Hannah Arendt, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Natality is the philosophical name I gave to what is perhaps the most fundamental condition of human existence: the fact that we are born. Not merely that we arrive biologically — though that is where the concept is rooted — but that each birth introduces into the world a being who is himself a beginner, someone for whom the principle of beginning is not an abstract idea but an ontological endowment.1
The insight came to me first through Augustine, whose Latin I kept returning to across decades of work: Initium ut esset, creatus est homo, ante quem nemo fuit — that a beginning be made, man was created, before whom no one was.2 Augustine meant something theological; I drew from it something political. What he saw as God's gift of freedom, I read as the structural condition that makes action — genuine political action, the beginning of something new among equals — possible at all.
Without natality, there is no freedom; without freedom, the public realm disappears entirely.3 The new always arrives against overwhelming odds. From the standpoint of statistical probability, from the standpoint of the automatic processes that seem to govern the world's course, every genuine beginning looks like a miracle — the infinite improbability that nevertheless occurs.4
This is not mysticism; it is a phenomenological observation. Action, seen from within the web of causal necessity, is precisely what cannot have been predicted from whatever came before.5 Each person who is born is unique, and with that uniqueness something enters the world that was never there before — which is why the unexpected can always be expected from human beings, why history is never simply the continuation of its own momentum.6
What natality does philosophically is challenge the tradition's obsession with mortality. Heidegger made death the spring of authentic existence; I insisted that birth is equally, and perhaps more fundamentally, constitutive of what we are.7 The life span running toward death would carry everything human to ruin if it were not for the faculty of interrupting that movement — beginning something new, which is what action is and what birth makes possible.8
The political meaning of this is direct: even under conditions of totalitarianism, even at the end of historical catastrophe, new beginnings remain possible. Every end in history contains a new beginning as its promise.9 And action is not merely one faculty among others. No other human ability — not reason, not consciousness — distinguishes us so radically from all animal species as the capacity to act, to begin something genuinely new.10
The biological cycle of birth and death, taken alone, is not creative in any meaningful sense; begetting and dying are phases of the same recurring natural process, which holds all living things as though spellbound.11 What breaks that spell is natality in the political sense — the capacity, rooted in the bare fact of having been born, to introduce into the world something that was not there before.
The most succinct expression of this I ever found was not philosophical but scriptural: A child has been born unto us. That announcement, which the Gospels called glad tidings, captures what natality means for human affairs — the faith and hope that only the experience of this capacity can bestow, and that Greek antiquity, for all its political genius, never quite managed to think.12
This beginning is not the same as the beginning of the world; it is not the beginning of something but of somebody, who is a beginner himself. With the creation of man, the principle of beginning came into the world itself, which, of course, is only another way of saying that the principle of freedom was created when man was created but not before.The Human Condition, p. 146
Arendt returned repeatedly to the key concept of natality, often citing the Latin text from The City of God (XII, 20) that inspired her interpretation: 'Initium ut esset, creatus est homo, ante quem nemo fuit'Love and Saint Augustine, pp. 137–138
Without freedom and its ground in natality, there is no human action in the world, and the political realm ('the public space') disappears entirely.Love and Saint Augustine, pp. 137–138
The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.The Human Condition, p. 146
It is in the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. This character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings and in all origins.The Human Condition, p. 146
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. And this again is possible only because each man is unique, so that with each birth something uniquely new comes into the world.The Human Condition, p. 146
Augustine's emphasis on 'entering the world through birth' as the model of human creativity and the precondition for freedom enables Arendt to challenge Heidegger's notion of 'death or mortality' as the spring of action.Love and Saint Augustine, p. 137
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, a faculty which is inherent in action like an ever-present reminder that men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.The Human Condition, pp. 200–201
But there also remains the truth that every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning; this beginning is the promise, the only 'message' that the end can ever produce.Love and Saint Augustine, pp. 137–138
No other faculty except language, neither reason nor consciousness, distinguishes us so radically from all animal species. To act and to begin are not the same, but they are closely interconnected.III, pp. 103–104
To beget and to give birth are no more creative than to die is annihilating; they are but different phases of the same, ever-recurring cycle in which all living things are held as though they were spellbound.III, pp. 103–104
It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their 'glad tidings': 'A child has been born unto us.'The Human Condition, pp. 200–201