Key Arguments

• Public first means that appearance before others confers reality; private intensities remain shadowy until transformed for public appearance.
• Public also means the world as common, constituted by artifacts and affairs that stand between people, relating and separating them like a table.
• Mass society becomes unbearable not primarily because of numbers but because the in-between world loses its power to gather, relate, and separate.

Source Quotes

The term “public” signifies two closely interrelated but not altogether identical phenomena: It means, first, that everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity. For us, appearance—something that is being seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves—constitutes reality.

The term “public” signifies two closely interrelated but not altogether identical phenomena: It means, first, that everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity. For us, appearance—something that is being seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves—constitutes reality. Compared with the reality which comes from being seen and heard, even the greatest forces of intimate life—the passions of the heart, the thoughts of the mind, the delights of the senses—lead an uncertain, shadowy kind of existence unless and until they are transformed, deprivatized and deindividualized, as it were, into a shape to fit them for public appearance.

This enlargement of the private, the enchantment, as it were, of a whole people, does not make it public, does not constitute a public realm, but, on the contrary, means only that the public realm has almost completely receded, so that greatness has given way to charm everywhere; for while the public realm may be great, it cannot be charming precisely because it is unable to harbor the irrelevant. Second, the term “public” signifies the world itself, in so far as it is common to all of us and distinguished from our privately owned place in it. This world, however, is not identical with the earth or with nature, as the limited space for the movement of men and the general condition of organic life.

It is related, rather, to the human artifact, the fabrication of human hands, as well as to affairs which go on among those who inhabit the man-made world together. To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time. The public realm, as the common world, gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other, so to speak.

Key Concepts

• The term “public” signifies two closely interrelated but not altogether identical phenomena:
• everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity.
• appearance—something that is being seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves—constitutes reality.
• the term “public” signifies the world itself, in so far as it is common to all of us and distinguished from our privately owned place in it.
• a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time.

Context

7 THE PUBLIC REALM: THE COMMON (lines 1171–1318): Opening definitional articulation of the two senses of 'public.'