Roland Végső opens up a new debate in favour of abandoning the very idea of the world in both philosophy and politics. Opening with a reconsideration of the Heideggerian critique of worldlessness, he traces the overlooked history of worldlessness in Hannah Arendt, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Alain Badiou.

The concept of an ontology of digital worldlessness developed in this essay examines how the unequal distribution of the ecological, political, and economic harms of AI undermines plural political belonging in a common world. It argues that digital worldlessness stems from a constellation of several sociopolitical practices, including: a) the formalization of information inherent in algorithmic procedures abstracted from the material world, history, and common sense; b) the insertion of digital surveillance networks into a common world to facilitate (...) continuous extraction of data; c) the opacity of algorithmic procedures to the general public affected by their outcomes; and d) the algorithmic sorting of people and nonhuman phenomena in relation to prediction targets set by corporations and state institutions. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s political theory and on critical race and feminist theories of AI, in particular, Ruha Benjamin and Wendy Chun, the essay foregrounds the relationship between world, technology and power in order to analyze the assaults on human plurality by algorithmic practices. These practices not only automate gender, racist and economic discrimination, but also undermine collective action contesting these harms. This approach to digital ontology provides an alternative to the dominant but narrow technical meaning of computational ontology in analytical philosophies and computer sciences where this term refers to formulating compatible taxonomies among different data sets for the purposes of information classification. (shrink)

I have three main objectives in this essay. First, in chapter 2, I shall put forward and justify what I call worldlessness, by which I mean the following: All truths (as well as falsehoods) are wholly independent of any circumstances, not only time and place but also possible worlds. It follows from this view that whatever is actually true must be taken as true with respect to every possible world, which means that all truths are (in a sense) necessary. (...) However, the account I shall propound is different from what is known in the trade as necessitarianism, i.e. the view that there is only one possible world, viz. the actual one, for the doctrine of the worldlessness of truth values, despite its commitment to the necessity of truths and falsehoods, is quite compatible with the idea of there being other possible worlds. Another important issue in chapter 2, explored in particular in section 2.12, is the claim that there is no real change in the world. Secondly, in chapter 3 I consider the eminent traditional argument for determinism, deriving from Aristotle, namely, logical determinism, i.e. determinism justified by an appeal to the logical principle of bivalence (that all proper statements, including those concerning the future, are either true or false). In this connection I try to show that, (i), the formulation of the conclusion of this argument as "Whatever will happen will happen of necessity" is implausible, at least from the modern point of view, (ii), the formulation as "Whatever will happen will happen inevitably" is more to the point, and (iii), on the basis of the worldless and timeless aspect advocated in chapter 2, this latter formulation is quite harmless, essentially amounting to the trivial statement, "Whatever will happen will happen". Thirdly, in chapter 4 I study theological determinism, or determinism that arises from God's supposed providential control over everything that happens. In this connection, I shall survey some historical accounts of the relation between human free will and determinism (not only theological but also causal determinism); the philosophers the views of whom I shall attend to include Chrysippus, St. Augustine, Boethius and Aquinas. I shall in particular consider G.W. Leibniz' theodicean aspirations, viz. his solution to the problem of evil and, especially, his compatibilist attempts to reconcile human free will with the strictly deterministic flow of actual events. I think it is important to try to explicate Leibniz' ingenious account of these matters, since it seems that it has not been fully appreciated in the literature, not even by contemporary Leibniz scholars (such as B. Mates, R.C. Sleigh, C. Wilson, R.M. Adams and D. Rutherford). In providing the Leibnizian compatibilist solution of the problem of determinism and freedom in chapter 4, I shall utilize the approach of chapter 2. (shrink)

이 논문은 한나 아렌트의 세계소외 개념을 다각도로 분석함으로써 코로나19 시대에 우리의 일상생활에서 엿보이는 세계상실의 맥락에서 민주주의의 의미를 다시금 고찰하고자 한다. 세계소외는 근대 사회의 사물세계와 공동세계의 상실 과정을 드러내는 개념으로서 사람들에게서 ‘세계에 대한 관심’이 사라지고 ‘자기에 대한 관심’만 남은 상태를 가리킨다. 우리는 이를 (1) 사물세계의 상실: 생산과 소비의 굴레 (2) 공동세계의 상실: 평등과 대표의 의미 (3) 외로움의 정치적 악용: 혐오의 전염과 확산의 측면에서 분석한다. 또한 아렌트에 따르면 민주주의는 모든 사람의 통치라기보다 평등한 관계를 열망하는 사람들의 행위다. 공동세계의 상실이 특별히 민주주의 훼손과 직결되는 (...) 까닭이다. 하지만 세계소외의 세 측면은 긴밀하게 연결되어 있으므로 우리 시대에 되살려야 할 민주주의는 (1) 사람들의 기본적인 소유의 보장을 바탕으로 (2) 타자와 현실과의 접촉을 거두지 않고 이를 통해 (3) 평등한 관계와 정치적 역량을 회복하는 것을 뜻한다. (shrink)

