FIELDS OF HUMAN LIFE IN HANNAH ARENDT'S "THE HUMAN CONDITION"

자료: Philosophy, Sociology and Psychology Vol. 2, No 9, 2002,
저자: Ivana Ivković

※ Some marks are added by this reader for his studies. To see the original paper, please refer to the above link.

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Abstract:
The paper opens with the outline of its context, including identification of the methodological axis for the analysis of "The Human Condition" and two lines of inquiry, the main one and the collateral one. What follows is a short presentation of the first two parts of the axis, human condition and practical activities, and then the paper focuses on the third part of the axis, fields of human life. The study of fields of human life comprises defining the notion of fields, scanning the process of their constitution, their relations to practical activities and their mutual relations, their development and characteristics of each field. The goal of the study is to discover why the mapping of the fields takes place in the concrete case of "The Human Condition"and the answer reached at the end is that the reason lies in the evaluation of human body. However, this evaluation is to some extent self-conscious.

Key words: mapping, fields, private, public, social, intimate, evaluation.

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CONTEXT OF ANALYSIS

The main line of inquiry in Hannah Arendt's book "The Human Condition" has for its subject three types of human practical activities, more precisely, why they exist and what their essence is.[1] Hannah Arendt's position in "The Human Condition" can be interpretedby using tripartite methodological axis:

human condition ____ human activities _____fields of human life

The main line of inquiry starts with the first part of this axis and is concentrated on the second part, on human activities, which are the focus of attention. In this paper I want to introduce and elaborate on the secondary or collateral line of inquiry that is not directly articulated in "The Human Condition". This line starts with the second part of the axis and is oriented toward the third part, toward the fields of human life. This line relies on what is present in the original text of "The Human Condition" and shows Hannah Arendt's implicit view on the fields of human life. This paper could be a contribution based on the concrete text to the problematization of the phenomena of field and demarcation, key phenomena lying at the intersection of several philosophical disciplines. Human activities and fields in which they are practiced are in a relation fundamental to both of them, so that the explanation of activities, at which Hannah Arendt primarily aims, can not be complete unless fields are thematized and taken into consideration. Fields are marginal subject of her inquiry, like the shadow of dominant interest for activities themselves. In this paper the order is turned upside-down, because my central effort is to analyze the mapping of the fields and to try to discover what stands behind it. Consequentially, I will select what Hannah Arendt, writing about the activities, writes about private, public, social and intimate fields of human life (in which fields a person can live or can practice all activities). Hannah Arendt's statements about fields will be foregrounded in this paper and checked from the aspect of their possible modification. The underlying hypothesis is that the changes in the number of the fields and history of various fileds' mappings indicate that new solutions are possible, besides the fact that they open the question of the meaning of mapping as such (what is its purpose etc.). Every study of private, public, social and intimate fields of human life has to deal with some fundamental issues raised about them: definition of the field, relation between fields and activities practiced in them, mutual relations between the fields, development of the fields, most important characteristics of each field, options present in or absent from each of them. After dealing with all that, the study dares suggest the ratio essendi of field creation and the meaning of mappings.

HUMAN CONDITION

Hannah Arendt believes that it is not possible to say what man is.[2] However, it is possible to say what man is like or what human existence is like. "Men are conditioned beings because everything they come in contact with turns immediately into a condition of their existence."[3] She gives one apparently rather large definition of condition: "Whatever touches or enters into a sustained relationship with human life immediately assumes the character of a condition of human existence."[4] The distinctive characteristic of human existence, its conditions, can be classified into two groups.

• The first group of human conditions consists of basic conditions under which life on earth has been given to man, and these are: life itself, worldliness, plurality, natality and mortality, and the earth itself.
• The second group of human conditions consists of conditions made by the men themselves, and these are man-made things and relations. "Whatever enters the human world of its own accord or is drawn into it by human effort becomes part of human condition."[5]

The first and second group of conditions together are labeled by a Latin term conditio humana. A common trait for all conditions is that "they never condition us absolutely."[6] According to Hannah Arendt, they are somehow changeable and flexible, but our condition itself is persistent and unavoidable. "The most radical change we can imagine in human condition would be an emigration of men from the earth to some other planet ... Yet even these hypothetical wanderers from the earth would still be human; but the only statement we could make regarding their 'nature' is that they still are conditioned beings, even though their condition is now self-made to a considerable extent."[7] It is important to notice that the number of conditions is unlimited but from all of them Hannah Arendt directs her attention to a few, taken to be most influential. This thesis about the condition of human existence is the starting point of the whole theory, the first part of the tripartite axis drawn at the beginning of this paper, and for the needs of this paper it will not be questioned, which does not imply that it can not be criticized.

