Natality and the Birth of Politics
Anne O’Byrne
The thought of natality begins to take shape very early in Arendt’s work—as early as her doctoral dissertation, Love and Saint Augustine (1929). It appears there under the name “birth” and comes into its own only later as the condition of natality until The Human Condition (1958). “Birth” refers to the moment when we appear out of our mothers’ bodies, but for Arendt, natality is always something more: our being created, our emergence from the negative condition of not yet being, our first appearance in the world, the opening to new beginnings, our being between past and future, our shared plurality, and the signal of our capacity for action, responsibility, and revolution. If we think of Arendt as a phenomenologist, we see her encountering birth as something we witness and experience in the world. Approached as a phenomenon, from various points of view in various parts of her work, natality is eventually revealed as an ontological structure of human being and, controversially, the key to understanding political life.
For Arendt, a thesis on Augustine was an occasion for working through, among other things, the questions of time and existence inherited from Heidegger, with whom she had studied in the years during which he wrote Being and Time. While Heidegger in that work devoted himself to the study of ours as a futural mode of being, Arendt retrieved his attention to both “not yet” and “having been” as ways of being in time, that is, both the “whence” and “whither” of our existence.
In The Human Condition, natality is prominent from the start. When each of us is born, the world has never seen anyone quite like us before, and this natal newness is intimately linked to the human condition of plurality. The difference is what we share. Yet, so far, this is just first birth, the material condition for the possibility of being in the world, but, as such, just part of the cycle of life and death that Arendt identifies in terms of the Greek word zōē, or mere life. This is the life we share with animals, and it characterizes human life insofar as that life remains subject to the cyclical time of the natural world. We labor and consume, are born, give birth, die, endure hardships, and also enjoy the sheer bliss of being alive. If we hanker after something more here, something like immortality, the desire is fulfilled in the joy of having children and grandchildren grow up around us, and death comes in ripe old age in the midst of an enduring clan, as it did for the patriarchs of the Hebrew Bible.
Yet, if the ancient Hebrews understood their lives in terms of their inherited traditions, and if the Romans saw themselves as being born in order to make themselves worthy of their ancestors, Arendt sees us moderns taking up a thought of second birth that has Christian and Greek roots. The structure is familiar as rebirth in Christ, the incarnate, crucified, and risen God, but, while this is ultimately a transcendent God, Arendtian natality is a matter of an essentially worldly second birth that takes more from Thucydides than from the Gospels. This second birth occurs when we enact our natality in the public realm, showing who we are by word and deed as Pericles famously did in delivering the Funeral Oration. It has been argued that this nostalgic example, among others, ties Arendt irredeemably to an ancient, un-usable model of political life. The argument has something to recommend it—she certainly tends to understand political action here in terms of appearance and even glory rather than deliberation and administration—but, thanks to the phenomenon of birth, her understanding of action includes novelty and spontaneity. Just as the world had never seen anyone quite like me before, I am capable of doing things the like of which have not been done before (novelty), and I can also perform actions that cannot be accounted for in a specific causal chain (spontaneity). This is the Kantian understanding of spontaneity, whereby a mental cause can produce an effect without itself having a prior cause.1 That is to say, we are capable of a practical creativity.
This ability sets us beyond the cycles of nature, and makes possible—or imposes on us—a trajectory that carries us through the world from birth to death, or from not yet being to having been. So long as zōē keeps us in the swing of natural time, it offers an attenuated version of immortality but also a bulwark against anxiety in the face of oblivion. What is oblivion if we are all part of nature? In contrast, the life now understood as bios is lived between two darknesses. What is to become of the distinctive, natal me, or you, or any one of us? For Arendt, the answer is to be found in the world. This is not the Augustinian world of God’s Creation, but the specifically human world of things, institutions, and stories—that is, culture—that we create, and in which people might continue to know who we were, what we did and said, and what role we played. In Arendt’s breakdown of human activities into labor, work, and action, birth is most closely connected with labor, but the condition of natality is most fully expressed in action. Labor populates the earth and keeps us fed; work is the building and rebuilding that sustains the common, public world; and action is how we show who we each are in that world, where actions are seen and where they will have their afterlife.
