Jeremy Elkins
The idea of appearance is fundamental in Arendt’s thinking, in a double sense. It is fundamental within her thinking in the sense that it pervades her work. And the reason that it does so is because—in the second sense—it is, in her thinking, a fundamental characteristic of the world. “The world men are born into,” she writes at the beginning of “Thinking,” the first volume of The Life of the Mind:
contains many things, natural and artificial, living and dead, transient and sempiternal, all of which have in common that they appear and hence are meant to be seen, heard, touched, tasted, and smelled, to be perceived by sentient creatures endowed with the appropriate sense organs. . . . In this world which we enter, appearing from a nowhere, and from which we disappear into a nowhere, Being and Appearing coincide.1
It is perhaps an indication of both how fundamental and how complex the idea of appearance is for Arendt that we should find her thus beginning her most sustained treatment of the topic in a volume concerned precisely with “mental activities,” which, in her account of them, “have in common a withdrawal from the world as it appears and a bending back toward the self.”2
In this, we are immediately met with an apparent paradox, one that frames the project of The Life of the Mind:
The primacy of appearance for all living creatures . . . is of great relevance to the topic we are going to deal with. . . . [That mental activities involve a withdrawal from appearance] . . . would cause no great problem if we were mere spectators [of] . . . the world. . . . However we are of the world and not merely in it; we, too, are appearances by virtue of arriving and departing . . . [and] [t]hese properties do not vanish when we happened to be engaged in mental activities. . . . [S]ince Being and Appearing coincide for men, this means that I can flee appearance only into appearance. . . . Our mental apparatus, though it can withdraw from present appearances, remains geared to Appearance.3
And so, it might be said, “mental activities” do not really involve a withdrawal in toto from “the world as it appears,” but only a withdrawal from a certain kind of immediate encounter with objects into a different kind of “appearance.” Along the lines of this distinction, Arendt finds it a “first consoling” response that, even within the old metaphysical view that “(true) Being [lies] behind (mere) Appearance,” there is the assumption that “when the philosopher takes leave of the world given by the senses . . . to the life of the mind, he [nonetheless] takes his clue from the former, looking for something to be revealed to him that would explain its underlying truth,” and that this “truth . . . can be conceived only as another appearance.”4 Although Arendt rejects the “two-world theory” that underlies this, she could nonetheless preserve the idea that both thinking and that which thinking thinks are themselves forms of appearance.
Yet for Arendt this will not do. Immediately after saying that thought, though “it can withdraw from present appearances, remains geared to Appearance,” she insists that “that does not solve the problem,” for the fundamental “problem concerns the fitness of thought to appear at all . . . whether thinking and other invisible and soundless mental activities are meant to appear or whether in fact they can never find an adequate place in the world.”5 To see why this remains a problem for Arendt requires that we go further into the meaning for her of appearance. There are three elements here that are of special relevance. The first concerns the subject of appearance. The opening passage of this chapter ends with the idea that “Being and Appearing coincide.” But what it begins with is the idea that the world “contains many things,” and the rest of that sentence makes clear that we are talking about things that are perceptible through the “appropriate sense organs.” It is this world of objects that appears to the senses that is primary for Arendt. The problem of thought, then, is, for her, what place it has in a sensory world.
The second element concerns the fundamental importance for Arendt of plurality to appearance. If the world is “meant to be seen,” it follows for Arendt that “nothing and nobody exists in the world whose very being does not presuppose a spectator.”6 To be seen—for Arendt “seeing” is often used as shorthand for sensory perception in general—is always to be seen by some particular being. And in the world there is not one being capable of seeing, but many. “Not Man but men inhabit this planet. Plurality is the law of the earth” and “each single object appears in a different perspective to each individual.”7 Every appearance is thus plural and perspectival: “the world opens up differently to every man, according to his position in it.”8 For Arendt, then, seeing implies seeming, and seeming is—in one of Arendt’s favorite phrases—dokei moi (“it seems to me”).
The third element concerns the importance for Arendt of the idea of a common world. That appearance always implies an “it seems-to-me” does not mean that appearance is the same as seeming. For while “the world opens up differently to every man,” the objects of the world are common, and they are common precisely because they can appear to all, even as they appear differently to each. The “‘sameness’ of the world, its commonness . . . resides in the fact that the same world opens up to everyone.”9 For Arendt, then, both the notion of a common object and the notion of plurality are entailed in the very idea of appearance.