REACTION TO HUMAN CONDITION

Presenting three human practical activities, labor, work and action, Hannah Arendt explains that they are "fundamental because each corresponds to one of the basic conditions under which life on earth has been given to man."[8] The relation between conditions and activities is not so simple as it may at first appear. There are several definitions of this relation:[9] activity responds to condition - condition of activity is that and that - activity is closely connected to the condition. In addition to this, we can remark that not all of basic conditions are equally treated: for example, natality and mortality as well as earth are only "connected" with the activities, while life itself, worldliness and plurality are each directly responsible for one of three mentioned activities. Other conditions are not explicitly mentioned in this context, but it is logical to suppose that they take part in shaping concrete manifestations of practical activities. Can we agree that the relation between the conditions of human existence and the activities is clarified enough? The last of the mentioned and in the same time weak eststatement (that the conditions and activities are closely connected) is surely true, but how are they connected? It is legitimate to conclude that each of the three types of practical activities is a response to something that conditions and provokes it. I believe that the origin of those human activities is this way acceptably conceptualized. However, the same can not be said for subsuming them under one common denominator. Vita activa is a common name for labor, work and action. Definition by which Hannah Arendt introduces this name is undoubtedly stipulative. "With the term vita activa, I propose to designate three fundamental human activities: labor, work and action."[10] Being known since Roman antiquity, although not in the sense which Hannah Arendt gives it, the term was a part of many centuries long tradition of systematization of human activities.[11] This tradition established a certain evaluation and certain hierarchy between vita activa and vita contemplativa. In this tradition vita contemplativa is a supradordinated, more valuable, dominantly significant notion, and vita activa is a subordinated, less valuable, marginally significant notion.[12]

FIELDS OF HUMAN LIFE: NOTION AND CONSTITUTION

An inevitable starting question is: can we speak of a notion of the field in Hannah Arendt's theory in "The Human Condition" or is every field so specific that it makes impossible to separate a set of characteristics of the field in general? In other words, what is understood by field?At first glance it looks like there is no common denominator for all the fields, nor did Hannah Arendt have an intention to create it. Moreover, favorization of one field, the public, is apparent; is it a legitimate next step to conclude that this field is the field par excellence? My hypothesis in this paper is that the answer to this is positive. Regardless of the first impression, it is not impossible to extract an implicit notion of the field in Hannah Arendt's position. The field is the result of conceptual organizational scheme for distribution of human activities, and more broadly speaking - aspects of human life, in totality of space understood as both physical and symbolic. This is what each field is as far as it is a field. It doesn't mean that fields don't differ among themselves in many characteristics, but it means rather they have a common denominator. A fundamental question for the status of fields in "The Human Condition" is a question concerning their relation with activities. It would be impetuous to grant ontological and/or temporal priority either to fields or to activities, or to use causality for explanation of the relation of fields to activities or vice versa. The theory of Hannah Arendt aspires to a far more subtle solution, unsuitable for quick and cliche readings. The essential idea in her solution can be read in the moment of transfer of the activities from one field to another, by which the activity is the subject of a certain transformation caused by the influence of a new field in which it is situated, whiled the field is the subject of certain transformation caused by entering of a new activity in it, but in spite of this, both of them keep some properties that belonged to them before the transfer.[13] I will call this idea cardinal thesis. This thesis comprises one-sided options in a complex, simethrically[symmetrically??] articulated answer. As activities change at entering un-proper fields for them (for the proper, in Hannah Arendt's opinion, the standard is Ancient Greeks' mapping) and at the same time they stay the same regardless of the movement, so the fields undergo the changes from acceptance of un-proper activities in them (for proper, in Hannah Arendt's opinion, the standard is Ancient Greeks' mapping) and remain untouched by this acceptance in some important aspects. In both directions, specific susceptibility and specific resistibility of both the activities and the fields are present. The best description of this cardinal thesis is non-radicalism, fluidity, complexity. In "The Human Condition" it is possible to find several examples supporting this thesis. When the activity of labor moved from private to public field, it changed in the sense of conformity to the principle of organization, dominant in the public field, and such change left consequences in the form of the division of labor.[14] However, the movement from private to public field has not influenced one very important aspect of labor, and that is productivity. Or, when the activity of speech moved from public to private field, it suffered change by losing glory and shine and relevance, which, in Hannah Arendt's opinion, can not exist in the private field. However, such movement didn't change the speech in its essential trait - to be the way and the medium of disclosure of the subject. (Here a note is necessary. Namely, in "The Human Condition" speech and action are treated as related, almost as unique activity, which doesn't necessarily need to be accepted without question, but for the purpose of this paper it can not be problematized. Action is defined as starting, that is launching an initiative, whose source is the beginning entering the world with our birth; every one of us is born unique, and each initiative will start something unexpectable, unforseeable, new. The meaning and a kind of explanation of this (initiating) action will be completed in words.) The private field was transformed by the displacement of economic activities from it -the transformation is manifested in the decadence of the institution of family and in changes in its functions and forms. However, what could not be disturbed in the private field is the possibility of property possessions and house possessions as symbolic strong points of the subject. The public field underwent changes when economic activities, labor and work, got access to it; at that, public field has been deprived of speech and action as essentially political activities, which meant that the type of disclosure and expressing of the subject in it was changed. However, its specific resistibility reflects itself in the fact that public field's analogons made by economic activities, primarily the exchange markets, have no essential importance for the public. Those analogons for Hannah Arendt are actually pseudo-public, quasi-public.[15] From that can be inferred that the real public, although not in the place where it used to be, is eventually in some other place. Naturally, the question is whether this really is a conclusive argument for public field's resistibility to the change or a mere nominalistic game, as it may appear.

