Friedrich Weißbach studied philosophy and musicology at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the Sapienza Universitá di Roma and the Université Lumière Lyon 2. After completing his studies, he taught political theory at the Institute for Social Sciences at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin from 2020 to 2023. In 2023, he was employed as a research assistant at the Chair of Political Philosophy and Philosophy of Law of Prof Dr Franziska Dübgen at the University of Münster. Since October 2024, he has been a doctoral student at the graduate school ‘Normativity, Critique, Change’ in Berlin and is writing a thesis on the ‘Philosophy of Worldlessness’ with Prof. Dr Rahel Jaeggi. In addition to his academic work, Friedrich Weißbach also works as a journalist and moderator. He writes for Zeit Online, FAZ, der Freitag, Deutschlandfunk, Tagesspiegel, monopol and Philosophie Magazin, where he is a permanent freelance author and part of the editorial team. He received a scholarship from the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes and was a Research Track Scholar at Humboldt University in Berlin.

Philosophy of Worldlessness

The project aims to develop worldlessness as a socio-philosophical and political-theoretical concept of analysis. The main point of reference for the work is the philosophy of Hannah Arendt: with worldlessness, she describes a deficient relationship of the individual to an intersubjectively constructed world. The reasons for this can vary and depend on historical circumstances at the cultural, political and materialistic level. According to Arendt, worldlessness has an impact on both the worldless people and the communities in which they live. For those affected, worldlessness leads to a disturbed experience of the world of things, of fellow human beings and ultimately of the self. In the historical constitution of global order, involuntary worldlessness can also be associated with a specific vulnerability. For democratic communities, a growing number of worldless people means a mass of members who have no connection to the political community. According to Arendt, this opens the space for totalitarian currents. Based on a hermeneutic examination of Arendt's ideas on worldlessness, which have not yet been systematically researched, the work aims to develop the concept by incorporating existing critiques and comparing them with related concepts in social philosophy and political theory, and to develop it with and beyond Arendt as a normative yardstick for social and societal criticism. The aim is not only to answer the question of what is meant by worldlessness in Arendt, but also to ask whether the concept can be used to reframe social injustices and better understand their effects. What perspectives does the concept of worldlessness open up that escape other socio-philosophical and political-theoretical approaches? As an analytical concept, worldlessness proves to be not only descriptive, but also combines a claim of normative critique: the diagnosis of a state of worldlessness always already contains the demand for its abolition and for social change. Furthermore, the concept offers – so the hypothesis – new perspectives on the question of the cause of the current crisis of democracy and opens up a unifying view of different forms of social exclusion, which have so far been seen as fundamentally different phenomena of exclusion.

Research Interests:

• Philosophy of law and social philosophy
• Political theory
• Critical theory
• Postcolonial theory
• Questions of social and political exclusion, democratic participation, national sovereignty, borders, migration and human rights
• Ideology critique, epistemic injustice
• Hannah Arendt