The Human Condition

Chapter 5 further elaborates on the distinction between the political and the social introduced by Arendt in Chapter 4. She begins by noting the difficulty of grasping the separation of these two spheres for modernity. The social, she says, has thoroughly infiltrated the political, a tendency evinced by the modern conception of the political state as a kind of household manager of the economy (the word “economy” derives from the ancient Greek word for home, oiko).

However, for the ancient Greeks, the difference between the political and the social was clear. She frames the distinction by contrasting freedom and necessity (30-31). The social or private realm of the family and household is defined by the natural necessity of labor, the need for activity that supports the biological maintenance and reproduction of the species. Examples would be birthing and rearing of children performed by women or the menial tasks executed by slaves.

Conversely, the political or public sphere is defined by freedom from labor: “[T]he mastering of the necessities of life in the household was the condition for freedom in the polis” (31). Males of a certain property status that liberated them from the drudgery of labor allotted to women and slaves, were thus the only citizens, that is, political actors, in the ancient Greek city-state. The equality of all male citizens in the public sphere is therefore predicated on the inequality of the social or domestic realm: “As far as the members of the polis are concerned, household life exists for the sake of the 'good life' in the polis” (37). She further examines the subsequent elimination of this clear gap between the political and the social throughout Part 2.

This chapter moves the historical perspective of Arendt’s discussion of the public and private realms forward into the modern era. In contrast to antiquity and the medieval era, Arendt understands modern life in terms of the emergence of an autonomous social sphere from the old binary between the private and public realms.

Though the social dimension or society retains the central concern of the traditional household, labor, the private sphere takes on a new meaning: intimacy and individuality (38). The home is no longer defined strictly by the necessities of labor, but by the growing enrichment of unique selfhood and personality in the shelter of privacy from the public.

Arendt claims that this modern linkage between privacy and individuality, represented by figures like the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the later Romantics, arose in opposition to the new power of the social realm. For Arendt, the modern notion of the social is defined by conformism (39). This idea contrasts the emphasis on individualism in the private sphere, and the role of excellent or noteworthy action (i.e., virtue) that characterized ancient public life. It is neither the singularity of unique individuals, nor of great public deeds that is demanded by society, but rather the predictability of behavior according to a shared model. Rational self-interest is one such model, a phenomenon that Arendt associates with the birth of modern social sciences, like economics.

In other words, the effect of the social is to level all human particularity and difference down to a common denominator: a society of laborers and jobholders (46). Society has so successfully invaded the private and public spheres such that labor, which the ancients regarded as a toilsome, animal-like burden to avoid at all costs, has become the defining activity of the human being. This unremitting power of the social is thus the distinguishing feature of modernity that separates us from the Greek, Roman and feudal (medieval) eras.

Chapter 7 provides a philosophical analysis of the public realm. Arendt defines the public realm in terms of its two main features: publicity and worldliness. Publicity refers to the ability of a phenomenon to appear, that is to say, “to be seen and heard by everybody” (50). Although the modern private sphere of intimacy allows for the rich development of subjective experience and emotion, Arendt argues that there is no substitute for the fact that, with publicity, “everybody is always concerned with the same object” (58).

The second feature of the public realm discussed by Arendt is worldliness. By this she means rather the space for work and action in which we are both related to, and separate from, one another (52). The world is a horizon of shared meaning, an “in-between” that both unites and distinguishes us. It therefore intimately connects to the possibility of human plurality, “the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and aspects” (57) in a common world.     

Arendt bemoans the atrophying of the public sphere evident in both Christian doctrine, with its message of salvation in worldlessness, and in modern societies, which are defined by a lack of pluralism, that is, either complete discord or absolute harmony (i.e., totalitarian and “mass” societies, neither of which exhibit true publicity). In both cases, Arendt claims that the true value of the public sphere is being neglected: “[M]en entered the public realm because they wanted something of their own or something they had in common with others to be more permanent than their earthly lives” (55). Accordingly, she connects the proper function of the public domain with immortality. It is only by coming together in an authentic public sphere and witnessing shared appearances that “the futility of individual life” (56) is defeated.