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I think that there is one specific firmness of the public, without which Hannah Arendt's call for the rehabilitation of the notion of the political would be a mere appeal for creatio exnihilo and every reader of her bitter criticism of the modern age would agree with me that this criticism is never perfectly nihilistic.[16] What could be seen as a shortcoming of my interoperation of Hannah Arendt is the absence of examples in "The Human Condition" concerning other two fields - the intimate and the social. It could indicate a doubt over conceptual unity of the notion of field(which should hold for all four fields). Or, it could indicate that the relation between the activities and the fields is not completely defined in what I called cardinal thesis (on the moment of transfer). But I declare both conclusions inadequate, and I believe that both the conceptual unity of the notion of the field and the cardinal thesis can be sustained, because there is a valid answer to the lack of examples concerning the intimate and the social fields.The intimate field has its resistibility and its susceptibility, although they could not betested in any transfer of activities in or out of it, for the simple reason that such displacement, theoretically conceivable, so far has never happened. Hannah Arendt in"The Human Condition" doesn't tell which activity corresponds to the intimate field (it makes sense to suppose that those are activities of vita contemplativa). It is also connected to the way she defines the intimate field. Later in this paper I will come to her definition of the intimate field and present the idea of including activities of speech and action into the intimate field defined somewhat differently. I will elaborate the idea of a hypothetical transfer to intimate field, which Hannah Arendt didn't have in mind, but which is ultimately possible.The social field is also in accordance with the cardinal thesis on resistibility and susceptibility. It is unquestionable that Hannah Arendt's view is that the social field appears in an attempt to move in and out - it is a failure of the move, a lock of the transfer, so that all activities included in the transfer remained together in one field, which established the social field. The social field has specific status, it seeks to encompass all activities in itself, as a blotter. It is not quite similar to the other three fields, but rather an exception, because the try-transfer is its logical and causal priority. But after its constitution, the social field is marked by a similar dynamics of its development as other fields, and the transfer in and out of it is conceivable. The indirect argument that this is so is Hannah Arendt's call to dismiss activities of speech and action from the social and to place them back into the public field. A principal ontological characteristic of all the fields is the equilibrium between the two poles of susceptibility-resistibility in their relation to activities.

RELATION BETWEEN HUMAN ACTIVITIES AND FIELDS IN WHICH THEY ARE PRACTICED:CONNECTION CRITERIA

Hannah Arendt's opinion about the organizational mechanism which generates fields is characterised by an extreme ambivalence of its description. From one standpoint, she writes that the connecting of activities and fields follows criteria external to activities and fields themselves, non-inherent criteria.[17] From the other standpoint, she allows that there is a certain correlation and not necessarily discrepancy between the inherent and non-inherent criteria of the connection between activities and fields.[18] Finally, there is a third variation which gives priority to inherent criteria.[19] Based on all this, it is hard to decide how to qualify the criteria of the connection between activities and fields. Perhaps the solution is in realizing that the distinction between inherent and non-inherent criteria seems to be a superficial level of a deeper criteria feature: their historicity. The following quotation tells us most directly about the historicity of field mappings:

"... we know that the contradiction between private and public realms, typical of the initial stages of the modern age, has been a temporary phenomenon which introduced the utter extinction of the very difference between the private and public realms, the submersion of both in the sphere of the social."[20]

Therefore the question can be raised: if a solution is applied that is adequate to its time, what are the possibilities for its criticism and change?Are those only the critiques from the point of view of some other time? Or, a certain period does not define uniquely the demands to be fulfilled, so the response can be created in various ways within the scope of those same demands? What does the temporariness of certain mappings actually mean: absolute temporariness (being tied to one unique moment) or potential transposition through different periods (repeating)?Hannah Arendt is nearer to the latter view, especially by her undertaking to revitalize some elements of the antiquity's mappings of the fields. If we want to sum up all those various statements, we will get to the conclusion that mapping and remapping are primarily under the influence of human conceptual fiat, that activities and fields signalize the place that suits them best and that supports their key features, but that they are subjects of historical development too. Being as it is, human conceptual horizon is the very place where intervention is most efficient, so that oblivion and misunderstanding of concepts of our predecessors are for Hannah Arendt what should be fought against. She wants to remind us of the antiquity's mappings of the fields because she considers them superior, although she is aware of the historicity of all mappings. Isn't it a paradox to be aware of historicity and to value one historical (temporary) pattern as superior to others? Isn't it a paradox to defend one "inherent" criterion as the most adequately embodied in one (let's say antiquity's) map, in spite of historicity of each possible map?[21]

MUTUAL RELATION BETWEEN THE FIELDS

Hannah Arendt's view about the mutual relation between the fields splits the period from antiquity to her time in two phases: 1) the phase in which there was no conflict and fluctuation among the fields and 2) the phase in which the demarcation lines are unstable.