I have come to the realization that we cannot regulate what we cannot define. However, the public sphere should be a place where dialogue is readily stated even if it makes someone uncomfortable, and this is not hate speech. Otherwise, we begin to stop talking about difficult things, and secondly, there is not anything I can say that is not going to offend someone if the crowd is large enough. Who defines hate? This is an insoluble problem; thus, it should (...) not be regulated. That is why we need the public sphere so desperately so that those with an invested advantage do not make our decisions for us. Western society lives in worldless times. The salvation of worldlessness is firstly, a world that is based in continuity and permanence, even though human beings require the unpredictability and uncertainty of a controlled outcome, and secondly, thinking that is driven by meaning-making, reason, and wonder, rather than the reverence of sciences and technology and lastly, an education that provides children deployment of trust from the world in order to reproduce. I will begin by defining the intricacies of worldlessness an Arendtian term, defining what thinking is, and how worldlessness relates to thinking. I will then demonstrate how various forms of thinking can be detrimental to society, and the public sphere. Additionally, I will investigate the prolific use of technology and sciences as an affecting mechanism in the way human beings think. Finally, I will be taking a closer look at how culture is formed or deformed through worldlessness and what the model of education needs to be in order for future generations to become more thoughtful thinking adults. (shrink)

This paper employs Hannah Arendt’s characterization of the social, which lacks location and mandates conformity, to evaluate social media’s: a) challenge to the polis, b) relationship to the social, b) influence on private space, d) impact on public space, and e) virus-like capacity to capture, mimic, and replicate the agonistic polis, where “everything [is] decided through words and persuasion and not through force and violence.” Using Arendt’s exact language, this paper begins by discussing how she differentiated the political, private, social, (...) and public realms. After explaining how online activities resemble (or not) her notion of the social, I demonstrate how the rise of the social, which she characterized as dominated by behavior (not action), ruled by nobody and occurring nowhere, continues to eclipse both private and public space at an alarming pace. Finally, I discuss the ramifications of social media’s setting the stage for worldlessness to spin out of control, as the public square becomes an intangible web. Unlike an Arendtian web of worldly human relationships that fosters individuality and enables excellence to be publicly tested, social media feeds a craving for kinship and connection, however remotely. Leaving such needs unfulfilled, social media risks to trump bios politicos. (shrink)

I have come to the realization that we cannot regulate what we cannot define. However, the public sphere should be a place where dialogue is readily stated even if it makes someone uncomfortable, and this is not hate speech. Otherwise, we begin to stop talking about difficult things, and secondly, there is not anything I can say that is not going to offend someone if the crowd is large enough. Who defines hate? This is an insoluble problem; thus, it should (...) not be regulated. That is why we need the public sphere so desperately so that those with an invested advantage do not make our decisions for us. Western society lives in worldless times. The salvation of worldlessness is firstly, a world that is based in continuity and permanence, even though human beings require the unpredictability and uncertainty of a controlled outcome, and secondly, thinking that is driven by meaning-making, reason, and wonder, rather than the reverence of sciences and technology and lastly an education that provides children deployment of trust from the world in order to reproduce. I will begin by defining the intricacies of worldlessness an Arendtian term, defining what thinking is, and how worldlessness relates to thinking. I will then demonstrate how various forms of thinking can be detrimental to society, and the public sphere. Additionally, I will investigate the prolific use of technology and sciences as an affecting mechanism in the way human beings think. Finally, I will be taking a closer look at how culture is formed or deformed through worldlessness and what the model of education needs to be in order for future generations to become more thoughtful thinking adults. (shrink)

The rise and legacy of world religions out of that period centered roughly around 500-600 BCE, what John Stuart-Glennie termed in 1873 the moral revolution, and Karl Jaspers later, in 1949, called the axial age, has been marked by heightened ideas of transcendence. Yet ironically, the world itself, in the literal sense of the actual earth, took on a diminished role as a central element of religious sensibility in the world religions, particularly in the Abrahamic religions. Given the issue today (...) of ecological unsustainability, including massive die-offs of wildlife and ever-increasing global human population and consumption, the legacy of those world religions face the question I consider here: Can religion transcend the earth in the long run? With the Axial Age/Moral Revolution, comes the possibility of transcendence of the world per se. The moral revolution/Axial Age represented significant changes in civilization, to be sure, but it can also be taken, as I do, as a second phase in the radical shift to anthropocentric mind already begun with the advent of agriculturally based civilization. The axial ideal of transcendence connects to a larger ideal, manifest not only in the legacies of the world religions but in contemporary science and technology, of a philosophy of escape from the earth. I show how ideas of axial transcendence, celebrated by scholars such as Jaspers and Bellah, nevertheless involve an unacknowledged tragic cost, the forgetting of the earth and its lessons and limits as central to what I have termed elsewhere, “sustainable wisdom.” . (shrink)

