The Play of Worlds — Toward a Plural Ontology of Relation: 1 Worlds in Play — From Relation to Plurality

To speak of “worlds” in the plural is to resist the metaphysics of the One. The world, conceived as a totalised unity, presupposes a neutral backdrop upon which beings appear and interact. A plural ontology of relation, by contrast, begins not from substance or space but from field — from the dense mesh of potential that differentiates itself into partially coherent horizons of sense. Each “world” is such a horizon: a stabilised phase of relational becoming.

In this view, a world is not an object among others, nor a bounded system; it is a configuration of ongoing construal. Worlds are enacted coherences — patterns of attention, habit, and material correspondence that mutually sustain their own intelligibility. What we call “the world” is always already a composite of overlapping relational fields: physical, symbolic, affective, ecological, social. Each articulates reality according to its own parameters of relevance, its own mode of alignment.

The plurality of worlds thus emerges not from multiplication but from differentiation within relation itself. The same relational medium — the play of potential — gives rise to distinct ontological regimes. What makes these worlds plural is not isolation but incommensurability: each construes being from a different inflection of relation. The scientific world is not false to the mythical, nor the aesthetic subordinate to the economic; they are distinct enactments of possibility, each with its own rhythm of coherence.

This pluralism is not relativism. It does not dissolve truth into perspective, but recognises that truths are modes of relational alignment. The world is not given, but continuously worlded through the play of relation. To think plural ontologically is therefore to move from representation to participation — from seeking to depict an external world to joining the improvisation by which worlds arise, overlap, and transform.

Such a shift has consequences. It means that difference is no longer the exception to unity but the very mode of being. It means that no world can claim finality, for each is sustained by the same generative medium that exceeds it. And it means that plurality itself is not chaos, but the play of coherence in motion — a cosmos alive with difference, a reality that never stops becoming.

In the posts that follow, we trace this play more closely: how worlds emerge, how they interact, how they translate or collide. We will see that plurality is not a fragmentation to be overcome, but the very texture of a relational cosmos — the rhythm through which being itself keeps time.