According to Hannah Arendt, into the earthly world of phenomenality, where reality depends on visibility and is identified with it, people appear in their “plurality”. Therefore, it is the concrete public personalities, speaking and acting in concert, that belong to the "arendtian world"— and not the purely private beings, or bodies as natural objects, or any empirical traits and indisputable facts, including sex. Based on these assumptions, Arendt apportions a character of abstraction to the claims of the feminist movement of her time. Respectively, it can be argued that the rationalistic feminist take-up of belonging to humanity converges, paradoxically, with the essentialistic view of the female sex, as follows: both tendencies seek to understand “what is” the woman. Arendt, however, is interested in the question of “who is” he or she who acts. Sex, just like every (biological) identity of the lonely self, is horizontally overridden by spontaneous initiatives and acting within the equalizing public sphere. Although politics is not based on empirical characteristics, these same facts filter out the citizens' unique perspective whenever their individual opinion is publicly expressed and, therefore, jointly perceived, and real.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Copyright © 2025 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.