A short review of mapping and demarcation between the fields through history would be as follows. The oldest mapping of the fields of human life (that is, the oldest of those analyzed in"The Human Condition") stems from Ancient Greece, which considered the divide between private and public fields most suitable for organizing the total space. Several centuries later the Romans introduced the third field, the field of the intimate, but in the way not to disturb the demarcation line between already established fields, giving to the intimate a space inside the private field. With those three fields completed the map of human activities was valid until 17th century. In the fields of intimate, private and public the whole human life has been taking place. That was the first phase in mutual relations among the fields. Hannah Arendt used the term coexistence for such a relation. A big reconstruction of the map took place[22] in 17th century. A new map, still valid in 20th century, has one field more compared with previously existing ones: the social field.[23] Why does it enter the map?[24] Because of the transfer of activities from private to public field. Since this transfer was not sustainable, what resulted was the intersection of elements of the private and the public, which was de facto a constitution of a new field. This new field had to find its place between private and public fields and at their expense, taking away the space that previously belonged to them, minimizing them, marginalizing them. If we compare this with previous remapping, it strikes us that the disturbance and outdating of the main demarcation line is now taking place, reworking the line between the private and the public. In the second phase, for describing the relation among fields Hannah Arendt uses several metaphors (ruffle of waves, growing).[25] The main demarcation line now is the one between the social and the intimate fields.[26] The difference between the first and second demarcation lines can be identified in their sharpness and propulsion.

PRIVATE FIELD

The private field in Ancient Greece was an interpersonal construction physically materialized in the form of the household, that is the house and the estate on which one family lived. The family understood in their sense of the word meant lord, his wife, his children and relatives and his slaves. The whole property belonged to the lord, all material objects of the property and all living persons regardless whether they were acquired slaves or his blood kins. In the house the lord and his subordinates undertook various activities, and all those activities had something in common - they were regarded as nonfree and therefore less worthy. The only activity in the family which was the lord's task was to command, to order, to force and to be master over the rest of the household members.[27] What he forced his subordinates to do was to work, to perform the activities which led to the satisfaction of direct human bodily needs (food, clothes, housing, warfare, sex, reproduction ...).[28] Because the necessities of the biological life were active there, the belief that they should be performed secretly was wide-spread in Ancient Greece, that is that they should be hidden in the household.[29] Hannah Arendt ascertains that for Ancient Greeks the private field had depriving andnon-depriving features. Depriving features stem from the fact that staying at home occupied by the activities of labor and/or childbirth a person was deprived of some other possibilities which were highly valued, to the extent to be considered essentially human and the highest human capabilities.[30] All except the lord suffered from the depriving features of private field, because they were left no other options. Non-depriving features[31] of private field in Ancient Greece stem from the fact that, due to the activities in the household, most urgent and intense human needs, closely connected with the life itself, were satisfied. In addition to that, the property owned by the lord of the house provided him with a place in the world and in the public sphere.[32] Hannah Arendt writes: "The distinctive trait of the household sphere was that in it men lived together because they were driven by their wants and needs. The driving force was life itself ... which, for its individual maintenance and its survival as life of the species needs the company of others. That individual maintenance should be the task of the men, and species survival the task of women was obvious, and both of these natural functions, labor of men to provide nourishment and labor of women in giving birth, were subject to the same urgency of life. Natural community in the household therefore was born of necessity, and necessity ruled over all the activities performed in it."[33] This interpretation of antiquity's views on family and household is unacceptable from several reasons. Slaves didn't labor/work and live with their masters driven by their needs and wants; among the members of one household there was no natural community in the sense of biological spontaneity, but rather all was regulated by (cultural) norms and therefore artifact, construct; childbirth was not a natural function and even less necessity of life for all. The unacceptability of this interpretation leads us to the private field today. Property and wealth are most important aspects of the private from the perspective of the other fields. Family is today differently understood, economic functions are not its dominant goal. Depriving features of the private, stressed in antiquity, are lost and only non-depriving features remain.

PUBLIC FIELD

The public field in Ancient Greece was an interpersonal construction materialized in places where the families' lords met, yet the place, for example a square, was not crucial for it but the presence of people qualified to make the public space. Their qualification was that they were free, and they saw themselves as free from the worry for elementary(biological) survival, because they had satisfied all basic needs before entering the public. The activities with which they were occupied in the public field were speech and action. These were, in the opinion of the Greek civilisation, the highest human possibilities, that which made man a man, and this for the reason that in them man disclosed who he was, although not to himself but to others.[34] The public field required the presence of people which were audience to each others' words and acts. Words and acts, according to Hannah Arendt, being something non-tangible and immaterial,[35] need witnesses to be real.The implicit thesis underlying the possibility of the public as such is the ontological thesis that there is no reality without appearance. The importance of (public) appearance[36] comes from the attitude that: "... appearance - something that is being seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves - constitutes reality."[37] Man is real if he, that is his words and acts in which he discloses himself, can appear and be noticed by others. But who are the others? Here comes a more precise ontological thesis: not every appearance is equally valuable, because not every audience is of equal value. The real audience for a subject consists of others who are recognized and accepted by that subject as equal to him. In antiquity, for a lord of a family, such audience was only and exclusively other families' lords.[38] The public field is corresponding to the notion of the world.[39] This relation between the world and the public field is mutually beneficial, as can be inferred from the following passage:

"... common world is what we enter when we are born and what we leave behind when we die. It transcends our life-span into past and future; it was here before we came and will outlast our brief sojourn in it ... But such a common world can survive the coming and going of the generation only to the extent that it appears in public."[40]

