The Dignity of a Durable Human World

Arendt uses the word ‘objectivity’ to denote the worldly quality of objects that does not diminish, but stands against and withstands the “subjectivity” of the living—the plurality of бокеТ pot and the life processes of consumption and use. From the viewpoint of life, things have a stabiliz?ing function. By virtue of durability and relative independence, they provide a reliable home and allow objectivity on earth where plurality is law.

[T]heir objectivity lies in the fact that—in contradiction to the Heraclitean saying that the same man can never enter the same stream—men, their ever- changing nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to the same chair and the same table. (HC, p. 137)

Things differ in objectivity. While destruction is the inherent end of things for consumption, and usage wears out durability, art things are the “most intensely worldly of all tangible things ..

No-where else does the sheer durability of the world of things appear in such purity and clarity, nowhere else therefore does this thing-world reveal itself so spectacularly as the non-mortal home for mortal beings. It is as though worldly stability had become transparent in the permanence of art, so that a premonition of immortality, not the immortality of the soul or of life but of something immortal achieved by mortal hands, has become tangibly present, to shine and to be seen, to sound and to be heard, to speak and to be read. (HC, pp. 167—168)