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 specific to politics: the immortalization of history.
However, it seems clear that this was only a partial definition. Merely to act on the public stage is not enough to achieve historical greatness: it also matters what one achieves and why. Understanding how and why this is can clarify the problem with more aesthetic interpretations of Arendtian political action discussed at the beginning of this chapter. The problem that seems to infect these interpretations is that they seem determined to assume a strict dichotomy between activities that are telos and a-telos, between an activity performed for some higher goal or purpose and an activity that was an end in itself. Of course, this is to some extent understandable: Arendt, after all, had clearly distinguished between work, which operates under conditions of means and ends, and action, which has no finished product, but is an end in itself. Thus, the logic runs that any instrumental or teleological activity occurring in politics must, according to Arendt, have an activity outside it that “redeems” it, and this redeeming activity is what true political action must therefore be. All elements of instrumentality should thus be kept out of political activity. The implication seems to be that most of what we consider to be the concrete concerns of politics, such as public policy or social justice, must be relegated merely to administration, so that politics can be free to engage in a deliberative and performative-disclosive activity of individual identity. This dichotomous understanding of the relationship between action and instrumentality is based on the fundamental assumption that there are only two, mutually exclusive ways of conceiving of activities, that is, they are either telos or a-telos.
However, it is possible there is a third option, an option suggested by none other than Plato himself. At the beginning of book 2 of the Republic, Plato proposes a sophisticated, threefold division of human goods.185 He has Glaucon suggest that there are things that are good for their own sake, such as joy; things that are only good for their consequences, such as physical training; and things that are both good for their consequences and good for their own sake, one of which, Glaucon suspects, might be justice. This third option, in other words, was an activity that was both telos and a-telos. In essence, I suggest that this distinction between action and work should be understood not on a logical level but instead at an ontological level. Mirroring their dynamic versus instrumental modes of causality, action and work should not necessarily be seen as mutually exclusive activities, but instead could potentially be the very same activity grasped at two distinct ontological levels. Does Arendt ever provide examples of political actions that are ontologically both telos and a-telos? There are in fact a number of such examples, but the clearest might be her acknowledgment, as Patchen Markell has argued elsewhere,186 that instances of work, which are teleologically governed by means/ends logic and always involving doing violence to something given, can also at the same time be instances of action. In “The Concept of History,” she points out that “insofar as the end product of fabrication is incorporated into the human world … its use and eventual ‘history’ can never be predicted.… This means only that man is never exclusively homo faber, that even the fabricator remains at the same time an acting being.”187 The most well-known instance of this is given in The Human Condition, when she pointed to the invention of the telescope,