The third chapter is dedicated to Plotinus. In six books of the Enneads, Plotinus managed to combine the teaching of the pre-Socratic Parmenides with the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. The best idea of Plotinus' philosophy can be formed by analyzing his allegory of the world as a giant tree, a single plant, whose appendages, branches and leaves are everything that exists. At that stage of the development of philosophical thought, the idea of an integral soul was certainly not something (...) new. For example, in Plato's Timaeus, the universe is represented as a huge living being. An innovative aspect of the Plotinus image is the plant form given to the universal soul. What is behind this change of perspective? The deep implication of the vegetable image of the world, permeated by the Universal Soul has the following meaning: there is nothing in the universe outside the soul, which, taking care of the animate body, contributes to the well-being of the world, saving it from immersion in materiality. For the philosophy of the twenty-first century, the relativization of reason is especially relevant in Plotinus' writings. There are as many varieties of mind in the world as there are forms of life, and each form of life is the material embodiment of the corresponding form of thinking. Plants, according to Plotinus, also have intelligence and have their share in the happiness and well-being that all living things desire. With this bold statement, the author of the Enneads resolutely breaks with the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. Plotinus's mind permeates the entire universe and is no longer limited to the rational part of the human soul or the eternal existence of the gods. Plotinus' system of views seems to the author of the book to be closer to modern scientific views than the obvious immutability characteristic of Aristotle's biology. Proceeding from them, but trying to be more Plotinian than the ancient Greek philosopher himself, he paraphrases Plotinus' dying words into the slogan: Try to bring back the plant in you to the Plant in the All! Chapter ten is about Martin Heidegger. If Plato's philosophizing took place in the shade of the plane tree, whose height is surpassed by the incommensurably distant world of Ideas, Heidegger opens to us another primary stage of philosophy: the thinker standing face to face with the tree. A full relationship to the apple tree is possible because we share being with it, even though man and tree have quite different kinds of existence. In the light of Heidegger's ontological concept of phusis as one of the ancient words for “being”, the plant should denote the being closest to the activity of being as such. In this understanding, nature is the common “ground of being”, and the same is true of the plant, whose principle of vitality makes possible the existence of all other living things. According to Heidegger's classification, the stone is worldless, the animal is poor in world, and man is world-forming, and the absence of plants in this hierarchy indicates their rejection, their extreme poverty in the world, bordering on the worldlessness of the stone. Heidegger later gives a harsher verdict: they have nothing. The world is created from the environment with a language that plants and animals do not have. The worldlessness of the stone is a consequence of its silence; the belittling of plants is the result of their apparent silence. Heidegger prefers to contrast man with the plant, which has in common with man the fact that it is alive. But the plant, in its living being, is closed in on itself, dim, irrelevant to anything else we call “revealed”. As Heidegger says, we... use “life” only to designate beings of plant or animal origin; by doing so we distinguish the human being from these other kinds, the human being means something more and something other than mere “life”. The subtlest distinction between mere life and true existence is death. In Heidegger's thought, logos takes the structural place of death. If the plant, bearing fruit, fulfills its promises, the human being's arrival at the end is always a disappointment and unfulfillment, because at the hour of death countless existential possibilities remain unrealized. All along, Heidegger thought, the world of the Ideas was not above us, but right before our eyes; it becomes apparent every time we come face to face with beings, because eidos is their appearance or face. A flowering tree, devoid of any resemblance to a human face, has an eidetic one outlines of which come through when we stand next to it. The philosophical encounter with the tree, on the ground where it is rooted, demands phenomenological attention to how it looks. But above all, this rendezvous symbolizes the end of the era known as “metaphysical”. (shrink)

A precise and poetic argument for the renewal of transcendental philosophy. The great poets and thinkers of modernity described a situation we still inhabit today: the catastrophic undermining of all foundations, the disorienting relativization of all reference points, the prospect of abandonment to chance and contingency alone--the shipwreck of Mallarmé's Coup de dés. In this precise and poetic work of philosophy, Gabriel Catren sketches out a new "phenoumenodelic" solution to this momentous ungrounding, defiantly refusing both unrestrained contingency and arbitrary refoundation. (...) Mobilizing a formidable knowledge of the major currents of modern thought, deftly articulating Kantian transcendentalism and Spinozan immanentism, phenomenological reduction and scientific realism, Catren argues that the projects oriented by the infinite ideas of reason (Truth, Beauty, Justice, Love) need not be abandoned in the face of the "exquisite crisis" of modernity. Instead, the "shipwreck" is to be understood as a suspension of finite subjectivity in the fullness of a "phenoumenodelic pleroma," an atonal milieu ringing with unheard-of possibilities. Announcing an ambitious program for the renewal of transcendental philosophy, in Pleromatica Catren recomposes the primary elements of modern thought into a startling new configuration, introducing a vivid constellation of new concepts with which to map out and navigate the vast space of this "worldless daydream. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on a number of respects in which Husserl’s, Heidegger’s, and Merleau-Ponty’s accounts of the world differ, despite other significant commonalities. Specifically, I discuss how both Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s accounts of our experience of the world challenge Husserl’s assertion of the possibility of a worldless consciousness; how Heidegger’s discussion of the world entails a rejection of Husserl’s claim that the world is at bottom nature; and how Merleau-Ponty puts pressure on Husserl’s account of the necessary structure of the (...) world. In concluding, and as a propaedeutic to adjudicating these disputes, I aim to show why Husserl makes these contested claims. Specifically, I suggest that it is Husserl’s phenomenological conception of reason and his commitment to (this conception of) reason that motivate him to make the claims about our experience and world with which the later phenomenologists take issue. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn the Black Notebooks, Heidegger ascribes in 1938/9 to the Jewish race an “empty rationality and calculative ability,” in his view the cause of its “worldlessness.” To assess this characterisation, I present Heidegger’s theories of history as a decline in Being and Time and in his later history of Being. For this purpose, I discuss his notions of Rechnen, Machenschaft, and Geviert, several existentialia from Being and Time, and Heidegger’s identification of modern machination and modern technology. Furthermore, I examine (...) Heidegger’s attitude toward the Jews and the Holocaust. I present his alignment of the unconcealment of modernity and the Jewish race, and compare his theory of machination with the texts “Positionality” and “The Question concerning Technology”. Heidegger’s notes about the Jews in the Black Notebooks after 1944 confirm that he tried “to silence Auschwitz silently,” as I already argued in a paper from 1995. (shrink)

