The Public and Private Realm | The Human Condition, Chapter 2

On occasion, you discover that a half-formed idea that you once had is to be found in another thinker’s work. When I was in graduate school, this was a source of disappointment — it meant I still hadn’t had an original thought. Now, though, I take this sort of discovery as a kind of encouragement; it means my half-formed idea might have some merit to it.

Politics is the art of living together. I took a liking to that way of describing politics a few years ago. At the time, I was trying to think about politics outside of the spectacular drudgery that is partisan politics, especially in the United States. I wanted a way to think about politics that wasn’t so tied up with the procedures of Congress or the pageantry of elections. I didn’t want to forget about politics; I wanted to think about the aspects of the political life that actually mattered; I wanted politics to be human again.

I thought about this quite a bit as I read Chapter 2 of The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt’s inquiry into the vita activa. We’re reading this book together over the next few months.

Here is the schedule for the read-along:

• November 25: Chapter 1: The Human Condition

• December 2: Chapter 2: The Public and The Private Realm

• December 9: Chapter 3: Labor

• December 15: Members-Only Zoom Call

• December 16: Chapter 4: Work

• December 23: Reading Week

• December 30: Reading Week

• January 6: Chapter 5: Action (§24-29)

• January 13: Chapter 5: Action (§30-34)

• January 19: Members-Only Zoom Call

• January 20: Chapter 6 The Vita Activa and The Modern Age (§35-40)

• January 27: Chapter 6 The Vita Activa and The Modern Age (§41-45)

• February 3: Final Thoughts

Nearly everything related to these read-alongs is free; I feel very strongly about making this project available to everyone. But on occasion, I’ll send out extra essays inspired by the reading, and of course we have our members-only Zoom calls in December and January.

If you want to take part in those members-only Zoom calls, all you have to do is become a paying subscriber. You’ll also be supporting my work here on Commonplace Philosophy and over on my YouTube channel.

I said that this chapter made me think of the line politics is the art of living together, and that that half-baked idea of mine was found in Arendt. This is true to some extent.

Arendt begins with an explication of the ancient Greek distinction between the public and the private realm. The public realm, originally, is a place where words and deeds are seen as unified (thus Achilles is a doer of great deeds and the speaker of great words), and in the public realm one is able to be fully human. (A slave, unable to be fully human, is barred from the public realm, and a barbarian refuses to establish a public realm.) This is the place of politics. The public realm, then, might be the place where we do things together. That’s why Arendt’s writing reminded me of my own little idea; I was just aping the Greeks.

The private realm is something like the household. It is a place of intimacy and privacy. Traditionally, it is also a place of domination; the head of the household, the paterfamilias, is able to rule with an unchecked authority that, Arendt notes, is not actually found in a monarchy. The monarch in the public realm can actually be contested.

As with Arendt’s discussion of the vita activa and vita contemplativa, she is interested in the development of the distinction between public and private throughout history, especially with the rise of what she calls the social. Whatever the social is, it has slowly taken over the public, but it also infringes on the private. Bureaucracy, a rule by nobody but the rules, is Arendt’s preferred example. Life itself becomes a matter of uniformity and conformity rather than a place of action; this makes it quite different from the public realm and especially different from the polis.

(An aside: I need to take some time this week to really define some key concepts. These include: work, labor, action, public, private, and social. If there are other concepts you think need explicitly defined, let me know down below.)

Study of Two Women

The public realm, as the common world, gathers us together yet prevents us from falling over each other, so to speak. What makes mass society so difficult to bear is not the number of people involved, or at least not primarily, but the fact that the world between them has lost its power to gather them together, to relate and to separate them. The weirdness of this situation resembles a spiritualistic séance where a number of people gathered around a table might suddenly, through some magic trick, see the table vanish from their midst, so that two persons sitting opposite each other were no longer separated but also would be entirely unrelated to each other by anything tangible.

This quotation, taken from page 54, is something of a thesis statement for the chapter. The social realm – mass society – lacks the cohesion of the public realm. We are together, but we are alone. We lack a common world.

Think of all the things we could do together, but that we treat as individual products of consumption. We don’t gather to hear stories; we might go and view live music, but we do not get together and communally make music; we don’t have community feasts. Instead we read novels, listen to music with our headphones, or go to restaurants.

As the public realm disappears, so does the private. They only exist as complementary spheres, it seems. The social impinged on the public and destroyed it; the same is said for the private. As we lose the private realm, we become shallow — while a life wholly spent in private is not fully human, a life spent wholly in public loses much of its quality.

There are a few other topics I’d like to think about more. This chapter deserves another read and some more reflection. Those topics are:

• The importance, in general and in this chapter, of private property

• The final discussion on the location of human activities, and especially the discussion of being wise and being good

• The concept of worldlessness

If I am at all able, I’ll write more later this week as a bonus post.