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129 11 Public Space “Public space” is the space where individuals see and are seen by others as they engage in public affairs. It is thus the space of the town hall meeting , the legislative assembly, or any of the other venues where public business is done. In her book On Revolution, Hannah Arendt links this space with “public freedom.” This freedom, she notes, is distinct from “the free will or free thought” that philosophers have traditionally discussed. As the revolutionary thinkers of the eighteenth century understood it, such freedom “could exist only in public; it was a tangible, worldly reality, something created by men to be enjoyed by men rather than a gift or capacity.”1 In so conceiving it, they returned to the ancient view that saw freedom as “manifested only in certain . . . activities,” namely those “that could appear and be real only when others saw them, judged them, remembered them.” For the ancients as well as those who revived their ideas, “the life of a free man needed the presence of others. Freedom itself needed, therefore, a place where people could come together—the agora, the market-place, or the polis, the political space proper.”2 This need points to the fact that the being of such freedom depends on its appearing . As Arendt writes, public freedom consists of “deeds and words which are meant to appear, whose very existence hinges on appearance.”3 Such appearance, however, requires the public space. In reflecting on the relation between public space and freedom, a number of questions arise: what precisely is this freedom that needs the presence of others to be? Normally, we say that something must first be in order then to appear. Here, however, we are saying that it must appear if it is to be. What does this reversal signify with regard to the nature of political freedom? How does such freedom relate to a private individual’s “free will or free thought”? Does the latter also depend on appearing? A further question concerns the relation of freedom to public space: If this space is required for the being of public freedom, how does this space come into existence? Can we say that it is created by our free activity if, indeed, such activity depends on this space? Finally, there is also the question of freedom and power: How do they politically combine without undoing each other? What is the nature of the public space that allows them to reinforce each other? In what follows, my approach to these questions will be determined by Arendt’s assertion that the being of free 130 E M B O D I M E N T S activity “hinges on appearance.” It will thus be a phenomenological account of this freedom, in particular, of the conditions and genesis of its appearing. My approach will show that what we take as the private realm of “will and thought” depends on the public space where these faculties manifest themselves. This will have important consequences for how we conceive political life and power. The Intersubjective Genesis of Freedom The traditional view of freedom locates it in an inner world, an internal forum immune from external pressures.4 Within it, our thoughts are free. So are our decisions as we exercise our will. The limitations of this position appear once we ask about the content of our freedom, that is, the actual choices that inform it. Since we are not born with them, they must result from our encounters with the world, in particular, from our encounters with others. I will not repeat my arguments for this point. It is sufficient to note their main conclusions. The first is that whatever we see others do tends to be regarded as a human capacity. As such, we regard it as one of our own possibilities. The second is that others do not just present us with the projects that form the repertoire of our possible ways of being and behaving. In doing so, they also provide us with alternate ways of disclosing the world—that is, alternate enactments of the senses it offers us. The result is a relativization of the world—one that robs it of what we took to be its determining necessity. Thus, instead of considering our actions as determined by our given world, we face the option of changing it through changing our behavior. With this, we have our third conclusion , which is that our very ability to step back...

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