This description is found in Arendt's Aristotle-influenced characterization of speech and

action as a political phenomenon that exists in a public sphere similar to the polis of the
ancient Greeks. While her take on politics is original and profound, the focus in this article
is not as much the conceptual investigation of politics as it is the phenomenological
understanding of how an effect of speech is a disclosure of the individual in the web of
relations that constitutes what Arendt calls "the human world" (1958, 95).
In order to reach a clear understanding of this idea of the human world the first need
is to outline the basic features of the phenomenological approach that Arendt inherits
from Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (1987). This work has itself been the object of
thousands of pages of study, so it is obvious that this description must limit itself to the
pinpointing of a few central elements that shaped Arendt's thought. These elements can be
recognized in her concepts of space of appearance, disclosure of the individual, the who/whatdistinction and the way they interact with her concepts of speech and action. At this point it
will be possible to understand Arendt's idea of the inherent ability of speech as a mode of
acting in the world and the consequences that follow from this view.
In spite of being driven out of the country, Arendt committed herself fully to her
German heritage, once stating that "[i]f I can be said to have 'come from anywhere' it is
from the tradition of German philosophy" (Quoted from Young-Bruehl 1982, 104). While
this tradition reaches back to include classical thinkers such as Kant, Hegel and Marx,
something profound developed in the work of Edmund Husserl around the turn of the 20 th
century. 50 years later Arendt would draw important resources from these intellecutal
innovations, which will be briefly outlined below.
Husserl was engaged with the Cartesian problem of how to bridge the gap of the
certain subjective character of experience and the seemingly intuitive claim of objectivity of
the external world. He suggested a practice of 'epoche', where the philosopher would
abstain from making claims about a phenomenon's reality and instead describe its
different modes of appearance (Husserl 1989 7). For him, objects or phenomena were
never just objects or phenomena, but always events, entities or things appearing to people
as such. Based in this realization he thereby thought it possible to elevate the human "life
world" of subjective appearances to the status of an object of scientific study. In Arendt's
phrasing:

Husserl's basic, and greatest discovery takes up in exhaustive detail the intentionality
of all acts of consciousness, that is, the fact that no subjective act is ever without an
object: though the seen tree may be an illusion, for the act of seeing is an object
nevertheless (Arendt 1977, 46).
Trading the Cartesian idea of the subject as res cogitans for his own constructed notion of
Dasein, Heidegger further develops this Husserlian idea that the human consciousness and
the surrounding world are intertwined. Essential to Arendt is Heidegger's notion of the
space that Dasein inhabits. Instead of the traditional Newtonian and geometrical space,
which has the properties of extension and time, Heidegger's space is existential. Among
other things, this phrase refers to the space of the human world being the space of
disclosure of the individual identities or beings. It is in this space that it is revealed who the
individual is, and not simply what it is. While the human, when thought of as a Cartesian
subject, can be understood as a what (a human subject with the properties of for
instance being a mother, a teacher, a bad hockey player), the who, the Self or the I, can only
be disclosed through the existential analysis of the being of one particular Dasein.
Heidegger writes:
If the I is an essential characteristic of Dasein, then it is done which must be
interpreted existentially. In that case the Who? is to be answered only by exhibiting
phenomenally a definite kind of being which Dasein posseses (...) Yet mans
substance is not spirit as a synthesis of soul and body, it is rather existence. (1987,
152-153)
As will be seen below, it is exactly the connection between the disclosure of man's
existence as a who and the activities of speech and action that Arendt explores, which can
be connected to Austin's speech act theory.
That Arendt adopts the framework of this tradition and especially that of
Heidegger is suggested when she claims to be looking for "the human reality and its
phenomenal evidence" (1958, 235). Through her phenomenological exercise, Arendt seeks
to interpret the events of political life within the horizon of meaning through which they
are given (Borren 2010, 21). Her roots become even more obvious as she writes in The Life
of the Mind that "being and appearing coincide" (1977, 46). For Arendt, the public space of
appearance is the place to find the meaningful human reality, as "for us, appearance
something that is being seen and heard by others as well as by ourselvesconstitutes
reality." (1958, 77). While Arendt seeks to understand both the space of appearance itself,
as well as what exists within it, she does not want to put forth a scientific theory about

human knowledge or politics (ibid., 200) . As Hinchman et al suggests, her concepts

should not be understood in the sense of scientific categories. Rather they should be
viewed as existentials in the Heideggerian sense where theyre meant to give a description
of the world as it discloses itself from the perspective of Dasein (Hinchman et al. 1984, 197).
As will be demonstrated in the concluding section, this is also the perspective through
which she has something to offer the speech act theory: An account of how linguistic
performatives are meaningful to the inhabitants of the human world.