It is in the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before.

Hannah Arendt

In Natality, Jennifer Banks, Senior Executive Editor for Religion and the Humanities at Yale University Press, invites the reader to attend to birth—“humanity’s greatest underexplored subject.” She sketches traditions in which death is central: Christianity, Stoicism, and Buddhism. We have forgotten, Banks says, to attend to birth.

Death has been humanity’s central defining experience, its deepest existential theme, more authoritative somehow than birth, and certainly more final. Birth, meanwhile, is what recedes into a hazy background, slipping back past the limits of memory, existing in that forgotten realm where uteruses, blood, sex, pain, pleasure, and infancy constellate.

Banks’ inquiry into birth begins in her own experience—or, in the questions that arise with her experience. “Fresh from the rapture, alive with birth’s dizzying intensities,” she realized, “I wasn’t the person I had been.” Somehow different because of her own experience, “I thought the common things that many new mothers think after giving birth: Why did no one tell me what this was like? Why did no one prepare me? Where was birth in all those books I’ve read so voraciously since childhood?” 

Banks’ questions are common to women in a society whose members understand their society as individualized, atomized, and rational; a society in which women largely do not hand on knowledge or rituals around birth. It is common, in a society like ours, for mothers and fathers, including those who have achieved an uncommon amount of formal schooling, to arrive at the first pangs of labor with little understanding of the science or significance of birth or the new world it creates. What is most impressive about Banks’ response to this moment is her ability to articulate for a wider audience the questions that arise in proximity to birth, but which are easy to lose in the quest for survival in milky newborn days of sleeplessness and wonder.

To orient her inquiry, Banks surveys the landscape of pro-natalists (have more children) and anti-natalists (don’t have more children). Banks listens to the pain of anti-birth feminists, whom she ultimately sees as upholders of patriarchy because they endorse views that “essentialized women according to a set of often oppressive ideas about gender.” She notices current statistics that reflect historically low birthrates, with the UK, the US, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan leading the decline. While she appreciates that lower birth rates might reflect longer lifespans or choices, Banks also sees cause for concern: she links lower birth rates with other, related phenomena such as deaths of despair, frayed social safety nets, and eroding democratic norms. “These phenomena all point to a profound isolation at the heart of modern life, a pulling back from a shared, embodied, and committed life with other people.” Banks affirms the role that criticisms of birth play in fostering reform. Her concern, however, is that “minimizing birth means diminishing one of the greatest powers humans have had: the creation and sustenance of life itself, the bringing forth of a next generation that might live better, imagine more, suffer less, and create a more lasting world.”

Banks addresses the last of her three questions first: “Where was birth in all those books I’ve read so voraciously since childhood?” She gathers that birth rarely makes it into our shared discourse for several reasons: it’s ineffable, it’s bloody, it’s too sexual, it’s too powerful, it’s potentially patriarchal. 

Bank’s first two questions—”Why did no one tell me what this was like? Why did no one prepare me?”—raise further questions. Namely, what is there to tell? What do we, members of a technologically advanced, individualistic society, need to know that we don’t know? What kind of wisdom could guide not only birthing mothers, but all of us who have been born and who encounter birth? Who can tell us, and how?

Natality aims to present stories of poets, novelists, philosophers, activists, and political theorists who “can help us rediscover birth in our midst, imagine how it relates to the life of our societies, and challenge us to lean into the future against which our backs are pressed so hard and perilously.” The book aspires to steer away from “the culture war’s heated polarized debates” around birth, toward a vision drawn from “those who intuit freedom in birth, not freedom from birth.” 

Banks takes as her starting point Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality. Bank’s epigraph comes from Arendt’s 1954 work, The Human Condition: “The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality.” As Banks describes Arendt’s concept, 

Natality conveys the idea that birth as a beginning represents (in Arendt’s words) “the supreme capacity of man,” a capacity inherent in human life that is the “miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin.” 

Banks argues that Arendt’s central insight is “that it is not enlightened wisdom to doubt human natality.” To be blind to birth, or thoughtless in the face of its significance, is “a sign, rather, that one is ripe for totalitarian control.” 

For Banks, natality as a concept highlights our common ground over and against our political polarization because we were all born. Consequently, the idea of natality allows us to explore birth not as grounds for political debates but as a human phenomenon. 

Subsequent chapters explore an author’s biography in connection with a specific theme: Arendt’s development of natality, Friedrich Nietzsche’s frustrations with birth and its creative and “unclean” elements, Mary Wollstonecraft’s exploration of birth’s vulnerability and strength, and Mary Shelley’s study of her mother’s works, with her own precarious efforts to harmonize love and loss, freedom and stability. Later chapters examine Sojourner Truth’s insights into the relationship between birth and maternity; Adrienne Rich’s painful effort to grapple with the monotony of mid-century suburban motherhood; and Toni Morrison’s conviction that “What you do to children matters. And they might never forget it.”

