Hannah Arendt and the meanings of being of the world - belonging and origin

Résumé

In her final book, The Life of the Mind, Hannah Arendt uses the concept of “being-of-the-world” to interpret our relationship with reality, appearance, and its constitutive plurality. However, the concept is not extensively developed. The aim of this text is to examine what it means not only to be and exist in the world, but to be of the world. The argument unfolds by emphasizing the character of belonging and estrangement in the face of the alienation from the world and the Earth described by Arendt in The Human Condition / Vita Activa. The hypothesis is that being of the world expresses both a more original relation between human beings and the earth, in a natural sense, and a relation to the artificial world of things; as well as it concerns a political sense of belonging to a community and sharing the world intersubjectively, just as it is affirmed and realized through political action. Finally, the text points to an attempt to conceive of a reconciliation with the world under the sign of being-of-the-world in a critique of alienation from the world.