#natality

Whenever something new occurs, it bursts into the context of the predictable process as something unexpected, unpredictable, and ultimately inexplicable—just like a miracle. In other words, every new beginning is by nature a miracle when seen and experienced from the standpoint of the processes it necessarily interrupts. Within the context of processes into which it bursts, the demonstrably real transcendence of each beginning corresponds to the religious transcendence of believing in miracles. In this sense, what we call real is already a web which is woven of earthly, organic, and human realities, but which has come into existence through the addition of infinite improbabilities.

For Arendt, all destructive force, even when it is unavoidable, is in itself anti-political: what it destroys is not only our lives but also the world that lies between our lives and makes them human. A human and humanizing world is not manufactured and no part of it that has been destroyed can ever be replaced. To Arendt, the world is neither a natural product nor the creation of God; it can only appear through politics, which in its broadest sense she understands as the set of conditions under which men and women in their plurality, in their absolute distinctness from each other, live together and approach each other to speak in a freedom that only they can grant and guarantee each other…Arendt [also] writes of a metaphoric desert-world, with life-giving oases of philosophy and art, of love and friendship. These oases are subject to ruin by those who attempt to adjust themselves to the conditions of desert-life, as well as by those who attempt to escape from the desert into the oases. In both cases the desert-world encroaches upon and devastates the oases of their private lives. The desert is a metaphor that ought not to be taken literally as a wasteland, or wasted land, envisioned as the final product of unleashed industrial expansion that depletes the earth’s natural resources, pollutes its oceans, warms its atmosphere, and destroys its capacity to nourish life. The desert is a metaphor for our increasing loss of the world, by which Arendt means our ‘twofold flight from the earth into the universe and from the world into the self.’ She is not thinking, as she does elsewhere in these pages, of a catastrophe in whose aftermath only the ‘vestiges’ of a destroyed civilization would remain. That could happen quickly, as the result of thermonuclear war or a new totalitarian movement rising from the conditions of the desert that are indeed most propitious to it. The desert is a metaphor for something that already exists, and in the world’s constant need of renewal, of being ‘begun anew,’ always exists. So far from being caused by public political life, the desert is the result of its absence…Though the desert is not [the evil that is the reduction of plural human beings to one single massed man, as under Nazism or Bolshevism], today, insofar as we have become increasingly estranged from the public world, we are well positioned to fall into evil as into hell; into empty interminate space, where nothing, not even the desert, surrounds us, and where there is nothing to individuate us, to either relate or separate us. This is our predicament, in which only the roots we are free to strike, providing we have the courage to endure the conditions of the desert, can make a new beginning. In analogy to the way trees in the natural world reclaim arid land by sinking their roots deep into the earth, new beginnings can still transform the desert into a human world. The odds against that happening are overwhelming, yet the ‘miracle’ of action is ontologically rooted in humankind, not as a unique species but as a plurality of unique beginnings. The promise inherent in human plurality provides perhaps the only answer to Arendt’s chilling question: ‘Why is there anybody at all and not rather nobody?’

With word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second birth, in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our original physical appearance. This insertion is not forced upon us by necessity, like labor, and it is not prompted by utility, like work. It may be stimulated by the presence of others whose~company we may wish to join, but it is never conditioned by them; its impulse springs from the beginning which came into the world when we were born.

Word of the Day #23

Perubahan angka kelahiran memiliki pengaruh yang signifikan terhadap kehidupan masyarakat dalam berbagai aspek. Berikut adalah beberapa dampak yang mungkin terjadi: