The World According to Arendt

For Hannah Arendt, the world is born out of human activity—the vibrant panoply of fabricated
things, the humanly cultivated land, the body politic, and so on. It is the arena for exercising
human capacities and newness, and the forum for politics and the vita activa. It is both “given”
to us (through history) and “created” by us (through action in the present). It comes into being
between people and celebrates their plurality, becoming larger and richer with “the more peoples
… who stand in some particular relationship with one another.” The world “endures beyond” the
generations; it is the only thing that can bestow “a measure of permanence and durability” on
human life. Yet it is fragile: it can be destroyed by an annihilating war that erases “the in-
between,” the “space” between people that cannot instantaneously be reconstituted, because it is
not a manufactured product but is birthed out of “action and speech created by human
relationships.”