because it has chocolate (brown) strawberry (pink) and vanilla (cream) flavours. These flavours are kept separate when frozen but blend into one beige-like colour if you let them melt and mingle. Please understand: the world is not like Neapolitan ice cream.

At a certain point, distinct characteristics of reality cannot be reduced further without loss of coherence, or blended without adulteration. So to distil the world down to three kinds of things (or qualities, structures, processes etc) is a way to keep track of our foundations, as if to say: this far but no further. To establish the threeness of the world does not preclude the notion that the three contains twos and is also one, but it’s important to establish that the one really does have a foundational quality of threeness. That’s another way of saying that if the world was a Neapolitan ice cream, it would never melt into a beige mush.

I hope that metaphor doesn’t leave you cold.

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It has been said that students who achieve Oneness will graduate, take a summer vacation, and move on to twoness. Those who achieve twoness will eventually seek threeness. Those seeking fourness are gauche, understand nothing, and will be sent to the back of the class to retake their threeness exam.

The Tao gave birth to One. One gave birth to Two. Two gave birth to Three. And Three became The Ten Thousand Things. The ten thousand things carry yin and embrace yang. They achieve harmony by combining these forces.

This is one of the signature lines from the classic Chinese text the Tao Te Ching, and it is perhaps second only to ‘The Tao that can be named is not to the true Tao’, which is another way of saying the map is not the territory, and also relevant to the claim that threeness is fundamental.¹

The 1-2-3-many highlights that threeness is fundamental and generative, but also that it is often hidden. Moreover, 1-2-3-many indicates that to say the world is fundamentally three is not to say it is just three and always three. I happen to be rather fond of the number seven. The point is that while Yin and Yang sound like a duality or polarity, their ‘and’ is one of the gang and does some heavy philosophical lifting. The third element can be seen as the relationship between masculine and feminine forces and/or the context that situates the relationship, and/or simply as the Tao.

The iconic image known as the Taijitu (太極圖) translates to "Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate." It can also be said that Qi is the life energy created by the interplay of opposing and complementary forces which gives rise to all creation. The Tao is the one, the ten thousand things and all that is creative in between. So while the Taijitu symbol may look like two fish having a cuddle, it signifies unity, duality, trinity and multiplicity. No wonder it’s a popular tattoo.

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What follows is not about Taoism. There are similar accounts of threeness in all the world’s religions. There’s the Christian trinity for a start, which is not so much ‘the young man, the old man, and the bird’ but more like the writing, the book and the reader; and the list of threeness claims goes on and on, and we’ll get to it. The underlying purpose of this inquiry is to give some deeper rationale for why the organisation I co-created about a decade ago and lead today - Perspectiva - speaks of ‘systems, souls, and society’ as a defining premise of our work. The quick version is unlike the prevailing view in certain quarters that the world is ultimately just matter or just consciousness, it is more helpful to stipulate that reality has three qualities that are equally real, and they are all different kinds of worlds that have to be approached and appreciated in different ways; together, yes, they co-arise in the world we experience but they are also distinct. They correspond very roughly to our exterior world (systems) our inner life (souls) and our shared culture and institutions (society).

Why three worlds? Is there not just one world? Why does it help to say it’s both, and neither and more than both? The quick answer is that while there are not just many things (forces, structures, forms, types, processes, patterns, stuff, epistemes, etc etc) in the world there are relatively few kinds or qualities of things, and that matters because these things have to be known and valued in distinct ways.

This is not a new idea. In fact, it is perennial but somewhat forgotten. A similar notion is also outlined in different ways in Classical Philosophy (The True, The Beautiful and the Good), in Sociology by Margaret Archer (Structure, agency, culture) and Marvin Harris (Infrastructure, Superstructure, Social structure), in analytic philosophy by Karl Popper (World I, World II, World III), in social theory by Jurgen Habermas(technical, interpretative, emancipatory knowledge interests) and Felix Guattari (Environment, Mind, Society) and in practice by Dave Snowden (Assemblages, Agency, Affordances) and Indra Adnan (I, We, World) amongst others. Forest Landry’s metaphysics refers to a ‘fundamental triplication’. Even Ken Wilber’s integral four-quadrant map of reality can be thought of as three main aspects of reality because the distinction between objective-interior and objective-exterior, between the ‘it’ and the ‘its’, can be combined with some loss of granular coherence, but without significant loss of intelligibility or explanatory power.

