The unworlding of the world. The withdrawing of the world. The unraveling of the world. The decaying of the world. The ending of the world.

How does the world end?

In childhood, with some luck, the world can seem like a lively and energetic place that is full of meaning and significance to the ones growing up, who are underway in finding out about themselves, others, and the world itself. The world seems to be lit up for them in the activity of childhood. It is the age of play and finding out what friendship is. It is the season of the childhood crush and the innocent development of adolescent love. It is also the season of experiencing the meaning of loss, betrayal, disappointment, heartache, and hatred. But these all go together with the average and typical childhood and family. The world and what exactly it is through these trials of the young is still maintained. It retains its developing meaning and significance. Of course, for some, the world can end abruptly and violently during these years, but here we cannot consider these circumstances. We are only concerned with the average and typical childhood, adolescence, and family.

The world then at that time seems like it is wide open, stretching to infinity in its size and also possibilities. Certain dreams are dreamt and certain inspirations inspire and, at the right time of mental development, one’s life begins to be thought about and the things which will make it a life worth living and enduring. One begins to grow up and graduates through the doors and into the long halls of high school. The existence of and existing of the early and young Dasein are just getting underway. So many changes are occurring and yet the world still maintains its essential meaning and constancy. The world is a constant and yet it itself is undergoing certain changes within its constancy. Just as well, certain constants are discovered within the constant. The things that are variable and subject to change are shaped by the constant and are always changing. What is constant is the world, and the early Dasein discovers its own constant existence, and its constant existence in the world.

What is constant is stable. What is stable is enduring. Yet what also endures is instability and inconstance. Indeed, for what is most enduring is that which is inconstant and always changing. What is inconstant and always changing is finite.

What is and only what is finite exists and can only exist in its finitude. We are that open space which encounters that event of appropriation, Ereignis, which appropriates us and world together, as finite mortals with an understanding of the meaning of finitude and mortality. They preset and preconstruct the world for us and our relation to and with it.

But the world has undergone a long, slow, and insidious process of taking up everything (the taking up of everything, that is, a particular mode of objectification of objects) as that which is constant, fixed, permanent, and forever secured. This is taken for granted by the young Dasein, as an a priori given. The world worlds as an enduring place within its constancy through the teenage years. Certain privileges and things enjoyed make life a good place, all things considered. Even through the most rapid and life changing inconstancies and alterations the world is disclosed as constant, unchanging, and fixed. For all that matters and is of concern for the young Dasein is their immediate situation and circumstance; the day wherein school and college are completed is far off in the mind of the teenager, far away behind an unforeseen day as a day yet to come. One looks upon this youthful naiveté and says, “Ah, to be young.”

But then one grows up and exits the academic facilities. The days of preparation and learning are no more. The world is still a place that is seen as constant, even through uncertainty and the advancement through different stages of life. But then one enters the life of work and labor in order to secure their existence and sustenance. What is the phenomenon of the world then?

Capitalism took root long ago, long before our existence. While we are young the phenomenon of capitalism is invisible and not explicitly noticed. The world of the young largely has no business with things such as capitalism. And why should it? It is largely concerned with the immediacy of youth and world-relations belonging to it. What is most important at that time is Nietzschean to youth: that which enhances life. What it is that enhances life then are things which are near to youth, and not things which are near to anthropology or sociology or the political.

But now that youth has been spent, the world is at an end. What is most important now is the tedious and mechanized securement of life through the selling of one's time and labor in exchange for a minuscule amount of money, so that then resources such as shelter and food and electricity can be obtained. It is here through waging labor and class struggle that the first true thinking of capitalism can begin and its structures can be explicitly seen. The most authentic mode of thinking capitalism, what it truly is and how it truly operates, can happen only through living it. The struggle and insecurity in living under capitalism confronts us with its brutal presence and reality. The massive strike of its barbarity seemingly jars us awake, awake to the fact of reality, the reality of its exploitative and sickly nature.

The phenomenon of the world here manifests itself in layers. What was previously seen as constancy shows itself again but in a new light. Previously the constancy of the world seemed fixed in the sense that the meaningful unchangingness which ordered life was thought to be unending, that the world would never end, and that which enhanced life was a permanent given. But now that world has been revealed to be temporary, while the new and current world is revealed in a new constancy. This new world of work and labor reveals itself to be ever present, and that it has been ever present all along but only hidden due to age and its world-relations. Capitalism and its modes of struggle and violence it inflicts upon us seem to be ever present, constant, and never ending. But this stifling and ever present presence is only a semblance of presence. The essence of this seeming presence is absence, that is, no presence at all: nothingness.

