Means they link to themselves at the level of their own ontological premises.

Discussions of the end of the world presume that there is something called the world that could end. While this apocalyptic pronouncement can function for individuals in an analogous way (“I feel like my world is ending”) and at the level of larger communities (the arrival of Europeans in the “Americas” resulted in the end of many Indigenous worlds), it is less clear that one can speak coherently of the end of the world when “the world” is taken as something which is singular and planetary in scope; when the world is understood as The World.⁷ There are at least two compelling reasons for rejecting this grander sense of The World. The first is that this concept is philosophically incoherent. The second is that this notion of The World is an imperialist attempt to impose a unitary imaginary on a planet that is home to many human and other-than-human worlds.

Perhaps the most succinct philosophical argument for the incoherency of The World is offered by Markus Gabriel.⁸ For Gabriel, The World is synonymous with totality. “It is supposed to be the place where everything takes place.”⁹ His “meta- metaphysical nihilist” position is derived from his ontological claim that all things must appear in a “field of sense.” Nothing appears without a background. If The World is the ultimate background – that in which all other things appear – then there is nothing in which The World itself appears. Defined this way, The World falls prey to an infinite regress and cannot exist.

A fuller account of Gabriel’s argument would require engaging with his devel- opment of a new realist philosophy and a greater exploration of his notion of fields of sense. Without delving into this wider ontology, it is sufficient to point out that his primary objection is to The World as a totality. The whole, everything, cannot be conceived of “at once” because there is no perspective from which this whole, that we ourselves are part of, could be seen.¹⁰ His emphasis is on the inherently totalising nature of the world. He readily admits that there exist “infinitely many worlds, which in part overlap but are also partly independent of one anoth- er.”¹¹ His objections are levelled at the closed totality of the concept of The World.¹² Gabriel is aware that The World so conceived might seem to be a “peculiar ob- ject,” so he also considers alternatives that cast The World as “a relative idea, a horizon, or a source of infinite eidetic variations.”¹³ For Gabriel, these ideas are no more successful. In order to exist, something must be an object (though not nec- essarily a physical one),¹⁴ and these attempts to discuss The World as something other than a totality ultimately wind up positing a non-object object.¹⁵ In other words, everything that can be discussed exists in a field of sense and is thus an object. To insist that The World is not an object, but then turn it into an object of discourse, is self-defeating. The result is a kind of new realist apocalypse; not the end of The World, but the end of the world perspective.¹⁶

Gabriel’s argument is, of course, dependent on his definition of The World. It is certainly the case that when The World is discussed in the context of apocalypticism, underlying metaphysical claims are being made (even if only implicitly). Yet when someone worried about climate change adopts an apocalyptic tone, The World is indicating something different from Gabriel’s understanding of the term. For example, when people worry about the end or “postponing the end of the world”¹⁷ or “the end of civilisation,”¹⁸ these concerns are not about the field of sense containing all other fields. This different understanding is not only evident in discussions of climate change. When Aimé Césaire writes that the end of the world is the only thing worth beginning, a claim later picked up by Frantz Fanon, Frank B. Wilderson III, Calvin Warren and others; they too seem to mean something other than the totality in which all other things appear.¹⁹ Yet Gabriel is right in that whatever this other sense of The World is, it seems to be a kind of object. This notion of The World is more like a “form of life” that is imagined, feared or hoped to be ending. A form of life in this sense is “not quite a race and more than culture or style, this phrase refers to those ways of being in the world – always lived collectively – without which one would no longer be who or what one is.”²⁰ Understanding The World in this way, one is not met with the same problem of infinite regress.

Though this argument evades Gabriel’s critique, it also returns the debate to my initial set of questions. If the goal is to offer an account of the ontological certainty seemingly required by an apocalyptic pronouncement, turning to “forms of life” does not offer much of a solution. Conceiving The World in these terms is either doomed to relativise The World into different worlds or take one vision of The World, one form of life, as universal. It is thus still subject to the second critique: that taking any given apocalyptic threat – nuclear annihilation, climate change, the instabilities of capitalism, some combination of all of these – as a threat to The World assumes that one can speak coherently of a shared World. This assumption falsely unifies the diversity of life-worlds in an imperialist gesture.