{to read again from here}

The answer to the question why the public field was for Greeks privileged in value has two parts, because two reasons established the dignity of the public field. We could callthose reasons a synchronic one and a diachronic one. The synchronic one is that in thepublic field a simultaneous presence of numerous perspectives is guaranteed, as manyperspectives of seeing and hearing are embodied in the participants of the public field.The more participants, that is more audience for someone's words and acts, the biggerquantum of appearance, that is of the reality by which the subject (the author of the wordsand acts) is granted. Therefore: "Being seen and being heard by others derive theirsignificance from the fact that everybody sees and hears from different position. That isthe meaning of public life, compared to which even the richest and the most satisfyingfamily life can offer only the prolongation or multiplication of one's own position with itsattending aspects and perspectives."41 The diachronic reason is that: "It is the publicity ofthe public realm which can absorb and make shine through the centuries whatever menmay want to save from the natural ruin of time."42The result of action and speech can be analysed on more than one level. The first levelis the space of appearance "... where men exist not merely like other living or inanimatethings but make their appearance explicitly. This space does not always exist, andalthough all men are capable of deed and word, most of them - like slave, foreigner andbarbarian in antiquity, like laborer or craftsman prior to the modern age, like jobholder orbusinessman in our world - do not live in it."43 The second level are modalities of thisspace of appearance, and the most important among them is the one "... where word anddeed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, wherewords are not used to veil intentions but to disclose reality, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities."44 This is onesmaller subset of all possible spaces of appearance, and its main distinctive characteristicis the birth of power. Power born in it is the result of an agreement of many wills andintentions, but an extremely unstable and insecure result.45According to Hannah Arendt, today the public field is destroyed, and that only meansthat it has lost its characteristics of antiquity's conceptual framework. Primarily those arethe characteristics concerning disclosure of subject through words and acts, expressingwho someone is in his unique individuality, and unexpectability, originality of impetuswhich builds human affairs and relations among people. What used to be the functions ofthe public field were mostly taken over by its modern substitute - society.

SOCIAL FIELD

As already mentioned, the appearance of the social field is not related to some newtype of activity that was not there before.46 Actually, the very correspondencelabor, work / private fieldwords and acts / public fieldhas lost the status of explanatory kit at the moment the society emerged. Now all types ofactivities are practiced in the social field. Hannah Arendt defines the social field in thefollowing way: "Society is the form47 in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sakeof life and nothing else assumes public significance and where the activities connectedwith sheer survival are permitted to appear in public."48 At its first steps, society was theorganization of private property owners who demanded to be guaranteed peacefulconducting of their economic affairs and enjoying of their property and wealth, previouslydisturbed by the lack of protection and regulation. They didn't accept antiquity'smotivation for entering the public - the search for audience and appearance, but broughttheir own motivation which primarily aimed at the protection of oneself and of one'sinterests (in their understanding, the interest was private property). The society is similar to a giant (antique) family which as its main concerns put forward economic activities, inother words biological survival. Hannah Arendt stresses one feature of the society sounderstood, and that is the social pressure to conformity, pressure unbearable forindividual to stand against and which essentially threatens plurality, so important forpolitics and reality itself (reality in the ontological sense).49From the moment the social field emerged, a trend begins that all practical activitiesbe practiced in it. But for some of them this is a favor, for others it is not. Labor and workin the social field experience rise, and words and acts here face the environment whichdeforms and distorts them and therefore they "flee" to the remaining patches of the publicfield.50 According to Hannah Arendt, the society ultimately excludes the possibility ofaction. People in a society don't act, they behave in the prescribed and expected way.Behavior is a hybrid type of activity, meaning establishing relations among people notbased on action, launching an initiative, but based on labor and work. Members of societyare not each other's audience but collaborators laboring together for the sake of an easierand more successful survival. They are also uniform by characters, and instead ofinitiatives and starting something new they just reproduce existing models, roles - theydon't disclose themselves as subjects but through stereotyped social roles. The sort ofrelations established among behaving people leads in the end to the automatization ofbehavior, that is to the alienation and depersonalization.

