The Human Condition

Arendt’s contrast between appearance and concealment is both a technical conceptual distinction and an almost poetic motif that helps to explain her coordinate opposition between the public and the private spheres. This is an element of The Human Condition where the philosophical method of phenomenology—a description of the way we encounter phenomena, or the contents of experience—is most prominent.  

Arendt writes that “appearance constitutes reality” (50). To be real is to be seen and heard by others. Appearance thus entails a public, or audience, that shares some common horizon of meaning within which phenomena can intelligibly appear to all. As its etymological roots in ancient Greek suggest, phenomena “shine forth” in their appearing, that is, visible to a plurality of human beings. Speech and action are what reveal unique individuals, that is, allow us to appear to one another. The capacity for appearance is thus a central symbol for the human condition throughout Arendt’s analysis.

Like all of Arendt’s pairs of opposition in the book, appearance entails its contrary, concealment or hiddenness. If appearance connects to the public, concealment connects to the private. The private is precisely what does not appear, that is, what remains hidden from the view of all. Appearance implies light and illumination, concealment darkness or opacity. Arendt situates concealment with the household or family. This is where birth and death, and the labor that unites these termini of human existence, occur.

The public space of appearance is dependent upon the shadowy realm of the private. That which appears can only do so because it comes forth from something that is hidden. This is the reciprocity between public and private, appearance and concealment, that Arendt imputes to the ancient Greek polis. The balance between these two contrasting realms is overturned with the eruption of labor, of the private concerns of the human body, onto the public stage. This, she says, is a feature of modernity, the social, that reconfigures the relationship between the appearing of phenomena and the concealment of life.

Arendt calls birth and death, or natality and mortality, “the most general condition of human existence” (8). All three elements of the vita activa address this intractable feature of the human condition: labor sustains and continues biological life, work imposes permanence on the fleetingness of time through the construction of a world, action provides the condition for remembrance and history within a political community.

Nature, Arendt suggests, know neither natality nor mortality: it is a perpetual and recurrent cycle that has no end. Linear finitude is imposed on human beings by virtue of our individuality; we begin and end like a particular story. This narrative quality of human existence is essential for Arendt, as nature produces species, not individuals. Stories thereby exceed the parameters of labor and the survival of the species. Narratives presuppose an enduring setting, the world created by work, and an audience, the public that sees and hears its events. Though mortal, our stories can become immortal through remembrance by others, witnesses to our deeds and words. This is a key function of the power of appearance in public: mortals are remembered after they die because they were seen and heard by others who can communicate about them. Appearance thereby overcomes the eventual disappearance that is mortality.

This made all the more urgent with the association between natality and action. Action is a kind of birth or beginning that discloses something that was not there before: a unique individual. Absent this second birth through action, we risk being submerged by the relentless cycle of natural decay that defines the rest of organic life. On their own, then, neither labor nor work can bring forth the human being as a phenomenon that overcomes death. Only action visible to others can do this.