A Politics of Natality

Author(s): JONATHAN SCHELL

Source: Social Research, Vol. 69, No. 2, Hannah Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism":
Fifty Years Later (SUMMER 2002), pp. 461-471
Published by: The New School
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 A Politics
of Natality / BY JONATHAN SCHELL

JljLannah Arendt never directly addressed the nuclear question

in a public work, yet in reflecting on this question, I have always
found her work more suggestive and invaluable than any other
thinker's.

What response is appropriate to the threat of extermination by

nuclear arms and other means of mass destruction that stands at

the center of the dangers of our time? We seem to be called on to

find some equivalent response - the moral equivalent not of war
but extinction. "With word and deed," Arendt wrote, "we insert
ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second
birth, in which we confirm and take on ourselves the naked fact
of our original appearance" (Arendt, 1958: 176). So entirely fit-
ting are these words to the nuclear predicament that one might
think that they were prompted by this danger. For inasmuch as
extinction - the end not of an individual but of the species - is a
second death that, when concretely defined, means the end of
birth, the foundation of a political order that guaranteed the con-
tinuity of life would be a true "second birth" - a rebirth - by which
this second death was defeated. It would be an act of deliberate

rescue counterpoised against universal destruction, a new begin-

ning thrown onto the scales against the end, absolute and eternal,
with which our kind threatens itself. However, Arendt was not
writing about the nuclear predicament. She was writing about the
springs of action in the individual soul. Doesn't this coincidence
suggest that there might be a profound concord between political
action as she conceives it and the concrete tasks that it has fallen
to our time to face?

SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 69, No. 2 (Summer 2002)

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462 SOCIAL RESEARCH

Arendt's work cannot of course be reduced to a single line of

thought; nevertheless, one among many valid ways to read it is as
a protracted, hugely, variegated, unsystemic yet coherent lifelong
investigation into the nature of action. In that reading, we would
find that birth - natality - is the mother of action; that action is
the locus of freedom - and therefore of novelty and renewal -
and also the source of power; that power, a necessary and good
thing, gives life to politics; that political action generates the
"common world," and, when stabilized by the foundation of the
polis, provides an immortal home for otherwise mortal beings. An
essential parallel theme would be her equally protracted polemic
against a contrary view of action, in which the freedom inherent
in action is found to be a curse, condemning human affairs to
irremediable unpredictability and therefore to meaninglessness;
unpredictability can be cured only by rule from above, which
expunges freedom; and rule from above is possible only by force,
freedom's very opposite, which therefore comes to be seen as the
essence of politics.
Central as it is in Arendt's thinking, the connection between
birth and action is not extensively elaborated. (It seems likely that
further elucidation would have been forthcoming in the planned
but unwritten work on the faculty of judgment that was to have
been the concluding volume of her trilogy, The Life of the Mind,
whose first two volumes are Thinking and Willing.) The subject is
first raised at length in the opening pages of The Human Condi-
tion, where we learn that each of the three components of human
activity (the vita activa) - labor, work, and action - "corresponds
to" one or more of the elements of the human condition, which
she enumerates as "life itself, natality, mortality, worldliness, plu-
rality, and the earth." Labor corresponds to life, in the sense of
biological life, which it sustains by producing life's necessities,
above all food. Work, which she distinguishes from labor, corre-
sponds to worldliness, because it is the artifacts of work - build-

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 A POLITICS OF NATALITY 463

ings, works of art, and so forth - that cr

artifice that outlasts the ever-perishing n
responds to plurality and natality. It corr
the fact that humans are many - because
work, is impossible for a solitary being an
human beings in the plural.
All of this is quite straightforward. It is ea
of labor keep people alive; that work - co
builds a physical world that may outlast a
action is possible only among many pe
Robinson Crusoe might be on his island
cian.) The correspondence of action to na
Arendt grants that the relationship is "so
tell us "no more than that we are doomed
being born." Certainly, it is difficult to i
evidence will disclose a connection between freedom and

natality - as if scientists might one day find the gene for f

somewhere on the newly mapped human genome. B
deeper problem with regard to explanations of free
beyond any such evidence or lack of it. This becomes c
we reflect that if a freedom gene were found, it would not
our belief in freedom but destroy it. Explained freedom
longer be freedom. When it comes to freedom, opacity
built in - which of course is one reason that philosophe
demand explanations for things, have so often dislik
denied its existence.

