It means, first, that everything that appears in public can be
seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity.
For us, appearance—something that is being seen and heard by
others as well as by ourselves—constitutes reality. Compared
with the reality which comes from being seen and heard, even the
greatest forces of intimate life—the passions of the heart, the
thoughts of the mind, the delights of the senses—lead an uncer-
tain, shadowy kind of existence unless and until they are trans-
formed, deprivatized and deindividualized, as it were, into a shape
to fit them for public appearance.41 The most current of such
transformations occurs in storytelling and generally in artistic
transposition of individual experiences. But we do not need the
form of the artist to witness this transfiguration. Each time we
talk about things that can be experienced only in privacy or in-
timacy, we bring them out into a sphere where they will assume
a kind of reality which, their intensity notwithstanding, they
never could have had before. The presence of others who see what
we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the
world and ourselves, and while the intimacy of a fully developed
private life, such as had never been known before the rise of the
modern age and the concomitant decline of the public realm, will
always greatly intensify and enrich the whole scale of subjective
emotions and private feelings, this intensification will always come
to pass at the expense of the assurance of the reality of the world
and men.
Indeed, the most intense feeling we know of, intense to the
point of blotting out all other experiences, namely, the experience
of great bodily pain, is at the same time the most private and least
41. This is also the reason why it is impossible "to write a character sketch
of any slave who lived. . . . Until they emerge into freedom and notoriety, they
remain shadowy types rather than persons" (Barrow, Slavery in the Reman
Empire, p. 156).
[ SO ]
The Public and the Private Realm
communicable of all. Not only is it perhaps the only experience
which we are unable to transform into a shape fit for public appear-
ance, it actually deprives us of our feeling for reality to such an
extent that we can forget it more quickly and easily than anything
else. There seems to be no bridge from the most radical subjec-
tivity, in which I am no longer "recognizable," to the outer world
of life.42 Pain, in other words, truly a borderline experience be-
tween life as "being among men" {inter homines esse) and death,
is so subjective and removed from the world of things and men
that it cannot assume an appearance at all.43
Since our feeling for reality depends utterly upon appearance
and therefore upon the existence of a public realm into which
things can appear out of the darkness of sheltered existence, even
the twilight which illuminates our private and intimate lives is
ultimately derived from the much harsher light of the public
realm. Yet there are a great many things which cannot withstand
the implacable, bright light of the constant presence of others on
the public scene; there, only what is considered to be relevant,
worthy of being seen or heard, can be tolerated, so that the irrele-
vant becomes automatically a private matter. This, to be sure,
does not mean that private concerns are generally irrelevant; on
the contrary, we shall see that there are very relevant matters
which can survive only in the realm of the private. For instance,
love, in distinction from friendship, is killed, or rather extin-
guished, the moment it is displayed in public. ("Never seek to tell
42. I use here a little-known poem on pain from Rilke's deathbed: The first
lines of the untitled poem are: "Komm du, du letzter, den ich anerkenne, / heil-loser Schmerz im leiblichen Geweb"; and it concludes as follows: "Bin ich es noch, der da unkenntlich brennt? / Erinnerungen reiss ich nicht herein. / O Leben,
Leben: Draussensein. / Und ich in Lohe, Niemand, der mich kennt."
43. On the subjectivity of pain and its relevance for all variations of hedonism
and sensualism, see §§15 and 43. For the living, death is primarily dis-appear-
ance. But unlike pain, there is one aspect of death in which it is as though death
appeared among the living, and that is in old age. Goethe once remarked that
growing old is "gradually receding from appearance" (stufeniveises Zuriicktreten aus der Erscheinung); the truth of this remark as well as the actual appearance of this process of disappearing becomes quite tangible in the old-age self-portraits of the great masters—Rembrandt, Leonardo, etc.—in which the intensity of the
eyes seems to illuminate and preside over the receding flesh.
[ SI }
The Human Condition
thy love / Love that never told can be.") Because of Its in-
herent worldlessness, love can only become false and perverted
when it is used for political purposes such as the change or sal-
vation of the world.