These three aspects of appearance for Arendt—the primacy of the sensory world, the plurality of perspective, and the commonness of objects—are brought together in her description of “common sense.” Common sense, she argues, is bound to the five senses as a synthetic function. It is “a kind of sixth sense needed to keep my five senses together and guarantee that it is the same object that I see, touch, taste, smell, and hear.” At the same time, common sense also “fits the sensations of my strictly private five senses . . . into a common world shared by others. The subjectivity of the ‘it-seems-to-me’ is remedied by the fact that the same object also appears to others though its mode of appearance may be different.”10
The problem posed by thinking, for Arendt, then, is how an activity that is not sensory and that takes place privately can be at home in a common world of sensory objects. We refer to this problem not in order to answer it, but because the fact that it is a problem at all for Arendt is revealing of her complex view of appearance. For Arendt, appearance is in one sense an ontological condition of the world. This is the sense in that “Being coincides with Appearance,” and in that (for example) thinking, even as it withdraws from “present appearances,” cannot be other than appearance. At the same time and in another sense, appearance is associated for Arendt with a world perceived by the senses and encountered by a plurality of individuals from differing perspectives. It is in this sense of appearing that thinking, for example, can be said to involve a “withdrawal from the world as it appears,” and in relation to which the question of whether “thinking and other invisible and soundless mental activities are meant to appear or whether in fact they can never find an adequate place in the world” can arise as a question.
Arendt herself does not clearly distinguish these senses of appearance, and one can have the impression that she is not wholly comfortable in making the distinction. (The same can be said of associated ideas, such as “world” and “common,” which can each refer to appearance in either the first sense or the second sense.) A simple way of treating the relationship between these two senses of appearance would be to say that while all that is appears, the sensory world remains primary for us and all other forms of appearance rest in some manner on that primary encounter. In a number of places, Arendt indeed says something very much like this.11 Still, Arendt seems to resist distinguishing too sharply between these two senses of appearance, as though to do so would undermine the importance of that which appears immediately to the senses and in common. So instead, there is often the inclination to bend the ontological itself toward the sensory, to equate appearance itself with a world of sensory objects that are held in common. The form of the question of whether thought is fit to appear at all is one example of this. (The significance of that question for Arendt’s thinking is not diminished by her project of seeking an answer to it.) A yet more forceful example comes in Arendt’s brief and dismissive treatment of “feelings, passions, and emotions.”
In reading Arendt’s account of these aspects of the inner life, one can sense an urgency to repudiate them, for there is nothing that demands more the distinction between the idea of appearance as coinciding with Being and the idea of the primary importance of a common world of sensory objects than the idea of an inner life. And so it is not surprising that Arendt should regard the emotions with a combination of disdain and fear of their contagion “when they” leave their “depths” and “come forth into the day.”12 Comparing inner life with the inner organs, Arendt declares that “the monotonous sameness and pervasive ugliness so highly characteristic of the findings of modern psychology, and contrasting so obviously with the enormous variety and richness of overt human conduct, witness to the radical difference between the inside and outside of the human body.”13 At times, she limits herself to dismissing the relevance of emotions to what appears in public.14 But the significance of appearing in public is so great for Arendt that she often seems to feel the need to deny to the inner life the status of appearance at all. “Emotions and ‘inner sensations,’” and indeed any “inside self” are “‘unworldly’ in that they lack the chief worldly property of ‘standing still and remaining’ at least long enough to be clearly perceived—and not merely sensed—to be intuited, identified, and acknowledged.”15 Therefore, “it is misleading to speak . . . of inner ‘appearances,’” she argues, and relegates emotions insofar as they remain internal to the status of “inner sensations whose relentless succession prevents any of them from assuming [the] lasting, identifiable shape” necessary to “appear . . . to either the inner or outward sense.”16 It is only by showing emotions, Arendt insists, that we can have thoughts about them at all; only by display of emotions do they gain appearance. It is the “show of anger, as distinct from the anger I feel” that “contains a reflection on it.” To “show one’s anger is . . . [to] decide what is fit for appearance,” and it is only this that “gives the emotion the highly individualized form which is meaningful for all surface phenomena.”17 This self-display, Arendt insists, is not an expression of “something