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Filozofski vestnik | Volume XLII | Number 2 | 2021 | 45–69 | doi: 10.3986/fv.42.2.03
* ZRC SAZU, Institute of Philosophy, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Peter Klepec*
World? Which World? On Some Pitfalls of a 
Concept1
The aim of this essay is not to provide a solution to a theoretical problem or 
a clear guide to political action, but merely to point out1– in the least techni-
cal way possible – certain pitfalls that await us when we attempt to define the 
concept of world. The latter, in fact, is one of those concepts that seem simple, 
clear, and self-evident, but ultimately turn out to be very slippery, elusive, and 
tricky. The very mention of the word “world” constantly leads to ambiguity and 
paradox for several reasons. First, the word “world” constantly shifts between 
its cosmological, ontological, theological, chronological, anthropological, so-
ciological, political, and existential meanings.2 Second, the word “world” can 
have contradictory meanings even within a single meaning, especially with re-
gard to its definition in terms of space, time, and ontology. The consequences of 
this affect its strict definition. Moreover, third, the world involves a peculiar par-
adox. It is with us from the beginning, it is always already there, but not really, 
or at least not yet completely – what appears to us as the world is either not the 
world at all, but an erroneous, inaccurate, or false conception of it, or the world 
itself is not yet at the level of its own concept. Yes, the world is there, but that 
does not mean it is simply identified with being (all that is) out there. This may 
seem strange, since “being there”, “presence”, “the outside”, “the real world”, 
and “the external reality” are often used as synonyms for “the world”. There are 
1 This article is a result of the research programme P6-0014 “Conditions and Problems of 
Contemporary Philosophy” and the research project J6-9392 “The Problem of Objectivity 
and Fiction in Contemporary Philosophy”, which are funded by the Slovenian Research 
Agency.
2 There is, of course, a great deal of philosophical discussion on this subject. Although we 
will not deal with the history of these discussions, here we have drawn on the follow-
ing recent overviews of the subject: Paul Clavier, Le concept du monde, Paris, PUF, 2000; 
Christian Bernier, Qu’est-ce qu’une conception du monde?, Paris, Vrin, 2006; Sean Gaston, 
The Concept of World from Kant to Derrida, London and New York, Rowman and Littlefield, 
2013; Kelly Oliver, Earth and World. Philosophy After the Apollo Missions, New York, Colum-
bia University Press, 2015; Walter Biemel, Le concept du monde chez Heidegger, Paris, Vrin, 
2015; Julien Rabachou, Qu’est-ce qu’un monde?, Paris, Vrin, 2016. 
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peter klepec
already big and important differences between them, but perhaps more impor-
tant for us here – and that is our fourth point – is that “the world” is not simply 
identical with external reality or with everything that exists. Nevertheless, and 
this is our fifth point, “the world” remains at the centre of the questions that 
relate it to truth: at the end there is always the question of whether it is really 
true that the world exists.3
One would have to enumerate many more points here, but from these arbitrarily 
chosen ones it is clear that “the world” as a concept necessarily presents many 
difficulties and contradictions. By definition, “the world” is in a quandary. While 
that may appear to somehow discredit, sully, or even refute the concept, it is, at 
least in our opinion, its main strength and driving force. For if “there is a world 
(out there)”, it is certainly full of problems, difficulties, contradictions, and an-
tagonisms: that is exactly what the concept of the world should take into account. 
In other words, the concept of the world, the grasping of the world, must reflect 
the fact that the world, if there is one, is constantly in disorder, change, and flux. 
As a concept, it must even embody the end of the world, that is, the end and im-
possibility of its own object. In this sense, the end of the world is implicit in its 
concept; just as for Adorno the end of art is implicit in its concept. What we will 
attempt here follows in the form of an exercise, with somewhat logical reasons 
and arguments leading in the direction of a dynamic concept of the world. In the 
process, we will encounter a number of paradoxes. Perhaps the most fundamen-
tal thing is that we will constantly move in circles, always returning to the start-
ing point to face the dilemma of the world, or rather, what to do with the world. 
What, which, and whose world are we talking about in the first place?
On the World
Let us go back, then. “The world,” as we have said, is always already “there.” 
What is meant by this? Namely, “the world” is not there only in the sense of our 
physical surroundings from the micro to the macro level in the sense of the uni-
verse and the cosmos, but it is also there in the sense of man, people, nations, 
and the peoples who inhabit them. Alternatively, as Heidegger put it, we are al-
ways already in the world, in the sense of the German word Mitsein, being-with, 
togetherness, companionship. We are always already living in “the world” with 
3 Bas C. van Fraassen, “‘World’ Is Not a Count Noun”, Noûs, 29 (2/1995), pp. 139–157. 
47
world? which world? on some pitfalls of a concept
the Other(s), and we can never really get out, we are always in some relation to 
it. “The world” shapes, conditions, and creates us in a sense, but it is also con-
stantly changing itself and is never really the same. These changes are also our 
product, for our relationship to the world is never purely neutral and passive. 
Even when we do nothing or pretend to be only passive observers of “the world”, 
like Hegel’s figure of the “beautiful soul”, we are always active and creative: we 
create “the world”.4 On the other hand, perhaps we only create “our world” and 
each of us only creates our own private world? How many worlds are there? One 
world, “the world”, or an infinite number of worlds, a multiplicity of worlds? 
How do they relate to each other and to “the world”, if there is one at all? Are 
these worlds just views of “the world”, “worldviews”? Or perhaps we all live 
today, as Badiou puts it, in a worldless5 world, in a world that is not a world at 
all, and we have to fight for a new, better world, a world for all?
But where to begin? There where the world is, of course. For it is presumably 
“there”. Yes, “the world” might be there, but never, already for Heidegger, in 
the sense of an object, of something that we can literally hold in our hands, that 
we are facing vis-à-vis. What is it then – “the world”? In addition, what does it 
actually mean to “be in it”, to “be in it together”, to “share it”? If we can “be 
in it” – does that mean it is some kind of container? Or is it itself contained in 
something else? Can we locate it, is it perhaps a place – where is it? Clearly, “the 
world” is everywhere and yet nowhere in particular. However, this “being every-
where”6 still needs to be specified. Does it refer to a whole that has no bounda-
4 The motif of the “creation of the world” has been remarkably elaborated by one of the most 
lucid contemporary thinkers of the problem of the world, the recently deceased Jean-Luc 
Nancy. Although we do not explicitly follow his arguments here, we are deeply indebted 
to him and his adage: “To create the world means: immediately, without delay, reopening 
each possible struggle for a world, that is, for what must form the contrary of a global injus-
tice against the background of general equivalence.” Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the 
World, or, Globalization, trans. F. Raffoul and D. Pettigrew, Albany, SUNY Press, 2007, p. 54. 
