Forever Young: Hannah Arendt and Natality
Genealogical approaches to intellectual history tend to emphasize contingency, but this may not be enough to evade the feeling of the past’s inevitability. For instance, if we think of genealogies as family trees, the individual is merely the latest branch of a tree over which she has no control. It can feel like family gatherings where you get the nervous feeling that you are doomed to be like one of your uncles. Each aspect of modernity is traced back to various sources which seem to determine outcomes. The modern emphasis on the individual is just the consequence of William of Ockham’s nominalistic philosophy from the 13th century. Even if tracing intellectual connections is meant to disrupt sedimented perspectives in order to change our sense of the past, it stills feels like the past is the only thing that matters.
Friedrich Nietzsche felt something like this in the 19th century when he lamented the weight of history in his time. In Untimely Meditations, he bemoans that “the weight of the past pushes man down or bends him sideways.” This weight “encumbers his steps as a dark, invisible burden.” For Nietzsche, historical consciousness has aged modern people. We have a deepening sense of the past and consequently are losing a sense of the future. Historical work, including the genealogical work inspired by Nietzsche, can make us feel prematurely old. Nietzsche describes “historical culture” as “a kind of inborn grey-hairedness, and those who bear its mark from childhood must instinctively believe in the old age of mankind.” The aged may be wise—in the sense that they know what has been—but as a consequence, they have no future. For the grey-haired, “there pertains an appropriate senile occupation, that of looking back, of reckoning up, of closing accounts, of seeking consolation through remembering what has been, in short historical culture.” To be old in this sense is to have no future, because one has too much past. All one does is look back.
Genealogical work can feel like an old person’s occupation, looking back and closing accounts. One never quite gets to say something new, because one keeps taking one step back to find origins, causes, connective moments. If history is like a palimpsest, genealogists never get around to writing something new, because we are always tracing and retracing the old. If genealogists are doing our work well, we are really looking for the newness in the old so that new things can happen now.
Here I think Hannah Arendt provides a key corrective. For Arendt, beginnings are the distinctive feature of the human. As she traces genealogies of her own, she draws on Augustine to formulate her concept of natality, the principle of beginnings. Writing of Augustine in her essay “What is Freedom,” she identifies natality as central to the human person. She sees the origin of this understanding in Augustine’s City of God.
Man is free because he is a beginning. . . . ‘Initium ut esset, creatus est homo, ante quem nemo fuit.’ [So that beginnings would be, humans were created, before whom there was no one] In the birth of each man this initial beginning is reaffirmed, because in each instance something new comes into an already existing world. . . . Because he is a beginning, man can begin; to be human and to be free are one and the same. God created man in order to introduce into the world the faculty of beginning: freedom.
Each human is a beginning, an inbreaking of the new. It is this beginning that means that we are marked not only by mortality but also natality. We are thus able to begin, to initiate what has not yet been.
When we speak of the birth of a new person, we are speaking of the birth of an initiator. Arendt writes in The Human Condition that “[t]o act . . . means to take an initiative,” and because “they are initium, newcomers and beginners by birth, men take initiative, are prompted into action.” Despite the weight of history, each person is free to act. Arendt writes that there are no more “glorious” words written than the Gospel’s “a child is born unto us.” For when we speak of birth, we speak not of “the beginning of something, but of somebody, who is a beginner himself.” Natality is beyond genealogy, because natality, the source of action, is “ontologically rooted.” Each person qua being human is new and so capable of newness.
Every day, new people are showing up. We cannot know what to expect of them, except that they must begin anew and differently what we have already begun. Natality is thus the source of plurality. For Arendt, plurality is the essential mark of the political, which is the most human of activities. It is the task of the many, as new, to live together in communities with historic institutions. To live this requires that we accept a vision of plurality. This does not mean diversity in the sense so popular in university marketing programs; rather, it means that each person is a source of originality beyond identity. Such originality grounds human plurality, which “is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.” No genealogy—whether intellectual, cultural, national or racial—can encapsulate the person, because each is new. The task of politics is to keep open this space of plural beginnings.
Arendt was well aware of the many ways politics may stifle natality and plurality. Our temptation is to downplay the former through a categorizing of persons that consequently eliminates the latter. For instance, Marxism downplays the universal category of human in order to emphasize class. In so doing, Marxists, living out the logic of their system, have consistently squelched the plurality of beginnings by oppression of difference, usually by force and murder. In contrast, Arendt saw we are all the same because of our difference, all different because of our sameness. She sought to insist on the intertwining of natality, plurality, and freedom. To maintain this is to maintain the possibility of the new.
The challenge for genealogists is that as we trace origins, family trees, and historical causation, we ought not deny the new. History is not just the continuation of what was before. History is also the origination of what had not been before. If natality means that there are new people showing up all the time, then history is the study of those new people showing up in the past. We need to allow for newness now and in the future. There are voices that say, “That which has been will be again. And that which has been done is that which will be done. There is nothing new under the sun.” This is the voice of the grey-haired who see only the old age of humanity. It is the voice of the old Solomon. It is also the voice of an older Nietzsche who consigns being to eternal recurrence and our response as amor fati. What many, including even Nietzsche, fail to see is that a child is born and something new is always happening.
Nietzsche, when he was younger and perhaps too romantic, wrote “Let us in the face of them [viz. the grey-beards] hold on with our teeth to the rights of our youth and never weary in our youth of defending the future against these iconoclasts who would wreck it.” He is identifying the need to let the new be, to in fact cultivate it. We are still young, still initiators of the new as we stand within traditions of the old. Genealogical work needs to hold on to both the new as what may be and tradition as what we have received. For Arendt, this youth is our natality; it marks us as humans, and not only when we are in our twenties. If we lose track of that, we will ourselves become gray-haired obstructers of the new. Genealogists do not just trace the past. We are students of birth.