INTIMATE FIELD

Hannah Arendt rarely mentions the intimate field. For her concept of the intimate fieldthe following are relevant places: "... modern discovery of intimacy seems a flight fromthe whole outer world into the inner subjectivity of the individual, which formerly hadbeen sheltered and protected by the private realm."51 and "Compared with the realitywhich comes from being seen and heard, even the greatest forces of intimate life - thepassions of the heart, the thoughts of the mind, the delight of the senses - lead anuncertain, shadowy kind of existence unless they are transformed, deprivatized anddeindividualized, as it were, into a shape to fit them for public appearance. The mostcurrent of such transformations occurs in storytelling and generally in artistictransposition of individual experiences."52 On the basis of this, it can be concluded thatthe intimate field is in "The Human Condition" a field only in the metaphorical sense,being in this conception limited only to the internal space of the subject's body.I would like to propose another definition of the intimate field. It would be aninterpretation according to which it would be a field. This interpretation requires that the intimate field is transformed from intrapshychic to interpersonal construction marked bysome specific features which would distinguish it from other such constructions (all threeother fields are this - constructions). The main argument in favor of such redefinition ofthe intimate field is that it is just a continuation of what Hannah Arendt started anyway.Namely, citing Rousseau as the first researcher and theoretician of the intimate, HannahArendt underlines: "The intimacy of the heart, unlike the private household, has noobjective tangible place in the world, nor can the society against which it protests andasserts itself be localized with the same certainty as the public space. To Rousseau, boththe intimate and the social were, rather, subjective modes of human existence ..."53 ForHannah Arendt the social field did not remain what it was for Rausseau, because shetreats the social field as a field analogous to its older counterparts. However, she didn'tcarry out the same process of modification for the intimate field. I think that it could andhad to be carried out. Conceptualized as (ontologically) parallel and equal to the socialfield, the intimate field could become a domain in which subject discloses itself in asimilar way as in antiquity's public field. My suggestion for materialization(operationalization) of the intimate field would be the following: the intimate fieldrepresents an emotional order each person creates for him/herself for negotiatetransactions with equals about the personal connections that will exist among them. Thisdefinition relies on the ideas of Anthony Giddens in "Transformation of Intimacy:Sexuality, Love and Erotism in Modern Societies". In his introduction he writes: "Somehave claimed that intimacy can be oppressive, and clearly this may be so if it is regardedas a demand for constant emotional closeness. Seen, however, as a transactionalnegotiation of personal ties by equals, it appears in a completely different light. Intimacyimplies a wholesale democratising of the interpersonal domain, in a manner fullycompatible with democracy in the public sphere."54 A principal characteristic of theintimate would be disclosure as opposed to functioning - in the intimate there arepossibilities for authentic expression, for individuality, for intense and concentratedrelation of actor to his/her own acts.In Hannah Arendt's theory the main obstacle for intimate field to take over thepossibilities previously open in antiquity's public field is a difference in the number ofparticipants. Since a great number of others can not be around one subject in the intimatefield, a modification of ontological thesis is necessary.More audience means more appearance means more reality should be changed inorder for synergic effects of combining quantity and quality of audience to appear, afterwhich the thesis would be:Less audience but of intensified presence and witnessing means more appearancemeans more reality.This way a new field for action is open. It could be also an auxiliary argument for whysuggested reinterpretation of the intimate field is justified. Hannah Ardent's basic idea is acall for recovering of the public field, that is she wants that the society, which has"swallowed" the public field, back up and release at least some space for it. I agree with that idea completely. However, I think that other strategies should be explored to findadditional place for activities of speech and action. (All the more so since there is noreason for one type of activity to be practiced only in one field.) One such additionalplace would be in the intimate field. But what still has to be checked is whether action canbe preserved if it was to be practiced in the intimate field operationalized in a certain(Giddens') way.Hannah Arendt lists two reasons why action can not be preserved in the social field:one touches upon the quality of subject and the other upon the conceptual inversions inthe social field. In society the action as an expression of uniqueness, individuality, nonrepeatability,as starting something new and unexpectable, looses its agent due to theinfluences of conformity pressures and compulsory depersonalization. Moreover, actionencourages equality rather than the sameness of acting subjects - which was crystal clearto Ancient Greeks, according to Hannah Arendt, while her contemporaries haveinclinations to miss that point of distinction. She draws attention to specially dangerousaspects of equality often emphasized by modern men which are, rightly speaking, onlyformulae of hidden sameness (equality in the face of death, or before god, lists HannahArendt, and I can add: equality by race, national origin etc.).55Nevertheless, none of the mentioned reasons is valid in the case of intimate field -either the reason touching upon the quality of subjects, or the reason touching upon theconceptual inversions of equality and sameness. Therefore the intimate field cansubstitute the former public field or serve as its complement. There is no incompatibilitybetween the action as described in "The Human Condition" and possibilities open in theintimate field defined in the above suggested way.

