Health of Public Life in the philosophy of Hannah Arendt: the relation of the public and private realms in the centuries of modernity
Health of Public Life in the philosophy of Hannah Arendt: the relation of the public and private realms in the centuries of modernity

Summary/Abstract: In The Human Condition (1959), which is mentioned as her opus magnum, Arendt gives a political ontology applying a phenomenological method; she blends the chronological explanation with a conceptual analysis. The axis of thought train is the private-public distinction put in a historical framework. The feminist authors warn us, that this distinction is not a neutral analytical instrument but an abstraction deduced from the reality of the antique patriarchal society. At the same time, Arendt, in other feminist interpretations is a forerunner of feminism who, in her biography written on Rahel Varnhagen, a Jewish woman of Berlin in the first half of the 19th century, created a role model of modern woman who dared to risk of entering the light of the public realm that had previously been dominated by males and, in her Berlin saloon, offered an alternative space where the women were peers of men. The pro-Arendt feminist interpreters assert, the Arendtian philosophy outlines the possibility for a no male-dominated, really democratic public realm. The political philosophy of Hannah Arendt has been flavored by a history of decline. The beginning of the modernity, in this interpretation, is the moment of derailment. During the centuries of modernity, step by step, the division lines between private and public spheres disappear. Lasting institutions, warranting the public sphere, dissolve in the never-ending procession of material production: everything becomes fluid: culture and politics change into the objects of the ever-widening cycles of consumption devouring whole reality and the intimacy, conquering and distorting the emptied public realm, creates proper constellation for totalitarian political practices.

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