5 For these topics in recent contemporary philosophy, see the excellent: Roland Végső, 
Worldlessness After Heidegger. Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction, Edin-
burgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2020.
6 Here we must mention an old philosophical discussion that is practically never mentioned 
in discussions of the problem of the concept of “the world”, a discussion which has been 
going on since Anselm of Canterbury on the subject of the ontological proof of God, and 
which has undergone a kind of renaissance with modern philosophy up to Kant. (Cf. Dieter 
Henrich, Der ontologische Gottesbeweis, Sein Problem und seine Geschichte in der Neuzeit, 
Tübingen, J.C.B. Mohr, 1967.) Kant in a way ended this whole discussion not only, as is 
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ries, or to something that is itself limited and constrained? The real problem is 
where exactly to draw a line, demarcation, or boundary. For example, if by “the 
world” we mean the whole of “the outside world”, it is not quite clear where 
the outside begins and where it ends. Indeed, the inside is already outside in 
a certain sense, and the outside is already inside. Such an assertion may seem 
somewhat trivial, but a mathematical object like a Klein bottle shows that there 
can be no boundary between outside and inside. Lacan even coined the neolo-
gism “extimacy” to indicate this and in this precise sense the world would have 
to be simultaneously inside and outside. This complicates things, because nor-
mally we presume that the world is out there – so, it is both outside and inside 
of us. Of course, this does not mean that the world spreads everywhere, without 
limits. Another paradox is namely that the world is literally everywhere, yet at 
the same time many things or beings fall out of it. For “the world” is always 
about who or what belongs to it, it is about setting boundaries and excluding, 
about questions such as the following: Does it include us in the sense of hu-
man beings, or rather a collection of living things, humans, animals, plants, 
viruses, bacteria, etc., along with the non-living things, the earth, the air, the 
atmosphere, the stratosphere, the galaxy, the universe, space as such? In one 
way or another, “the world” is always bound up with the problem of demarca-
tion between what is outside it and what is inside it. Heidegger, for example, 
in his seminar of 1929-1930 drew a line between human beings, animals, and 
stones – “the stone is worldless, the animal is poor in world, man [i.e. Dasein] 
is world-forming.”7 Nevertheless, this solution was clearly only provisional for 
him, for in a sense he never quite solved the problem of delimitation and demar-
often assumed, by repeating the old thesis that existence cannot be a predicate, but also 
by pointing out that ontological proof is a conceptual operation that connects two con-
cepts, ens necessarium and omnitudo realitatis. This conceptual operation is, for Kant, 
found in all other proofs of the existence of God; however, for him it is impossible not only 
because it is purely conceptual, but also because the concept of ens necessarium, of being 
that is absolutely necessary, is self-contradictory and therefore impossible. Kant’s critique 
opened up new avenues of conceptual thought not only in philosophy, but also for modern 
physics and evolutionary theory. The second concept that remains from the above-men-
tioned conceptual operation, the concept of omnitudo realitatis, “all of reality”, reaches its 
apogee with Hegel (“Die Wahre is das Ganze”, “The true is the whole.”) and then remains 
central to the discussion of post-Hegelian philosophy as well as modern logic and mathe-
matics to this day. The discussion of the “world” being “everywhere” and “all there is” is 
therefore part of this context, but we cannot go into it more deeply here.
7 Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, 
trans. W. Mc Neill and N. Walker, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2001, p. 183.
49
world? which world? on some pitfalls of a concept
cation. His infamous affair with Nazism, as well as his private anti-Semitism, 
bear witness to this fact, for instance.
This, by the way, is not just a problem of philosophy or of a particular philos-
opher, but also the problem of the political itself. What is at stake here is the 
ideological, political, racial, and cultural appropriation of the world in terms 
of domination and power over it. In Heidegger’s case, of course, the question 
was whether this “our little world” was the German world, the Western world. 
Again, not only for him – as Rodolphe Gasché8 has pointed out, there is a long 
tradition of equating the concept of “the world” with the idea of Europe. Al-
though we seem to live in a globalized world where we are increasingly becom-
ing part of one big global village, there are still fences, borders, and boundaries. 
The segregation that Lacan predicted in the early 1970s is on the rise today. In 
this regard, Achille Mbembe, one of the most important contemporary critics of 
racial segregation, emphasizes the following: “As has long been the case, the 
contemporary world is deeply shaped and conditioned by the ancestral forms of 
religious, legal, and political life built around fences, enclosures, walls, camps, 
circles, and, above all, borders.”9
Who belongs on the inside and who belongs on the outside is not only an ab-
stract academic question, but also one of great political explosiveness – the 
question of borders is particularly important in the contemporary context of 
heated political debates about migration policy, refugees, “Fortress Europe”, 
and the rise of populisms and illiberalisms.
However, borders and limits are not only spatial, they concern time, too. Every-
one agrees today that the American world, the world that was created after the 
Second World War, is now in shambles and sinking, that relations between the 
world’s geopolitical powers are changing rapidly, and that consequently the 
world is changing. Or, as current U.S. President Biden pointed out in one of his 
recent speeches, “The world is changing; it is not the same as it was twenty 
years ago.” (June 14, 2021) Here, by the way, the reader might notice that we 
8 For more on this, see Rodolphe Gasché, Europe, or the Infinite Task. A Study of a Philosoph-
ical Concept, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2009.
9 Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, trans. L. Dubois, Durham and London, Duke 
University Press, 2017, p. 24.
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peter klepec
are suddenly moving quietly and without warning into a different terrain – the 
world we are now talking about is a geopolitical world, a world of geopoliti-
cal and power relations. This world was always about the division of the world 
into orders, races, and colonies. Today we are witnessing the emergence of new 
forms of colonialism, and yet, despite these brutal facts, we need to be aware, 
as Mbembe put it, that
in the end, there is only one world. It is composed of a totality of a thousand parts. 