The persuasiveness of political assertions in any case rarely rests

on such proofs. Where is the scientific evidence, for example, for
the rights of man, or equal justice under law, or, for that matter,
the divine right of kings or the dialectic of history? Nothing is
more common in political thought than to argue by analogy - to
seek in the wider background of life, nature, or a divine order, a
grounding, or, as the Chinese put it, a "way of heaven" that, if fol-
lowed in political affairs, will be fruitful. This was the procedure
of the Enlightenment philosophers, who sought to ground

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 464 SOCIAL RESEARCH

human law in natural law, and al

some of the most creative and su
the twentieth century, who, with
their faith in "truth."

What Arendt finds in both birth and action is, above all, that
both are "beginnings" and, as such, bear fruit that is absolutely
novel and unpredictable. For "it is in the nature of a beginning,"
she elucidates, "to carry with itself a measure of complete arbi-
trariness. Not only is it not bound into a reliable chain of cause
and effect, a chain in which each effect immediately turns into
the cause of future developments, the beginning has, as it were,
nothing whatsoever to hold on to; it is as though it came out of
nowhere in time and space" (Arendt, 1965). Just as birth brings
into the world a distinct, new person, unlike anyone who has ever
lived before or ever will live again, so action creates unforeseeable
new combinations and forms in the political world. Birth and
action, in other words, break up the fixed, known patterns of
cause and effect that, if we were to believe some scientific and
metaphysical schools, otherwise seem to rule the processes of
nature and life. In Arendt's words, "action has the closest con-
nection with the human condition of natality; the new beginning
inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the
newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew,
that is, of acting." And acting, so construed, is the seat of freedom
in human life. As Arendt writes, "With the creation of man, the
principle of beginning came into the world itself, which is of
course only another way of saying that the principle of freedom
was created when man was created but not before." At the very
least, Arendt's assertion that through the exercise of our faculty
of freedom in action we can "take on" the fact of our birth is inar-

guable, since, whether or not birth and action are knotted in our
genes, we are certainly capable, when we contemplate doing
something new, of taking heart from the gigantic, indubitable fact
that each of us is something new. As she puts it, "Because they are
initium, newcomers and beginners by virtue of birth, men take ini-

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 A POLITICS OF NATALITY 465

tiative, are prompted into action" (Aren

due appreciation of natality leads us to d
spontaneity is no more embarrassing to hu
fact that men are born - newcomers again
that preceded them in time" (Arendt, 1978
Arendt sharpens her point by drawing a
tion between a faculty for deciding between
choices - the liberum arbitrium of antiquity
ing a fork in the road decides which branch
a restaurant decides which item on the me
the more impressive faculty for initiating
course of action (as when someone writes a
project with others). The latter constitu
observes, quoting Kant, "of spontaneously
successive things or states." Only to this fa
to accord the name freedom. The likeness o
cially strong to birth, the most spectacular
new starting up seemingly out of nothing
experience.
In politics, the capacity to begin something new is exhibited
most clearly, she asserts, in the foundation of bodies politic.
Foundation, like spontaneous action, is a kind of creation ex
nihilo - a circumstance that poses thorny issues for the founders.
Political acts require legitimacy, which are usually derived from
some pre-existing sanction - some mandate, tradition, or article
of absolute faith - yet the act of foundation, because it requires a
total break with the past, obviously lacks anything of this sort to
fall back on. Founders and the institutions they found become
the touchstones of legitimacy for those who follow in their steps,
but who legitimizes the legitimizers? Can they legitimize their
own acts? If so, how, and by what authority? How can they evade
the appearance or the reality of utter arbitrariness - a potential
nightmare in a political context - not to speak of the conflict of
interest inherent in being the judge in one's own case?

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466 SOCIAL RESEARCH

In On Revolution, Arendt sifts thr

proposed for this problem histo
Roman foundation legend, is to fin
political order that is being restore
nal homeland of the founder, Aeneas. A second is to invoke a
deity - a recourse, attempted half-heartedly and futilely by Robe-
spierre and one or two of the American founding fathers. A third
was the American recourse to the constitutional conventions in

the states, conceived as a sort popular mandate after the fact for
the work of the constitutional convention in Philadelphia. A
fourth was the attempt in the French Revolution to separate the
founders of the new political order, the constituant, from its first
stewards, the constitues, by barring the members of the first
French Assembly from holding office in its successor. A fifth was
the belief, embodied in other foundation myths as well as in polit-
ical theory, that whereas the state that had been founded might
be based on freedom, foundation itself necessarily was accom-
plished by force. The virtue of violence in this one circumstance
was that violence makes no pretense to legitimacy, which there-
fore is frankly dispensed with on this one all-important occasion.
Yet the moment of foundation, if Arendt was right, was the
apogee of freedom. Was there no better way to use it than to have
recourse to freedom's opposite and nemesis, force? If so, it
became positively a debacle, or, as Arendt says, a veritable "abyss."

