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By onto-ethics of worldliness, I mean, for now, a broad but specific register of the ethical life anchored in a sense, or hunch, that the self’s relation to the world could and should be more admirable, more far-reaching, and more wittingly reciprocal, than it is in the present. Such an ethics presupposes an original orientation to self and world that does not see their consociation as fixed but rather apprehends both of them as unfinished and co-emergent. It also entails the apprehension of a tendency running counter to this orientation in the human self, a disposition to be out of kilter with the world, or a comfort found in a state of relative alienation from it.

To be sure, the type of incipient striving towards worldliness I am painting here with broad strokes can be, and has been, interpreted, intensified and socially absorbed through very diverse and at times divergent configurations of ethical life. In the Euroamerican philosophical tradition, many will associate the concept of worldliness with the major and quite distinct elaboration it received in the twentieth century in the thought and writings of Hannah Arendt (1958a, 1978). Worldliness is, in one of her commentators' words, “what Arendt prizes most” (Kateb 1977: 142), that of which the ever increasing impracticability informs her critical diagnosis of the modern age, and that of which the restoration orients her political and moral theory. For Arendt, worldliness anchors itself as the highest pursuit in the existential condition of natality: the “naked fact” of one’s “appearance” into being, which presupposes an immanent power to appear and thus also the “appearingness” of other beings recipients of my appearance (1978: 19-23, 1958a: 175-181). Every living entity’s appearance, in this Arendtian sense, is an ontological event that makes sensible in the present an as yet indeterminate future in which this entity will have been seen, heard, and otherwise pulled “out of the darkness of sheltered existence” by other entities that it will have similarly grasped and engaged in various ways (1958a: 175-181). This material-semiotic “play” (1978: 22) of appearances is what Arendt called “the world,” which thus emerges and lies, in her formulation, “in-between” (inter-esse) the entities that appear to each other.

In the case of the human animal, the mediation of “word and deed” within this interplay immensely amplifies the range and wealth of worlds it holds in potentia, Arendt argued, at the same time as it extends and deepens the “disclosure” of those who take part in it (including of themselves to themselves). Such a potential and intensification, however, are dependent for their actualization on the availability of a shared “space of appearance,” that is, on the prior scaffolding of a virtual structure fixed enough to house the incorporation of an incommensurate plurality of words and deeds, perspectives and aspects, wills and efforts, into an enduring common world, instead of their dissipation into a swirl of noise. ‘Worldly’ is thus the predicate of that which has achieved the relative consistency, hardiness and endurance of a world spawned out of the play and mutual refractions of the entities that appeared in it. But worldliness also applies, by extension, to that which makes this achievement possible in the first place, at least amongst speaking and acting creatures, viz., a common commitment on their part to the reality and sufficiency of the world that will have emerged between them.

Arendt found the practical and cultural conditions for such a commitment lacking, undermined or even deliberately taken away from some under modernity. A great deal of her work from The Origins of Totalitarianism (1958b) onwards is dedicated to analyzing the “atrophy of the space of appearance” (1958a: 209) in the modern age under a vast array of forces that include capitalist expropriation, the technoscientific shrinking of the earth, and the capture of the political by the nation-state. The stateless refugee constitutes the prototypical figure, in the genesis of this analysis, of “a new kind of human beings” (1994: 111) who, being denied entry into a public realm enclosed by national citizenship, are deprived of “a place in the world that makes opinions significant and actions effective” (1958b: 296, emphasis added). The near equivalence that Arendt assumes between the pursuit of worldliness and the semiosis of public life, her assimilation and indeed at times willful containment of the former to the latter, has for correlate that the ethical and political telos of worldliness stands, for her, in awkward tension with kinship. In The Human Condition in particular, Arendt asserts (rather than argues) that the family cannot be a world — it cannot be the scene for seeing and hearing others, and being seen and heard by them, in a manner that makes it possible for “worldly reality [to] truly and reliably appear” (1958a: 57). The household and neighborhood, in her view, are milieus that can only allow for a mere replication of the same perspective from which no worldly in-between could ever emerge. Yet these pronouncements are at odds with other writings where Arendt “insists on the affirmation of all that she seems subsequently to dismiss from the political space” (Birmingham 2006: 71). In such passages, and counter to the strict distinction between the bios politikos and zoe championed in HC, the “sphere of private life” is that which shelters and sustains, in the face of “dumb hatred, mistrust and discrimination,” the “dark background of mere givenness” internal to the event of appearance that carries within it and anchors the principle of plurality and worldliness (1958b: 301).

A more contemporary proponent of an ethics of worldliness is Donna Haraway, who makes explicit use of this very language and concept in a manner that echoes Arendt’s to name the kind of response that critical social theory must contribute to formulate and bring about in the face of ecological devastation (Haraway 2008). Worldliness, in Haraway’s writings, applies both to an existential (material-semiotic) condition that grounds an ethical and political project of joint flourishing in worlds that humans share and co-shape, in a robust sense, with other kinds of lives, at the same time as it indicates the horizon of this project. Worldly is something that one is, and something at the same time that one has to learn to be (3) against depredatory habits of living anchored in “human exceptionalism,” or the “[fantastic] premise that humanity alone is not a spatial and temporal web of interspecies dependencies” (11). Such a process of learning involves enriching and intensifying “attachment sites and sticky knots” (296) that makes human and other types of lives and worlds possible, and this, through the cultivation of knowledge, respect and “response-ability” (88) across species and kinds. Interestingly, and in contradistinction to Arendt’s equivocations, Haraway has taken to argue in her most recent writings that the pursuit of worldliness in this anthropocenic sense amounts to an urgent practice of learning to “make kin” not only within but also across disparate orders of living (2015, esp. 161-162, 2016). Making “make kin!” a slogan for better living in the midst of ecological system collapse surely subjects the language of kinship to metapragmatic “stretch and recomposition”: it entails a deliberate framework for putting it to use in new contexts and with new relationalities as its referents. But if this slogan presents itself to us with any force, Haraway claims, it is also that it returns to, and taps into, this language’s “deepest sense”, a prior interpretation that connects kinship with the worlding of worlds. “Kin is an assembling sort of word” (162).

In the remainder of this essay, taking my cues from Haraway, Arendt and the anthropologists of kinship whose recent works I channeled, I try to further explore and conceptualize linkages between formations of kinship and the ethics of worldliness in the ethnographic context of Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon in the mid-2000s.

Arendt, Hannah. 1958a. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

———. 1958b. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Cleveland: Meridian Books.

———. 1978. The Life of the Mind. Volume I : Thinking. Edited by Mary McCarthy. New York: Harcourt Brace.

———. 1994. “We Refugees.” In Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile, edited by Marc Robinson, 110–19. Boston: Faber.

Birmingham, Peg. 2006. Hannah Arendt and Human Rights : The Predicament of Common Responsibility. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

———. 2015. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities 6: 159–65.

———. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Kateb, George. 1977. “Freedom and Worldliness in the Thought of Hannah Arendt.” Political Theory 5 (2): 141–82.

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