Of everyone. Of all worlds. […] There is therefore only one world, at least for now, 
and that world is all there is. What we all therefore have in common is the feeling 
or desire that each of us must be a full human being. The desire for the fullness 
of humanity is something we all share. And, more and more, we also all share the 
proximity of the distant. Whether we want to or not, the fact remains that we all 
share this world. It is all that there is, and all that we have.10
Mbembe knows very well that in the political sense “a common world for all” 
does not really exist. Not yet, or rather not in the strict sense of the word. Some-
times it is hard to distinguish between the utopian call for a single world that is 
deeply woven into our Western pop culture (take, for example, Lennon’s song 
“Imagine”, which ends with the conclusion, “And the world will live as one.”), 
humanitarianism (like the 1985 mega-pop charity Band-Aid, which installed a 
phenomenon Keith Tester called “commonsense humanitarianism”11), and pure 
ideology.
The problem is that on an abstract level we cannot refrain from referring to the 
world – and in the last instance, to a single common world. This is precisely 
what, at least in our opinion, Mbembe’s remark quoted above points to. Even 
more. Such hesitation, such doubt, such division cannot be eliminated – at least 
on an abstract level – when we talk and think about the world as such. We can-
not help but refer to “the world” in one way or another, and yet we are never sure 
what that really means, what the world is, if it exists at all. The world seems to 
be something very solid and present, but as a rule, it always turns out to be the 
opposite, something very uncertain, floating, something endangered or even 
10 Ibid., pp. 180, 182.
11 See Keith Tester, Humanitarianism and Modern Culture, University Park (PA), Penn State 
University Press, 2010.
51
world? which world? on some pitfalls of a concept
threatened. This split between “always already” and “not yet” is constitutive 
of the very idea, representation, and concept of “the world”. On the one hand, 
in our desperate attempt to hold onto the world, we are constantly confronted 
with its fragility and uncertainty, its demise, its collapse, its crisis, or its disso-
lution. Or, as Novalis put it, we have lost the world and the world has lost us. 
However, one should be very precise here – we may have lost the world, but not 
completely, there always remains a remainder here that we cannot really get rid 
of. This can be especially troublesome and painful when we somehow decide to 
construct for ourselves the new, the true world.
The Two Worlds
There is a classical, typical, and predominant way of dealing with the world, 
which is found in religion, myths, and other ways of representing the world. The 
simplistic “two-world-theory” divides the world into two halves and in this way 
seemingly bypasses many problems with the world: one version of the world, 
more or less the bad one, makes everything impermanent, changeable, and un-
controllable, while the other, the alternative one, is the good, stable, clean, and 
pure one. The solution creates two worlds, two diagnoses of what and how the 
world is: the solution does not abolish the chaos, mess, and confusion of the 
real world; the latter is superposed by a purified and cleansed version of itself. 
To illustrate, let us quote a very recent passage from Bernard-Henri Lévy de-
scribing the problems with the world in the face of the crisis caused by the Covid 
19 pandemic. On the one hand, Lévy says, there is mundus
as the real world. The one in which people strive, grieve, hope, and die. The one 
that fell into ruins twice in the twentieth century […] But mundus also signifies 
what is neat and clean. Immaculate and without stain. Aseptic. Sanitized. Disin-
fected. In Greek, the word is cosmos. In French and English, cosmetic. […] it is the 
name of a too beautiful world in which we are asked to hide the misery, the evil, 
the Medusas that we would prefer not to see.12
It seems that the passage quoted very aptly illustrates the usual way of dealing 
with “the world” that splits the world into two parts and in this way “saves” its 
12 Bernard-Henri Lévy, The Virus in the Age of Madness, New Haven and London, Yale Univer-
sity Press, 2020, pp. 90, 92.
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coherence, consistency, and solidity. This procedure involves different levels, 
reasons, or causes, which according to Lévy are here political, personal-affec-
tive, structural, and aesthetic. However, from the passage quoted, it seems that 
Lévy somehow suggests that the world has always been just that, more or less 
split into two Manichean halves. It seems that he more or less deliberately pre-
sents things in such a way that readers will somehow conclude that any attempt 
to resolve the contradictions of the real world always leads to disaster, to to-
talitarianism. This would be the political side of the problem presented above, 
implying the moral that we should never try to solve the real world, because that 
would certainly end horribly.
Such a perfidious tactic loses some of its force, however, because the two ex-
tremes to be avoided are not really on the same level. You do not have to be 
Derrida to notice this – although it would be interesting to make a classic decon-
structionist reading in this case, but there is no room for that here. The alterna-
tive to the real world is perhaps too simply a boring world, a purified and sani-
tized world that does not work well on the next level, which for Lévy is the level 
of desire and life. On the one hand, there is a world, Lévy says, “in which people 
strive, grieve, hope, and die.” This is a world of desire, a world of passions, af-
fects, instincts and drives, a world of life, a world of procreation and corruption, 
reproduction, sex, sin, impurity, change, chaos, and misery. The problem here – 
and that Lévy knows very well – is that life as such is always accompanied by its 
negation, death, and that must be present already here and not only in the other 
world. Why does one need the purified world after all? The same is true of desire. 
Desire, in fact, is restless, never satisfied, never still and at rest; it is always split 
between hope and fear, as Hegel would put it, and it too, like life, is meaningless 
without its negation. In the above quotation, Lévy contrasts the world of desire, 
the chaotic world, with the world in which this very desire and life are purified 
and sterilized. Lévy’s simile falls short not only because negation is already an 
inherent and integral part of desire and life, but also because this very logic of 
negativity produces a surplus that is projected into the other half or the oth-
er world. In Lévy’s example, one does not really see the dialectical connection 
between the two halves. The world is now split, and so his diagnosis overlooks 
how the actual contradictions in the (real) world are related to its splitting. The 
splitting up of the world, the distinction and separation of its two sides, the 
good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, is obviously done here in a delib-
erately exaggerated way for pedagogical and moral reasons – again, perhaps to 
53
world? which world? on some pitfalls of a concept
avoid all extremes. Such a juxtaposition of the two worlds is too Aristotelian, too 
committed to “maintaining the Golden Mean”, whatever that may be.
