phenomenon, but instead “its true space lies between people living together for this purpose [of acting and speaking together], no matter where they happen to be.… Action and speech create a space between the participants which can find its proper location almost anytime and anywhere.”170 Thus, any formally instituted public realm is based on a more original, primordial, and informal public realm that precedes it and enables its continuation in the world. In other words, while action in the public arena is the raison d’être of politics, other less elevated and significant forms of action can occur in private relationships characterized by more informal spaces of appearance.
The language Arendt uses can often be overly mysterious, but the idea of a space of appearance simply seems to be her way of capturing the nature of relationships. The notion of a space of appearance indicates that relationships can exist among an indeterminate number of individuals: it can arise between two friends, in a family, a group (churches, companies, political movements), or even a nation. Something arises between the individuals involved in any kind of relationship, something they never fully control, that separates and relates them to each other. A space of appearance is incredibly significant to human beings because action can only appear, and therefore exist, within it. The significant events of our lives only have meaning if there are other people who occupy a common space of appearance with us, who have a relationship to us, who can see and appreciate those events. Action needs a space of appearance to illuminate it; it provides a kind of intersubjectively constituted spotlight for our actions.171 At the same time, Arendt also argues that only action can bring a space of appearance into being: “Action, moreover, no matter what its specific content, always establishes relationships.”172 Thus, relationships are somehow the result of action, but also the only place where action can occur.173 There seems therefore to be a kind of reciprocal and dynamic causality to the relationship between action and the space of appearance, where each brings the other into being.
There are therefore a number of essential distinctions that need to be recognized when coming to terms with what Arendt means by the common world. The common world as a whole is an amalgam of two human conditions. The first is the web of human relationships that is almost infinite in its relativity and instability and is constituted by an almost endless variety of shifting and multidimensional relationships or “spaces of appearance.” The second is the human artifice: our laws, institutions, technology, scientific and historical documentation and literature, and works of art that provide a civilizing bulwark against natural necessity and without which human life descends into savagery.174 Contra the simplistic view sometimes attributed to her, work for Arendt entails much more meaningful endeavors than is typically implied by the mundane idea of a “production process.” It is difficult to overstate the value Arendt attributes to these products of work: these “islands of stability” are literally the primordial wellspring of human civilization. Action, though guided by goals and intentions, could never properly be thought predictable, and even when careful plans are worked out they quickly become irrelevant, since action never produces a finished product but rather sets off a chain of events in the web of human relationships. One might think of the endless shifting alliances in the television show Survivor as an example of what would become of our culture without the human artifice: human culture with no products of work to stabilize it quickly degrades into tribalism and endless infighting.
Arendt’s “Common World”
| Web of Human Relationships | Human Artifice | |
| Private Realm | Family, friends, etc. | Homes, possessions, etc. |
| Public Realm | Political actors and citizens | Laws and institutions, historical documentation, public infrastructure |
Arendt’s sharp distinction between the public and the private has been attacked from the standpoint of social justice in variety of ways; in particular, feminist critics point out that the assertion of a private sphere has been used as a cloak for various kinds of barbaric practices and domestic abuse.175 Essential as the public realm is to the political activities of judging and acting, Arendt also recognized the political relevance of the private realm. This political relevance comes from another faculty involved in historical reflection: the faculty of thought, which, as we will see later, Arendt insists can only be performed in private, in withdrawal from our worldly entanglements. This emphasis on freedom of thought partly explains her determination to maintain the distinction between the two realms. While it is arguably true that Arendt did not take these objections seriously enough, one doubts she would have altered her view significantly. She believed that how and where various communities draw the distinction between the public and private is a matter those communities’ own citizens should judge over.176 But perhaps even more significant, one thing her research on totalitarianism appeared to have taught her was that this distinction must be drawn: while feminist critics in particular level a powerful critique, one must wonder if the idea that “the personal is political” is a dangerously slippery slope.
There is no doubt, however, that Arendt saw the revival of an authentic public realm to be the most urgent purpose of her work. While the private realm seems to be constituted by a wide variety of different informal relationships or spaces of appearance, the public realm is a formally articulated and institutionalized space of appearance, giving unusual stability and endurance to that space.177 While The Human Condition generally focused on the Greeks’ experience of their public realm, how the public realm is organized and articulated often differs from society to society. In “Introduction into Politics,” the book she attempted to write in 1958–1959 about the broad relationship between thought and action, Arendt outlined a number of forms the public realm can take. Her ideal is what she calls a “political public realm.”178 As Chapter 2 will discuss in more depth, Arendt believed there were three original instances of political public realms: the ancient Greeks, the republican Romans, and (for brief periods) modern revolutionary actors. These public realms were “political” because their citizens were primordially involved in the maintenance of their public realms. Historically, however, most public realms have been nonpolitical public realms. The church in the Christian era afforded a kind of public realm, though because of Christian theology it was a much less authentically political space.179 The same was true for the early modern era of emerging capitalist expansion, which found its own public realm in the exchange market.180 As we will see later, the public realm of the modern world is generally what Arendt calls the social realm. The social realm is a form of public realm where the distinction between the public and the private has lost its meaning, and, as a result, many of the activities that historically were thought to belong in the private realm have been allowed into the public realm.181 The social realm is a space of appearance, no doubt, but one that has lost the original political capacity to memorialize and disclose the “who” of the actors and instead has become a place of conformity, hypocrisy, and corruption.182
While clearly most action thus probably occurs in private life, Arendt understood political action to be the highest kind of action. The most direct and unequivocal definition of political action she ever gave came at the conclusion of her 1963 lecture course “Introduction into Politics,” where she stated simply that “action [is] political if performed in the public realm.”183 What is so special about performing action in the public realm? In “What Is Freedom?” she tells us: “[The public realm] is the realm where freedom is a worldly reality, tangible in words which can be heard, in deeds which can be seen, and in events which are talked about and remembered, and turned into stories before they are finally incorporated into the great storybook of human history.”184 In other words, what makes the public realm special is that only by acting within it is it possible to achieve the kind of athanatizein
