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Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth
An exhilarating exploration of natality , a much-needed counterpoint to mortality, drawing on the insights of brilliant writers and thinkers. Birth is one of the most fraught and polarized issues of our time, at the center of debates on abortion, gender, work, and medicine. But birth is not solely an issue; it is a fundamental part of the human condition, and, alongside death, the most consequential event in human life. Yet it remains dramatically unexplored. Although we have long intellectual traditions of wrestling with mortality, few have ever heard of natality , the term political theorist Hannah Arendt used to describe birth’s active role in our lives. In this ambitious, revelatory book, Jennifer Banks begins with Arendt’s definition of natality as the “miracle that saves the world” to develop an expansive framework for birth’s philosophical, political, spiritual, and aesthetic significance. Banks focuses on seven renowned western thinkers―Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Sojourner Truth, Adrienne Rich, and Toni Morrison―to reveal a provocative countertradition of birth. She narrates these writers’ own experiences alongside the generative ways they contended with natality in their work. Passionately intelligent and wide-ranging, Natality invites readers to attend to birth as a challenging and life-affirming reminder of our shared humanity and our capacity for creative renewal.
272 pages, Hardcover
Published May 2, 2023
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April 8, 2024
This was a bit different than I was expecting, but went into it mostly blindly.
The chapters on Hannah Arendt and Mary Wollstonecraft (and her daughter Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley) were the most intriguing to me — especially as I found Erika Bachiochi's book "The Rights Of Women" excellent for getting familiar with Wollstonecraft's philosophies but wasn't meant to be a full biography. This filled in some much-needed background, and honestly it was tragic. But so were all the vignettes in various ways. The theories behind her daughter's writing of Frankenstein are something I'll not soon forget, either.
But ultimately, I was fascinated by her premise that death is focused on *so* intensely (for good reason) while the concept of birth is hardly given its due. It's more a fact we take for granted and move along, but this puts some literal flesh on ideas surrounding birth.
The chapters on Hannah Arendt and Mary Wollstonecraft (and her daughter Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley) were the most intriguing to me — especially as I found Erika Bachiochi's book "The Rights Of Women" excellent for getting familiar with Wollstonecraft's philosophies but wasn't meant to be a full biography. This filled in some much-needed background, and honestly it was tragic. But so were all the vignettes in various ways. The theories behind her daughter's writing of Frankenstein are something I'll not soon forget, either.
But ultimately, I was fascinated by her premise that death is focused on *so* intensely (for good reason) while the concept of birth is hardly given its due. It's more a fact we take for granted and move along, but this puts some literal flesh on ideas surrounding birth.
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June 12, 2023Three months ago, I read a book on Anti-Natalism by David Benetar. So you can imagine my excitement when I saw this book available for pre-order just a few days later. Now here we are.I was expecting a book with a philosophical exploration of a dramatically unexplored subject, according to the book’s description. There is no philosophy of birth in this book. There are stories of women who gave birth. There are mini profiles of seven people (6 women and 1 man) who wrote (minutely and tangentially) about birth. But there is no philosophy of birth.
April 27, 2024
Banks gives very interesting bios of several thinkers and their thoughts about birth. However, I expected Banks to conclude by pulling together threads from these various thinkers into something of her own philosophy, giving her readers a vision for what she thinks a philosophy of birth could or should be. It’s popular in academia to say what literally anyone else thinks but yourself. (I went to Yale, where Banks works, for grad school. I know this.) But in reading these thinkers and in thinking deeply on the topic for some time, Banks herself has the credibility to give her readers her own thoughts. I wish she would have. If she writes a second book with her own ideas on a philosophy of birth, I would read it. She should.
April 4, 2025
Arendt called natality "the miracle that saves the world." "Because we all were born, Arendt believed, we are always all capable of beginning again, of starting something new through each human action - the most prized of capabilities, in Arendt's estimation.
