Phenomenal Existence and World-Building: Revisiting the Ambivalences of Hannah Arendt’s Public/Private Distinction and Its Relation to the Body

Abstract

Hannah Arendt argues for a primacy of appearance in which human existence is embedded. Specific forms of appearing relate to specific activities. In the first part of my paper, I turn to Arendt’s late work The Life of the Mind in order to reconstruct how human activities can come into view. This allows to get a clearer grasp of what world-building in a phenomenal world amounts to and how certain activities like building, acting, speaking, thinking, and judging open up dimensions that go beyond the immediately appearing world. They disclose historical, generative, and political horizons and thereby create new worlds within the appearing world. While in the first section I focus on the careful distinctions Arendt makes between the phenomenal world, the space of appearance, and the public realm, I turn to a problematization of her public/private distinction in the second section. Instead of accusing her of a “phenomenological essentialism” which locates every type of activity in a proper place, I take a look at the correlation between embodiment and architecture. Based on the horrors of a boundless mega-body, the need for bodies to be sheltered and located, and the possibility to relate bodies to a common history, Arendt develops specific claims about how bodies should be arranged, housed, and located.