inside.” The “expressiveness of an appearance” rather has the character that what “it ‘expresses’ [is] nothing but itself.”18 “Seen from the viewpoint of” this reality, “of the spectators to whom it appears and from whose view it finally disappears,” there is no self other than what is displayed. The “courageous man is not,” for instance, to be understood in terms of an inner state, but rather as “one who has decided that fear is not what he wants to show.” It is through “such choices” of how to present oneself that “courage can then become second nature or habit.” Arendt accordingly dismisses “psychology, depth psychology, or psychoanalysis” not only as having no relevance to public life but also as having literally nothing to say about individuals qua individuals at all, “discover[ing] no more than the ever-changing moods, the ups and downs of our psychic life.”19 “Distinction and individuation occur through speech,” by which Arendt refers here not to language or the capacity for speech, but actual speech to an audience of spectators. “Individual psychology,” she concludes, is solely the “prerogative of fiction, the novel, and the drama.”20
This is a very poor account of emotions. But the main point for our discussion is not that, but rather that what seems to impel Arendt to give such an account is the need to diminish the conflict that re-appears again and again between the broad ontological idea that all that is appears, and the more specific commitment to the importance of displaying oneself in public to others.
One way in which Arendt seeks to bridge the difference between these senses of appearance is through a different ontological claim: that it is part of the very beingness of human beings that they are “possessed by an urge toward self-display,” an “urge to appear.” “Prominent already in the higher forms of animal life,” this urge to “self-display . . . reaches its climax in the human species”: the need by humans to “make their appearance like actors on a stage set for them” and in this way to “answer . . . the fact of [their] own appearingness.”21 The urge to appear can only be realized in the presence of others, and it thus depends on the existence and quality of a public world. “For us,” writes Arendt, it is “being seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves” “in public” that “constitutes reality,” and, “since our feeling for reality depends utterly upon appearance,” it requires “the appearance of a public realm into which things can appear out of the darkness of sheltered existence.” “Compared with the reality which comes from being seen and heard” in public, “even the greatest force of intimate life”—including “the delights of the senses”—“lead an uncertain, shadowy kind of existence unless and until they are transformed, deprivatized and deindividualized, as it were, into a shape to fit them for public appearance.”22
In this vein, the idea of a “common world” takes on a more specific meaning. It is equated here not with the world of objects that are “common” just in respect of the fact that they are the same objects regardless of the perspective from which they are seen, not the world of all “things, natural and artificial, living and dead, transient, and sempiternal,” but to that part of the world that appears in public. Especially in her writings on the vita activa and politics, what appears in the common world of humans is distinguished both from what is private and from what is natural. “This world . . . is not identical with the earth or with nature,” but “is related, rather, to the human artifact, the fabrication of human hands, as well as to affairs which go on among those who inhabit the man-made world together.”23 While occasionally Arendt will distinguish the public realm as only a “part of the world common to us all,”24 more generally, it “signifies the world” just “in so far as it is common to all of us and distinguished from our privately owned place in it.”25 “The common world is what we enter when we are born and what we leave behind when we die,”26 writes Arendt in The Human Condition, in virtually the same words that she will use in The Life of the Mind (“To be alive means to live in a world that preceded one’s own arrival and will survive one’s own departure.”)27 But here it is insisted that the “common world” can “survive the coming and going of the generations only to the extent that it appears in public,”28 where “public” refers to a specific, contingent, and very fragile realm, one that can be founded, nurtured, or, as Arendt argues has happened in mass society, lost. “The reality of the public realm relies on the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives,” that “everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity.” And it is only here that “worldly reality [can] truly and reliably appear.”29
