Abstract

VARGAS GUILLEN, Germán  and  REEDER, Harry P. Language and Meaning in the Construction of the Public in Hannah Arendt. Prax. filos. [online]. 2008, n.26, pp.151-168. ISSN 0120-4688.

Our theme is meaning, as the between or the fitting together within the public order, in Hanna Arendt’s The Human Condition. (The Spanish term here, cabe, is hard to translate, it has the sense of both between and of the "fit" between or within two things) This theme is clarified by means of an account of the emergence of possibilities within language itself, and, in addition, of language’s function as the basis for understanding the political (the public). These two elements are presented in terms of a dialectic of the flow of action, which perhaps can also be called the human experience of the world.We likewise distinguish between this flow of meaning, this Heraclitean river, and the emergence of meaning, as water emerges from a spring. Our hypothesis es that the thought of Arendt has more the second sense than the first. In this case, what is the relation between time and meaning? This question is the backdrop for our "essay in understanding." The lecture develops in five sections: in Section I, The Preeminence of Right, examines the connection between the politics of Arendt and the judgment of Eichmann; Section II, Narrative Identity, examines the primacy of the self-justification which a subject constitutes for himself in a tale and, likewise examines the movement toward …, or the opening of meaning offered by the tale; Section III, The Public, examines how intersubjectivity is the common ground for achieving the constitution of ownness, of the sphere of ownness; Section IV, Language, examines the character of language as the between, the in the middle of, or fit, in intersubjective relations, as well as in the subjective understanding of the world; finally, in Section V, The Person, we introduce, by way of conclusion, the preeminent the Augustinian thesis concerning the person -his nature as hypostasis of being, as between and in himself, regarding his relation with others; we also indicate the scope and the limitations of Arendt’s thesis, in terms of an evaluation from the perspective of genetic phenomenology, which studies the political as a thing itself.

Keywords : meaning; cabe; (" between" or "fit"); phenomenology; hermeneutics; subjectivity; intersubjectivity; politics; Husserl; Ricoeur.

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