Introduction

This chapter presents Hannah Arendt's related concepts of action, freedom, and the political, as well as to her new understanding of subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and a distinct form of the "we" in a political sense. It addresses the major phenomenological concepts that are involved and transformed namely: appearance, experience, intentionality, subjectivity, and world. The chapter elaborates on a hidden methodology that is at work in Arendt's main philosophical work The Human Condition, more precisely in her analysis of the dynamic relations between basic conditions, basic activities, and the spaces of the public and the private. All these issues relate to the actualization of plurality and the political. This will make it possible to map the terrain for a fundamental phenomenological theory of political subjectivity and intersubjectivity, one that takes its inspiration from Arendt's initial concern for plurality and at the same time aims at basic phenomenological and ontological questions of the constitution of the self along with different forms of sociality.