Vita Activa; Hannah Arendt
This modern equality, based on the conformism inherent in
society and possible only because behavior has replaced action as
the foremost mode of human relationship, is in every respect different
from equality in antiquity, and notably in the Greek citystates.
To belong to the few "equals" (homoioi) meant to be permitted
to live among one's peers; but the public realm itself, the
polis, was permeated by a fiercely agonal spirit, where everybody
had constantly to distinguish himself from all others, to show
through unique deeds or achievements that he was the best of all
{aim aristeuein). 34 The public realm, in other words, was reserved
for individuality; it was the only place where men could show
who they really and inexchangeably were.
34. Aien aristeuein kai hypeirochm emmenai allon ("always to
be the best and to rise above others") is the central concern of
Homer's heroes (Iliad vi. 208), and Homer was "the educator of Hellas."
The emergence of society—the rise of housekeeping, its activities,
problems, and organizational devices—from the shadowy interior
of the household into the light of the public sphere, has not
only blurred the old borderline between private and political, it
has also changed almost beyond recognition the meaning of the
two terms and their significance for the life of the individual and
the citizen. Not only would we not agree with the Greeks that a
life spent in the privacy of "one's own" (idion), outside the world
of the common, is "idiotic" by definition, or with the Romans to
whom privacy offered but a temporary refuge from the business of
the res publica; we call private today a sphere of intimacy whose
beginnings we may be able to trace back to late Roman, though
hardly to any period of Greek antiquity, but whose peculiar
manifoldness and variety were certainly unknown to any period
prior to the modern age.
This is not merely a matter of shifted emphasis. In ancient
feeling the privative trait of privacy, indicated in the word itself,
was all-important; it meant literally a state of being deprived of
something, and even of the highest and most human of man's
capacities. A man who lived only a private life, who like the
slave was not permitted to enter the public realm, or like the barbarian
had chosen not to establish such a realm, was not fully
human. We no longer think primarily of deprivation when we
use the word "privacy," and this is partly due to the enormous
enrichment of the private sphere through modern individualism.
However, it seems even more important that modern privacy is
at least as sharply opposed to the social realm—unknown to the
ancients who considered its content a private matter-—as it is to
the political, properly speaking. The decisive historical fact is
that modern privacy in its most relevant function, to shelter the
intimate, was discovered as the opposite not of the political sphere
but of the social, to which it is therefore more closely and authentically
related.
