Ontological Responsibility: Finitude, Exposure, and World-as-Event
This article develops a model of “ontological responsibility” by triangulating three influential strands in contemporary continental philosophy. The first is Heidegger’s analysis of finitude and Being-toward-death. The second is Agamben’s investigation of bare life and the state of exception. The third is Mario Kopić’s conception of world-as-event and post-anthropocentric humanism. The central claim is that these three lines of thought can be coordinated into a single praxis. In that praxis, responsibility is understood as responsiveness to Being, to exposed life, and to the event-character of world itself, prior to and grounding moral, legal, and political obligations. Heidegger articulates responsibility at the level of singular existence by uncovering finitude and Being-toward-death as the horizon within which Dasein’s possibilities are gathered. Agamben relocates the decisive site to the nexus of life and law, and analyzes how modern power operates through the production of bare life and zones of exception. Kopić widens the frame by arguing that the world is first the space of Being as event, and that humans bear an ontological responsibility for existence which precedes and conditions political, juridical, and moral responsibility.
Heidegger: Finitude and Seriousness
In Being and Time, Heidegger describes Dasein as the being for whom its own being is at issue. Dasein always already finds itself thrown into a world of projects, concerns, and relations that it must in some way assume. Heidegger names this structure of thrown projection “care” (Sorge) and uses it to emphasize that existence is not a neutral presence but a continuous having-to-be. Death, within this analysis, is not primarily a biological occurrence. Rather, it is the ultimate possibility that delimits all other possibilities, the impossibility of any further possibilities. Being-toward-death is the mode in which Dasein anticipates this non-relational, unsurpassable possibility. In such anticipation, the anonymous “they-self” (das Man), the diffuse everyday horizon of norms and roles, loses its authority. Dasein is then individualized in the sense that it must take over its existence as its own. Responsibility here is ontological rather than moral. It is the necessity of deciding, in the face of finite time, which possibilities to enact and which to abandon.
Understood in this way, finitude is not simply a restriction but the condition for meaningful commitment. If time were limitless and possibilities inexhaustible, decisions would lose their weight. Because existence is finite, every affirmation of a project is also a renunciation of numerous others. To exist is to select under the pressure of a temporal horizon that cannot be postponed indefinitely. Heidegger’s point is that this ontological situation underlies and shapes moral and political responsibilities. Whatever one’s roles or duties, they are taken up by a finite being who can die at any moment. To become attuned to Being-toward-death is to experience the ground-level seriousness of existence. One cannot evade deciding how to be, and deferral or conformity are themselves decisions with consequences. A praxis informed by this analysis would not fixate on death as a topic. Instead, it would rely on concrete procedures to bring finitude to explicit awareness. It might, for example, mark temporal boundaries in work and life in order to highlight that all projects have a limited horizon. It might also periodically identify specific vulnerabilities, whether bodily, relational, or professional, as ways of making the abstract notion of mortality tangible in a particular life-context. The aim is to cultivate a habit of taking decisions seriously, with the understanding that they are made under conditions of non-repeatable, finite existence.
Agamben: Bare Life and Exception
Agamben shifts the discussion from individual finitude to the structure of political power over life. His figure of homo sacer, a person who can be killed with impunity but not sacrificed, exemplifies a life included in the legal order only in the form of its exclusion. Such a life inhabits a threshold. It is neither fully inside nor fully outside law, and is exposed to violence without the protections usually associated with citizenship or recognized personhood. Building on this figure, Agamben analyzes the “state of exception” as a situation in which the normal juridical order is suspended in whole or in part, yet remains in force. Historically understood as a temporary emergency measure, the state of exception in modernity tends to become permanent. It becomes a structural feature of governance in which zones are created where law applies by withdrawing itself. The paradigmatic space for this development is the camp, understood broadly to include not only concentration camps, but also refugee camps, detention centers, and other institutional spaces where life is managed under exceptional conditions.
Agamben reads these developments as part of a wider transformation in which politics becomes biopolitics, the management of life at the level of populations. In that context, the classical distinction between zoe, the simple fact of living, and bios, politically qualified life, becomes operative in new and pervasive ways. Modern power is increasingly concerned with regulating birth, health, risk, and survival. Certain groups are effectively reduced to “bare life,” understood as bodies to be counted, contained, and administratively processed, rather than as bearers of fully recognized political subjectivity. Responsibility in this register is not only a matter of individual decisions. It also concerns the ways in which one participates in or resists structures that sort lives into categories of visibility and disposability. The question is where, in concrete institutions and practices, the logic of the exception and the reduction to bare life are at work, and how one’s own roles are entangled with them. A praxis oriented by Agamben’s analysis would involve sustained attention to the sites where life is rendered vulnerable by legal and administrative decisions. This includes obvious spaces such as detention facilities and border regimes. It also includes less conspicuous environments such as hospitals, welfare offices, and bureaucratic systems in which individuals appear primarily as cases, files, or data points. Such a praxis requires both witnessing and self-implication. It involves observing who is rendered voiceless or anonymous within these structures, and recognizing how one’s own actions, omissions, or professional roles contribute to the production and maintenance of such zones. Responsibility is sharpened by the recognition that there is no neutral outside. Each person is already involved in networks that expose some lives more than others.
