natality
The two certainties of life are birth and death. Is our fundamental essence one of beginnings or of ends, or both?
Let's first consider a mortality-facing politics. Figures like Heidegger cast humans as "beings-toward-death," whose inevitable demise frames existence. Death is as individual an event as there is. You must face it alone, and it is an absolute limit that cannot be outrun. While recognition of mortality can lead us to live authentic and bold lives, it can equally pull us away from active, worldly, public affairs. Death is the realm of the contemplator, the pessimist.
Or, there are politics that glorify death and martyrdom. Fascism and totalitarianism treat individual humans as superfluous and so destroy our agency, plurality, and dignity. The Hobbesian tradition organizes itself around the fear of violent death. Downstream is selfishness, nativism, patriarchy, and carceral logics.
But what of a birth-facing politics? Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition, argues that our world is perpetually inundated with newcomers. Each birth is the beginning of someone unpredictable. In contrast to labor (biological processes) and work (the creation of things), action is the interdependent engagement among people. We use action to plunge into an uncertain future with boundless and irreversible consequences. We act in a web of relationships among equals, plagued by risk, spontaneity, and serendipity. Politics requires a durable, shared space for living people to speak, act, and build institutions together. We are unique not just in the sense of otherness or distinction, but because of our capacity to begin things. Arendt sees our world as the appearance and departure of "single individuals, unique, unexchangeable, and unrepeatable entities." Birth is the realm of the actor, the optimist.
Two social technologies make the complex and unpredictable dance of action bearable. The first is forgiveness. The past is the past, and it cannot be rewritten. The act of forgiveness frees the transgressor and the victim both from the endless chain reaction of past acts. Vengeance is its inverse, a blind and violent reaction that maintains the status quo. The second technology is the promise, throwing "islands of predictability" into the "ocean of uncertainty." They spawn a new assurance and build collective power.
Forgiveness is faith in another's future self. A promise is faith in your future self offered to another. Both are tools to remedy disappointment, to fortify belief in fellow humans.
I will end with a famous anecdote from the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl:
An elderly doctor was afflicted by severe depression after losing his wife of many years. He could not overcome the grief he felt, for she was everything to him. Frankl asked him, “What would have happened, Doctor, if you had died first, and your wife would have had to survive you?” To which he said: "Oh, for her this would have been terrible; how she would have suffered!” Frankl replied: “You see, Doctor, such a suffering has been spared her, and it was you who have spared her this suffering.” The doctor said nothing but shook his hand and calmly left.
The primary use of this story is to prove humanity's tolerance for meaningful suffering. Yet I also see a change in the man's perspective from a death-facing to a beginnings-facing outlook. In the former, the widower's life has already ended, and he is mournfully lingering in the world without purpose. In the latter, his life has begun anew, having brought meaning to tragedy and by doing so, closing that chapter and transforming your view of the past. By only staring ahead at doom, the many and varied threads of your life merge into one, converging on terminus. Yet looking back towards your own birth and the many beginnings and ends you've lived and weathered since, you can find comfort in your own plurality, your own unrepeatability.