Hannah Arendt refused the title of philosopher, preferring to be considered a political theorist. Her insistence, though, on rehabilitating the importance of political life is rooted in a phenomenology of appearance. She speaks of “the value of surface” (borrowing the term from the zoologist, Adolf Portmann) in an effort to overturn the philosophical priority of the invisible over the visible. Appearance, according to Arendt, is the site of maximum expression and diversity, whereas the inner is commonplace and indistinguishable. Metaphors drawn from the outer world light up inner experience, but this activity is not reversible. Metaphors arising from inner experience tell us nothing about the world. Drawing largely on Arendt’s final work, The Life of the Mind, this paper explores her phenomenological approach to the world of appearance and its relation to inner experience. It suggests that her phenomenology of appearance and metaphor is related to her project of disentangling meaning from truth. Meaning, according to Arendt, is revealed, for example, when spectators of the appearing world withdraw into themselves to form free judgements, while remaining plural in recognizing that they share an event from multiple perspectives. She reverses the traditional philosophical hierarchy, since Parmenides and enshrined by Plato, that places truth above meaning. Meaning for her is intimately concerned with the rich variety of appearance. Metaphor, she tells us, reveals the primacy of surface and bridges “the abyss between inward and invisible mental activities and the world of appearances” [Arendt (The Life of the Mind. Mary McCarthy. Harcourt, 1978, 105)].