Because “our feeling for reality depends utterly upon appearance and therefore upon the existence of a public realm,” those “things” that remain in “the darkness of sheltered existence”30 not only appear less (in the obvious respect) but also have less reality for having less of the quality of “appearingness.” Indeed, in the more e xtreme language that Arendt often uses, they do not truly appear at all. This does not imply for Arendt that all things are realized best when they appear in public, for there are “matters which can survive only in the realm of the private”—such as, in Arendt’s view, “good deeds” and “love, in distinction from friendship”—and these are “extinguished the moment [they are] displayed in public.”31 Yet those things that can only properly exist in private can for that reason never genuinely appear. “Goodness,” for instance, “must go into absolute hiding . . . if it is not to be destroyed,” and this means that it must “flee all appearance.”32 It is only when in public we “talk about things that can be experienced only in privacy or intimacy” that “we bring them out into a sphere where they will assume a kind of reality which . . . they could never have had before,” though they still remain still in “twilight” compared to the full reality of what belongs fully in the public realm.33 “To men the reality of the world is guaranteed by the presence of others and its appearing to all; ‘for what appears to all, this we call Being,’ and whatever lacks this appearance comes and passes away like a dream, intimately and exclusively our own but without reality.”34
Although the public realm includes the work of fabrication—“Unlike the animal laborans . . . who . . . is incapable of . . . inhabiting a public, worldly realm, homo faber is fully capable of having a public realm of his own”35 —the public realm of homo faber is not “a political realm, properly speaking.” And just as, for Arendt, what appears in the public realm has more reality than that which appears in “privacy or intimacy,” so it is in the political arena, in contrast to “the spaces which are the work of our hands” where the true “space of appearance comes into being.”36 It is in this “space of appearance . . . where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly.” It is here where, for Arendt, “each individual in his unique distinctness” most authentically “appears and confirms himself.” Only in this realm, through “disclos[ure] . . . in speech and action,” can a human “achieve . . . his own appearance and actualization”; only in this “space of appearance,” of which “plurality . . . is the condition sine qua non,” can “the reality of one’s self, of one’s own identity, . . . [and] of the surrounding world” be “established beyond doubt.”37 To be sure, for Arendt, the private realm is necessary, and “no man . . . can live in” the political realm of “action and speech . . . all the time.”38 But this is at least in part because the very “quality” of the public realm involves “rising into sight from some darker ground which must remain hidden” and which cannot itself appear.39 To be deprived of the political realm in general, is “to be deprived of reality, which, humanly and politically speaking, is the same as appearance.”40
It was earlier suggested that Arendt’s tendency to elide the idea that Being and Appearance coincide with the idea that what appears in the common world of sensory objects is primary has important implications for her treatment of inner life. Similarly, the tendency to identify “appearance” with what appears in, and is fit for, the public realm, when “men are together in speech and action”41 has important implications for her understanding of politics. For instance, in the very broad ontological idea of appearance, according to which everything that is appears, it must be the case that the “everyday common-sense world” must “know . . . error as well as illusion,” and that the concerns of the public realm properly include the critical examination of what appears to common sense: the “elimination of errors” and “dispelling of illusions”—not in order to “arrive at a region beyond appearance,” but as, and “always for the profit of,” “a new appearance.”42 However, when appearance is identified more narrowly with what is seen and heard together in the public realm, common sense assumes a special and privileged status. It is, Arendt writes, because “the only character of the world by which to gauge its reality is its being common to us all” that “common sense occupies such a high rank in the hierarchy of political qualities.”43 Indeed, so closely is common sense here identified with the political realm that “the withering of common sense,” Arendt argues, brings “the atrophy of the space of appearance” itself.44 What is thus displayed in public through “words and deeds,” seen by all through the senses, and recognized as common through common sense are the primary “political ‘products,’”45 and the natural focus of attention for what aims to be political.
What may, in this view of things, tend to be dismissed as not wholly fit for this space of appearance because it can “never find an adequate place in the [common] world” is thus not only that which occurs in the “private realm” but also that which is not perceived by the senses or that runs up against common sense. What, for example, Ricoeur referred to as the “hermeneutics of suspicion”—a mode of inquiry that rests on the idea that the world is not ju st what it seems—must, at least according to the spirit of this idea of the public realm, whether or not by its absolute logic, have an uncomfortable standing in relation to the political. Such matters as are taken up in that mode may tend to be regarded as questions of “scientific” or “philosophical” thought whose relation to, and fit for, inclusion in the political realm are at best secondary. And this all the more so when that inquiry takes as its object not what appears to the senses as objects in the distinctly “public realm,” but the dynamics and the structure of the “common world” more broadly understood.