At the fourth and last level, which we call structural, this becomes obvious. For 
if we divide the world into two parts, we get two halves, two sets of elements that 
appear as ordered and as disordered. Where does this very order come from? How 
does it come about, what determines it? This is precisely the question that the 
principle of avoiding extremes does not raise in any way. It is not only a question 
of how internal order and disorder are related, or who or what determines and 
governs them. It is also a question of visibility and representation, a question of 
how things appear and how the world itself appears, or, in Rancière’s sense of 
the French word partage, how it is divided and shared. By being divided, it not 
only avoids its contradictions and antagonism, but it also produces a certain 
order of the visible. There are two important consequences of that. They concern 
the highest and the lowest; the latter is simply that which remains invisible for 
that order. The former concerns that which shines as the paradigm of visibility 
itself (the other world as the world of ideas, for example, in Plato), which is pro-
jected out of the world onto the imaginary perfect world. In other words, what 
is missing in Lévy’s account of the two worlds is their dialectical connection. 
What drives the chaotic world, what desire strives for, is represented in the other 
world in a purified but neutered, castrated, or sterilized way.
Strictly speaking, we could also find in Lévy a relation between the two poles; 
for him, the reasons for the division of worlds lie in a general explanation sim-
ilar to Freudian repression: we simply do not want to deal with the unpleasant 
and ugly side of the world, or, as he puts it, “we prefer not to see.” The other 
world, however, is much more fundamentally connected to the (real) world; it 
is really an escape and a remainder of its antinomies. The two worlds are much 
more interdependent; the chaotic world needs the pure world as its complement 
in order to remain what it is, that is, in order to maintain the intolerable, the 
unbearable, the repugnant, and the undesirable in it. This is nothing new, of 
course, but has already been hinted at in the history of philosophy. These are 
the very questions that Ludwig Feuerbach sought to clarify in his explanation of 
the origin of religion in his 1841 work on the essence of Christianity. Feuerbach’s 
argument is that
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[r]eligion is the disuniting of man from himself; he sets God before him as the 
antithesis of himself; God is not what man is – man is not what God is. God is the 
infinite, man the finite being; God is perfect, man imperfect; God eternal, man 
temporal; God almighty, man weak; God holy, man sinful. God and man are ex-
tremes: God is the absolutely positive, the sum of all realities; man the absolutely 
negative, comprehending all negations.13
At first glance, it seems that Feuerbach acts similarly as Lévy; here too we have 
two worlds, one imperfect and the other perfect. However, the relationship be-
tween the two is set differently – because one is imperfect and finite (man), one 
needs the perfect and the infinite (God) as his or her complement.
Nevertheless, even that explanation is too simple and a further step has to be 
taken, a step already taken by none other than Marx. As is well known, Marx 
criticized Feuerbach in his eleven Theses on Feuerbach , which were actually a 
sketch for the first chapter of the German Ideology, a work written with Engels 
but not later published and left to “the gnawing criticism of the mice.” The The-
ses also remained unpublished until after Marx’s death; Engels published them 
in 1888. In them, Marx essentially argued that Feuerbach’s materialism was too 
mechanistic, playing too much of a game of “black against white,” while the 
origin of the problem was to be found elsewhere, in praxis, which Marx himself 
later explained as the capitalist mode of commodity production. This is what 
determines the world and its contradictions, and in Marx’s view our task is to 
change it.
The Point Is to Change It
Marx’s reading of Feuerbach’s view reaches its peak in the form of the infamous 
11th thesis: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various 
ways; the point is to change it.” Marx’s primary concern here is to abandon 
the position of idealist interpretation, which merely passively observes and 
interprets the world in various ways without first considering how much it is 
itself involved in it and without actually intervening in it. His aim is to initi-
ate a materialist turn that brings materialism, praxis, to the fore. This praxis is 
13 Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. G. Eliot, Walnut, Mt. San Antonio 
College, 2008, p. 1.
55
world? which world? on some pitfalls of a concept
not mechanistic materialism, but a materialism that draws heavily on German 
idealism. The story is, of course, much more complicated than that, but that 
is not our subject here. The issue here is primarily Marx’s general observation 
that the world is not something we merely observe, perceive, and describe, but 
something that is actively produced and created. Not only by others, but also 
by us. Although Marx here foregrounds change as an alternative to reflection 
and interpretation, the real problem – also for him in the following decades – 
is how to explain the changing world, its self-transformation, and its dynamic 
character. Of course, there are a number of other problems with this point of 
Marx’s as well – is it possible to juxtapose theory and practice in a rather crude 
naive way? Is theory incapable of thinking of change? How can the world be 
changed without rethinking it and reflecting about where and how to intervene 
in it, what to achieve?
These and similar questions have been vigorously debated throughout the his-
tory of Marxism. As Frank Ruda has masterfully shown, there are at least three 
traditions and readings of Marx’s theses on Feuerbach.14 If you look closely, 
claims Ruda, you can immediately see that Feuerbach’s themes are scattered 
not only throughout Marx’s work, but also in every critical theory worthy of 
its name. That is, if we stay with the problem of the world that interests us 
here: How does capitalism relate to the question of the world, to the question 
of whether there is a world at all? If there is one – what options does it leave us 
and what does it force or coerce us into? Ruda in his text relies heavily on Alain 
Badiou, who claims 
that, today, the world deprives the vast majority of human beings of their visibil-
ity. It is a protocol of exclusion of the visible, and not the transcendental distri-
bution of a situation in the visible. The fundamental question of the world is in 
reality that of names. Who receives a name? It is not to begin with the question 
of wealth and its distribution. It is the question of knowing who is counted under 
its name, and who is not. The old world, which subsisted until the beginning of 
the 1980s, was in no way perfect, and it was even regularly sinister – but it was 
a world. […] Today, we are in an intervallic period in which the great majority of 
people do not have a name. […] We are the experimenters of the interval. We are 
14 For an astute interpretation of Marx’s 11th thesis, see Frank Ruda, For Badiou. Idealism 
without Idealism, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2015, pp. 11–31. 
