The Human Condition is by Arendt’s admission a critical appropriation of Heidegger’s Daseins-analytic that she first learned from his lecture courses, seminars, and more private tutorials in her three semesters at the University of Marburg. The Heideggerian antimetaphysical stress on the facticity and contingency of the human condition, its Da-sein—as opposed to anything like a human nature—is overt in Arendt’s analysis of the three levels of human activities in the world: of labor in the private world of the household, work in the environing world of things, and action in the interhuman world (Mitwelt), where I from birth already find myself thrown together with others. The Human Condition reaches its climax in Arendt’s unique development of Heidegger’s concept of the Mitwelt, of being together with others, that will yield her unique concept of the political. What she does is simply to radicalize Heidegger’s occasional use of the plural “others” with which the self from the start finds itself, and articulate its full implications. The basic facts of human plurality and natality constitute for Arendt “the facticity of the entire world of human affairs.” One therefore begins with how human beings in their full particularity are in fact situated together in their lifeworld: “Politics is based on the fact of the plurality of human beings. Politics thus has to organize and regulate the being-together of different and not equal beings.”17 But despite their essential differences, human beings share equally in the capacity for mutual communication. This equality of mutuality implies that humans spontaneously engage in nonsovereign relationships with each other. If plurality signifies personal uniqueness, equality enables community. It is not in man as political animal but between humans as its very space, that politics arises. What in fact arises in this public space between humans is freedom and spontaneity: “The very content and sense of politics is freedom.”18 It is in this public space of plurality that new beginnings and new initiatives are possible: each new birth inaugurates a new voice which can spontaneously initiate new actions and manifest its virtuosity before others. Natality thus introduces spontaneity into the public space of politics. This is politics in action, its veritable praxis. Politics is the free disclosure of self, through words and deeds, to one’s equals in the public realm of inter-esse.
Freedom of movement in this public space in fact assumes two forms: (1) the aforementioned freedom to begin something new and unprecedented, the freedom of initiative that comes from the natality of being-there; and (2) the freedom to move among the many and speak with them, thus to experience the many, which in their totality is in each instantiation the world that we share in common, about which we speak and exchange our perspectives with one another and opinions against one another. This is the freedom of speech and unimpeded communication with others (“the many”) in expressing our opinions about the actual
17. Hannah Arendt, Was ist Politik?: Fragmente aus dem Nachlass, ed. Ursula Ludz, foreword by Kurt Sontheimer (Munich: Piper, 1993), ii.
18. Arendt, Was ist Politik?, iii.