Arendt’s Multi-perspectivism and the Tension Between Place and Space

Abstract

On the surface it appears as if Hannah Arendt has said little on hermeneutics or place. Yet she provides insights into ways of thinking about space and place, once we recover the way her approach overlaps with a particular kind of hermeneutics, the phenomenological hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer. In that light, place and space can be seen as unspecified resources for her theorizing. For example, for Arendt the reality of the public realm is dependent on the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives. The public object is realized when many spectators, from their different locations see “sameness in utter diversity.” This is a reality that comes into being not through abolishing different spatial locations but rather by multiplying them. Multi-perspectivism, the need for many spectators to be differently located, or even more strongly, for one spectator to think through the many perspectives on an object from their own position, provides a way to recognize her unarticulated contributions to space and place. With a primary focus on The Human Condition, this chapter addresses the formulation of the modern decline in a sense of place as articulated by Casey and Augé as overlapping with the decline in the public realm as articulated by Arendt. Both can be treated as instances of world alienation. The chapter goes on to articulate the way Arendt’s tri-partite division of labor, work and action offer ways of rehabilitating the concept of space from its modern sense of immensity to a formulation of ways that space and place, world and polis, can dialectically support each other. To develop these conceptions of place and space, it is argued, is simultaneously to develop a sense of what multi-perspectivism looks like.