world in which we live and which we share in common. The freedom to express opinions is “the right to hear others’ opinions and to be heard in return.” This second freedom, “which became crucial for the organization of the polis, distinguishes itself from the freedom peculiar to action, the freedom to posit a new beginning, in that it is dependent to a far greater degree on the presence of others and being confronted with their opinions.”19
Constituted by this twofold sense by the freedom of action and freedom of speech, the polis is superbly the public space of freedom, “the realm where freedom is a worldly reality, tangible in words which can be heard, in deeds which can be seen, and in events which are talked about, remembered, and turned into stories before they are finally incorporated into the great storybook of human history.”20
Arendt tends to call this public space of the many the “space of appearance,” of dokein or doxa in the twofold Greek sense of “opinion” and “splendor, fame, repute,”21 Ansicht and Ansehen in the German, of how things look to me and how I look to others, my public image. This double sense immediately recalls two of the equiprimordial dimensions of persuasion that Aristotle identified in the rhetorical speech situation, namely, the doxic content of the speech itself and the ethos of the speaker himself, how he presents himself in the judgment of his audience. At first, “space of appearance” referred almost exclusively to the domain where “I go public” and “make an appearance,” “make my debut, have my coming-out party,” as it were. The Greeks established the polis to multiply the opportunities for every free man “to distinguish himself, to show in deed and word who he was in his unique distinctness” and thus to win “immortal fame,” or ignoble shame.22 A sister New Yorker and friend of Arendt, Mary McCarthy, provides a modernized example of this theater of appearance: “Through politics, men reveal not their skill or their products [of work] but themselves in their words and actions, held up to admiration or contempt in the free open space of the agora or forum—a tradition still maintained in the open-air ‘forums’ of Union Square and Hyde Park. The desire to achieve glory and everlasting remembrance through conspicuous deeds and words has shrunk, however, in modern times, to the right to ‘blow off steam’—the most evanescent thing there is.”23 But a major way in which I show myself in the public space, there to be seen and heard by others, is in the expression of opinions. This dimension of doxa multiplies the public world into a vast manifold of appearances (doxai), a pluralized “space of appearances” that sometimes threatens to reach anarchic proportions. Each person assumes a position toward the world in accord with that person’s particular position in it, and the political realm degenerates into a “battlefield of partial, conflicting interests, where nothing counts but pleasure and profit, partisanship, and the lust for dominion.”24 When this agonal spirit took over, the Greek
19. Ibid., 48–52.
20. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking, 1968), 154f.
21. Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” 80.
22. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Garden City: Doubleday, 1959), 175; see also 177, 183, 187, 197.