This chapter examines the shift in the notion of privacy between the ancient and modern eras. The original sense of the word “private,” Arendt argues, had the connotations of “privative,” that is, to be deprived of or lack something. In antiquity, private life meant “to be deprived of the reality that comes from being seen and heard by others” (58), that is, to lack access to the public sphere.

Despite this clear opposition between public and private, the most private concern for modern humans, individual property and wealth, was for the ancients intimately connected to the public realm. Property, understood as “no more or less than to have one’s location in a particular part of the world and therefore to belong to the body politic” (61), was not a strictly private matter for the ancient Greeks and Romans. On the contrary, property was the gateway to the freedom of citizenship and public life denied to those without property, such as slaves and women. In a certain sense, then, property was not private in antiquity.

For Arendt, the modern conflation of property with private wealth only arises with “an essentially agricultural society” in which the accumulation of personal riches is inextricably tied to ownership of a specific piece of land (66). Contrary to our expectations drawn from social contract theory, Arendt argues that it is not property that modern society values first and foremost, but the accumulation of private wealth (66-67). Indeed, it is the absence of the importance of property in its older sense as the ability “to be master over one’s necessities of life and therefore potentially to be a free person” (65) that allows the distinctly societal imperative of economic gain to dominate both the public and private spheres at the expense of genuine freedom.

Chapter 9 continues the discussion of the change in conceptions of the public and private realms that accompany the developments of modernity. Arendt argues that the transformation of property from the mere condition of participation in public life to the source of private wealth precipitates the ascent of the social. Society becomes “an organization of property-owners” (68) who together demand public protection for the maintenance of their private wealth The modern political state, or commonwealth, is thus really about “common wealth,” that is, the public concern and care for private accumulation. For Arendt, the result is that the “durability of the world” (68) as a shared horizon of public meaning is sacrificed for the impermanent, fungible character of individual wealth. With the rise of society, then, the private decisively consumes the public.

On the other hand, Arendt emphasizes that society has similarly violated the private sphere. While the clear separation between the public and private formerly sheltered the individual (by providing a kind of protection from the visibility of a common world), the social makes public that which used to be private. Arendt’s example is the new public role given to laborers, that is, workers and women, in the modern age. Labor, a private concern for the ancient Greeks and Romans, is now a public matter. What is left of the private, the notion of subjective intimacy, is for Arendt a poor substitute for the old balance between the public and the private that at least allowed for a domain of equal freedom. This aspect of antiquity has not been reproduced by the new configuration of the public and the private under the dominion of society.

This closing chapter of Part 2 provides a summary of Arendt’s views on the public and the private as well as a transition to Part 3 (on labor). While Arendt has to this point subsumed a number of parallel oppositions under her overriding distinction between the private and the public (i.e., necessity versus freedom, inequality versus equality, force versus consent, shame versus excellence and honor), she suggests that the fundamental contrast between them consists in the notion that “there are things that need to be hidden and others that need to be displayed publicly if they are to exist at all” (73). In other words, the most important component of her analysis of the private and public dimensions of human life regards the “proper location” (73) of activities in the world, that is, their concealed or open character.

Arendt illustrates this point with a discussion of two related phenomena: the Christian doctrine of good works and the philosophical idea of wisdom. For Arendt, what these two phenomena share is the notion that they are immediate and conclusive activities without a lasting or enduring existence. For the Christian, good works are a clandestine matter between the believer and God; once a good deed becomes public and known, the activity loses its purely moral character and can be seen as instrumental to a non-moral end (i.e., reputation or reward) (74-75). Similarly, philosophical contemplation is a dialogue between “me and myself,” a process that, as argued in Part 1, consciously avoids the public gaze. The good Christian is thus lonely, the true philosopher solitary. However, even this similarity forms another distinction: the philosopher may at least give permanence to her thoughts through writing or engage with an objective order of ideas, but good works “must be forgotten instantly” (76) after the act and are therefore truly worldless. 

Arendt concludes with a transitional hypothesis: perhaps the extreme case of the complete worldlessness of Christian morality says something about how political communities have configured the locations of the various dimensions of the vita activa. Her exploration of the dialectic between the public and the private will continue as she moves into her closer examination of labor, work, and action.