What the public realm considers irrelevant can have such an
extraordinary and infectious charm that a whole people may adopt
it as their way of life, without for that reason changing its essen-
tially private character. Modern enchantment with "small things,"
though preached by early twentieth-century poetry in almost all
European tongues, has found its classical presentation in the petit
bonheur of the French people. Since the decay of their once great
and glorious public realm, the French have become masters in the
art of being happy among "small things," within the space of their
own four walls, between chest and bed, table and chair, dog and
cat and flowerpot, extending to these things a care and tenderness
which, in a world where rapid industrialization constantly kills
off the things of yesterday to produce today's objects, may even
appear to be the world's last, purely humane corner. This enlarge-
ment of the private, the enchantment, as it were, of a whole people,
does not make it public, does not constitute a public realm, but,
on the contrary, means only that the public realm has almost com-
pletely receded, so that greatness has given way to charm every-
where; for while the public realm may be great, it cannot be
charming precisely because it is unable to harbor the irrelevant.
Second, the term "public" signifies the world itself, in so far
as it is common to all of us and distinguished from our privately
owned place in it. This world, however, is not identical with the
earth or with nature, as the limited space for the movement of
men and the general condition of organic life. It 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. To live together in the world means essentially
that a world of things is between those who have it in common,
as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world,
like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time.
The public realm, as the common world, gathers us together
and yet prevents our falling over each other, so to speak. What
makes mass society so difficult to bear is not the number of people
[ 52 ]
The Public and the Private Realm
involved, or at least not primarily, but the fact that the world be-
tween them has lost its power to gather them together, to relate
and to separate them. The weirdness of this situation resembles a
spiritualistic seance 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 un-
related to each other by anything tangible.
Historically, we know of only one principle that was ever de-
vised to keep a community of people together who had lost their
interest in the common world and felt themselves no longer related
and separated by it. To find a bond between people strong enough
to replace the world was the main political task of early Christian
philosophy, and it was Augustine who proposed to found not only
the Christian "brotherhood" but all human relationships on chari-
ty. But this charity, though its worldlessness clearly corresponds
to the general human experience of love, is at the same time clearly
distinguished from it in being something which, like the world, is
between men: "Even robbers have between them [Inter se] what
they call charity."44 This surprising illustration of the Christian
political principle is in fact very well chosen, because the bond of
charity between people, while it is incapable of founding a public
realm of its own, is quite adequate to the main Christian principle
of worldlessness and is admirably fit to carry a group of essentially
worldless people through the world, a group of saints or a group
of criminals, provided only it is understood that the world itself
is doomed and that every activity in it is undertaken with the pro-
viso quamdiu mundus durat ("as long as the world lasts").46 The
unpolitical, non-public character of the Christian community was
early defined in the demand that it should form a corpus, a "body,"
whose members were to be related to each other like brothers of
the same family.46 The structure of communal life was modeled
44. Contra Faustum Manichaeum v. 5.
45. This is of course still the presupposition even of Aquinas' political philoso-
phy (see op. cit. ii. 2. 181. 4).
46. The term corpus rei publicae is current in pre-Christian Latin, but has the connotation of the population inhabiting a res publica, a given political realm. The corresponding Greek term soma is never used in pre-Christian Greek in a political
[ 53 ]
The Human Condition
on the relationships between the members of a family because
these were known to be non-political and even antipolitical. A
public realm had never come into being between the members of
a family, and it was therefore not likely to develop from Christian
community life if this life was ruled by the principle of charity and
nothing else. Even then, as we know from the history and the
rules of the monastic orders—the only communities in which the
principle of charity as a political device was ever tried—the danger
that the activities undertaken under "the necessity of present life"
(necessitas vitaepraesentis) 47 would lead by themselves, because they
were performed in the presence of others, to the establishment of
a kind of counterworld, a public realm within the orders them-
selves, was great enough to require additional rules and regula-
tions, the most relevant one in our context being the prohibition
of excellence and its subsequent pride.48
Worldlessness as a political phenomenon is possible only on
the assumption that the world will not last; on this assumption,
however, it is almost inevitable that worldlessness, in one form
or another, will begin to dominate the political scene. This hap-
pened after the downfall of the Roman Empire and, albeit for
quite other reasons and in very different, perhaps even more dis-
consolate forms, it seems to happen again in our own days. The
Christian abstention from worldly things is by no means the only
conclusion one can draw from the conviction that the human arti-
fice, a product of mortal hands, is as mortal as its makers. This,
on the contrary, may also intensify the enjoyment and consump-
sense. The metaphor seems to occur for the first time in Paul (I Cor. 12: 12-27)
and is current in all early Christian writers (see, for instance, Tertullian Apolo-geticus 39, or Ambrosius De ojficiis ministrorum iii. 3. 17). It became of the greatest importance for medieval political theory, which unanimously assumed that all
men were quasi unum corpus (Aquinas op. cit. ii. 1. 81. 1). But while the early writers stressed the equality of the members, which are all equally necessary for
the well-being of the body as a whole, the emphasis later shifted to the differ-
ence between the head and the members, to the duty of the head to rule and of
the members to obey. (For the Middle Ages, see Anton-Hermann Chroust, "The
Corporate Idea in the Middle Ages," Review of Politics, Vol. VIII [1947].) 47. Aquinas op. cit. ii. 2. 179. 2.