What Banks seeks to illustrate through these authors’ lives is the way in which birth “challenges us with otherness, with the putting aside of oneself to make room for another person, and with the challenges of difference and plurality.”

Strengths & Tensions

Natality’s most valuable contribution is the thought experiment that frames the work: What if philosophy starts with natality instead of mortality? What if we attended to birth with the same gravity that we, at our best, attend to death? What if our horizon encompassed natality and mortality? 

Banks sees that Arendt’s concept of natality can elevate the lived experience of birth as well as the story of human freedom. For Arendt, natality is the principle of freedom. Drawing on Augustine, Arendt writes in The Human Condition that creation (and birth) are “not the beginning of something but of somebody, who is a beginner himself.” Consequently, “The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable.” A community whose members are blind to our nature as beginners who can begin things is a community vulnerable to domination. Banks has done valuable work in drawing that insight into view to benefit personal reflection as well as public discourse.

Jennifer Banks’ key insight here is that an aversion to birth reveals an aversion to the other—and that cultivating an openness to birth is a way to learn to make room for others in our intimate as well as our broader communities. With Arendt, Banks affirms natality as our capacity for freedom. For Arendt, an approach that begins with natality reminds us that we have the capacity to act—to do the unexpected, to begin something new.

Meanwhile, Natality might get further along “toward a philosophy of birth,” as the subtitle says, if it more carefully defined the relationship between natality and birth. The terms are sometimes distinct, sometimes interchangeable.

To move toward a philosophy of birth is to seek wisdom that illuminates humanizing ways to relate to birth. Each chapter in Natality excavates the role of birth in a specific person’s life, starting with Arendt and closing with Toni Morrison. But what insights should we draw from these stories? How do these authors belong together, and what does each offer to the reader or to our society? Through intimate accounts of abandonment, unreconciled desire, and vulnerability, each chapter points to the importance of the key ideas Arendt considers in relation to natality, or our capacity for action—namely, forgiveness and promise. 

For Arendt, the capacity to act generates two troubling consequences. First, action is irrevocable. Second, action creates unpredictability. Arendt proposes that we respond to the irrevocable nature of action with forgiveness, which she understands as the only reaction that has the character of action—namely, the power to begin something new. Arendt also proposes that we meet unpredictability with promise—in her image, our capacity to make commitments across time is a way to create islands of certainty in the sea of uncertainty that follows action. While Natality itself stops short of exploring these ideas, Hannah Arendt, Sojourner Truth, and Toni Morrison emerge as exemplars—women whose thoughts and lives might illuminate personal experience as well as public discourse about birth. In their own ways, Arendt, Truth, and Morrison model the power of promise, which enables one person to commit to another, as well as forgiveness, which frees both the offender and the offended from being indefinitely chained to an action.

I return to the questions Banks’ Introduction raises for me: What is there to tell? What do we, members of a technologically advanced, individualistic society, need to know that we don’t know? Who can tell us, and how? Many of our political debates rise from deep, pre-political anxieties: a desire for control, fear of what we cannot predict, fear of suffering, that old question about whether it’s better to love and lose or to never have loved at all. Banks’ aim is to move toward a vision of freedom in birth, not freedom from birth. Banks’ approach to the authors she surveys invites the reader to reflect on why birth is good, or why the suffering that attends birth and the new world it creates is significant or worthwhile. For Banks, following Arendt, each birth brings a new beginner, a person capable of doing something unpredictable. In future work, Banks could productively continue to develop why freedom in birth is more humanizing—better for our flourishing—than freedom from birth. The threads in Natality indicate that we are the kinds of creatures for whom an attempt to escape the unpredictability and newness birth brings would also constitute an attempt to escape our own freedom. 

It is worth stepping back from hot political controversies to examine birth. And Banks uses the concept of natality effectively for that purpose. Whatever wisdom we gain from stepping back should shed light on how to live in the light of the fact of our own births. What we gain should illuminate how we relate to the human births we encounter in our lives. At the same time, whatever wisdom we gain should shed light on ethical questions, old or new, that attend birth: technologies related to conception, abortion, surrogacy, genetic selection or manipulation, and care for disease and disability in babies before birth. Before these are political questions, they are human questions because we are all vulnerable and we are all born into what Arendt calls “the web of relationships.”

Jennifer Banks rightly affirms that Arendt’s concept of natality is important for everyone, biological parents or not: Arendt challenges us to accept our agency, the possibility of the new, the insight that we’re not born to die but to live. For Arendt, our world is always old and new. It always needs people who can renew shared institutions and face a new world. Banks lays out questions that, if we follow them, might uncover wisdom that can inform mundane practice and policy alike to help us live well in such a world.