The problematic of world articulation is central to post-phenomenological approaches. With Castoriadis, it emerges as a significant if shadowy thematic. Its shifting contours in his thought are redolent of the ongoing dialogue between romantic and enlightenment currents. They are also indicative of the ambiguity inherent to cultural articulations of the world in modernity. Here, two world perspectives open up various — and conflicting — interpretative challenges to which a response is necessitated. In Castoriadis's case, these take on particular forms of (...) more general trends of `alienation' and `worldliness'. In particular, the isolation of the social-historical as the sole bearer of creativity tends to result in world alienation, whilst his later shift towards radical physis indicates a trend towards vertical worldliness. Arnason's theorization of world articulation in its twofold sense re-imagines the worldliness of the social-historical both in terms of the world tout court and our concrete stance towards it (or the world towards us). As such, it offers a corrective to the `worldless freedom' of the social-historical in Castoriadis's thought. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.3 (2000) 513-530 [Access article in PDF] Hans Blumenberg and Hannah Arendt on the "Unworldly Worldliness" of the Modern Age Elizabeth Brient Introduction In attempting to describe and respond to the dominant ethos of the modern age one is quickly confronted with a startling and seemingly intractable paradox: the age which has defined itself by the very intensity of its "this worldly" orientation (...) is at the same time haunted by an ever growing sense of world loss, of the Unheimlichkeit of modern reality.On the one hand the modern turn away from the transcendent contemplative and religious ideals and values of antiquity and the Middle Ages is evidenced by a profoundly new, active, and indeed constructive approach to the world. Modern science is predicated on an objective stance which demystifies the cosmos and allows for a technological mastery of nature which has improved human life in innumerable ways. The modern conception of the self is grounded in a new conception of the autonomy and dignity of the individual, and modern political theory begins with the notion that society is an artifact to be constructed in the service of the very individuals who constitute the body politic. We are made uneasy by the nagging suspicion that life in this world which we have remade for ourselves is somehow hollow, an artificial construction without depth or solidity, a merely superficial order which threatens to dissolve into meaninglessness. The technological advances made possible by modern science have also brought the atomic bomb, global warming, and acid rain. Power over nature has led to the power to destroy nature. The modern world has seen an unprecedented rise in individual freedom, and yet the autonomy of the individual has all too often given way to the anomie of the individual. Loss of community advances alongside failed experiments in social engineering, and the specter of totalitarianism haunts the modern dream of social and political emancipation. [End Page 513]Paradoxically, then, modern worldliness is attended by an uneasy sense of world alienation. It has become quite common in attempting to give an account for this perplexing state of affairs to speak of a process of secularization in the transition from the medieval to the modern world, a process in which many of the central ideas and principles of the modern age are taken to be secular variations on medieval theological themes. Thus, for example, faith in the progress of science or of history is taken to be a secularized version of belief in divine Providence, the political equality of all individuals under the law is said to be a secular reiteration of the understanding of the equality of all human beings before God, the transcendental subject is exposed as a secular version of the divine or angelic knower, and the communist state and other modern utopias marking the end of history are said to be secularizations of Christian eschatological expectations of the end of the world and the coming reign of God.This reading of the epochal transition explains the worldly character of modern reality in terms of the "immanentization" or secularization of religious attitudes and expectations. It also serves to explain the uncanny sense of worldlessness characteristic of much of modern life. This is because the new secular forms are now revealed either as distorted and impoverished versions of an originally meaningful world view (as for example in Neo-Scholasticism) or as the unfortunate perpetuation or unfolding of an inherently nihilistic tradition (as say Nietzsche, Heidegger, and many contemporary post modernists would have it). But does the secularization thesis as a tool of historical explanation really do justice either to the complex reality of the epochal transition in concrete historical terms or even, and more to the point, to the fundamental character of the supposedly secularized modern ideas?Hans Blumenberg and Hannah Arendt would both no doubt answer emphatically in the negative. Both insist on the genuine novelty of modernity, on the fundamentally unprecedented character of the modern orientation to and in the... (shrink)