48. See Article 57 of the Benedictine rule, in Levasseur, op. cit., p. 187: If one of the monks became proud of his work, he had to give it up.
r 5 4 i
The Public and the Private Realm
tion of the things of the world, all manners of intercourse in which
the world is not primarily understood to be the koinon, that which
is common to all. Only the existence of a public realm and the
world's subsequent transformation into a community of things
which gathers men together and relates them to each other de-
pends entirely on permanence. If the world is to contain a public
space, it cannot be erected for one generation and planned for the
living only; it must transcend the life-span of mortal men.
Without this transcendence into a potential earthly immortali-
ty, no politics, strictly speaking, no common world and no public
realm, is possible. For unlike the common good as Christianity
understood it—the salvation of one's soul as a concern common
to all—the common world is what we enter when we are born
and what we leave behind when we die. It transcends our life-
span into past and future alike; it was there before we came and
will outlast our brief sojourn in it. It is what we have in common
not only with those who live with us, but also with those who
were here before and with those who will come after us. But such
a common world can survive the coming and going of the genera-
tions only to the extent that it appears in public. It is the publicity
of the public realm which can absorb and make shine through the
centuries whatever men may want to save from the natural ruin
of time. Through many ages before us—but now not any more—
men 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. (Thus, the curse of slavery
consisted not only in being deprived of freedom and of visibility,
but also in the fear of these obscure people themselves "that from
being obscure they should pass away leaving no trace that they
have existed.")49 There is perhaps no clearer testimony to the
loss of the public realm in the modern age than the almost complete
loss of authentic concern with immortality, a loss somewhat over-
shadowed by the simultaneous loss of the metaphysical concern
with eternity. The latter, being the concern of the philosophers
49. Barrow (Slavery in the Roman Empire, p. 168), in an illuminating discussion of the membership of slaves in the Roman colleges, which provided, besides
"good fellowship in life and the certainty of a decent burial . . . the crowning glory of an epitaph; and in this last the slave found a melancholy pleasure."
[ " ]
The Human Condition
and the vita contemplativa, must remain outside our present con-
siderations. But the former is testified to by the current classifica-
tion of striving for immortality with the private vice of vanity.
Under modern conditions, it is indeed so unlikely that anybody
should earnestly aspire to an earthly immortality that we proba-
bly are justified in thinking it is nothing but vanity.
The famous passage in Aristotle, "Considering human affairs,
one must not . . . consider man as he is and not consider what is
mortal in mortal things, but think about them [only] to the extent
that they have the possibility of immortalizing," occurs very prop-
erly in his political writings.50 For the polls was for the Greeks,
as the res publica was for the Romans, first of all their guarantee
against the futility of individual life, the space protected against
this futility and reserved for the relative permanence, if not im-
mortality, of mortals.
What the modern age thought of the public realm, after the
spectacular rise of society to public prominence, was expressed
by Adam Smith when, with disarming sincerity, he mentions
"that unprosperous race of men commonly called men of letters"
for whom "public admiration . . . makes always a part of their
reward . . . , a considerable part . . . in the profession of physic;
a still greater perhaps in that of law; in poetry and philosophy it
makes almost the whole."51 Here it is self-evident that public
admiration and monetary reward are of the same nature and can
become substitutes for each other. Public admiration, too, is
something to be used and consumed, and status, as we would say
today, fulfils one need as food fulfils another: public admiration
is consumed by individual vanity as food is consumed by hunger.
