Are All Human Beings Destined to Inhabit the Same Perceptual Space?
Abstract
A universal perceptual space becomes illusory when global exchange preserves dominant powers and dissolves difference only in their favour.
Philosophy, globalisation and political economy · Full reading edition
The deceptive promise of a single world
The appealing idea of humanity merging into one family may naturalise dominant forces. The projected ‘great mixture’ hides selection: global exchange values what strengthens yesterday’s strongest actors rather than what reduces their advantage.
Marx exposed this alleged universal fraternity as capital’s freedom to crush labour. Growth for some may depend on the declining value and autonomy of others.
No neutral interworld
If worlds overlap, their common zone is not automatically neutral; it is exposed to influence and unequal power. Nations do not dissolve in the international sphere, and even a small part of their being remains politically vital.
The ‘Whole-World’ may become the amplified voice of powerful states, leaving each country in its established rank while presenting hierarchy as consensus.
The corporate world without states
Large firms imagine a unified space in which borders, customs and political regimes disappear from view. The Washington Consensus gave this vision a programme: rapid liberalisation, removal of regulation and an ultimately self-regulating global market.
Such universalism does not abolish power. It conceals which actors define the rules and benefit from the disappearance of visible political limits.
Situation and the irreducibility of others
Merleau-Ponty reminds us that everyone inhabits a world from a particular situation. One cannot live another person’s private landscape without dissolving their alterity into one’s own perspective.
Shared ideas do not require identical origins. People and states may converge because they recognise their differences and discover a common relation to being, as non-aligned countries once did.
Convergence without fusion
Attention moves among different worlds and opens new horizons, but no dialectical mechanism guarantees their merger. Political unions continue to carry survivals, inequalities and excluded possibilities from the older order.
A just common world must therefore preserve the reality of different situations while challenging the forces hidden behind appearances. Difference can generate convergence without being erased.
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