RESUMEN En este trabajo esperamos mostrar la relevancia del análisis arendtiano de la cuestión judía, y en particular de las políticas de asimilación y del proceso de secularización, para abordar el problema de la carencia de mundo en la época moderna. De este modo, la cuestión judía nos permite delinear una incisiva crítica a la configuración del mundo moderno, a la vez que esbozar una concepción ampliada del mundo a través de la reconstrucción de la tradición oculta de los judíos (...) parias. Así, tomando distancia de las interpretaciones que conciben el mundo en Arendt como un espacio de interacción ideal o formal, este recorrido por la problemática judía posibilita el despliegue de los aspectos materiales, culturales e históricos concretos que sustentan el mundo común. ABSTRACT In this paper I try to show the relevance of the Arendtian analysis of the Jewish issue, and especially of the assimilation policies and the process of secularization, in relation with the problem of worldlessness in modern age. Through the Jewish issue, it is possible to delineate a criticism to the modern world’s configuration, while at the same time, following the reconstruction of the hidden tradition of pariah Jews, an expanded conception of world could be illuminated. Taking distance from the interpretations that conceive the world in Arendt´s perspective as an ideal or formal interaction space, the study of the Jewish problematics, makes possible to highlight the material, cultural and historical concrete aspects of the common world. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt’s Jewish writings were central to her thinking about the human condition and engaged with the dialectics of modernity, universalism and identity. Her concept of the ‘conscious pariah’ attempted both to define a role for the public intellectual and understand the relationship between Jews and modernity. Controversially she accused Jewish victims of lack of resistance to the Nazis and argued that their victimization resulted from apolitical ‘worldlessness’. We argue that although Arendt’s analysis was original and challenging, her characterization (...) of Jewish history as one of ‘powerlessness’ is exaggerated but, more importantly, her underdeveloped concept of ‘the social’ is insensitive to the complex modalities of resistance and consciousness among subaltern Jewish communities. Furthermore, her lack of interest in religious observance obscures the importance of Judaism as a resource for resistance. This is illustrated by the ‘hidden transcripts’ of Jewish resistance from the early modern period. (shrink)

This article examines the tension in Hannah Arendt’s thought between the creativity of political action and the worldlessness of labour in light of fieldwork with feminist activists in Mexico City. Drawing from my ethnographic research, I explore how labour and action are knitted together in the feminist practice of accompanying women who seek safe abortion in the city. Bringing Arendt’s thought into dialogue with anthropologies of illness experience as well as the reflections of my interlocutors in the field, I (...) shift from an approach to the situation of abortion as a decision-making event, to ask other questions about autonomy and dependency, freedom and necessity, mortality and political life. I argue that what is interesting about Arendt’s conceptualisation of the labouring body is not that she separates ‘bare life’ from the political sphere of ‘men’, but rather that it alerts us to the uncertain way our life is implicated with others. In conclusion, I argue that feminist accompaniment networks foster an ephemeral relation of care between activists and women in situations of abortion, one that invites us to re-imagine the temporality of political action and to ask, again, what it is to make a new world versus make this world livable. (shrink)

Drawing on the texts of Martin Heidegger, at times interpreted against the grain, I tackle the relation between ecology and economy in our era of rampant economism. I begin by outlining the ecological and economic variations on ethics and politics, with the view to the logos and nomos of dwelling (oikos). Thereafter, I consider the rise of a worldless, homeless world from the undue emphasis placed on nomos, which is but the active (actively gathering) dimension of logos. This lopsidedness, I (...) argue, coincides with and is reinforced by the deterioration of ontological rank to valuation and, ultimately, to numeric orderability. Further, I focus on the excesses of a purely economist comportment that, emboldened by the inflation of nomos, devastates “economy” itself from within by converting the elemental fold for dwelling first into a manageable territory and finally into an empire. I conclude with the thesis that things, sharply contrasted to objects, maintain the possibility of an ecological existence, recalling us to the lost dwelling. (shrink)

According to the New Theory of Reference, proper names (and indexicals) and natural kind terms are semantically similar to each other but crucially different from definite descriptions and “ordinary” predicates, respectively. New Theorists say that a name, unlike a definite description, is a directly referential nondescriptional rigid designator, which refers “without a mediation of the content” and is not functional (i.e. lacks a Carnapian intension). Natural kind terms, such as ‘horse’ and ‘water’, are held to have similar distinctions, in contrast (...) to other predicates. However, the New Theory contains some problems related to reference, descriptionality, content and meaning. In view of these problems, it will be argued that the distinctive shared feature of proper names and natural kind terms, while technically corresponding to nonfunctionality, is to be explicated in terms of independence of possible worlds, rather than in terms of reference and content: natural kind terms are world-independent predicates, making “worldless” predications. Just as, say, ‘Elvis’ names Elvis even with respect to “Elvisless” worlds, or, rather, names Elvis independently of worlds, natural kind terms are in an important sense “worldless” as well: to talk about Elvis is to talk about him irrespective of moments of time and possible worlds, and is to talk about a human, also irrespective of moments and worlds, while it is not to talk about, say, a drug-addict irrespective of moments, nor about a singer irrespective of worlds. There is no genuinely timeless and worldless predication of the sort “Elvis is (was) bald”, but there is, it seems, such a predication “Elvis is (was) human”. This notion of independence of times and worlds is detached from those of descriptionality and content mediation. (shrink)