However, if in natality freedom has an origin - not, to be sure,

a cause, but at least a location - then there might be a way out of
the impasse. It would, so to speak, give an orientation to freedom
and mark off limits that it must respect. For like all origins, birth
would define the limits beyond which what has been originated
cannot go without destroying itself. These limits point to a new
fundament from which political action, always in need of a source
of legitimacy outside itself (in order to avoid the arbitrariness that

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 A POLITICS OF NATALITY 467

is the plague of action and power) , would tak

fundament would be the human condition - above all, the condi-
tion of natality, which human action now menaces, and whose
protection should be the first order of business for any politics
worthy of the name. For the task of politics is not, as in earlier
times, to provide a safe home for human life in the house of
nature and nature's law but to provide a safe home for nature in
a human house built of human law. With this resolve, the deepest
of the abysses of freedom - the absolute nothingness of extinc-
tion - closes up, for freedom, we understand, is not arbitrary or
unbounded but does need limits and a proper and circumscribed
place in terrestrial life, in which it is rooted, and toward which it
must not be a mortal peril.
What are these limits, and how are they to be respected? Arendt
arrives at her answer, characteristically, by analyzing the very
nature of action. In The Human Condition she admits that action,
which she has defined as the seat of freedom, has defects in its
own nature. One is its "irreversibility." Unlike the product of
work - say, a building, or a highway - which can always be torn
down, an action, once performed, cannot be unperformed. Every
action that has been taken has been taken forever. Its conse-

quences propagate themselves through the human communi

without limit. Action, she now discovers, seems to fall victim to th
very automatism from which it promised relief. "Nowhere," i
short, "does man appear less free than in those capacities whos
essence is freedom." If in our collective life there were no reme
for the self-defeat of freedom, then it would be "reason enough
turn away with despair from the realm of human affairs and t
hold in contempt the human capacity for freedom, which, by pr
ducing the web of human relationships, seems to entangle its pr
ducer to such an extent that he appears more the victim an
sufferer than the author and doer of what he has done" (Arend
1978: 233). But there is a remedy, she finds. It is forgiveness - "dis-
covered" and explicated by Jesus of Nazareth. Forgiveness over
comes the irreversibility of action and breaks the endless chain
its consequences, releasing the sons from the sins of the father

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468 SOCIAL RESEARCH

For forgiveness, she remarks, follow

vengeance, which "acts in the form
nal trespassing, whereby, far from
quences of the first deed, everyb
process, permitting the chain react
to take its unhindered course." With
to interrupt the inexorable chain o
she further writes, "the process of a
endure throughout time until mank
(Arendt, 1978: 233). To which we ca
bring mankind to an end.
What is striking about this formul
cover in forgiveness, which is an
philosophies of nonviolence, the ver
found in action and birth: namely,
and the capacity to bring forth the ne
action and speech, without the artic
be doomed to swing forever in the e
ing, then without the faculty to un
control at least partially the process
be the victims of an automatic nece
the inexorable laws which, accord
before our time, was supposed to con
acteristic of natural processes." For
the only reaction that does not me
unexpectedly, unconditioned by th
therefore freeing from its consequ
gives and the one who is forgiven"
Forgiveness, in short, plays the sa
action plays in life and nature: it is
this conclusion we seem, as far as t
have chased freedom to its innerm
constant release from what they do
only by constant willingness to c
again can they be trusted with so g
something new."

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 A POLITICS OF NATALITY 469

This twofold derivation of freedom, in w

foundation for action, which is the beare
action turns out to be subject to its own
released from them by forgiveness - in a so
birth that is action - has an obvious resemblance to Gandhi's

understanding of action. Arendt 's conclusion that forgiveness

redeems action from (so to speak) its own sins, and so perfects an
fulfills its promise almost exactly parallels the insistence of th
twentieth century's great advocate of nonviolence, Mohandas K.
Gandhi, that nonviolent action (based on forgiveness) is "supe
rior" to violent action - indeed, "more active" than violence.
Gandhi, we recall, although rightly best known for his advocacy of
nonviolence, placed an even higher priority on action, whether
violent or not. For him, it was only when the obligation to act had
been fully accepted that the obligation to remain violent had any
value. Arendt's assessment of the role of forgiveness likewise par-
allels Gandhi's, although the nuances are somewhat different. For
Arendt, as for Jesus, forgiveness is in itself almost a definite act. In
scripture, the need to define forgiveness as an enactment may
have been especially strong because of the contrary teaching of
the old law, which Jesus was bent on revising. (A considerable por-
tion of Paul's letters likewise wrestles with the issue of the relation

of Jesus' new teaching to the old teaching of the law.)