9 - Arendt understood the biological realm as separate from culture and politics - which is so weird, and obviously wrong. She's such a rich and also limited thinker. "In the world today, celebrating birth can seem like an oblivious denial of just how dire our political, social, and ecological reality is. But Arendt saw birth and our engagement with it as a deep, direct encounter with reality in all its materiality and brutality, rather than as an evasion of it. What she detected in various totalitarian movements was people's belief in their own 'cyncial "realism,"' a conviction that their vague, expansive hatred - of the world and of other people was based on a realist reckoning with the world, when in fact it merely expressed their complete alienation from reality. It's a stupid cynicism, she believed, that denies birth's creative capacities - a cynicism that suggests one knows less, not more, about reality and that tries to masks a deeper bafflement. Totalitarian leaders, she wrote, know neither birth nor death and 'do not care whether they themselves are alive or dead, if they ever lived or never were born.' They take power when their subjects stop caring too."
"Totalitarianism thrives, she continued, in conditions where people are profoundly isolated from one another and 'when the most elementary form of human creativity, which is the capacity to add something of one's own to the common world, is destroyed.' Each new thing we add to the world is another birth; our having been born is what guarantees usuthe ability to act, to work as agents in our societies. Once that creativity, as she defined it - birth, politics, action, people coming together to create new lives and new realities - had been completley extinguished, you had a mass society of atomized individuals who could be completely codrced into doing anything their leaders ordered. They had lost touch with reality, a reality that included the fact that they had all once been born and that this birth was evidence of their inherent, miraculous creativity. 'Ideologies,' she wrote, 'are never interested in the miracle of being." (10).
"So much of who we are is mysteriously given to us at birth, she believed: our 'mere existence' and the fact of our inequality. We aren't all born the same. Biological birth isn't democratic or equalizing: it delivers us into the 'abstract nakedness of being nothing but human,' a vulnerable state taht can be related to only through friendship, sympathy, or love. This kind of love, she'd later write, says, 'I want you to be,' without being able to give any particular reasons for such supreme and unsurpassable affirmation." (source seems to be uncited, though earlier quote is in Origins of Totalitarianism). Yes! This was my own experience or first overwhelming feeling of having a child - that I wanted him to be, and to keep on being.
"Arendt witnessed [in Gurs], over the five weeks of her internment, her fellow captives' wild fluctuations between suicidal despair and what she called 'a violent courage for life.' (We Refugees) To survive the experience, many turned from the immediate terror of their situation, and that turn away from life as it was in the present into a remembered past or a hoped-for future was, in her mind, a disastrous betrayal of their humanity. In hope 'the soul overleaps reality,' she'd later write, and in fear it 'shrinks back from it.' As Samantha Rose Hill has argued, Arendt saw hope as a'a dangerous barrier to acting courageously in dark times.'" (38).
Origins opens by saying "The past was irretrievable, and the future was entirely unpredictable." (40). Sees the shock of "the deadly convergence of anti-Semitism, racism, alienation, resentment, imperialism, nationalism, displacement, a crisis of political legitmacy, and the rapid technological chnage that spurred all these forward" along with "the gratitude she expresses for teh historic apocalypse she has just lived through in that it brought to the surface and made undeniable streams taht had run subterranean below European life for millenia. The Holocaust was not a freak of human history, some wild, twentieth-century, German exception to human thought and experience, she argued. The situation was actually much worse. The Holocaust was a consequence of a death drive that ran deep through Western societies, one that had propelled humanity into a fruitless, barren place. Thought and experience had long ago parted ways, creating the conditions for radically distorted ideas about reality to take root in people's minds and setting the stage for a modernity in which people were alienated from one another. Locked in their own privacy, flying into their inner selves, they had lost faith in their ability to transform their worlds and to create new, plural realities through their actions and their speech. People survived in modernity only by setting their gaze elsewhere, outside the world into ideal abstractions or into some immaterial, heavenly hereafter." (41). Humans caught between omnipotence and powerlessness, "bred to be either an executioner or a victim."
"Birth confounds the binary. It is an experience of neither mastery nor powerlessness; it confronts us with our embodied, earthly creativity, with what we can control and with what we simply cannot control." (41).
Mary Wollstonecraft: "She came to see that her passionate commitment to Imlay and to her child was not a violation of her ideas about female emancipation; they were simply the painfully lived, experiential realization of what she'd argued all along: that we are ardently bound to other people, that i tis a sign of perfect reason to take affectionate care of the people we are responsible for.
"When her younger sister Bess married, she had written that "I will not marry, for I don't want to be tied to this nasty world." But she was beginning to appreciate how there really wasn't an alternative to being tied to this nasty world. the world might be nasty, but it's where we're born and where we'll live out our days. We cannot untie ourselves from this difficult world, as we have no other world to claim. As she matured personally and intellectually, she articulated a creed that, Virginia Woolf believed, was 'fitted to meet the sordid misery of real human life.'" (92).