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between two worlds, one of which is falling little by little into oblivion, while the 
other is only fragmentary. What we have to do is pass through. We are passers.15
Badiou argues that in today’s capitalist world there is no longer a common 
world,16 that we are perhaps passers in-between two worlds and that we must 
act and create a new world, new protocols of the visible and of visibility. We can 
see in this passage his entire philosophical and political programme in simple 
but very powerful and meaningful sentences. One can only agree with Badiou; 
however, perhaps an additional step is required. This is precisely what Ruda 
provides in his interpretation of Marx’s 11th thesis. Ruda concludes the chapter 
on the 11th thesis with the following appeal:
To read the 11th thesis today from a Badiousian perspective implies thus initially 
an affirmation of the existence of a (common) world before addressing the ques-
tion of how to change it. From a Badiousian perspective and under present con-
ditions, one can rather read the 11th thesis in the following manner: The philoso-
phers have only interpreted the world, in variant ways; the point is to affirm it. Or to 
give a longer version of this reformulation: The philosophers have only interpreted 
the world, in various ways; the point is to affirm its existence.17
This point is particularly relevant to our topic here, too. However, we will add 
yet another step to the steps presented by Badiou and Ruda. This step simply in-
volves what we are doing here, namely, asking questions about “the world” and 
about the concept of the world. In other words, before we affirm the world, with 
the aim of changing it by bringing forth a new one, we may need to devote a little 
more attention to the question of how the world actually relates to its concept. 
To do that, we need to return to our question about the world.
15 Alain Badiou, The Adventure of French Philosophy, trans. B. Bosteels, London and New 
York, Verso, 2012, pp. 64–65.
16 Of course, Badiou is not alone in claiming that we live in a world that is not a world at all 
– the worldless world is precisely the subject of Végső’s excellent book mentioned earlier. 
Late Derrida was quite concerned with the end of the world, and for him nothing is less 
certain than the world itself; the absence of a common world even made him claim that 
perhaps “there is no world.” (Quoted from Gaston, The Concept of World from Kant to Der-
rida, p. 132.)
17 Ruda, For Badiou, p. 31.
57
world? which world? on some pitfalls of a concept
Which World?
The details are crucial here. The very use of a definite or indefinite article in the 
case of “world” namely implies a choice that has rather radical consequences. 
In French, for example, it is not the same to speak of “le monde”, “the world”, 
or of “un monde”, “a world”. “The world” refers to something real in the sense 
of an open whole, whereas “a world” refers to a closed entity or to a particular 
section, plane, or area of a whole. Here we again encounter the problem of the 
doubling of the world that we mentioned above in Lévy and Feuerbach. If there 
the world was divided into two halves, one of which was perfect and the other 
not, here we find a different division, the division between the finite and the in-
finite world, known in history from antiquity to the early Renaissance, and then 
to Newton, Leibniz, and Kant. Alexandre Koyré brilliantly presented the histor-
ical and factual story of the process of the gradual abandonment of the ancient 
conception of the world that took place in the realm of ideas and science. Koyré 
described the history of the gradual transition from the ancient conception of 
the world as closed, to the new, modern conception of the universe as infinite 
from Nicholas of Cusa to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.18 That is why Nancy claims:
We no longer live in a cosmos in the Greek sense of the word – that is, we no longer 
perceive the totality of an ordered and thus beautiful world – a double significa-
tion to which the words “cosmonaut” and “cosmetics” bear witness. Today it’s 
no longer possible to speak of a beautiful, cosmic order because altogether the 
galaxies do not really present an order – physicists describe a finite world in an 
infinite expansion. It’s no longer possible to describe an order that would be com-
parable to that of the Ancients, who represented this order as spheres containing 
one another.19
Nevertheless, even when we stop speaking of the world as cosmos, we still re-
tain some sort of vague notion of “world” for everything that exists, much like 
omnitudo realitatis, which, as we already noted, belongs to a long metaphysical 
tradition. The claim that the world is all that exists has recently been challenged 
18 See Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, Baltimore, The Johns 
Hopkins Press, 1957.
19 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Possibility of a World. Conversations with Pierre-Philippe Jandin, trans. 
T. Holloway and F. Méchain, New York, Fordham University Press, 2017, p. 29.
58
peter klepec
by Marcus Gabriel’s thesis that the world does not exist at all. His argument 
concerns the world in the sense of “everything”, “everything that exists”. If 
the world existed in this sense, Gabriel argues, it would be identified with the 
realm or domain in which not only all things and facts exist with and without 
us, but also the domain that encompasses everything – life, the universe, and 
everything else. Gabriel, for whom the world is larger and more encompassing 
than the universe itself, makes a strong distinction between the world and the 
universe:
One must differentiate the world from the universe. However, what is this actual-
ly, the world? What does the term “world” refer to? Nowadays we use it in every-
day life, among other things, for the earth, for the planet on which we live. In 
English, it has become naturalized to denote more or less habitable planets, as 
well as those outside of our solar system, as “worlds.” Moreover, there is also the 
use of “world” in the sense of the world of a novel, the world of the Aborigines, 
the world of the happy, or the world of the Romans. For starters, by nature, as it 
were, we tend to identify the world with the totality of all existing objects. Howev-
er, in order for there to be such a totality, there must be a kind of rule or a law that 
holds this totality together.20
If the world does not exist in the above sense of the domain of all domains, it 
is perhaps more appropriate to speak of a world, or better still, of a plurality 
of worlds. Again, there are many meanings in which the latter may be under-
stood. We humans tend to appear in many worlds, or, as Badiou puts it: “Man 
is this animal to whom it belongs to participate in numerous worlds, to appear 
in innumerable places.”21 Although it is debatable whether or not we humans 
are animals, we can indeed appear in and participate in several worlds, which 
can be further defined and specified by adjectives or other particulars. These 
worlds are numerous and include domains, spheres, and realms. For example, 
my world, your world, our world, the world(s) of the senses, the transcendent 
world(s), the world(s) of fiction, the world(s) of certain fictional characters (such 
as the world of Don Quixote, the world of Emma Bovary, or the world of Hermi-
20 Marcus Gabriel, Why the World Does Not Exist, trans. G. S. Moss, Cambridge, Polity, 2015, 
p. 32.