MEANING OF THE MAPPING OF THE FIELDS - VALUATION

Earlier in this paper I defined the field as a segment of totality identified by being aproduct of conceptual scheme for distribution of human activities and aspects of humanlife in the space understood as physical and symbolic. What is the purpose of the mappingof fields? The questioning of the purpose of the scheme which generates segments, that isfields, inevitably leads to perceiving the valuation background of the whole construction.My conclusion therefore is that fields are conceptualized in order to be valued differently,in other words so that what is happening in them can be valued differently.Hannah Arendt in "The Human Condition" transmits antiquity's value treatment offields, with which she agrees openly, while she also presents modern value ranking offields.56 For fundamental antiquity's dichotomy private/public she writes that it "equals the distinction between things that should be shown and things that should be hidden".57 Afew paragraphs later a more explicit statement is to be found, according to which "thedistinction between private and public coincides with the opposition of necessity andfreedom, of futility and permanence, and finally, of shame and honor."58 Such valuepolarization is crude enough that its author herself soon mitigates it by stating that "it isnot by no means true that only the necessary, the futile, and the shameful have theirproper place in the private realm"59 and she offers the example of good deeds (in thesense of Christian duties) which could be performed only in the private field but which,according to hers and the opinion of wide range of people, are neither necessary, norfutile, nor shameful. The same view is refracted also through the value axisrelevant/irrelevant. "Yet there are a great many things which cannot withstand theimplacable, bright light of the constant presence of others on the public scene; there, onlywhat is considered to be relevant, worthy of being seen and heard, can be tolerated, sothat irrelevant becomes automatically a private matter."60 Of course, like in the abovementioned case, she immediately mitigates such sharp value polarization: "This, to besure, does not mean that private concerns are generally irrelevant; on the contrary ... thereare very relevant matters which can survive only in the realm of the private. For instance,love ..."61 In speaking about contemporary time and fields in it, Hannah Arendt uses adifferent language pattern. A negative appraisal about the social field is given in the formof fear for its extinction, and there are expressions such as: danger comes from it, trend ofits promotion is frightening, it destroys some very necessary things. A positive valuationappraisal about the intimate field, although scarce and modest, is given in the form ofrespect for how rich and diversified it can be.62I would say that Hannah Arendt's value judgements about fields of human life aredeeply rooted in her value judgement about the body, that is judgement about the socalled biological nature of man. This negatively valued human body as such relies onantiquity's value optics, but lasts until the 20th century. Many people of the 20th century,especially feminist theoreticians, can not agree with it, and I step on their side in thisrejection of disrespect towards the body. Namely, this value optics claims: "... from thebeginning of history to our own time it has always been the bodily part of humanexistence that needed to be hidden in privacy, all things connected with the necessity oflife process itself, which prior to the modern age comprehended all activities serving thesubsistence of the individual and the survival of the species. Hidden away were thelaborers who 'with their bodies minister to the (bodily) needs of life' and the women whowith their bodies guarantee the physical survival of the species. ... The fact that themodern age emancipated the working classes and the women at nearly the same historicalmoment must certainly be counted among the characteristics of an age which no longer believes that bodily functions and material concerns should be hidden."63 To completethis view, it should be added that speaking of the hidden as a domain of birth and death,Hannah Arendt relates it to that what is impenetrable to human knowledge "... becauseman does not know where he comes from when he is born and where he goes when hedies."64It seems, paradoxically enough, that the destiny of the hidden is to provoke itsdisclosure, which I also undertake here. If hiddeness is not understood as hiddeness fromoneself, the unconscious, which Hannah Arendt doesn't propose, then it is hiddeness fromthe others/audience. The key for interpretation then is how we understand theothers/audience. Only in antiquity's interpretation of the others/audience, as exclusivelythose equal to the subject outside his home/family, the relation hidden/private becomesequivalence, because in Ancient Greece that what is private/in the house is hidden fromthose outside. In every other possible interpretation of the others/audience, whereanybody can be understood as the others/audience, whether this noun be in singular or inplural form, this relation becomes contingent. The hidden then can be equally put inrelation to the public, social or intimate, as well as to the private field. In other words, thehidden becomes contingent practice with regard to any field of human life, to any objectof hiding. We saw, moreover, that Hannah Arendt brought the hidden in a relation to whatis impenetrable to human knowledge. Isn't that relation something like a feedback: what isnot known is suppressed from the center of attention, but what is out of the center ofattention can not be explored and known? As the breach of that cycle, the veryepistemological reasons lead to a negation of impenetrability of the hidden. It could beadded that the body has never been in absolute darkness, and the proof for that is that it isin a certain way included in Hannah Arendt's theory, as well as in many others.As to the judgement that the 20th century is the age which does not believe any morethat bodily functions and material concerns should be hidden, I would take it with somereserve, because it can be noticed at least that contemporary attitudes don't necessarilymean that this époque believes that body matters should be open. Certain uneasinesstowards the body is still present, but at the same time the awareness of that uneasiness ispresent, which is the first step toward overcoming and disappearing of that uneasiness.The usage of ethical operators should/should not in regard to this is rare. The appraisal ofthe body becomes self-conscious, questionable, problematized, chosen. Perhaps the 21stcentury which has just begun will fulfill the hope of demystifying of the body.In "The Human Condition" there is an evaluation hierarchy of the fields of human lifeand a corresponding hierarchy of practical human activities. However, what must beemphasized in the end is that there is also a clear awareness of how differing evaluationstatements conflict among themselves because they are what they are - evaluationstatements. It is displayed in the following part of the text, which I take the most lucid oneof many lucid parts in "The Human Condition". "The conviction that the greatest that mancan achieve is his own appearance and actualization is by no means a matter of course.Against it stands the conviction of homo faber that a man's products may be more - andnot only more lasting - than he is himself, as well as the animal laborans' firm belief that life is highest of all goods. Both therefore ... will incline to denounce action and speech asidleness, idle busybodies and idle talk, and generally will judge public activities in termsof their usefulness to supposedly higher ends - to make the world more useful and morebeautiful in the case of homo faber, to make life easier and longer in the case of animallaborans."65 Hannah Arendt's view is that human dignity lies in human words and acts,that is in his own disclosure or his political expression/appearance. She is an openproponent of the first of the three mentioned beliefs. However, she realizes that it isequally legitimate to be a proponent of each of the three views. What I want to close thispaper with is the conclusion that only in coming to the evaluation underlying mappings(remappings) of the fields of human life do we come to the possibility of choice of ourown attitude toward mapping and toward inevitable demarcations on it.

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[1]. Here is what the author herself says about it: "What I propose in the following is a reconsideration of thehuman condition from the vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears. ...'What we are doing' is indeed the central theme of this book. It deals only with the most elementaryarticulations of the human condition, with those activities that traditionally, as well as according to currentopinion, are within the range of every human being. For this and other reasons, ... the book is limited to adiscussion of labor, work, and action, which forms its three central chapters." This quotation is from Arendt,Hannah, The Human Condition, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London, 1958, p. 5.For all other quatations from the same book I will use abreviation HC. All italics, quatation marks etc. in citedquatations are original.