Kopić: World-as-Event and Ontological Responsibility
Mario Kopić enters this discussion by challenging both classical anthropocentric humanism and certain forms of biopolitical critique that remain tied to inherited metaphysical distinctions. For Kopić, the world is not first the sum of entities, nor the stage of national and political conflicts. Instead, it is the space of Being as event. Existence is thus understood as an ongoing happening in which beings and relations emerge, interact, and pass away, rather than as a collection of stable substances. Within this frame, the human is not the metaphysical center or measure of all value. Rather, human existence is one mode among others, alongside animals, environments, technological systems, and many other forms of life and structure, in which the event of Being occurs. Kopić therefore argues for a post-anthropocentric humanism. This shift does not reject the human but rethinks human responsibility as responsibility for existence-as-event, rather than for the interests of a privileged species.
Kopić’s key move is to insist that the responsibility that matters most is ontological. It is a responsiveness to the fact that there is world, that existence has unfolded in a particular way here, and that humans are in a position to shape how this event continues. Political, juridical, and moral responsibilities are real and important, but they are grounded in and limited by this more basic responsibility for world-as-event. In his engagement with Aristotle, Foucault, and Agamben, particularly in discussions of the transition “from the good life to the bare life,” Kopić shows how modern politics often narrows its focus to the preservation and management of bare life. In doing so, it can lose sight of the broader question of how existence is to be inhabited. Kopić argues that critiques of biopolitics can remain trapped in metaphysical dualisms, such as human versus animal or zoe versus bios, if they do not descend to the level at which life appears as a finite, vulnerable event that calls for care.
His reflections on the COVID-19 pandemic make this approach especially clear. On one level, pandemic governance exemplifies biopolitics. Societies reorganize around the management of infection rates, hospital capacities, and survival, and often suspend normal legal and social arrangements in the process. On another level, the pandemic confronts individuals and communities with their finitude, with the fragility of their lifeworlds, and with the interdependence of human and non-human processes, whether viral, ecological, or technological. For Kopić, such events cannot be reduced to ethical dilemmas or to biopolitical mechanisms. They are instances in which world-as-event becomes salient and in which ontological responsibility is brought to the fore. The question becomes how to inhabit such situations in a way that acknowledges both the exposure of life and the broader responsibility for the style in which world is enacted.
A praxis informed by Kopić’s thought would aim to broaden attention beyond human-centered interests and beyond institutional frameworks, without ignoring either. It would involve deliberate efforts to register the participation of non-human elements and infrastructures, including climate, technology, architecture, and biological processes, in shaping the situations in which human decisions are made. At the same time, it would articulate commitments that address the “worlding” dimension of action. That requires asking, in each case, not only whether a decision is legal or efficient, but also what kind of world it helps to bring about. One might, for example, evaluate policies and practices in terms of how they affect the density and diversity of shared life, rather than only in terms of aggregate outcomes or procedural correctness.
Toward a Three-Dimensional Praxis
Seen together, Heidegger, Agamben, and Kopić illuminate three axes of the same field. Heidegger thematizes finitude as the existential horizon within which each person must take over their own being under the anticipation of death. Agamben reveals exposure as the political and legal structure that sorts lives into protected and unprotected, visible and invisible, recognized and abandoned. Kopić brings into focus world-as-event as the ontological field in which humans and non-humans co-appear and for which humans bear a distinctive responsibility. Responsibility becomes fully three-dimensional only when all three are considered together. A focus on finitude alone risks privatizing seriousness. A focus on exposure alone risks remaining within inherited metaphysical splits. A focus on world-as-event alone risks becoming too abstract if it is not tied back to concrete vulnerabilities and structures.
A praxis of ontological responsibility would therefore entail layered work. At the Heideggerian level, it would cultivate awareness of one’s own finitude and the seriousness of one’s choices. At the Agambenian level, it would scrutinize institutional and political arrangements through which some lives are exposed as bare, and would acknowledge one’s own involvement in those arrangements. At the Kopičian level, it would widen attention to world-as-event and would articulate commitments that respond to existence as a shared, fragile happening that includes human and non-human actors. The aim is not to produce a new moral code that can be applied mechanically. The more modest and, at the same time, more demanding proposal is to develop a mode of inhabiting existence that remains responsive to finitude, sensitive to structures of exposure, and attentive to the broader ontology of world. In that sense, “ontological responsibility” names both a conceptual integration of Heidegger, Agamben, and Kopić, and a concrete, ongoing effort to live in a way that does justice to the event-character of existence.
The practical force of this proposal lies in a shift of emphasis. To take one’s own finitude seriously is to treat time and attention as scarce and ethically charged. To recognize the dynamics of exposure is to situate one’s daily work within broader patterns that render some lives precarious and others secure. To think in terms of world-as-event is to ask of each policy, each practice, and each small decision what sort of shared world it helps to sustain. If ontological responsibility has any traction, it lies precisely here, in the quiet reorientation of how one chooses, how one works, and how one inhabits a world that remains, at every moment, an unfinished event.
Questions for Reflection
- Where in your current life do you feel the pressure of finitude, and how does that awareness (or its absence) shape the way you choose your projects and relationships?
- In your institutional or professional setting, who is most at risk of being treated as “bare life,” and in what subtle ways are you implicated in that process?
- If you truly regarded the world as an ongoing event rather than a stock of things, what concrete aspect of your everyday environment would you begin to relate to differently?
- Thinking of a recent decision you made, how did it respond (or fail to respond) to all three dimensions at once: your own finitude, others’ exposure, and the kind of shared world the decision helps to enact?
- If you adopted “ontological responsibility” as a guiding phrase for the next year, what is the first small, specific habit you would commit to changing?
Recommended Reading:
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by
Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford University Press, 1998.
Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell.
University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson.
Harper & Row, 1962.
Kopić, Mario. “From the Good Life to the Bare Life.” 2022.
Mikki, Said. “The Historical Lifeworld of Event Ontology.”
Phainomena, vol. 30, no. 116–117, 2021, pp. 191–214.