Natality

Natality enters the depth-psychology concordance primarily through the philosophical architecture of Hannah Arendt, whose concept — developed across The Human Condition, the Origins of Totalitarianism, and her retrospective revisions of the Augustine dissertation — treats birth not as a biological fact but as the ontological ground of human freedom, novelty, and political action. The passages assembled here trace the genealogy of Arendt’s thinking: the concept’s emergence in the 1950s rather than in her early theological work, its Augustinian substrate (‘initium ergo ut esset, creatus est homo’), and its structural opposition to mortality as the twin ‘supreme events’ defining linear human time. For depth psychology the concept gains resonance through its convergence with archetypal images of the divine child, the virgin birth, the cosmic Nativity, and the hero’s miraculous origin — all of which Edinger, Rank, Campbell, and Neumann read as projections of the psyche’s own generative capacity. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological gloss — that birth cannot appear to consciousness as an experience of its own — introduces an irreducible pre-personal horizon that complements Arendt’s political emphasis. Together these voices establish natality as the site where philosophical anthropology, depth-psychological symbolism, and phenomenological analysis converge on the question of what it means for something genuinely new to enter the world.

In the library 13 passages

it is only because of natality, she continues, that the realm of human affairs yields more than a chronicle of ruin and futility: The life-span of man running toward death would inevitably carry everything human to ruin and destruction, if it were not for the faculty of interrupting it and beginning something new

Arendt’s central claim that natality — the capacity for new beginning inherent in the fact of birth — is the sole counterforce to the mortal trajectory that would otherwise reduce human history to futility.

Hannah, Barbara, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981thesis

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natality, Arendt’s concept of, 5 ‘beginning’ concept linked to, 66–7 forgiveness and, 53–6 historical origins of Arendt’s thought concerning, 41 human condition and, 68–9 in Human Condition (Arendt), 50–7 influence of Augustine’s work on, 39–42

A comprehensive index entry mapping the full structural role of natality in Arendt’s thought, linking it to beginning, forgiveness, the human condition, and its Augustinian origins.

Hannah, Barbara, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981thesis

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the concept of natality first emerges in Arendt’s work only in the 1950s. It belongs to an understanding of human freedom that she first arrived at only after she had written The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Establishes the precise historical moment of natality’s emergence in Arendt’s corpus, correcting the myth that the concept is present in the early Augustine dissertation.

Hannah, Barbara, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981thesis

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to call natality in the sense of birth a ‘condition’ of beginning would be to say that birth is the fundamental phenomenon on the basis of which this difference becomes meaningful: It is that in virtue of which the actuality of events acquires its weight.

Argues that natality functions as the ontological condition that lends weight and irreducibility to every event, grounding the very experience of temporal difference and new beginning.

Hannah, Barbara, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981thesis

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‘The miracle of freedom is inherent in . . . [an] ability to make a beginning, which itself is inherent in the fact that every human being, simply by being born into a world that was there before him and will be there after him, is himself a new beginning’

Links natality directly to the miracle of political freedom: physical birth is the metaphysical warrant for each human being’s status as an irreducible new beginning in the world.

Hannah, Barbara, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981thesis

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a kind of unexpectedness and novelty – which Arendt immediately equates with archê and ‘beginning,’ and ties not just to the activity of the historian but also to political science and political action – is a feature of all events

Extends the natality principle beyond individual birth to all events, arguing that every occurrence carries an ineliminable residue of novelty that exceeds foresight or intention.

Hannah, Barbara, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting

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‘God chose to create one individual for the propagation of many,’ Augustine writes in City of God, ‘so that men should thus be admonished to preserve unity among their whole multitude.’

Traces Arendt’s natality concept to its Augustinian source in the theological doctrine of a single origin for humanity, which she later reframes as the philosophical ground of human plurality.

Hannah, Barbara, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting

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I can apprehend myself only as ‘already born’ and ‘still alive’ — I can apprehend my birth and my death only as prepersonal horizons: I know that people are born and die, but I cannot know my own birth and death.

Phenomenologically establishes that birth constitutes an irreducible pre-personal horizon of existence, a limit of first-person consciousness that cannot be experienced from within yet conditions all experience.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting

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she brought forth her first born son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.

Situates the Christian Nativity within Rank’s comparative study of hero-birth myths, where marginality and displacement at the moment of birth signify the hero’s exceptional, world-transforming origin.

Rank, Otto, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, 1909supporting

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A purely hectic rush produces nothing new. It reproduces and accelerates what is already available.

Indirectly illuminates the conditions under which natality’s generative potential is suppressed: hyperactive acceleration forecloses the contemplative space in which genuine novelty can arise.

Han, Byung-Chul, The Burnout Society, 2010aside

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