Sojourner Truth and theology: "In Eve she saw a woman's earth-shatterin gand world-re-creating agency. Women were actors capable of changing their worlds." If Jesus came into the world solely through God who created him and Mary who birthed him, "Man, where is your part?' In that one sentence, she overturned the patriarchal, theological tradition she was heir to, one based on the passing of divine power from a heavnly father to a savior son. She saw a woman's birthing as cosmically significant. If gestational language had been key to the 'world-making and wolrd-breaking capacities of racial slavery," as Hartman argues, here we see a variation on that gestational language being used by a former slave for liberatory purposes." (140)
"Women's procreative, bodily strength was both an oppressive stereotype and a liberatory resource for early members of the women's movement . . . After a speech she made in 1858 in Indiana. After she spoke, a pro-slavery group of men accused her of being a man and challenged her to bare her breast to the women in the audience, to give bodily proof of her womanhood. Truth reportedly didn't hesitate; without any sense of shame, she bared her breast to her audience and 'told them that her breasts had suckled many a white babe . . . that some of those white babies had grown to man's estate." Those white babies who had suckled her colored breasts were, she told them, more manly than her accusers. She disrobed not to her shame, but to their shame. As she disrobed, she asked them if they too wanted to suck" (142)
Truth, Wollstonecraft, and Shelley all understand that someone needs to do the nurturing, and if it's not mothers, it will be servants from a differnt class. The problem isn't nurture itself, it's that nurture isn't shared equally by all. Twentieth century black feminists make the same argument, which "often come as a surprise to those who see black motherhood as an intrinsically oppressive state" (143).
Rich believed nuclear family, buit on possession "could work as a negation of the world we share in common with other people. The family, as a unit, could be individualistic and competitive with other families, rather than cooperative." B/c of Roman law, a man's family was his property. "The concept of motherhood Rich was trying to dismantle had developed at 'this crossroads of seual possession, property ownership, and the desire to transcend death.'" (165)
Critiqued Arendt for being product of male notions of philosophy: "Politics was, for Arendt, where we step out from our personal and private lives, from our individual homes and the labor we perform there, and where we embark on the project of our plural existence." Which doesn't work if you're trapped in a suburban home with the kids. (148)
Adrienne Rich born in 1929 to a Baltimore physician and musician. Raised by a tyrannical father after age 4, won the Yale Younger Poets prize (selected by Auden) and married. "Birth radicalized her, brought her down to her root, the source of her being."
One summer was able to be alone with the boys for a summer in Vermont, where they threw out schedules, lived half wild, washed in the hose, and the boys fell asleep at night while she stayed up writing and reading. "She was an impatient mother, she confessed. She felt that the demands of caring for her sons were eating away at her, stymieing her, but at the same time she passionately loved those three small bodies, which astounded her with their 'beauty, humor, and physical affection.' She saw them not as the heirs of patriarchy but as the 'sweet flesh of infants, the delicate insistency of exploring bodies, the purity of concentration, grief, or joy which exists undilute din young children'" (160). She got herself an apartment to have some space, though she told her family she wasn't leaving them. Several weeks later her husband killed himself. She raised the teenagers alone, haphazardly, between various teaching jobs and houses.
How have I never heard of Of Womaan Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution????? Birth "seubert[s] the 'deep fatalistic pessimisim as to the possibilities of change' "She saw within birth the relational fertile energy of creation itself. "Every infant born is testimony to the intricacy and breadth of possibilities inherent in humanity (163).
"Toni Morrison's experiences giving birth spurred her creatively forward, inspiring her to write. They returned her to the community she had been born into, to the setting of her own birth and to the theme of birth more generally. birth would be integral to her artistic vision, both conceptually and narratively" (183)
Angela Davis argued that black women did not see Roe as a step toward liberation, but "a reminder of the dire conditions that drove many women to abortion, and teh ruing did nothing to fundamentally change those conditions." Plus the history of extortionate abortion for profit and forced abortions and sterilizations. (191).
Alice Walker published womanist book/poetry: feminism largely a movement of white women for women's rights and equality, womanist were mostly black women "committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female . . . womanists are grown-up, responsible, in charge, capable" (192-3).