21 Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds. Being and Event, 2, trans. A. Toscano, London and New 
York, Continuum, 2010, p. 513.
59
world? which world? on some pitfalls of a concept
one Granger), the world(s) of philosophy (like the Kantian world, the world of 
metaphysics), the world(s) of art, the world(s) of science, the world(s) of poli-
tics, and so on and so forth. Then there are past or present worlds and epochs 
of human history (such as the ancient world, the Roman world, the mediaeval 
world, the American world) or worlds in which a particular political-practical 
view prevails (such as the Anglo-Saxon world or the Western world, the Muslim 
world, the Christian world, and so on).
We could go on listing many more examples, variants, and references of the 
word “world”, but one thing at this point is now clear – the concept of world 
has a difficult task to perform. On the one hand, it must reflect and distinguish 
many different kinds of world(s); on the other hand, it must present a world as a 
single coherent entity. It must avoid the Scylla of many worlds and the Charyb-
dis of one world without falling into the trap of the so-called worldview. It must 
offer a view of the world as a whole without presenting it merely as a limited or 
particular point of view. Moreover, it must be a view of the world itself and not 
a view from the outside. Another requirement is that it must be a dynamic and 
plastic concept, capable of reflecting and interpreting both the world and our 
place and position in it. Finally, it must really be a concept, that is, something 
that captures and holds the object with which it is concerned. Nevertheless, 
how and by what means is it possible to accomplish this difficult and rather 
paradoxical task?
One of the attempts to resolve this predicament can be to see it as a concept that 
shapes all other concepts, to understand the world as a horizon. Such a horizon 
determines the understanding of everything that happens in the world, here 
and now. More than that. Such a horizon also determines what (in such a world) 
is possible and what is not, and was described by Edmund Husserl as universal 
horizon:
Thus in whatever way we may be conscious of the world as universal horizon, as 
coherent universe of existing objects, we, each “I-the-man” and all of us togeth-
er, belong to the world as living with one another in the world; and the world is 
our world, valid for our consciousness as existing precisely through this “living 
together.” […] The consciousness of the world, then, is in constant motion; we 
are conscious of the world always in terms of some object content or other, in the 
alteration of the different ways of being conscious (intuitive, nonintuitive, deter-
60
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mined, undetermined, etc.) and also in the alteration of affection and action, in 
such a way that there is always a total sphere of affection and such that the affect-
ing objects are now thematic, now unthematic […]. Obviously this is true not only 
for me, the individual ego; rather we, in living together, have the world pregiven 
in this “together,” as the world valid as existing for us and to which we, together, 
belong, the world as world for all, pregiven with this ontic meaning. Constantly 
functioning in wakeful life, we also function together, in the manifold ways of 
considering, together, objects pregiven to us in common, thinking together, valu-
ing, planning, acting together.22
For Husserl, the horizon described forms a framework of meaning against which 
all things and actions appear as meaningful. This horizon is not static or un-
changing; on the contrary, it is constantly changing, but exactly how this is, 
Husserl has somehow not really been able to explain successfully. He also con-
ceptualized it as the lifeworld, i.e. as something that is always already there 
and forms a background for all our common and shared experiences. Yet, the 
concept of the lifeworld is ambiguous. On the one hand, it still represents some-
thing rather self-evident and anthropologically universal, while on the other 
hand it should be something practical, vivid, and concrete – lived. However, 
as such it is a unique, a singular world – which, by the way, Derrida dealt with 
exhaustively23 – and it seems that Husserl never succeeded in overcoming the 
dilemma between universality (science, scientific worldview) and singularity.24 
The whole problem of how to understand the dynamic social and political na-
ture of the lifeworld remained a task for Husserl’s successors, including Heideg-
ger, Merleau-Ponty, and Patočka.
Although this could be discussed at length and widely, it is clear that Husserl 
tries to avoid certain problems that arise if one tries to have a static view of the 
world, or if one tries to neutralize – as we saw above with Lévy and Feuerbach – 
the negativity and contradiction that one encounters in the (real) world. A view-
point on the world that attempts to repress or exclude the internal contradic-
22 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. An 
Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. D. Carr, Evanston, Northwestern Uni-
versity Press, 1970, pp. 108–109.
23 For an informative overview, see Gaston, The Concept of World from Kant to Derrida, pp. 
104–110.
24 See ibid., pp. 47–66.
61
world? which world? on some pitfalls of a concept
tions of the world itself is ultimately nothing more than a pure fantasy – and 
that is why, by the way, for Lacan the world as such is but a fantasy: “the world 
is merely the fantasy through which thought sustains itself.”25 However, thought 
sustains itself, if we may say so, in many ways to neutralize the negativity and 
contradictions in the world. These range from clinical paranoia and conspiracy 
theories, on the one hand, to “worldview”, on the other.
On the Worldview
There is virtually no philosopher who would not reject and strongly oppose 
what is called “worldview”. Why? Because the latter is a static and egocentric 
machine that neutralizes the disparities, contradictions, and antagonisms that 
one encounters “in the real world”. It is a unilateral view of the world, the frame 
of which in fact prevents us from seeing the world as it is. The word “world-
view” became popular after the French Revolution, at the turn of the 18th centu-
ry, when the old world of the ancien régime, “the old order”, was turned upside 
down and revolutionized. The term Weltanschauung was coined later, by the 
Romantics, as a sort of reaction to the Revolution; Schleiermacher introduced 
it in his 1813 speeches on religion as a totality of influences. Later with Dilthey, 
a worldview was equated with an overall view of our place in the world. In its 
most general terms, it seems that it seeks to fill in the gaps encountered in the 
real world – recall here Heine’s infamous description of the philosopher pic-
tured with his nightcap filling in all the holes in the world. Heine’s target here 
is obviously Hegel as a patchworker, patching up the holes in the world; the 
trouble is that Hegel himself actually firmly rejected the very idea and concept 
of Weltanschauung.
What exactly is it, how is it to be defined? Why this world when we know that 
there are other similar terms in German such as Weltsicht and Weltschau? Freud 
points out the specific German sense of the word and its fundamental meaning. 