To be sure, we can find in Arendt’s discussion of politics passages that indicate the possibility of a more inclusive scope for the political realm. There is, for instance, the suggestion that the concerns of politics are as broad as “culture” itself and involve the “judicious exchange of opinion about the sphere of public life and the common world, and the decision what manner of action is to be taken in it, as well as to how it is to look henceforth, what kinds of things are to appear in it.”46 Yet in almost all such passages, there is ambiguity—in this case in the meaning of the “common world” and of the “kinds of things [that] are to appear in it.” This ambiguity is not merely one of exposition, but rather a reflection, now at a different level, of the duality that runs throughout Arendt’s account of appearance: between, on the one side, the idea that the common world of appearance is that in which all “things can be seen by many in a variety of aspects” and “from . . . different position[s],”47 and, on the other, the idea that what is truly common and capable of appearance is that particular category of things fit for the public realm, in contrast with the private or the social—a particular realm that is destroyed when “social and economic matters intrude . . . into” it.48 Among that which the former view includes and the latter excludes is not only such matters as “questions of social discrimination” (including integration of the public schools)49 but even the kind of political reflection, “clarification,” and inquiry attempted by Arendt herself, who considered her work as “shy[ing] away from the public realm” and herself as a “mere spectator” rather than as one who properly lives within the realm of the political as a “political animal.”50
This is but a particular version of what we find over and again in Arendt’s thinking about appearance. On the one side, there is this constellation of ideas: that all that is appears; that all objects are objects of appearance; that they are in their nature “common” insofar as they are “the same object” regardless of the perspective from which they are viewed, and insofar as they are capable of “being perceived . . . by different persons” as “common to them”; and that this shared world of appearance is a function of the “commonness” of “language” and of “intersubjective communication.”51 On the other side, there is this: that “true” appearance has a qualitative character; that things that are can either appear or not; and that this depends on whether they appear in a common, public space. This ambiguity is never quite taken account of by Arendt, and that is of no small significance. For there is the danger that by transposing the full weight of the ontology of appearance first only to those objects that can be perceived directly by the senses, and then only to what can be seen and heard in a particular public sphere, what may disappear from the “space of appearance,” from Being itself, and from “the political,” are not only those “things” whose natural home is said to be other “realms” but also those non-“things” that do not appear directly to the senses at all—such as dynamics and relations—both “within” the “public realm” and between that which is constituted as the public realm and that which lies outside of it.
Notes
1 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1978), 19, italics in original.
2 Ibid., 22, italics in original.
3 Ibid., 22–23, italics in original.
4 Ibid., 24.
5 Ibid., 23.
6 Ibid., 19, italics in original.
7 Ibid., 19, 50.
8 Hannah Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” Social Research 71, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 427–54, 14.
9 Ibid., 14.
10 Arendt, Life of the Mind, 50.
11 E.g., Ibid., 24, 32.
12 F. W. J. Schelling, Of Human Freedom trans. James Guttman (Chicago, IL: Open Court Press, 1936). Quoted in ibid., 35.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid., 31.
15 Ibid., 39–40.
16 Ibid., 39.
17 Ibid., 31.
18 Ibid., 30.
19 Ibid., 35.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., 21, 29–30.
22 Ibid., 50–51, italics added.
23 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 52.
24 Ibid., 198.
25 Ibid., 52.
26 Ibid.
27 Arendt, Life of the Mind, 20.
28 Arendt, Human Condition, 55.
29 Ibid., 57, italics added.
30 Ibid., 51.
31 Ibid., 51, 76.
32 Ibid., 75.
33 Ibid., 50–51.
34 Ibid., 198–99.
35 Ibid., 160.
36 Ibid., 199.
37 Ibid., 207–8.
38 Ibid., 198–99.
39 Ibid., 71.
40 Ibid., 199.
41 Ibid.
42 Arendt, Life of the Mind, 26.
43 Arendt, Human Condition, 208.
44 Ibid., 209.
45 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Viking Press, 1961), 218.
46 Ibid., 223. For other examples, see Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1994), 22; Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1955), 75; The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 99, 103, 128–29, 135; Human Condition, 7, 199.
47 Arendt, Human Condition, 57.
48 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 91.
49 Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” Dissent 6, no. 1 (1959): 45–56, 53.
50 Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 8.
51 Arendt, Life of the Mind, 119.