And I did not know about Lucille Clifton's poetic testaments to birth, poems to uterus and period "about mothers and abortions, the unborn and living children" (193)
Garner's maternal love "greater than the desire simply to preserve life." Arendt also saw "Politics is never for the sake of life" (195) (about p. 37 of The Human Condition
9 - Arendt understood the biological realm as separate from culture and politics - which is so weird, and obviously wrong. She's such a rich and also limited thinker. "In the world today, celebrating birth can seem like an oblivious denial of just how dire our political, social, and ecological reality is. But Arendt saw birth and our engagement with it as a deep, direct encounter with reality in all its materiality and brutality, rather than as an evasion of it. What she detected in various totalitarian movements was people's belief in their own 'cyncial "realism,"' a conviction that their vague, expansive hatred - of the world and of other people was based on a realist reckoning with the world, when in fact it merely expressed their complete alienation from reality. It's a stupid cynicism, she believed, that denies birth's creative capacities - a cynicism that suggests one knows less, not more, about reality and that tries to masks a deeper bafflement. Totalitarian leaders, she wrote, know neither birth nor death and 'do not care whether they themselves are alive or dead, if they ever lived or never were born.' They take power when their subjects stop caring too."
"Totalitarianism thrives, she continued, in conditions where people are profoundly isolated from one another and 'when the most elementary form of human creativity, which is the capacity to add something of one's own to the common world, is destroyed.' Each new thing we add to the world is another birth; our having been born is what guarantees usuthe ability to act, to work as agents in our societies. Once that creativity, as she defined it - birth, politics, action, people coming together to create new lives and new realities - had been completley extinguished, you had a mass society of atomized individuals who could be completely codrced into doing anything their leaders ordered. They had lost touch with reality, a reality that included the fact that they had all once been born and that this birth was evidence of their inherent, miraculous creativity. 'Ideologies,' she wrote, 'are never interested in the miracle of being." (10).
"So much of who we are is mysteriously given to us at birth, she believed: our 'mere existence' and the fact of our inequality. We aren't all born the same. Biological birth isn't democratic or equalizing: it delivers us into the 'abstract nakedness of being nothing but human,' a vulnerable state taht can be related to only through friendship, sympathy, or love. This kind of love, she'd later write, says, 'I want you to be,' without being able to give any particular reasons for such supreme and unsurpassable affirmation." (source seems to be uncited, though earlier quote is in Origins of Totalitarianism). Yes! This was my own experience or first overwhelming feeling of having a child - that I wanted him to be, and to keep on being.
"Arendt witnessed [in Gurs], over the five weeks of her internment, her fellow captives' wild fluctuations between suicidal despair and what she called 'a violent courage for life.' (We Refugees) To survive the experience, many turned from the immediate terror of their situation, and that turn away from life as it was in the present into a remembered past or a hoped-for future was, in her mind, a disastrous betrayal of their humanity. In hope 'the soul overleaps reality,' she'd later write, and in fear it 'shrinks back from it.' As Samantha Rose Hill has argued, Arendt saw hope as a'a dangerous barrier to acting courageously in dark times.'" (38).
Origins opens by saying "The past was irretrievable, and the future was entirely unpredictable." (40). Sees the shock of "the deadly convergence of anti-Semitism, racism, alienation, resentment, imperialism, nationalism, displacement, a crisis of political legitmacy, and the rapid technological chnage that spurred all these forward" along with "the gratitude she expresses for teh historic apocalypse she has just lived through in that it brought to the surface and made undeniable streams taht had run subterranean below European life for millenia. The Holocaust was not a freak of human history, some wild, twentieth-century, German exception to human thought and experience, she argued. The situation was actually much worse. The Holocaust was a consequence of a death drive that ran deep through Western societies, one that had propelled humanity into a fruitless, barren place. Thought and experience had long ago parted ways, creating the conditions for radically distorted ideas about reality to take root in people's minds and setting the stage for a modernity in which people were alienated from one another. Locked in their own privacy, flying into their inner selves, they had lost faith in their ability to transform their worlds and to create new, plural realities through their actions and their speech. People survived in modernity only by setting their gaze elsewhere, outside the world into ideal abstractions or into some immaterial, heavenly hereafter." (41). Humans caught between omnipotence and powerlessness, "bred to be either an executioner or a victim."
