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 ac
tivities can come into view. This allows to get a clearer grasp of what 
world-building in a phenomenal world amounts to and how certain ac
tivities 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 problematiza
tion 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 me
ga-body, the need for bodies to be sheltered and located, and the possibil
ity to relate bodies to a common history, Arendt develops specific claims 
about how bodies should be arranged, housed, and located. 
KEYWORDS: Hannah Arendt, public private differentiation, space of 
appearance, body, worldlessness