Arendt's Judgment. Jonathan Peter Schwartz
of plurality is based on the fact of the narrative agency of human beings and expresses the fact that the world is filled with a plurality of unique life stories. As we’ve seen, like Heidegger, Arendt believed this narrative ontology of human beings was the primordial source of history: “That every individual life between birth and death can eventually be told as a story with a beginning and end is the prepolitical and prehistorical condition of history, the great story without beginning and end.”157 The deep question this condition poses is how these stories, which in her view are so distinctive that they are literally sui generis,158 can escape the isolation and solipsism this absolute individualism implies and be related to each other in a way that could afford the possibility of historical immortality. She sought to do this by articulating the activity, action, that humans perform to provide the content of these stories and by defending the ability of a common world and public realm to provide an intersubjective space of reality where actors can enact their life stories before their peers. I argue in the following that only action performed in a public realm, political action, is capable of achieving historical greatness, that is, political athanatizein.
The interpretation of Arendtian political action offered here implicitly takes a position on a point that has been somewhat ambiguous in the literature on Arendt: to wit, whether there could be any kind of action performed in the private realm, that is, nonpolitical action. I believe the notion that Arendt thought action could only take place in the political arena is largely based on a lack of precision in her writing in The Human Condition, imprecisions she clarifies elsewhere. In The Human Condition, Arendt draws a sharp distinction between the public and the private realm. Because of her interest in reasserting the significance of the public realm, she is often thought to have taken a dim view of the private realm. This notion is reinforced by the fact that when she initially discusses the public realm in The Human Condition she seems to identify it with the idea of the “common world.” 159 The “common world” is the general concept Arendt develops to explain how the absolute plurality of individual “whos” can be related to each other. The common world, in Arendt’s words, has the power “to gather them together, to relate and to separate them.”160 Thus, if the common world is indeed identical to the public realm, then it seems true that there could be no action in the private sphere. However, there is good reason to believe that this section of the book was either not fully thought through or simply badly written.
To begin with, Arendt is not nearly as contemptuous of the private realm in The Human Condition as is often thought. Her concern, rather, was that the distinction between the public and private realms had become muddled in the modern era, and it was this “social realm” to which she directed her contempt. She believed, in fact, that the private realm was a sacred space withdrawn from the world that humans needed desperately, a realm that sheltered them from the cold light of the public realm, and indeed it was the role of politics to protect this realm as much as it was to protect the public realm.161 She believed one of the tragedies of modern capitalism was the redefining of private property away from the idea of a “privately held place within the world” and toward the idea of capital accumulation.162 Moreover, in later writings she clearly distinguishes between “the [common] world and its public space,”163 and repeatedly indicates the existence of action in the private realm. In her lecture course, “Some Questions Concerning Moral Philosophy,” written a few years after The Human Condition, she explicitly indicates the existence of “nonpolitical action, which does not take place in public.”164 And even in The Human Condition there are indications suggesting the existence of this kind of action in privately situated settings, such as when she states of “action and speech” that the modern era has “banished these into the sphere of the intimate and the private.”165 Thus, the common world is better understood as including both our public and private relationships. While it is probably the case that truly private action is impossible—since action necessarily must be performed with and before others—it is likely that most action is of a kind of quasi-public nature. Most of our relationships probably involve some kind of informal public realm or space of appearance.166 In “Introduction into Politics,” Arendt states that “wherever human beings come together—be it in private or social, be it in public or politically—a space is generated that simultaneously gathers them into it and separates them from one another.… Wherever people come together, the world thrusts itself between them, and it is in this in-between space that all human affairs are conducted.”167
This is most clearly evident in how Arendt describes the idea of a “space of appearance.” Arendt identifies a space of appearance with reality as such: a space between the actors where phenomena can intersubjectively appear to them.168 This space of appearance is a broad phenomenon and can appear wherever people act and speak together: “The space of appearance comes into being wherever men are together in the manner of speech and action, and therefore predates and precedes all formal constitution of the public realm and the various forms of government, that is, the various forms in which the public realm can be organized.… Wherever people gather together, it is potentially there, but only potentially, not necessarily and not forever.”169 The space of appearance is therefore not necessarily a formal 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