He points out that
“Weltanschauung” is, I am afraid, a specifically German concept, the translation 
of which into foreign languages might well raise difficulties. If I try to give you a 
25 Jacques Lacan, Television. A Challenge to Psychoanalytic Establishment, trans. D. Hollier, R. 
Krauss, A. Michelson, J. Mehlman, New York and London, W. W. Norton & Co., 1990, p. 6.
62
peter klepec
definition of it, it is bound to seem clumsy to you. In my opinion, then, a Weltan-
schauung is an intellectual construction which solves all the problems of our ex-
istence uniformly on the basis of one overriding hypothesis, which, accordingly, 
leaves no question unanswered and in which everything that interests us finds its 
fixed place. It will easily be understood that the possession of a Weltanschauung 
of this kind is among the ideal wishes of human beings. Believing in it one can 
feel secure in life, one can know what to strive for, and how one can deal most 
expediently with one’s emotions and interests.26
Freud is not concerned in this lecture with a systematic elaboration of what a 
worldview is, but rather with an attempt to place psychoanalysis in the context 
of a rift between science and religion. Philosophy, which Freud incidentally also 
mentions here, does not play an important role for him. It namely operates with 
a technical language that only a few have mastered: 
Philosophy is not opposed to science, it behaves like a science and works in part 
by the same methods; it departs from it, however, by clinging to the illusion of 
being able to present a picture of the universe which is without gaps and is co-
herent, though one which is bound to collapse with every fresh advance in our 
knowledge. It goes astray in its method by over-estimating the epistemological.27
The point is that philosophy, for Freud, is dangerously close to a worldview – and 
here Freud refers to the above quotation from Heine (which was also very close 
to his heart, as he often quoted it28), while psychoanalysis itself, in Freud’s own 
opinion, “is incapable of creating a Weltanschauung of its own. It does not need 
one; it is a part of science and can adhere to the scientific Weltanschauung.”29 
And while Freud stands shoulder to shoulder defending modern science, Hei-
degger famously takes the opposite viewpoint – in modern science he sees the 
problem, the problem of domination over the world, because science “does not 
26 Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis and Other Works, trans. J. 
Strachey, in The Standard Edition. The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 
Vol. 22 (1932-1936), J. Strachey and A. Freud (eds.), London, Hogarth Press 1964, p. 158.
27 Ibid., p. 160.
28 For more on that, see Mladen Dolar, Oficirji, služkinje in dimnikarji, Ljubljana, DTP, 2010, 
pp. 249–258.
29 Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis and Other Works, p. 181.
63
world? which world? on some pitfalls of a concept
think.” Nevertheless, there is a line of argumentation with him that is close to 
Freud, except that Heidegger uses somewhat different terminology. He does not 
speak of Weltanschauung, but of Weltbild:
What is it – a “world picture”? Obviously, a picture of the world. But what is a 
world? What does “picture” mean here? “World” serves, here, as a name for be-
ings in their entirety. The term is not confined to the cosmos, to nature. History, 
too, belongs to world. Nevertheless, even nature and history – interpenetrating 
in their suffusion and exceeding of each other – do not exhaust world. Under 
this then we also include the world-ground, no matter how its relation to world 
is thought.
Initially, the word “picture” makes one think of a copy of something. This would 
make the world picture, as it were, a painting of beings as a whole. But “world 
picture” means more than this. We mean by it the world itself; the totality of be-
ings taken, as it is for us, as standard-giving and obligating. “Picture” means, 
here, not a mere imitation, but rather that which sounds in the colloquial ex-
pression to be “in the picture” about something. This means: the matter itself 
stands in the way it stands to us, before us. To “put oneself in the picture” about 
something means: to place the being itself before one just as things are with it, 
and, as so placed, to keep it permanently before one. But a decisive condition in 
the essence of the picture is still missing. That we are “in the picture” about some-
thing means not just that the being is placed before, represented by, us. It means, 
rather, that it stands before us together with what belongs to and stands together 
with it as a system. To be “in the picture” resonates with: being well informed, 
being equipped and prepared.30
As already indicated, the problem for Heidegger lies in modern science as well 
as in modern philosophy, more specifically in Descartes, who introduced the 
figure of the modern subject: “That the world becomes picture is one and the 
same process whereby, in the midst of beings, man becomes subject.”31 In other 
words, as “soon as the world becomes picture the position of man is conceived 
as world view. […] The fundamental event of modernity is the conquest of the 
30 Martin Heidegger, “The Age of World Picture” in Off the Beaten Track, trans. J. Young and 
K. Haynes, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 67.
31 Ibid., p. 69.
64
peter klepec
world as picture. […] Within this, man fights for the position in which he can be 
that being who gives to every being the measure and draws up the guidelines.”32 
According to Heidegger, the key to the picture of the world is that everything 
is subordinated to man’s vision and his will to dominate the world. Moreover, 
the aspect of perspective is also crucial, i.e. a God’s eye or all-seeing view. This 
emphasis on the fact that what is most important in the worldview or Weltbild 
is precisely a particular perspective is, incidentally, something that others, such 
as Wittgenstein, have also emphasized: “The concept of surveyable representa-
tion is of fundamental significance for us. It characterizes the way we represent 
things, how we look at matter. (Is this a ‘Weltanschauung’?)”33
The Point Is to Liquidate It, in Order to …
In short, what thinkers as diverse as Freud, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein have 
in common is an understanding of a worldview as something constructed, but 
limited by one’s perspective and position. A worldview is actually an ideology, a 
framework that gives us meaning in the world, a framework that gives us direc-
tion in our daily lives. As an ideology, a worldview has the function of making 
sense of our place in the world, of structuring, stabilizing, evaluating, and di-
recting our relationship to the world into a whole, a totality. A worldview gives 
support and meaning to life in the world, to structure and totality. One could say 
that the function of a worldview is to domesticate the world, to tame it in order 
to master it. By providing an overview of the entire world, it gives us a direction 
as to where we are in the world in the first place. The problem with this is that 
a worldview is something that is beholden to necessity, urgency, provision, and 
circumstance, not eternity, universality, or objectivity.34 Those who want to ori-
ent themselves are more than ever lost, says Husserl, pointing to the connection 
between historicism, scepticism, and worldview. Although a worldview should 
be an infallible compass that orients us in the world, it is actually something 
that “locks us into” our private world – and as such it is something that leads 
nowhere. It is something that is too strong and concurrently too weak, precisely 
32 Ibid., pp. 70–71.
33 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations/Philosophische Untersuchungen, trans. 
