Arendt Paper

A detailed Summary of Arendt Paper

Arendt's Understanding of Public Spaces

This critical essay is about Arendt's understanding of public spaces. In this essay I will show how she understands the distinction between action, labor, and work and the relation between freedom, power and action. In the conclusion of this essay, I will show that the city of Chicago in both its architecture and its "public spaces" does not exhibit Arendt's notion of the public.

"Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor." In ordinary terms, labor is just life itself. According to Arendt, labor is a necessity that all living things do to survive and in this, we have no distinction between animals and ourselves. With labor, all we do is produce and consume, keeping to ourselves, not talking to anyone because it is more efficient. In Arendt's point of view, a life devoted to labor is bad because to truly live, according to Arendt, is to become "public," to be known, to be recognized, but to stay silent and to your self, you then are never really alive. She also calls labor as repetitive, that is, it i

Arendt's understanding of the relationship between freedom, power, and action is very evident in The Human Condition. "For power, like action, is boundless; it has no physical limitation in human nature, in the bodily existence of man, like strength." (HC p. 201) What Arendt is basically saying here is that action and power are only limited what humans make them to be. She also says that you need action in order for power and that power is "acting in concert," doing something with a lot of other people. Arendt also describes freedom as the ability to move, if you are free, then you have power and you are able to act with others. If people were unable to move around, they could not gather and "act in concert," they would just stay to themselves and power would not exist. So what she is saying is that each one of these three need each other in one form or another, power need action, power needs freedom, freedom needs action, and action needs freedom.

"This beginning is not the same as the beginning of the world; it is not the beginning of something but of somebody, who is a beginner himself. With the creation of man, the principle of beginning came into the world itself, which, of course, is only another way of saying that the principle of freedom was created when man was created but not before." (HC p. 177) This rule also applies to power. Without a beginning, people getting together for one cause, there would be no power, power would not exist. This shows how action, freedom, and power need each other in order to survive.

The "public places" in Chicago are really no longer "public" in the eyes of Arendt. Today's society has no time for leisure or freedom, everyone is out producing or consuming, or they are behind their computers in their cubicles, staying private, trying not to appear. In Chicago's public spaces, the private has become the public with people living in them, people eating in them, and people doing or acting the way they should act only behind closed doors. Chicago's ethnic diversity and pride also shows the fact that no one is treated equal, someone is better that someone one place, but that person is better somewhere else. Chicago just would not be considered a public space in Arendt's eyes.

"Power is what keeps the public realm, the potential space of appearance between acting and speaking men, in existence.

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Approximate Word count = 1594
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)

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