The philosophical idea of the death of God has had various semantic operations within dominant modern positions on human empowerment. Beginning with the significance of this, the article aims to discuss the half-life of a God who has become a metaphor. In other words, it explores the reverberation of God and God's death in secularized philosophy as well as the consequences of this for ethics and the conception of the Good. Then, the article illustrates the complex connection of this aim (...) with the Occidental delimitation of human potentialities through gleanings from Murdoch, Arendt and Badiou´s ideas about the constellation ‘worldlessness, rupture, human frailty and everydayness’. It shows that such delimitation, operative in theories that share most of the assumptions surrounding the above constellation, re-sacralizes the justification of ethics as humanist programme. Finally, it indicates how this particular delimitation of human potentialities can be revisited through the revival of the dead metaphor of the angelic and the kind of ethics it can animate. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article argues that there is an elemental confluence between the moral ideal of cosmopolitanism and the economic and commercial practices of globalization. By looking at Foucault's and Arendt's readings of Kant, I show that the cosmopolitan premise of humanity is bound to an eschatological vision of the end of politics. In aligning Foucault's discussion of state-phobia with Arendt's discussion of world alienation, I argue that the eclipse of the public realm is intrinsic to the liberal conception of progress. (...) While critics have viewed Arendt's social/political distinction with suspicion, less attention has been paid to the parallel contrast between intimacy and privacy in her work and to the ways in which her critique of intimacy's worldlessness converges with her depiction of the crisis of modernity. In Arendt's account, the social swallows up and depoliticizes the public realm and spits out intimacy as the consolation for this loss. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper examines Heidegger’s remarks about the worldlessness of Judaism in his Black Notebooks. In the first part of the paper I examine Heidegger’s concept of the world in Being and Time and subsequent writings. In the second part, I analyze a distinction that Heidegger draws between mere human actuality and genuine human existence in a 1932 lecture course on The Beginning of Western Philosophy. This distinction, I suggest, relates to the development of Heidegger’s thoughts on nihilism and (...) what he conceives as its gravest danger. In the third part, I argue that the above-mentioned distinction can help us to better understand Heidegger’s remarks on Judaism. In particular, I suggest that the Jewish figure comes to symbolize for Heidegger a kind of unessential human actuality that is irredeemably detached from the question of Being. (shrink)

Our purpose in this study – which stands at the crossroads of contemporary philosophy, anthropology, and religious studies – is to assess critically the plea for radical contingency in contemporary thought, with special attention to the work of Meillassoux, in light, among other things, of the symptomatic presence of Pauline motifs in the late twentieth to early twenty first-century philosophical arena, from Vattimo to Agamben and especially Badiou. Drawing on Aristotle’s treatment of τύχη and Hilan Bensusan’s neo-monadology (as well as (...) on the network biology of David George Haskell, Scott Gilbert’s holobiont hypothesis, and Terrence Deacon’s teleo-dynamics), we ask what is missing in such plea, from a theoretical standpoint. Next, we examine the relation between radical contingency and worldlessness in dialogue with Leroi-Gourhan’s theory of biocultural evolution, Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, Pierre Clastres’s ethnography, Heidegger’s philosophy of language, and contemporary authors like Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Patrice Maniglier. These two parallel lines of inquiry help us explore what radical contingency, in turn, prevents us from thinking: the intersection of ontology, cosmopolitics, and modality. (shrink)

Feminist care theorists Virginia Held and Joan Tronto have suggested that care is relevant to political issues concerning distant others and that care can provide the basis for a more comprehensive moral approach. I consider their approaches with regard to the policy issue of military humanitarian intervention, and raise concerns about exceptionalist attitudes toward international law that entail a collection of costs that I refer to as “the problem of global worldlessness.” I suggest that an ethic of care can (...) overcome these concerns, and offer an Arendt-inflected rereading of some of Tronto's work to show how this is possible. (shrink)

This essay argues for reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring as a work of love that calls for an environmental politics of desire rather than self-preservation narrowly construed. I make this argument by reading Silent Spring in conjunction with the extant love letters of Carson and Dorothy Freeman, where they depict their love as a wondrous multispecies achievement constituted through encounters with birds. I argue that their example reveals that love need be neither worldless nor heteronormative, but may be a world-disclosing (...) practice that leads individuals to live, and desire to live, differently. Reading Silent Spring through the lens of these letters, I argue that it calls us to see the threat insecticides pose not only to “mere life” (Honig) but also to pleasurable lives of wonder and love. I build on Silent Spring to argue for an alternative politics of survival in the face of climate change: one that foregrounds the connections between inter-human affects and a vibrant multispecies world, between intimate and public feelings, and calls for preservation of a multispecies world through and on behalf of human pleasure. (shrink)

Environmental theorists, seeking the origin of Western exploitative attitudes toward nature, have directed their attacks against 'humanism'. This essay argues that such criticisms are misplaced. Humanism has much closer affinities to environmentalism than the latter' s advocates believe. As early as the Renaissance, and certainly by the late eighteenth century, humanists were developing historically-conscious, hermeneutically-grounded modes of understanding, rather than the abstract, mathematical models of nature often associated with them. In its twentieth-century versions humanism also shares much of the mistrust (...) of consumerism, instrumental reason, and 'worldlessness' that marks environmentalist literature. Nevertheless, humanism is indeed committed to the principle that human beings are and ought to be free, and opposes theoretical approaches that suppress freedom. Reconciling humanism and environmentalism thus involves two steps: resisting the former's tendency to treat nature and freedom as metaphysical polarities, and drawing environmental theory away from flirtation with deterministic, biologistic worldviews. The essay concludes by suggesting Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac as the paradigm case of environmental thought with roots in humanist approaches. (shrink)