[2]. "Moreover, nothing entitles us to assume that man has a nature of essence in the same sense as other things.In other words, if we have a nature of essence, then surely only a god could know and define it, and the firstprerequisite would be that he be able to speak about a 'who' as though it were a 'what'." In: HC, p. 10.
[3]. HC, p. 9.
[4]. HC, HC, p. 9.
[5]. HC, p. 9.
[6]. HC, p. 11.
[7]. HC, p. 10.
[8]. HC, p. 7.
[9]. "Labor is the activitiy which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneousgrowth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life processby labor. The human condition of labor is life itself.Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, andwhose mortality is not compensated by, the species' ever-recurring life cycle. Work provides an 'artificial' worldof things, distinctly different from all natural surrodundings. Within its borders each individual life is housed,while this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all. The human condition of work is worldliness.Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter,corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit theworld. ... Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is human, in such a waythat nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.All three activities and their corresponding conditions are intimately connected with the most general conditionof human existence: birth and death, natality and mortality." In: HC, p. 7-8.

[10]. HC, p. 7.
[11]. "And this tradition ... grew out of a specific historical constellation: the tril of Socrates and the conflictbetween the philosopher and the polis." In: HC, p. 12.
[12]. Reason that moved Hannah Arendt to reaffirm the notion of vita aciva is displayed in the following way: "...it is because I doubt not the validity of the experience underlying the distinction but rather the hierarchicalorder inherent in it from its inception." In: HC, p.17. She continues: "My contention is simply that theenormous weight of contemplation in the traditional hierarchy has blurred the distinctions and articulationswithin the vita activa itself ..." In: HC, p. 17. She finds also Marx's and Nitsche's reversals of this hierarachydissatisfying, because although vita activa came by it to the top position in hierarchy, it still failed to beadequatly articulated in itself. Hannah Aarendt implies not only that her definition of vita aciva ensuresdistinctions in this notion, but also that it enables its equal footing with vita contemaplativa in regard to thedignity bestowed on it.
[13]. In: HC, p. 46-47.
[14]. Hannah Arendt comprehends the division of labor as the spliting of labor process into series of minimaloperations, and not as division in the sense of different branches of economy. This can be concluded from herfootnote in HC, p. 47-48.
[15]. Hannah Arendt emphasizes that the real public field can not exist if all that is visible in it is man as laborer,because all that is achieved by this are private activities performed publicly and not public space in the propersense. Similarly, the exchange markets as the results of meetings of the men as workers can not be real publicspace either.
[16]. As support for this we can find: "The instrumentalization of action and the degradation of politics into ameans for something else has of course never really succeeded in eliminating action, in preventing its being oneof the decisive human experiences, or in destroying the realm of human affairs altogether." In: HC, p. 230.

[17] "... the modern age was as intent on excluding political man, that is, man who acts and speaks, from itspublic realm as antiquity was on excluding homo faber. In both instances the exclusion was not a matter ofcourse ..." In: HC, p. 159.
[18]. "... the historical judgements of political communities, by which each determined which of the activities ofthe vita activa should be shown in public and which be hidden in privacy, may have their correspondence inthe nature of these activities themselves." In: HC, p. 78.
[19]. "If we look at these things (things that are to be hidden and things that are to be shown - remarque mine),regardless of where we find them in any given civilization, we shall see that each human activity points to its properlocation in the world. This is true for the chief activities of the vita activa, labor, work, and action ..." In: HC, p. 73.
[20]. HC, p. 69.

[21]. Hannah Arendt analyzes the problem of different historical judgements on the location of human activities,especially in terms of later ages' difficulties in comprehension of their predecessors' views. Besidesepistemological and theoretical problems, this miscomprehension can have a serious impact on the dangeroustrend of the society's development. Hannah Arendt's estimations of modern age are quite striking. She writes:"It is quite conceivable that the modern age - which began with such an unprecedented and promising outburstof human activity - may end in the deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known." In: HC, p. 322.Short explanation of this dark diagnosis/prognosis is: "If we compare the modern world with that of the past,the loss of human experience involved in this development is extraordinarily striking. It is not only and noteven primarily contemplation which has become an entirely meaningless experience. Thought itself ... becamea function of the brain, with the result that electronic instruments are found to fulfil these functions much betterthan we ever could. Action was soon and still is almost exclusively understood in terms of making andfabricating, only that making ... was now regarded as but another form of laboring ...Meanwhile, ... an elimination of laboring from the range of human activities can no longer be regarded asutopian. ... The last stage of the laboring society, the society of jobholders, demands of its members a sheerautomatic functioning ..." In: HC, p. 321-322. This pesimistic picture of modern age is the consequence of theoblivion and miscomprehesion of the past, which started as: "... the extraordinary difficulty with which we ...understand the decisive division between the public and private realms, ... between activities related to acommon world and those related to the maintenace of life, a division upon which all ancient political thougtrested as self-evident and axiomatic. In our understanding, the dividing line is entirely blurred ..." In: HC, p. 28.