Obviously, from this viewpoint the test of reality does not lie in
the public presence of others, but rather in the greater or lesser
urgency of needs to whose existence or non-existence nobody can
ever testify except the one who happens to suffer them. And
since the need for food has its demonstrable basis of reality in the
life process itself, it is also obvious that the entirely subjective
pangs of hunger are more real than "vainglory," as Hobbes used
50. Nicomachean Ethics 1177b31.
51. Wealth of Nations, Book I, ch. 10 (pp. 120 and 95 of Vol. I of Every-
man's ed.).
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The Public and the Private Realm
to call the need for public admiration. Yet, even if these needs,
through some miracle of sympathy, were shared by others, their
very futility would prevent their ever establishing anything so
solid and durable as a common world. The point then is not that
there is a lack of public admiration for poetry and philosophy in
the modern world, but that such admiration does not constitute a
space in which things are saved from destruction by time. The
futility of public admiration, which daily is consumed in ever
greater quantities, on the contrary, is such that monetary reward,
one of the most futile things there is, can become more "objective"
and more real.
As distinguished from this "objectivity," whose only basis is
money as a common denominator for the fulfilment of all needs,
the reality of the public realm relies on the simultaneous presence
of innumerable perspectives and aspects in which the common
world presents itself and for which no common measurement or
denominator can ever be devised. For though the common world
is the common meeting ground of all, those who are present have
different locations in it, and the location of one can no more coin-
cide with the location of another than the location of two objects.
Being seen and being heard by others derive their significance
from the fact that everybody sees and hears from a different posi-
tion. This is the meaning of public life, compared to which even
the richest and most satisfying family life can offer only the pro-
longation or multiplication of one's own position with its attend-
ing aspects and perspectives. The subjectivity of privacy can be
prolonged and multiplied in a family, it can even become so strong
that its weight is felt in the public realm; but this family "world"
can never replace the reality rising out of the sum total of aspects
presented by one object to a multitude of spectators. Only where
things can be seen by many in a variety of aspects without chang-
ing their identity, so that those who are gathered around them
know they see sameness in utter diversity, can worldly reality
truly and reliably appear.
Under the conditions of a common world, reality is not guar-
anteed primarily by the "common nature" of all men who con-
stitute it, but rather by the fact that, differences of position and
the resulting variety of perspectives notwithstanding, everybody
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The Human Condition
is always concerned with the same object. If the sameness of the
object can no longer be discerned, no common nature of men, least
of all the unnatural conformism of a mass society, can prevent the
destruction of the common world, which is usually preceded by
the destruction of the many aspects in which it presents itself to
human plurality. This can happen under conditions of radical iso-
lation, where nobody can any longer agree with anybody else, as
is usually the case in tyrannies. But it may also happen under con-
ditions of mass society or mass hysteria, where we see all people
suddenly behave as though they were members of one family,
each multiplying and prolonging the perspective of his neighbor.
In both instances, men have become entirely private, that is, they
have been deprived of seeing and hearing others, of being seen
and being heard by them. They are all imprisoned in the subjec-
tivity of their own singular experience, which does not cease to
be singular if the same experience is multiplied innumerable times.
The end of the common world has come when it is seen only under
one aspect and is permitted to present itself in only one perspec-
tive.
8
T H E P R I V A T E R E A L M : P R O P E R T Y
It is with respect to this multiple significance of the public realm
that the term "private," in its original privative sense, has meaning.
To live an entirely private life means above all to be deprived of
things essential to a truly human life: to be deprived of the reality
that comes from being seen and heard by others, to be deprived
of an "objective" relationship with them that comes from being
related to and separated from them through the intermediary of
a common world of things, to be deprived of the possibility of
achieving something more permanent than life itself. The priva-
tion of privacy lies in the absence of others; as far as they are
concerned, private man does not appear, and therefore it is as
though he did not exist. Whatever he does remains without sig-
nificance and consequence to others, and what matters to him is
without interest to other people.
Under modern circumstances, this deprivation of "objective"
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The Public and the Private Realm
relationships to others and of a reality guaranteed through them
has become the mass phenomenon of loneliness, where it has as-
sumed its most extreme and most antihuman form.62 The reason
for this extremity is that mass society not only destroys the
public realm but the private as well, deprives men not only of
their place in the world but of their private home, where they
once felt sheltered against the world and where, at any rate, even
those excluded from the world could find a substitute in the
warmth of the hearth and the l