Disclosure of the Nothing and Groundlessness

Capitalism reveals the nothing. The nothing of existence. But that which is nothing has no existence. The world as it exists under capitalism is revealed to be held by nothing. At the very bottom of the world there is a gaping void. The world is secured by nothing. Nothing has no existence, and we exist on the basis of this nothing. A world on the basis of nothing is not a world at all. Even the semblances of objects and products which are supposed to be of value and meaningful yield up their superficiality and nothing.

What has happened to the world and our way of relating to and with it? At every moment and place, no matter whether at home on the TV, on the road on large signs, or anywhere on the internet, we are perpetually bombarded with the advertising and marketing of products, products, and products. They are inescapable and they leer toward and at us, past us, as an attack on existence itself, an attack on our existing as care. Standing reserve as enframing finds its bottom line, its efficient means of promulgation, through capitalism as commodification and productification. We are swept up in an endless wind of objectlessness and mindlessness as mindless consumerism. We stand as being attacked endlessly on all fronts. The signs of advertisements point to us and gaze fixedly and mercilessly. What of the human remains anymore in the world? We are unworlded, not even objects anymore, but objectless consumers of products unto the destruction of the earth.

The world is depersonalized, no longer a place for us, but a constant mechanical void of products void of earth. They stare and leer at us from signs which point to nothing. What is void is without ground, groundless. Our groundlessness is the home of our nothingness, from which we are held out into (What remains? Without art the world is products).

The world is at an end. The world has ended. Signs used to impart significance and useful information, and now they merely solicit and advertise to us, pointing and referring to nothing, nothing but our nothingness, our groundlessness. As an attack on us, on existence, in their pointing at us, they indict us, and we stand accused of nothing. The world is now filled with nothing. What seems to hang overhead and linger is the perpetual constancy of nothing, so perpetual and unending and constantly there as to be taken as presence. That the world has ended has become concealed and hidden in all the superficiality, marketing, advertising, and making into standing reserve. The signs on the side of the road which bear the “design” of advertisements do not even move us anymore to consume. They have become just as pure nature—as trees or plants or weeds—and they have now become rundown with vines and faded by the sun. The world these ads were meant to support has been in long decay, and we now stand at the end of it.

The world has undergone a long, slow, and insidious process of taking up everything as that which is constant, fixed, permanent, and forever secured. The products of capitalism are unending in order to ensure the constant flow of and eternity of profit. This unendingness has fixed itself as being constant and without variables. The constant constantly establishes itself in its constancy so that it can remain constant. The constant in terms of concrete concepts, what we call the ontic, is nothing more than the system of capitalism which benefits the ruling class at the expense of the lower class. The ruling class is first of all the State, and then the rich and wealthy, for example, the owners of corporations, and billionaires who have major power, resources, and influence in both politics and economy. The constant in terms of ontological concepts, what we call being or meaning or essence, is nothing more than world decay, world withdrawal, world collapse, and world death. World death in the sense of ontological phenomena and also ontical, actual destruction and death of our physical planet earth.

The phenomenon of world has withdrawn itself. We have inherited a groundless void of products and advertisements, the signs of which gaze at us and indict us of our nothingness. The constant presence of this capitalist landscape is merely semblance of presence and turns out to be nothingness. This seeming presence has also caused us to forget or else conceal our own finitude and self-closedness; the point which indicates temporality and from which we are already the most outside, beside ourselves in temporal ecstasis; the point from which we are already given together with past, present, and future. How is it that existence can go on? In order to exist authentically, there must be in some manner a way to disclose and reveal the world of beings; there must be in some way something to disclose. There must be in the first place an understanding of being along with the fundamental movement of Ereignis, that event of appropriation which gathers and appropriates all into a onefold unity in which the clearing of being happens and beings are allowed to shine forth in themselves as the beings they are. Only mortal Dasein can disclose this, in the authentic temporality of its being. That being the place of self-closedness in which our birth happens, our past endures, and the future is decided or undecided based on our present.

From here, we have forgotten, that death does not come from afar out of a constant and indeterminate future which will “happen” to us, but we are already ahead of ourselves into our future possibilities, and so we live in the vulnerability of the possibility of world collapse—we are running-unto-death. To be faced with constant presence is precisely to not die. But we are at an end. We stand at the end of the world.

The world is ending, and we mean this ontically and ontologically. We live in the age where the world for us means a place of cold calculation, mechanized industry, standing reserve, and where people have become just as objects are and worse—objectless.

