Key Arguments

• Arendt opposes the political conviction of appearance/actualization to the belief "that a man’s products may be more—and not only more lasting—than he is himself" and to the "firm belief that life is the highest of all goods."
• She concludes: "Both, therefore, are, strictly speaking, unpolitical, and will incline to denounce action and speech as idleness, idle busybodyness and idle talk."
• These perspectives "generally will judge public activities in terms of their usefulness to supposedly higher ends—to make the world more useful and more beautiful ... to make life easier and longer."

Source Quotes

The conviction that the greatest that man can achieve is his own appearance and actualization is by no means a matter of course. Against it stands the conviction of that a man’s products may be more—and not only more lasting—than he is himself, as well as the ’ firm belief that life is the highest of all goods. Both, therefore, are, strictly speaking, unpolitical, and will incline to denounce action and speech as idleness, idle busybodyness and idle talk, and generally will judge public activities in terms of their usefulness to supposedly higher ends—to make the world more useful and more beautiful in the case of , to make life easier and longer in the case of the This, however, is not to say that they are free to dispense with a public realm altogether, for without a space of appearance and without trusting in action and speech as a mode of being together, neither the reality of one’s self, of one’s own identity, nor the reality of the surrounding world can be established beyond doubt.

Against it stands the conviction of that a man’s products may be more—and not only more lasting—than he is himself, as well as the ’ firm belief that life is the highest of all goods. Both, therefore, are, strictly speaking, unpolitical, and will incline to denounce action and speech as idleness, idle busybodyness and idle talk, and generally will judge public activities in terms of their usefulness to supposedly higher ends—to make the world more useful and more beautiful in the case of , to make life easier and longer in the case of the This, however, is not to say that they are free to dispense with a public realm altogether, for without a space of appearance and without trusting in action and speech as a mode of being together, neither the reality of one’s self, of one’s own identity, nor the reality of the surrounding world can be established beyond doubt. The human sense of reality demands that men actualize the sheer passive givenness of their being, not in order to change it but in order to make articulate and call into full existence what otherwise they would have to suffer passively anyhow.

Key Concepts

• that a man’s products may be more—and not only more lasting—than he is himself, as well as the ’ firm belief that life is the highest of all goods.
• Both, therefore, are, strictly speaking, unpolitical, and will incline to denounce action and speech as idleness, idle busybodyness and idle talk, and generally will judge public activities in terms of their usefulness to supposedly higher ends
• to make the world more useful and more beautiful in the case of , to make life easier and longer in the case of the

Context

Section 29; Arendt contrasts the political valuation of appearance with fabricator- and life-centered valuations that depoliticize action and speech. Note: the text contains lacunae where typographical omissions occur.