In my paper, I explore Hannah Arendt’s concept of political opinion and the role it is supposed to fulfill in constituting the common world of the public sphere. While Arendt’s account of opinion and the common world is the basis for her often used notion of free political action, it is haunted by a central problem (e.g. Backman 2007, Hoffman 2011). Opinion on the one hand, is supposed to fundamentally constitute the common world of the public sphere. The thus freely constituted public sphere allows for a strong account of autonomous political action. On the other hand, however, Arendt has often neglected to address that opinion is supposed to be about something and to not be merely arbitrary –opinion needs also to refer to an already constituted world. In my paper I address the contradiction between the constituting and referencing moments that political opinion in Arendt’s sense implies and argue that it might be overcome by embracing a specific concept of truth for the political sphere.
In order to address the issue, my article develops in three steps. Firstly (1), I analyze Arendt’s interpretation of the Greek concept of doxa as expression of the “dokei moi” – of the “it seems to me” as the mode of fundamental and pre-conceptual access to the world. Secondly (2), I discuss how opinions understood in this way can constitute a common world, by reconstructing the requirements of such an intersubjective constitution of the public sphere – namely the need for both a referencing and constituting moment in respect to the common world. Lastly (3), I argue that the concept of doxa allows for fulfilling both requirements with some adjustments. Doxa produces political opinions in the narrow sense of the word but also a ‘political’ truth, which represents a pre- or non-conceptual reference to world, which opinions refer to.