The real and actual world, our planet earth, has become more poisoned than it ever has before with manufactured waste, waste products, and corporate pollution. Climate change is here, and we say violently that it is not man made but corporate made, and its devastation and destruction can already be seen in the ravage and disruption of animal life and agriculture. It will further ruin human societies and cultures with racist and faux border crises while civilizations compete for resources and the rich get wealthier in the environment they have created. Runaway and irreversible climate change is already here and, due to corporations, their hegemony, and their poisoning of every human environment, the world will die. Intense warming of the planet will cause migration and immigration in both human societies and the animal world, intensifying violence and death at the borders due to white supremacy. That a massive grassroots, socialist, and working class revolutionary movement for climate action and justice, and the blood of corporations and billionaires, has not formed in the streets is beyond shocking.

The phenomenon of the world has withdrawn itself. We no longer dwell on and with the earth. We have merely become objectless products. The reality that we will die has not been forgotten but ran away from and covered over due to the constant nothingness as the semblance of presence, which is symptomatic of decaying capitalism. There was a time when the signs of death reminded us of our essential finitude. But now the signs of death have been transposed onto the signs of capitalism on the side of the road, hidden and concealed by the vines and overgrowth and rust. The real and ontical world is dying and will die due to the poison and pollution and utter waste of the corporations of capitalism. This is due in no small part to corporate economic philosophies of exponential growth. Exponential growth means exponential waste.

Self-Closedness as Self-Openness: Temporality as Enclosedness

That we will die has been run away from and stubbornly unseen, covered over and concealed in constant nothingness. It is finitude, our finitude, which is the condition for our ability to orient, structure, categorize, and take inventory of our world; that is, to have an understanding of being. Understandings of being per se are only possible by way of fundamental temporality, our fundamental finitude. Our fundamental finitude is that character of self-closedness which constitutes the essence of Dasein as existence on the basis of ecstatic temporality. Life and time thought radically and fundamentally are not linear but enclosed. We are self-closed. But this self-closedness which is thought radically and fundamentally is not a closing that closes off and keeps out or keeps in. Originally and fundamentally, self-closedness is simultaneously self-openness. A contradictory statement, or a paradox. What is the truth?

Truth expressed in its essence, originally and fundamentally, also seems to yield contradiction or paradox. Thought in its essence, truth itself contains within itself falsehood, untruth. But this does not say that truth is falsehood. The interpretation of truth as falsehood reaches that conclusion because that interpretation presupposes an ontic way of thinking, that is, a theoretical, present-at-hand taking up of the subject with a discrete, concrete, and scientific objectification of objects.

The traditional conception of truth is truth as correctness, which is expressed in an assertion which correctly corresponds to its object. The traditional conception of truth is itself an ontic interpretation of truth. But here we raise the question of truth ontologically, which questions the being of truth and not truth as a being. This difference between being and beings is called the ontological difference. Formally expressed it says: being is not itself a being. Truth as correctness, ontically, is made possible by truth, ontologically, as having the possibility of falsehood, untruth. But this is so only and because truth in its essence is disclosure of being, which means a revealing and unconcealing of being. But unconcealment of being can also conceal being. Truth as unconcealment contains within itself the possibility of falsehood: “the truth is that the nature of the matter is false.”

The conception of truth as correctness is a derivation of the essence of truth as aletheia: unconcealment, which means disclosure—revealing—of beings in their being. The essential matter of truth is that truth contains within itself the possibility of falsehood. This does not mean that truth is untruth. Rather, it means that within its structure, truth is in tension with untruth. Truth and untruth go together as a unitary whole. Truth is aletheia, which means unconcealment; untruth is lethe, which means concealment. Truth as aletheia is that free and open clearing in which beings shine forth as the being they are in the disclosure of their being. The shining forth of beings in that open region, the clearing of truth, is unconcealment in the bringing-forth of beings. Untruth as lethe is concealment of beings happening in that open region. Truth as containing untruth in its structure is the interplay of that strife in the open region.

In the same way, self-closedness is simultaneously self-openness. We are essentially finite because we are self-closed primarily and fundamentally. Because we are self-closed finite beings on the basis of temporality we can be open to the calls of being and call our own being into question. Self-closedness and self-openness are two aspects of the same phenomenon: ecstatic temporality. Ecstatic temporality is the basic phenomenon of Dasein. Through ecstatic temporality Dasein is always a thrown projection of itself beyond its present and into its past and future possibilities. As ecstatic, Dasein is always beside itself, the most outside itself, in its temporal projection of itself.

