Contribution short abstract:

The paper presents Arendt's ontology of plurality as a timely contribution to contemporary debates in social anthropology concerning 'worlding', both in terms of worldbuilding and as sharing a common world. We claim that friendship, rather than solidarity, delivers the model for shared action.

Contribution long abstract:

Arendt's way of exploring human social existence claims plurality as its basic condition or 'the law of the Earth' (Arendt 1958, 1974). With this idea she provides conceptual possibilities gained from a phenomenological anthropological perspective to recent debates (within the anthropology of ethics as well as regarding the ontological turn in anthropology). According to Arendt, ontological diversity and irreducible plurality do not endanger mutual understanding and the possibility to share one world (as, following de Castro 2014, many scholars would hold). Those features are in fact the conditions for the meaningfulness of the very category of a 'world' to begin with (an argument recently put forward by Ingold 2018). She defends this account among other places in her famous address about G.E. Lessing, the 'father' of humanism in German enlightenment in the opening essay of her 'Men in Dark Times'. Friendship (greek philia) is not necessarily an attitude of private intimacy (HC, 243) but key to shared action, not solidarity, as identity-oriented social ontology nowadays would hold.

The talk will develop its line of argument from a selection of Arendt's texts including 'Men in Dark Times' and defend an Arendtian version of plural, critical phenomenology as a possible, feasible option for social anthropologists.