This article examines the limits of Heidegger’s ontological description of emotionality from the period of Sein und Zeit and Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik along the lines outlined by Lévinas in his early work De l’existence à l’existant. On the basis of the Lévinassian concept of “il y a”, we attempt to map the sphere of the impersonal existence situated out of the structured context of the world. However the worldless facticity without individuality marks the limits of the phenomenological approach to (...) human existence and its emotionality, it also opens a new view on the beginning and ending of the individual existence. The whole structure of the individual existence in its contingency and finitude appears here in a new light, which applies also to the temporal conditions of existence. Yet, this is not to say that Heidegger should be simply replaced by Lévinas. As shows an examination of the work of art, to which brings us our reading of Moravia’s literary exposition of boredom (the phenomenon closely examined in Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik), the view on the work of art that is entirely based on the anonymous and worldless facticity of il y a must be extended and complemented by the moment in which a new world and a new individual structure of experience are being born. To comprehend the dynamism of the work of art in its fullness, it is necessary to see it not only as an ending of the world and the correlative intentional structure of the individual existence, but also as their new beginning. (shrink)

In this article, I intend to discuss the Arendtian conception of culture. In her influential essay “Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Its Political Significance,” Arendt argues that culture is at risk of disappearing under conditions of modernity. In her view, modernity is the age of mass society that leads to the destruction of culture and the development of mass culture. This is the situation Arendt has in mind when she speaks of a “crisis in culture,” a situation she describes (...) as worldlessness. Culture, according to her, is a phenomenon of the world. Because of this conviction, argues Arendt, culture has a closer relationship to politics. The article is divided into two parts. In the first part, I explore Arendt's critical reflection on the modern attitude to culture. In the second part, I examine her analysis of the relationship between culture and politics. Throughout these parts, I suggest a reading of Arendt that illustrates her understanding of culture based on the authority of Greek and Roman thought and Kant’s Critique of Judgment. (shrink)

This book addresses a lacuna in scholarship concerning Hannah Arendt's Augustinian heritage that has predominantly focused on her early work. It de-canonises the sources that political theology has appealed to by shifting the interpretive focus to her mature treatment in The Life of the Mind. Arendt's initial criticism of Augustinian desiring is that it generates worldlessness. In her later works, Arendt develops a more nuanced reading of the movements of thinking, desiring, and loving in her engagement with Augustine. This (...) study attends to these movements and inspects the spatio-temporal framework which structure Arendt's conception of the political. The author assesses the claim that Arendt's conception of the political is drawn from a pedagogy of desiring and thinking from Augustine severed from his mystagogy. Although respecting the method of political theory, the author contends that Arendt's severing of Augustinian pedagogy from mystagogy brings her to an insurmountable aporia. Instead, the author embeds these pedagogical practices within Augustine's theology and suggests how that aporia might be overcome and used to develop a mystagogy for contemporary political life. The book will be of particular interest to scholars of political theology, as well as political theory, and political philosophy. (shrink)

Woman is not simply an object, however. If we think in terms of the production of culture, she is an art object: she is the ivory carving or mud replica, an icon or doll, but she is not the sculptor. Lest this seem fanciful, we should remember that until very recently women have been barred from art schools as students yet have always been acceptable as models. Both Laura and Beatrice were turned into characters by the poems they inspired. A (...) poet as sensitive as Chaucer to this reification of the female allowed Criseyde to recognize and lament her own dilemma: "Allas, of me, unto the worldless ende,/Shall neyther ben ywritten nor ysonge/No good word; for these bokes wol me shende" . Like the words written about her, she fears she will be "rolled on many a tongue!"6· 6. I am indebted for this view of Criseyde to Marcelle Thiebaux's "Foucault's Fantasia for Feminists: The Woman Reading" .Susan Gubar, associate professor of English at Indiana University, is coauthor of The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination and coeditor of Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets, both with Sandra M. Gilbert. They are currently working on No Man's Land: Feminism and Modernism, the sequel to their book. (shrink)

Sensibility has traditionally been defined as a relation with the world’s exteriority. However, a certain post-husserlian phenomenology tends to reverse this definition and to redefine sensibility as an internal relation that takes place from within the world. This article focuses on this phenomenological concept of “sensibility” in Levinas and Merleau-Ponty and intends to show that this concept rests upon the presupposition of an alternative according to which we would have whether a sensible experience of identity, or an acosmic experience of (...) otherness—whether a wordly experience of the same or a worldless experience of otherness. Yet, by reducing sensibility to the experience of the world’s interiority and rejecting otherness beyond any worldly experience, this conception fails to account for a significant dimension of sensibility—namely, sensibility as the experience of the world’s own otherness, foreignness or exteriority. It is our hope that, from the critical exposition of this alternative, will eventually appear in conclusion the significant part of this forgotten dimension of sensibility. (shrink)