Self-openness is that characteristic of Dasein to be open to being and the calls of being: in being open to its world, others, and itself. Only Dasein has an understanding of being and only Dasein can disclose meaning or call itself into question.

Self-closedness is that characteristic of Dasein of being limited by and to its own finitude. As being self-closed, Dasein has its beginning and is faced with its end, death, and it is thrown into a world it did not choose with preset understandings of being it inherits, which it can subsume, modify, augment, or negate and deny. In being self-closed, insecurity and uncertainty are also limiting factors of Dasein’s finitude, as they present the choice of authenticity. The uncertainty of the moment of one’s death proffers the possibility of the call of being, the choice of authenticity, and opens the possibility of new understandings of being through thrownness. Insecurity that is thrown with Dasein into its situation is an attuned insecurity which can reveal uncertainty.

Self-closedness and self-openness are unitary, being two aspects of the same phenomenon. Dasein is faced with its end and it is also open to and for its future through the present on the basis of a past. The being of Dasein in its authentic truth is existence which is possible through a particular understanding of being, and this only through self-closedness—the fact that Dasein is finite and yet open through ecstatic temporality.

Dasein faces its end, and now Dasein stands at the end—of the world. The phenomenon of the world has withdrawn to reveal our present state of groundlessness through nothingness. But this is due to the phenomenon of capitalism as commodification and productification which takes up everything as standing reserve through technology. Even people are taken up as commodities and products—as objects and even now as being objectless.

Hints of a Constitutional Change in Dasein Through Societal Alienation

We asked what remains of the human anymore in this withdrawn and rotten and rusted world of transactions and capitalist consumerism, for what is a human without a world to dwell in and an earth to keep and take care of? Marx said that the capitalist mode of labor and production alienates us from each other. But it has not stopped there in the technologically advanced world. No, we are not merely alienated at work in the factory which houses the means of both production and there also the means of a groundless culture. We are now fundamentally alienated in the whole of society, much to the monetary and physical profit of the ruling class: State and government, corporations and billionaires. Societal alienation means the deterioration of class consciousness. Class consciousness is the realization of the material conditions of one’s class, the fact that we are being violently exploited of our labor and time for the profit and enrichment of the ruling class while we are made to live with very little in return and contrast.

Societal alienation means that I am cut off from you and we are cut off from our neighbors, and they to us. We are each distant islands. We now have no essential relation or way of relating to and with each other. We are more than strangers. As objectless, we no longer have a shared world or a shared understanding of being. As objectless, you and I no longer have an essential world. We are merely free floating above and against each other. What appears before us is not human, not a human body, but a potential source of monetary transaction. We begin to mirror the exact way that the ruling class views us: as products and commodities. We are not worlds apart—what separates us is not even a matter of distance—but eternities apart. Infinity separates us and it is doubtful that we even experience the meaning of time.

Truly, what separates us is not even a matter of time nor of constant presence, but nothingness. We are leered and stared at, pointed at accusingly, by the rusted signs of advertisements and marketing. We are indicted of our nothingness and we cannot even stand to face our condemnation, for we stand on groundlessness. We cannot face up to death or experience the meaning of finitude. Wholly different from the Nietzschean teenager, what life is and what pertains to it is not taken up as enhancement or enhancing, but an establishing of the constant, and that means maintaining the semblance of presence which is in fact the nothing. The true nature of reality is concealed, the nothing, and the state of semblant presence is desired and constantly established and maintained. That is, the status quo, the establishment, through capitalism as commodification and productification.

Capitalism in its essence, and that includes the unified structure of capitalism-imperialism-colonialism, is the condition of the possibility of our groundlessness which houses our nothingness. The groundless nothing is there and there constantly so as to be taken as presence. This is the basic phenomenon of capitalism. As the nothing begins to be taken as presence the world itself begins to unworld, decay, and collapse. This presents a danger due to the fact of a double concealment: the groundlessness and the nothingness it houses is concealed and confused, and then it is forgotten, and the fact that it is forgotten is itself concealed.

