The Courage to Make Plurality

It requires courage even to leave the protective security of our four walls and enter the public realm, not because of particular dangers which may lie in wait for us, but because we have arrived in a realm where the concern for life has lost its validity. Courage liberates men from their worry about life for the freedom of the world. Courage is indispensable because in politics not life but the world is at stake.

-Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future

This quote is a favorite among political theorists who study Arendt. Understandably, for it seems perfectly to capture Arendt as the figure whose principal concern is the public sphere and the politics that can occur only in this sphere. The private realm is characterized by protective walls that allow us blind ourselves to everything but our individual needs while the public opens us up to the grander concerns of the world.

Courage, in this reading, is largely a rhetorical flourish that affirms the grandness of the public realm and the smallness of private, bourgeois concerns with comfort and self-interest. But in reading the concept of courage solely through what has become the “characteristically” Arendtian opposition between the public and private spheres, one overlooks the profound significance of courage for understanding the character of the public realm as Arendt uniquely conceived of it. Arendt acknowledges that courage is necessary for individuals to leave the private sphere and its particular concerns: it takes courage to leave the protective security of private life. But she does not stop there and asserts that courage reflects a key feature of the public realm itself beyond and independent of individuals’ move out of the private. According to Arendt, we need courage not only to leave the private sphere, but also to confront the fact that in the public realm, the world itself is at stake in our own activity of politics.

What Arendt means by this statement that the world is at stake in politics is not clear without a clear understanding of the plurality is for her constitutive of the public realm. For Arendt, plurality is not a statement of difference; it does not summarize the fact that each occupies his or her own standpoint in the world. Rather, plurality reflects the fact that all individuals must show themselves and appear to other human beings. She writes in The Life of the Mind, “everything that is meant to be perceived by somebody. Not Man but men inhabit this planet. Plurality is the law of the earth.” In other words, plurality reflects the fact that the human world is a function of relations of spectatorship. Our world is built upon individuals showing themselves to and being seen by others.

Politics for Arendt is that activity by which individuals reveal or disclose themselves to one another; it describes the activity by which we appear. But when we understand with Arendt that the world itself is constituted in an by these relations of spectatorship, we are forced to confront the fact that the stakes of choosing to appear in the public cannot be limited to individual life and the question of whether or not we choose to live this life courageously. In choosing to appear, in having the courage to appear, we accept the task of creating the world itself and become constitutive members of what is an objective home for all human beings.

This relationship to the world and the burdens and responsibility it imposes on individuals in the very basic task of appearing is for Arendt a necessary, inescapable feature of public life. And this fact that individual appearance is constitutive of the world is what ultimately makes the decision to enter the public realm a matter of courage. To show oneself to others—to say, as Cicero did, “[b]y God I’d much rather go astray with Plato than hold true views with these people”—is not just to reveal, however courageously and however contrary to established codes of behavior, oneself as an individual. It is to affirm and reconcile oneself to one’s responsibilities in a world that is created and sustained by nothing other than individuals showing themselves in their thoughts and judgments to one another. The courage that politics demands is the courage to take on the responsibility to make the world.

Courage might be one motivation behind the decision to leave the protective walls of the private. Others might be recklessness, pride, ambition, or, as Arendt said of the Nazis, merely the ruthless desire to conform to what others are doing. But the choice to engage in politics and appear in the world implicates not just questions about the individual’s character, good or bad, but grounds of the world itself and whether this is strong enough to sustain a world for all men. And one cannot take up this task of creating and sustaining the world with nothing more than one’s own human capacity to appear to others without courage.

-Jennie Han