"Birth confounds the binary. It is an experience of neither mastery nor powerlessness; it confronts us with our embodied, earthly creativity, with what we can control and with what we simply cannot control." (41).
Mary Wollstonecraft: "She came to see that her passionate commitment to Imlay and to her child was not a violation of her ideas about female emancipation; they were simply the painfully lived, experiential realization of what she'd argued all along: that we are ardently bound to other people, that i tis a sign of perfect reason to take affectionate care of the people we are responsible for.
"When her younger sister Bess married, she had written that "I will not marry, for I don't want to be tied to this nasty world." But she was beginning to appreciate how there really wasn't an alternative to being tied to this nasty world. the world might be nasty, but it's where we're born and where we'll live out our days. We cannot untie ourselves from this difficult world, as we have no other world to claim. As she matured personally and intellectually, she articulated a creed that, Virginia Woolf believed, was 'fitted to meet the sordid misery of real human life.'" (92).
Sojourner Truth and theology: "In Eve she saw a woman's earth-shatterin gand world-re-creating agency. Women were actors capable of changing their worlds." If Jesus came into the world solely through God who created him and Mary who birthed him, "Man, where is your part?' In that one sentence, she overturned the patriarchal, theological tradition she was heir to, one based on the passing of divine power from a heavnly father to a savior son. She saw a woman's birthing as cosmically significant. If gestational language had been key to the 'world-making and wolrd-breaking capacities of racial slavery," as Hartman argues, here we see a variation on that gestational language being used by a former slave for liberatory purposes." (140)
"Women's procreative, bodily strength was both an oppressive stereotype and a liberatory resource for early members of the women's movement . . . After a speech she made in 1858 in Indiana. After she spoke, a pro-slavery group of men accused her of being a man and challenged her to bare her breast to the women in the audience, to give bodily proof of her womanhood. Truth reportedly didn't hesitate; without any sense of shame, she bared her breast to her audience and 'told them that her breasts had suckled many a white babe . . . that some of those white babies had grown to man's estate." Those white babies who had suckled her colored breasts were, she told them, more manly than her accusers. She disrobed not to her shame, but to their shame. As she disrobed, she asked them if they too wanted to suck" (142)
Truth, Wollstonecraft, and Shelley all understand that someone needs to do the nurturing, and if it's not mothers, it will be servants from a differnt class. The problem isn't nurture itself, it's that nurture isn't shared equally by all. Twentieth century black feminists make the same argument, which "often come as a surprise to those who see black motherhood as an intrinsically oppressive state" (143).
Rich believed nuclear family, buit on possession "could work as a negation of the world we share in common with other people. The family, as a unit, could be individualistic and competitive with other families, rather than cooperative." B/c of Roman law, a man's family was his property. "The concept of motherhood Rich was trying to dismantle had developed at 'this crossroads of seual possession, property ownership, and the desire to transcend death.'" (165)
Critiqued Arendt for being product of male notions of philosophy: "Politics was, for Arendt, where we step out from our personal and private lives, from our individual homes and the labor we perform there, and where we embark on the project of our plural existence." Which doesn't work if you're trapped in a suburban home with the kids. (148)
Adrienne Rich born in 1929 to a Baltimore physician and musician. Raised by a tyrannical father after age 4, won the Yale Younger Poets prize (selected by Auden) and married. "Birth radicalized her, brought her down to her root, the source of her being."
One summer was able to be alone with the boys for a summer in Vermont, where they threw out schedules, lived half wild, washed in the hose, and the boys fell asleep at night while she stayed up writing and reading. "She was an impatient mother, she confessed. She felt that the demands of caring for her sons were eating away at her, stymieing her, but at the same time she passionately loved those three small bodies, which astounded her with their 'beauty, humor, and physical affection.' She saw them not as the heirs of patriarchy but as the 'sweet flesh of infants, the delicate insistency of exploring bodies, the purity of concentration, grief, or joy which exists undilute din young children'" (160). She got herself an apartment to have some space, though she told her family she wasn't leaving them. Several weeks later her husband killed himself. She raised the teenagers alone, haphazardly, between various teaching jobs and houses.
How have I never heard of Of Womaan Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution????? Birth "seubert[s] the 'deep fatalistic pessimisim as to the possibilities of change' "She saw within birth the relational fertile energy of creation itself. "Every infant born is testimony to the intricacy and breadth of possibilities inherent in humanity (163).