Yet nothing is guaranteed. We send our actions into a plural world that is full of people who are themselves natal beings, all capable of newness, and all capable of receiving our actions with enthusiasm, resistance, or indifference, and of working to sustain them, adapt them, or bury them. The fate of action is essentially unpredictable because the condition of natality is also the condition of human plurality. Hence the vulnerability of our identities—our whoness—and our worldly existence, but hence too the relentless hope for a new beginning.
The Origins of Totalitarianism as it had first appeared in 1951 contained no explicit development of the thought of birth or natality, though the erasure of spontaneity in the totalitarian system became a theme in that work in two ways. First, Nazism exploited a longing on the part of the masses for consistency and for a world that was wholly meaningful; spontaneity is a threat to all who cherish predictability and abhor uncertainty.2 Second, the camps were identified as the place where not just lives but human individuality itself was erased, and, she writes, “to destroy individuality is to destroy spontaneity, man’s power to begin something new out of his own resources, something that cannot be explained on the basis of reactions to environment and events.”3 When the second edition of Origins appeared in 1958, it had an epilogue, “Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government,” written in 1953, where this thinking anticipates the thought of natality from The Human Condition. “With each new birth, a new beginning is born into the world, a new world has potentially come into being.”4 This is human freedom. Each of us is a new beginning and, in a sense, each of us begins the world anew.5 The book ends thus:
Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man’s freedom. Initium ut esset homo creatus est—“that a beginning be made man was created” said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.6
We are infinitely plural, and Arendt understands this realization as an exhortation to affirm the structure of plurality, the fact of natal difference in the person of each human individual, and the difference of cultures, understood as distinct modes of existence. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, this leads her to a new philosophical definition of genocide. She argues that when the Nazis took upon themselves the right to decide with whom they would share the world, they committed a crime against human plurality, and thereby against natality. This is the specific character of their crime against humanity.
Yet she sees the challenge posed to identity and belonging by plurality and newness. It is the existential challenge each generation faces with the constant rise of new young people. Their new energy is necessary to sustain the world we bequeath to them, but what if they wreck it? What if they destroy what we have made? That possibility must not be eliminated because newness must always shelter the possibility not just of renewal but of revolution. Thus, natality, the signal of action, is also the sign of our capacity for radical political change.
How are we to understand the relation between the phenomenon of birth and how we ought to live? Seyla Benhabib argues: “It is the step leading from the constituents of a philosophical anthropology (natality, worldliness, plurality, and forms of human activity) to [an] attitude of respect for the other that is missing from Arendt’s thought.”7 The criticism is fair if what we seek is the derivation of norms. However, what Arendt offers is better understood as the revelation of ontological structures that come with a call to responsibility for the world that is so structured. In her dissertation on Augustine, she speaks of the loving affirmation of another: amo: volo ut sis (“I love you: I will that you be”). By the time of “The Crisis in Education,” the same thought takes the form of an all-embracing challenge. Educators, parents, and all the older generation inevitably find themselves introducing the new ones to the world. They may do so in a way that shirks responsibility by acknowledging its cruelties and injustices, but at the same time noting that they did not make it that way, and telling the young that they have to deal with it as best they can. Or they may say, as they point out the details of the world to their charges: “This is our world. We must take joint responsibility for it.” Indeed, for Arendt, education is the preparation for our second birth as individuals capable of action, and it is the time when we decide if we love the world enough to take responsibility for it.
Notes
1 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A445/B473.
2 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1976), 352.
3 Ibid., 455.
4 Ibid., 465.
5 Ibid., 466.
6 Ibid., 479.
7 Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), 196.