G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. Hacker, and J. Schulte, Malden and Oxford, Willey-Blackwell, 
2009, p. 55. 
34 Edmund Husserl, Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft [1911], ed. Eduard Marbach, Ham-
burg, Felix Meiner Verlag, 2009, p. 61.
65
world? which world? on some pitfalls of a concept
because it is an obstacle to a more objective view of the world. It is something 
that absolutely does not belong to philosophy, and because it is often confused 
with personal opinion, it is something that is directly diametrically opposed to 
philosophy. It is too arbitrary – everyone has his or her own worldview. Fichte 
was perhaps the first to associate philosophy with a certain personal character; 
according to him, we choose such a philosophy as we are ourselves. Hegel, as 
already mentioned, was opposed to the Weltanschauung, and it is no wonder 
that his successors were very critical of it. From a Marxist perspective, a world-
view is inherent in ideology as practice, and it is no coincidence that Theodor 
Adorno, a contemporary of the three thinkers mentioned above, was a great 
opponent of worldview. In his lectures on philosophical terminology, Adorno 
emphasized that “a task of philosophy in my view is not to affirm but […] to 
liquidate worldview:”35 For Adorno, the liquidation of opinion is tantamount to 
the liquidation of worldview.36
Our contemporary, Badiou, goes even a step further – it is not only necessary to 
liquidate worldview, in a sense the world itself must be liquidated. The world, 
or better, a particular conception of it, must be destroyed, as Badiou says: “phi-
losophy begins by destroying the very concept of the world; it knows, as does 
Lacan, that there only is a fantasy of the world, and that it is only in its defection, 
or its defeat, that one can subtractively think some real.”37 However, perhaps the 
world does not need to be destroyed or liquidated, since it is already destroying 
itself. This is exactly what Jean-Luc Nancy points out in his works. Nancy starts 
from the fact that the world is self-destructive; it is destroying itself. For him, 
this fact is not a matter of exaggeration, fear, anxiety, or catastrophism: “The 
fact that the world is destroying itself is not a hypothesis: it is, in a sense, the 
fact from which any thinking of the world follows.”38 However, in order to do 
that, i.e. to think the world, one must, for Nancy, still free oneself “from the so-
called worldview or Weltanschauung. Indeed, the representation of the world 
implies a vantage point, that is, a position outside the world from which the 
world can be seen and represented.” It is only when the world is no longer con-
35 Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie, Vol. 1, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 
1973, p. 118.
36 See ibid., p. 123.
37 Badiou, Adventures of French Philosophy, p. 317.
38 Nancy, The Creation of the World, or, Globalization, p. 35.
66
peter klepec
ceived of as a (world) representation, (world) picture, or (world) view that “one 
reaches the most contemporary determination of the world.”39
The diagnosis Nancy presents here is further elaborated in his many works. Here 
we can present only its basic coordinates. Why does he speak about the destruc-
tion of the world? For him, the real reason for the destruction of the world lies – 
and here he agrees with Marx’s assertions cited above – in the regime of general 
equivalence that produces global injustice and renders the world “unworldly”, 
immonde. For Nancy, the spread of general equivalence in the world is another 
name for globalization, and he believes that this process leads not only to gross 
inequalities but ultimately also to the destruction of the world itself. Here Nan-
cy distinguishes between two French terms: globalisation (globalization) and 
mondialisation (world-creating or world-building). Globalization is, for him, not 
just another name for capitalism, but also for the domination of the world by 
the West, which has established a regime, a network of global capitalism spread 
through technology. This domination by the West has led not to unity but to 
disintegration, because the only unifying force is that of ruthless technological 
and economic exploitation. In this context of global expansion, the West is no 
longer the harbinger of universal reason. In addition, while globalization im-
plies a form of totality, mondialisation, for Nancy, is associated with the poten-
tial for a liberatory process of creation. It is a process that extends to the entire 
human world. The world, in this sense, is undergoing a process of reinvention 
and exists in the form of the multiple relations between singularities that con-
tinually contribute to this reinvention. For Nancy, the creation of the world en-
tails a practice that addresses the injustices of the contemporary world. Let us 
quote here, again, the task he presents: 
However, as I mentioned, this task is a struggle. In a sense, it is a struggle of the 
West against itself, of capital against itself. It is a struggle between two infinites, 
or between extortion and exposition. It is the struggle of thought, very precisely 
concrete and demanding, in which we are engaged by the disappearance of our 
representations of the abolishing or overcoming of capital. […] But such thinking 
is not only theoretical: now as in the past, it is practically manifest and neces-
sary – in the sense of the necessity and manifestedness of the world – that the 
struggle is straightaway and definitively a matter of concrete equality and actual 
39 Ibid., p. 43.
67
world? which world? on some pitfalls of a concept
justice. In this sense, Marx’s demand is not obsolete. The “thinking” of which we 
are speaking is necessarily involved both in the questioning of the “‘sense of the 
world” and in immediate, political, economic, and symbolic acts. […] To create 
the world means: immediately, without delay, reopening each possible struggle for 
a world, that is, for what must form the contrary of a global injustice against the 
background of general equivalence. But this means to conduct this struggle pre-
cisely in the name of the fact that this world is coming out of nothing, that there is 
nothing before it and that it is without models, without principle and without giv-
en end, and that it is precisely what forms the justice and the meaning of a world.40 
Therefore, here the real task of the concept of the world begins. After we have 
made a complete circle – or perhaps we might say that we have turned several 
times in a similar way – we have come back to our starting point. In the mean-
time, we may have succeeded in exposing some of the pitfalls that await us in 
our endeavour, but our task – as inhabitants of the world and as philosophers 
– remains. This task is set above by Nancy, but it is set in a similar way also by 
other contemporaries. Let us, at the end of our contribution, once again quote 
Badiou, who, as always, has clearly and succinctly formulated the only true 
and legitimate task of contemporary philosophy in this respect: “Philosophy 
has no other legitimate aim except to help find the new names that will bring 
into existence the unknown world that is only waiting for us because we are 
waiting for it.”41
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