Groundlessness as Nihilism

And herein comes nihilism. Is it not the case that the phenomenon of the world we have been describing is nothing other than nihilism? The basis of the whole world, we have said, is groundlessness and nothingness. Nothing seems to be the phenomenon of the world. We are beyond objects; we are objectless. The ontological meaning of the world has died and the ontical world itself is dying and will die. In the unworlding of the world, worlding has ceased. The meaning and significance of the world have decayed. The structure of worldhood in its referential relations has collapsed. Things in the world under this nihilism have become objectified in a certain way that is essential to nihilism. The essence of nihilism lies in its manner of objectification of objects—in the way it reveals the being of beings. Revealing means disclosing, which means essentially unconcealing. Unconcealment, unconcealing the being of beings, is the meaning of the word aletheia—truth. The truth of the being of beings under nihilism, that is, how a world becomes disclosed under it through an understanding of being, is negation. The essence of nihilism in its revealing being, in the way it objectifies its objects, is negation. Negation of the worlding of the world.

The phenomenon of the world has become nothing as nihilism, which means negation. The phenomenon of nothing as nihilism is the activity of the unworlding of the world. The nothing as nihilism, the revealing of the nothing by nihilism, is not in the first place a valuation of some kind or other, whether moral or ideological. Nihilism understood originally, fundamentally, is the activity of the world’s unworlding—as negation. For to form a negative, nihilistic valuation concerning ethics or morality, politics, or ideology, the being of beings must first be revealed as nothing through fundamental negation of world (carefully, tentatively).

What would it mean and what would it take for the phenomenon of world to regain its meaning, significance, and intelligibility—for the world to authentically regain its worldhood? How might the world be disclosed to dwelling peoples who care for the earth and their places on and with it? The commodification and productification of capitalism, the particular way that capitalism objectifies its objects, here through its use of technology and technology’s revealing of standing reserve through enframing, is the essential way modern technological capitalism has disclosed the nothing as nihilism. Through technological capitalism in its particular objectification of objects—commodification and productification through standing reserve—the nothing looms and comes to be taken as presence and, as soon as this happens, the world begins to unworld.

Reclamation of Stewardship of the Earth and Soulfulness

There has to be a fundamental shift in thinking being under technological capitalism in order for the world to once again shine forth in its unconcealment. The earth and its peoples need to be revealed not as a supplier of resources for profit or objects to profit from, but a dynamic community in stewardship of the earth, where technology becomes the enhancing, enriching apparatus of care. And it must be said with warning that this new disclosure of being cannot be a looking back as a romanticism of the past, but a forward thinking and looking for and to new ways of understanding being which set forth humanity as caring stewards of the earth.

The definition of stewardship is: the conducting, supervising, or managing of something; especially: the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one’s care. In a hasty reading, this sense of conducting, supervising, and managing takes on the same sense as the usual, everyday, and business activity of taking stock of, storing, and managing resources, commodities, and products as standing reserve. This means business as usual and no change. Here we want to stress the second half of the definition: the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one’s care. What has been entrusted to our care is the earth. To take stewardship of it means to care for it in careful and responsible management of it. To take management means to handle and supervise service. Management as handling and supervising service means the activity of bringing under management by astute, careful, and responsible cultivation, refinement, and the work of servicing.

To take stewardship of the earth through its management means dwelling on and with the earth. It means the revealing of the earth’s resources not as something to be stored up and having energy unlocked for our harnessing, but the revealing of resources as resources: as something to be harvested, harvesting, to ensure the housing of shelter and the nourishment of sustenance for the sake of our dwelling: caring for, tending to, and protecting all environments, ecosystems, land and water, wildlife, human societies and cultures, and earth’s raw materials. Dwelling is existing in harmonic unity with each other, the earth, and its life and environments.

It remains doubtful and pessimistic whether a new understanding of being of this kind is even possible under the epoch of technological capitalism—enframing in the epoch of being. One reason is because of the history and trajectory of capitalism. It has been, since its inception, on a dominating course which tries to conquer and master all and everything in its path in order to profit and perpetually enhance and increase profit, and it does this even to the detriment of not only peoples, wildlife, and environments, but to the toxic poisoning of earth itself, even to its destruction and death. For as long as there is capitalism, there will be the use of violent power to challenge forth and conquer the earth, its resources, and life for the sake of profit.

Surely nothing short of libertarian socialist revolution and overthrow will save us, and that here means an entirely anarchist revolution. Communism itself cannot seem to kill its State, and therefore hierarchy. We seek the utter destruction of all States and hierarchies. In place of them, we want no authority other than the people directly, through direct democracy and horizontalism. No one should be able to own the public’s land or the plenitude of resources of the earth. And that also means no hoarding of wealth, for we seek the abolition of all money.

Perhaps it is only through this that there could be a revealing of being which discloses humanity’s stewardship of the earth. In the meantime, however, we must smash nihilism and do all we can to counter technological capitalism, and endeavor to recover our groundedness.