126 struggling with the worldTh e best- known example of succumbing to this temptation in the his-
tory of the West is the attempt to formulate Christian doctrine in the
categories of Greek philosophy.
Nevertheless, the requirements of this vision of the world are far
from trivial. Th ey do more than exclude a wide array of beliefs about
nature and humanity that have held a prominent place in the history of
speculative thought. Th ey contradict many of the beliefs prevailing
even where and when one or another version of the struggle with the
world has been the predominant orthodoxy. Th us, if the struggle with
the world confl icts (as I later argue) with the way contemporary societ-
ies are or ga nized, it also contradicts, through its presuppositions, many
of our entrenched ways of thinking. To this day, aft er centuries of unri-
valed infl uence, it has not fully penetrated the consciousness of many
of those who claim to be unconditionally loyal to it.
- Th ere is one real world.* Th e most important fact about the world is
its scandalous particularity: that it is what it is and not something else.
Th e idea of the one real world stands in opposition to the view that our
world is one of many worlds, existing in parallel, or passing from pos-
sibility to actuality. Under such a view, incompatible with the vision
informing the struggle with the world, the one real world thus cedes
some of its reality to the many other actual ones: it appears as simply a
precarious and evanescent variation on the workings of nature.
Th e characterization of the one real universe as one of many, even of
infi nitely many, universes has had a prominent career in contemporary
cosmology and physics. It has been used to redescribe as an explana-
tory success the failure of certain theories— such as string theories in
particle physics— uniquely to explain the characteristics of the universe
in which we fi nd ourselves. To each version of such theories, there
* See Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Lee Smolin, Th e Singular Universe and the Real-
ity of Time, 2014 for a development of many of the theses of this metaphysical vision
informing the struggle with the world. In that work, the conception stands on its
own as a position within cosmology and natural philosophy. Its pertinence to the
argument of the present book is to suggest how we can not only radicalize this meta-
physical vision but also, by radicalizing it, reconcile it with what science has discov-
ered about the workings of nature.