Tentative answer (for Nikhil)

3. Arendt is often credited with reemphasizing the ideas of the Greek polis and using them to evaluate the contemporary world. How does the concept of ‘action’, support that view.

The Greek polis served a twofold function. Firstly, it allowed one to show through deed and word “who he was in his unique distinctness” by multiplying the occasions for one to express and distinguish himself in the polis (196). Secondly, it saves great works and deeds from being forgotten, making them immortal by bringing them to fame by virtue of their existing in a larger political sphere. Arendt offers the example of Homer immortalizing the trojan war through the Illiad, primarily because he wrote in a broader audience with political significance. A society of poets only would not be able to immortalize the history that Homer was able to. Through this twofold functionality of the polis, any action in the polis is magnified and does not go by without witness. Arendt suggests, “men’s lives together in the form of the polis seemed to assure that the most futile of human activities, action and speech, and the least tangible and most ephemeral of man-made “products”, the deeds and stories which are their outcome, would become imperishable” (198). That is, the polis made action live on beyond the lives of the individuals who initiated it, sharing its final achievements past mortality. Connecting this to Arendt’s other concepts in this work, the polis moreover models a space of appearance, wherein one makes their appearance explicit, going to see, and be seen by, others. Given that appearance becomes a paradigm for reality, since political and human reality only thrive in a space wherein speech and action are made explicit, the polis as a space of appearance is revisited in Arendt’s work as a viable means to facilitate, expand, and immortalize human action.