"Toni Morrison's experiences giving birth spurred her creatively forward, inspiring her to write. They returned her to the community she had been born into, to the setting of her own birth and to the theme of birth more generally. birth would be integral to her artistic vision, both conceptually and narratively" (183)
Angela Davis argued that black women did not see Roe as a step toward liberation, but "a reminder of the dire conditions that drove many women to abortion, and teh ruing did nothing to fundamentally change those conditions." Plus the history of extortionate abortion for profit and forced abortions and sterilizations. (191).
Alice Walker published womanist book/poetry: feminism largely a movement of white women for women's rights and equality, womanist were mostly black women "committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female . . . womanists are grown-up, responsible, in charge, capable" (192-3).
And I did not know about Lucille Clifton's poetic testaments to birth, poems to uterus and period "about mothers and abortions, the unborn and living children" (193)
Garner's maternal love "greater than the desire simply to preserve life." Arendt also saw "Politics is never for the sake of life" (195) (about p. 37 of The Human Condition
October 5, 2023
This book will be important in the future as technovaters seek to separate birthgiving and nurturing children from biology. Banks focused on excellent subjects, diverse thinkers who maintain independence and yet see the inherent dependency of natality is a force to celebrate, not annihilate.
I also loved it because I learned about the sexual abuse heaped upon Sojourner Truth by her female enslaver, more about Toni Morrison's Catholic love of mystery, about the family systems that formed Hannah Arendt and Adrienne Rich.
I also loved it because I learned about the sexual abuse heaped upon Sojourner Truth by her female enslaver, more about Toni Morrison's Catholic love of mystery, about the family systems that formed Hannah Arendt and Adrienne Rich.
November 30, 2025
Just read the Hannah Arendt and Toni Morrison chapters
November 13, 2023
I just happened to see this in the library when I was picking up something else and it intrigued me. Natality was Hannah Arendt's answer to mortality. Banks chose 7 thinkers to illustrate the philosophy, which is often overlooked and neglected. Society had a "death drive" which we would benefit from combatting with a healthy dose of natalism. We are not just born to die, but to live. I just read 'Earth Democracy' by Vandana Shiva an she agrees with Arendt that totalitarianism thrives in an atmosphere of hopelessness and that remembering our agency, our power, our human creativity can help us resist becoming obediant followers of those who would control us.
July 9, 2023
Really well done. I loved it. A great antidote to the nihilism that permeates our world today. I thought the chapters on Arendt, Nietszche, and Wolstencraft were particularly good.
March 5, 2024
This was not quite what I expected, as it included much more history and biography than philosophy, per se. It's very, very enjoyable, informative, and elegantly written, though.
'Natality' is a collection of chapters that each focus on a historical figure who thought deeply about, and wrote provocatively about, the notion of 'birth' or 'natality' related to the experience of being human. It's extremely intriguing, and I learned a lot about the figures that are featured, particularly Mary Shelley and Adrienne Rich, but every chapter contains insights. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on Sojourner Truth.
If anything, Banks' work here proves how much more there is to explore, on a philosophical level, when it comes to 'natality.' She is right to say we focus almost exclusively on 'mortality' when it comes to exploring the human experience, and part of me wishes this book was more about that philosophical task, rather than so much history. But it's enjoyable and extremely well-written, and it sparked my interest in the broader topic, so it's certainly a success.
'Natality' is a collection of chapters that each focus on a historical figure who thought deeply about, and wrote provocatively about, the notion of 'birth' or 'natality' related to the experience of being human. It's extremely intriguing, and I learned a lot about the figures that are featured, particularly Mary Shelley and Adrienne Rich, but every chapter contains insights. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on Sojourner Truth.
If anything, Banks' work here proves how much more there is to explore, on a philosophical level, when it comes to 'natality.' She is right to say we focus almost exclusively on 'mortality' when it comes to exploring the human experience, and part of me wishes this book was more about that philosophical task, rather than so much history. But it's enjoyable and extremely well-written, and it sparked my interest in the broader topic, so it's certainly a success.
October 2, 2025
Not a bad read but ended up irritating me by the end, partly because I felt like this book didn’t end up saying much of anything. Nor did I feel like it ultimately justifying the selection of eclectic and very very loosely connected authors it glazes the surface of in each chapter. It is also quite repetitive, both in ideas and sometimes phrasing.
