The Play of Worlds — Toward a Plural Ontology of Relation: 3 Incommensurability and Resonance — The Music of Worlds

If worlds are relational constellations of possibility — patterned coherences in the flow of becoming — then the problem of incommensurability arises wherever these patterns diverge. Scientific, mythical, aesthetic, ecological, digital: each constitutes a world not by enclosing reality but by orienting relation differently, by tuning attention to distinct gradients of potential. Their incommensurability, then, is not a failure of reason but a sign of multiplicity itself — an indication that relation can never be reduced to a single schema of coordination.

Yet incommensurability does not mean isolation. Worlds resonate. Their divergences create the intervals through which resonance becomes possible. Between scientific precision and poetic ambiguity, between economic calculation and moral imagination, there exists a space of vibrational overlap — not translation in the conventional sense, but sympathetic tension. Each world, when confronted with another, trembles slightly, reconfiguring its own sense of coherence in response.

This resonance is not additive. It is improvisational and asymmetrical. When myth encounters science, or ecology meets technology, what emerges is not synthesis but modulation — a partial alignment that rearticulates the potentials of both. Incommensurability ensures that no alignment is ever total; resonance ensures that none is ever sterile. The worlding process is thus neither harmony nor dissonance but the dynamic interplay between the two — the continual adjustment of perspectives across ontological thresholds.

From a relational standpoint, this means that incommensurability is not an obstacle to be overcome, but a medium to be lived. It is the space where sense multiplies, where the reflexive tension of coexistence makes new meaning possible. To inhabit resonance is to dwell in the uncertainty of relation — to allow the foreign vibration of another world to transform the rhythm of one’s own.

In this way, worlds are not fixed ontologies but ongoing performances of mutual attunement. Their coherence is rhythmic, not structural; sustained through continual adjustment rather than enforced unity. The music of worlds, then, is the music of relation itself: the sound of possibility reverberating across difference, never resolving into a final chord, yet endlessly reconstituting the conditions for listening.