Various scholars have argued that the rise of modern information technology over the past century has coincided with a steady decline of traditional methods of learning and interpretation, and has contributed to the general sense of “worldlessness” or anomie. In the words of Paul Ricoeur, “we are overwhelmed by a flood of words, by polemics, by the assault of the virtual, which today create a kind of opaque zone.” Philology, the ancient discipline that grew in the past two centuries (...) to encompass literary study, linguistics, and intellectual history, was originally conceived as a return to the past with the aim of retrieving the knowledge of bygone times. While the recent revival of interest in philology recognizes its importance to the humanities, it remains unnamed as such. The aim of my exploration of the history and practices of philology is to suggest how it can reinstate the presence of the past. With its attentiveness to language—undertaken in the silent spaces of private study, archive, and library—philology not only confirms the presence of the dead but also enacts a more fundamental return to “world.”. (shrink)

This dissertation presents evidence that a number of the great traditional Western metaphysicians based their metaphysical systems upon their experiences of altered states of consciousness . It poses the question: what state of consciousness would be necessary for the metaphysician to actually experience "reality" in the way that he describes it? It specifically discusses evidence in the philosophical writings of Plato, Berkeley, Schopenhauer and Hegel which strongly suggests that they experienced various non-ordinary planes of "reality" during certain ASCs. ;Four different (...) metaphysical planes or levels of "reality" are presented: the everyday material world , the eternal soul , the archetypal Platonic Ideas or essences and the Divine Mind of God , which is identified with the mystical godhead. ;It is argued that Plato directly experienced the non-ordinary realm of the eternal Ideas . Berkeley's metaphysical claims about the unreality of matter and the dependence of the entities in the everyday world upon the mind or soul for their existence are grounded in his direct experience of the soul during a worldless ASC. Schopenhauer's description of the aesthetic experience of the Platonic Ideas is discussed as a perceptual form of concentrative meditation. Hegel's fundamental metaphysical concept of the Universal Mind of God or Absolute Spirit is rooted in his mystical experiences of Level Four. His non-Aristotelian form of logic is described as a "state-specific logic," i.e., a form of logic which is rooted in the experience of a specific ASC. ;It is argued that "analytic" philosophers have misunderstood the experiential nature of traditional metaphysical language. Some of the implications of this experiential approach to philosophy are explored in terms of the notion of "state-specific metaphysical systems.". (shrink)

In this essay I describe how my involvement in the political struggles of an immigrant domestic workers' collective inspired me to hang out not only with the workers, but also with the writings of María Lugones and Hannah Arendt. The essay invites the reader to engage in a playful rereading of Arendt's notion of the worldlessness of laboring in the private realm by putting her into dialogue with Lugones's notion of the hangout that defies the public–private split Arendt adamantly (...) insists on in all her writings. By following the complex physical, mental, and emotional itineraries of immigrant domestic workers to, from, and in-between a number of places and spaces, I demonstrate how their stories blur the line between public and private, and therefore also between the unfreedom of the body and the presumed escape into the political public. I describe the women's experiences as the living promise of a world that allows for an embodied fluid movement between labor, work, and the freedom “inherent in action” (Arendt 193, 153). (shrink)

Caught in a dilemma-namely, the decontextualization and negation of its early interpretive schematism which served as the sole ground for a free society--modernity is presently losing its legitimacy, its fidelity to individual freedom, the "core of nondialectical humanism," which Cahoone attempts to isolate. In part 1, he argues that the "self-negating strain" of modern philosophical activity is a "methodological or systematic dualism" endemic to "subjectivism," viz., the belief that the distinction between the non-subjective and the subjective is fundamental for any (...) investigation. The claim that the individual thinking subject is the nucleus of all value within the parameters of the finite world could only be viable in combination with "transcendental" claims which were articulated largely in the "theological firmament" of seventeenth-century methodology, epistemology, and metaphysics, and were impeached in the nineteenth century. "Non-transcendental subjectivism" differs from early modern objectivity and subjectivity, for when the self becomes entirely "worldless," devoid of mediation of the transcendent, it is no longer possible to think of objectivity and subjectivity as independent and yet interrelated, and there begins the movement toward "philosophical narcissism". Denuding the subject of all capacities except its "natural" inclinations toward consciousness of material objectivity and its instrumental rational mastery, philosophical narcissism rejects any notion of "transcendental vehicles of relatedness" which are beyond the division into objective and subjective spheres, so that either the non-subjective must absorb the subjective or vice versa. (shrink)

Heidegger nunca llama a la política por su nombre; escribe la palabra entre comillas, pues la “política” carece de verdad; pero su adhesión al nacionalsocialismo es consistente con sus ideas, sobre todo las relativas a la historicidad, la resolución y el destino del pueblo ¿Quiere decir que la “política” carente de esencia se inviste de “verdad interna”? ¿Habría una filosofía nazi de verdad? La “animadversión contra la política”, que advierte Arendt en la mayoría de los filósofos, tiene una réplica en (...) ella, manifiesta en su reserva frente a la filosofía, especialmente frente a la filosofía política. La relación de Arendt con Heidegger pasa por su despertar del sueño político y la experiencia de una pérdida de mundo. Este artículo analiza la relación entre ambos a la luz de la tensión entre filosofía y política, e intenta responder esas interrogantes y paradojas, a través de una discusión de las ideas de carencia de mundanidad y de apoliticidad. (shrink)