I am sick of the phrase life affirming and all of its variations. Please let’s find some new phrases. And I don’t think finding joy in life, creativity, even the concept of natality (which I actually quite like philosophically) entails finding joy in the physical and social process of human pregnancy and childbirth. Which I think this book became increasingly focused on near the end. Though the concept of natality put forward here is just too vaguely sketched in general; it often became unclear to me what exactly the author was trying to weave together in these disparate analyses.
I am sick of the phrase life affirming and all of its variations. Please let’s find some new phrases. And I don’t think finding joy in life, creativity, even the concept of natality (which I actually quite like philosophically) entails finding joy in the physical and social process of human pregnancy and childbirth. Which I think this book became increasingly focused on near the end. Though the concept of natality put forward here is just too vaguely sketched in general; it often became unclear to me what exactly the author was trying to weave together in these disparate analyses.
February 9, 2025
"To experience birth, to witness it and even celebrate it while living amid death and destruction, was to experience a complex and dissonant truth. It was a truth so obvious as to be banal: that we are born, and we will die; or that we are natal creatures in a mortal world. And yet it was a truth not easily digestible, not packageable for quick consumption. It has been best expressed not in polemics but in poetry: “were we led all that way for / Birth or Death?” one of the Magi asks in T. S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi... They never answer the question they ask of themselves in the poem, and perhaps that’s because it is unanswerable: “were we led all that way for / Birth or Death?”
Hundred of highlights from this one. phenomenal paradigm-shift.
Hundred of highlights from this one. phenomenal paradigm-shift.
July 1, 2025
I enjoyed this collection of biographical essays looking at their subject's perspectives on natality (Toni Morrison's especially), but it should be called 'Toward Natality and a Philosophy of Birth' to emphasize its disinterest in laying out what this philosophy of birth is or might be (which is to the author's credit, I'd like it to have been more forthright about it so I wasn't anticipating one).
June 28, 2023
Part of the problem is my expectations. I thought this books would address questions related to abortion, human population growth, and what we owe future generations but it’s “philosophy” or more the “literature studies” style, which is fine, and interesting for much of the book, but be aware that many of the questions around birth that you’d expect a book of philosophy to address will sidelined.
February 24, 2024
I highly recommend “Natality.” In reading about the lives, struggles, and yet hard-earned hopes for renewal of the writers portrayed, a light shines on birth and its many varied circumstances. The book showed me something I'd never considered before: how birth could be, in the words of Hannah Arendt, “the miracle that saves the world.”
January 6, 2026
Picked this up wanting to learn more about Hannah Arendt and her philosophy- ended up gaining a full syllabus on the crash course in Natality. I plan on going back through and reading each of the works mentioned.
Though after the fact, I realized that multiple people thought I was reading a book about Natalism…
Though after the fact, I realized that multiple people thought I was reading a book about Natalism…
August 29, 2023
Thought-provoking — unearths an often ignored theme of "birth" in thinkers and writers like Nietzsche, Sojourner Truth, Toni Morrison, Hannah Arendth, Andrienne Rich, etc. and argues for why birth is meaningful both literally and metaphorically.
January 13, 2024
An empty promise wrapped in an intriguing title. The author talks about birth, without talking about birth itself. Would love to see a truly intersectional approach, that weaves actual philosophies from across cultures and time. Until then, I’ll be searching for the content that this book promised.
February 21, 2024
Incredible book by an amazing writer. This book is a must read, it introduces an entirely new topic never before fully explored. It's a deeply research, well written and thought provoking book. I highly recommend it.
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January 28, 2024DNF after chapter 1. Picked this up at the library, not what I thought it would be.
May 8, 2024
Very interesting analysis of birth, but it just seems like it’s missing the most central theme: the beauty of life.
February 2, 2025
Fascinating idea, could have been developed more. Would recommend but with the caveat that there is a strong emphasis on the 'towards'.
August 19, 2024
A refreshingly hopeful book, "Natality" runs through the contributions of several major thinkers to form a vision of our common life organized around life rather than death. It's a worthwhile project, and I commend it on philosophical as well as practical grounds. If we truly hope our better days are before us, we need to re-commit to generative lives of creativity, birth, and fruitfulness.
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