In other words, threeness runs deep, and it gets deeper still in the esoteric notion of ‘the law of three’ developed in detail by Cynthia Bourgeault, which I am increasingly drawn to. And perceptive readers may have noticed that the conceptual structures of threeness I have outlined above are by no means exactly the same. While they are all broadly metaphysical, I’ve noticed that it helps to distinguish the different aspects of metaphysics they are working with (Popper is ontology/epistemology; Habermas is epistemology/axiology etc).

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Metaphysics can be defined in a range of ways, but it is about the fundamental nature of reality and existence; questions of the nature of time, space, causality, identity, value, meaning and so on. It can seem abstract because it explores questions about the universe that go beyond what we can observe directly, but precisely for that reason it appeals to poets and visionaries as a wellspring for societal renewal.

Within a week Minna Salami will publish her book Can Feminism be African? which I was privileged to get early sight of. The book is a valuable affordance for anyone seeking tonics free of Europatriarchial flavouring, and it opens a new frontier. Minna distinguishes between Empirical Africa with all its history, boundaries and data, and Metaphysical Africa which is “rooted in imagination, dreams, symbolism, language, and the fluid temporality of memory.” Speaking personally, deciding to learn a little about African feminism initially felt like daring to order something from the epistemic pub menu other than fish and chips. But it’s a much bigger adventure; not even a meal or restaurant as such, and not just one thing, but an entirely different cuisine and ethos that gives you a glimpse of alternative social imaginaries and the forms of life they might inspire. I’ll have more to say on Minna’s book in due course but can already heartily recommend it.

Some days I temper myself with the simple thought that metaphysics just means, pace Aristotle, ‘after physics’. But then I remember that meta means so much more than after; it’s also between, within, beyond, with reference to itself, and so on.

If forced, now, to try to articulate it in my own words, I suppose I think of metaphysics as the universe’s invisible operating system that only God could conceivably change, if God exists and is distinct from us, if we know what existence means, and if the underlying computer metaphor doesn’t denature Life.

(I’m reminded of the amusing prayer I first heard from Iain McGilchrist: “Dear God, if there be a God. Save my soul, if I have a soul…”).

More pragmatically, I find it helpful to think of metaphysics as four(ok, you got me) overlapping and cross-pollinating features: cosmology, axiology, epistemology and ontology. To have or perceive a metaphysical view of the world is to have tacit or explicit views on each of these things and some notion of how they interact.

Cosmology is one’s vision of the universe as a whole, including the creation story and its purpose (it is different from Theology which, for now, I include within it). The Lord of the Rings, for instance, has a Cosmology, as does Star Wars. Axiology is the study of value - of what is good and perhaps also true and beautiful (assuming they are good); axiology is what Robert Pirsig was up to when he alighted on the statement: “Good is a noun”. Epistemology is the study of knowledge, of inquiries into truth and understanding; epistemology is what we’re doing, for instance, when we ask how intuition works or what we might learn from indigenous ways of knowing. Ontology is about existence, about what is real, and what is there; ontology is something like the furniture of the world, and whether there is more to it than tables and chairs and the other medium-sized objects that shape our lives. It is hard to keep all these open inquiries apart, and we shouldn’t try too hard. As Owen Barfield once put it - I paraphrase - we have to get better at recognising there can be different aspects of the same thing.

So I plan to run through theories and structures of threeness in a few forthcoming posts - probably not consecutively, and hopefully not too many. In the next post in this series, there is a second preamble about maps and territories. Before we get too absorbed in triptych maps and hang out together in the three worlds, we need to remember that maps are just maps, and even the number three needs an alibi.

Deepening our understanding of the threeness of the world feels like my work to do, and I’ve been putting it off. Life is busy and it will be quite a slog, but I think it’s important, so if you think so too, please do cheer me on. I will need moral support from at least three of you.

Thank you.

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Full Series:

The Threeness of the World 1

The Threeness of the World 2

The Threeness of the World 3

The Threeness of the World 4

The Threeness of the World 5

The Threeness of the World 6

1. The irrepressible Curt Jaimungal recently geeked out on this line in an amusing way here. “The point is that The Tao isn’t as mystical as some make it out to be. It’s supposed to be a principle of natural order which is accessible through your experience and observation, even if it’s not fully definable.”