Birth and Natality in Hannah Arendt

Abstract

In the reflections of Hannah Arendt the theme of birth enjoys privileged status, above all in respect to the theories of action and politics, which make up a sector central to the thought of this authoress, who wanted to establish her professional competency precisely in that field. The centrality of this theme can be considered by now a given,1 and not only in the feminist studies that focused on it first,2 as they identified there a way of doing philosophy that was not homologated to the canons of the logocentric tradition.3 Given how birth recurs in Arendt’s works, one can, however, speak of it on the same level as a dominant theme, inasmuch as the multiple problems of politics, existence, Judaism, education, etc., that our authoress addresses all reconnect sooner or later to birth. An example is her constant reference to Augustine as the author who most emphasized the specifically innovative character of birth. The continuity of her reference to Augustinian thought, present from her PhD thesis4 to The Life of the Mind,5 is indicative of how the human capacity to be an initium, in the precisely causal and not only temporal sense, represents for this authoress the focus of a constellation of problems inherent in the human condition. And in fact, it is in Active Life: The Human Condition — written in close relationship to the thought of Heidegger, her first “professor,”6 and published in the mid-1950’s7 by when she had finalized her detachment from the forms of currently reigning socialization — that, undertaking a renewed comparison with the question of existence, Arendt fully explicates the topic of natality. While she criticizes the