Scenarios of two persons facing each other in mutual encounters are prevalent in modern social and political philosophy. They negotiate social contracts, struggle for recognition or engage in open consensus-oriented dialogue. From Hobbes, Fichte and Hegel to Taylor, Habermas and Honneth, mutual encounters have served as paradigms. Yet, Hannah Arendt is somewhat wary of making mutual encounters central to her phenomenology of acting and speaking with one another. Arendt might want to insist on a subtle but crucial difference: It is one thing to mutually understand each other in relations of personal affinity and another thing to share experiences and perspectives on our common reality of human affairs.