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

Summary/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 dis-close 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.

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