In Arendt's thinking, it was the fearful automaticity of the con-
sequences of action that played the role that law played in the Old
Testament. In her argument, forgiveness almost retains a tinge of
"re-action," as if to say: forgiveness is the best revenge. In Gandhi's
thinking, on the other hand, forgiveness, as an overt gesture
toward the offender, does not stand out as clearly. Gandhi is
instead concentrated more single-mindedly on the new action of
the doer. For instance, we find no ceremonial episode in which
Gandhi forgives an antagonist, such as Jan Smuts in South Africa
or any of the imperial viceroys in India. Rather, forgiveness seems
merely implicit in his way of acting - a necessary part of persever-
ing (graha) in truth (sat).

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470 SOCIAL RESEARCH

Reading what Arendt has to say abo

to action, it is impossible not to re
regarding the wellsprings of action, in
action seems to have been excluded. This is what he seems to be

saying when he asked if men should "conceive their goals in order

to oblige someone or to resent their action," and answered "If it
is a goal, it must be pursued irrespective of the acts or threats of
others." He spoke in the same vein when he said that "Not only
could swaraj [self-rule] not be given" to Indians, "but rather it had
to be created by them." And that was why, after his conference
with Lord Irwin in London in 1932, he commented that this was
only of secondary importance, for "the true conference is with
ourselves." It was on these grounds, too, that he disliked the con-
cept of independence - it smacked too much of a reaction to oth-
ers, not enough of action starting up out of the conference with
oneself. Here we see in concrete practice a kind of action that
appears to spring directly out of the will of the person, lacking
entirely the reacting component (even in the form of self-con-
scious forgiveness), as if the actor were, for the shortest instant, to
inwardly withdraw from the world in order to prepare something
new to offer it upon his return.
Holy Writ is not a political treatise, yet the Old and the New Tes-
taments as well as subsequent Christian interpretation of them
also seem unmistakably to deal in their own way with the issues of
birth, action, and freedom. In this comparison, the basic obliga-
tion to act in the world corresponds to the Old Testament and the
commitment to act nonviolently corresponds to the New. Much
as, in Gandhi's view, the doctrine of nonviolence did not repeal
the obligation to act (that would have resulted in what he hated
most, apathy or cowardice), the New Testament did not, accord-
ing to Paul, repeal the law of the Old Testament but enlarged
upon it and "fulfilled" it. The two testaments, moreover, each
open with a birth - the Old with the sinner Adam, and the New
with Jesus, who redeems Adam's sin, and all humankind. His non-
violent teaching of forgiveness promises, very logically, the "glad
tidings" of the angels who announce to the shepherds that unto

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 A POLITICS OF NATALITY 471

them a child was born, bringing "peace on e

men." If we follow Arendt, the birth of Ad
of action, bringer of freedom, and the birth
birth of forgiveness and nonviolence, the sa
own doom and, now, ours. This sequence, o
to Christian theology, which taught that
world with Adam as punishment for his
Eden, and was repealed by the birth of Jes
life. Arendt's argument, hewing strictly to
less parallels, in a sort of transmutation, th
In Arendt, too, the forgiveness brought by J
umph of life over death. The crucial diffe
umph is in and of this world, not eternal l
writes, "If left to themselves, human affairs c
of mortality, which is the most certain and th
a life spent between birth and death" (Are
however, because it not only renews the
affairs, brings freedom with it, thwarts th
from mortality - not the irremediable mor
but the new, self-created mortality of the
all else, humankind now requires. Arendt's
associating with freedom and forgiveness a
ity (exactly the thing that extinction men
suggest, to define the human powers that
challenge. For "the life span of man runnin
inevitably carry everything human to ruin an
not for the faculty of interrupting it and
new, a faculty which is inherent in action
reminder that men, though they must die,
to die but to begin" (246).

References

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1958.

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