The Private in the Work of Hannah Arendt

Abstract

Throughout her work, Hannah Arendt insists on the importance of the divide between public and private. However, this divide often sits uneasily with Arendt scholars. While the appeal of the public realm is clear, the private is often characterized as a realm of necessity and oppression hidden away for the sake of the public. In this dissertation I offer a new and positive perspective on how Arendt understands the private. Hiddenness, I argue, is not a cage in which private activities are trapped, but a distinct feature of the human condition, one which offers its own richness and depth. After tracing the story of the public/private divide as Arendt presents it in The Human Condition and as it has been taken up in the scholarship, I turn, in Chapter Two, to Arendt’s later work, The Life of the Mind. Focusing on the activity of thinking, I argue that it too is a hidden activity. While, on the surface, thinking’s pursuit of meaning may seem quite different from the household labour associated with the private, closer examination reveals the way in which the two activities follow a similar pattern: daily activities which do not produce results, but instead sustain life. It is this rhythm which should be central to our understanding of the private. In Chapter Three, I focus on thinking’s affinity with action, a very public activity which shares thinking’s pursuit of meaning. In demonstrating this pursuit playing out on opposite sides of the public/private divide, this relationship can offer a new positive vision of the relationship between public and private, one characterized not by antagonism, but mutual support. Finally, in Chapter Four, I examine the ways Arendt’s understanding of the private might offer valuable insights for our own time in which the urgent need to think is so easily ignored.