Natality and Finitude

1. Introduction: Sophocles’ Wisdom

one 5 Introduction: Sophocles’ Wisdom I appreciate in myself the precariousness of being. It is not that classic precariousness based on the fact that I have to die but a new, more profound version, founded on the fact that there was very little chance of my ever being born. —Georges Bataille “Oh wretched, ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing.” —Friedrich Nietzsche Not to be born is, past all prizing, best; but, when man has seen the light, this is next best by far, that with all speed he should go thither, whence he hath come. —Sophocles 1. Get Born Long before Hannah Arendt made natality—the human condition of having been born—the central concept of a political theory, and before Arendt scholarship began to uncover all of the work the concept does in even the furthest reaches of her thinking, birth and natality would surface—occasionally, marginally, obscurely—as an OBYRNE_final_pages.indd 1 7/28/10 2:39:20 PM  s Natality and Finitude object worthy of thought. The thinkers dealt with here—Heidegger, Dilthey, Arendt, Nancy—all belong in a distinct historical tradition and stand in relation to one another in quite specific ways, but they also reflect a strain of thinking that runs far and deep in western philosophy . In the first century bc, Lucretius writes a long series of arguments aimed at demonstrating the foolishness of fearing death, but close to the end he adds this comment: Look back now and consider how the bygone ages of eternity that elapsed before our birth were nothing to us. Here, then, is a mirror in which nature shows us the time to come after our death. Do you see anything fearful in it?1 It is a rarely succinct assessment of our finitude. Certainly Plato had already made philosophy what it is by turning from the city and from life to gaze at death, finally construing the philosophical life as the life spent practicing death. What makes Lucretius’s exhortation as rare as a jewel is the very mention of birth: we are finite by virtue of the end we will meet when we die, cutting us off from the great expanses of time that will follow, but also by virtue of the beginning we had when we came into the world, when the irruption of our birth put an end to the ages of eternity before, transforming those ages into the time when we were not yet. Yet Lucretius’s insight is as valuable for what it assumes and hides as for what it discloses. His starting point is the fear of death, the phenomenon of which he so disapproves and which he hopes to discourage by force of argument: spirit and mind are as mortal as the body, he claims, and therefore death is simply a state of nonexistence. Fear of death is based on the thought that we will suffer afterward or that we will be deprived of what we love, but both of these are nonsense if we will not exist to feel either pain or desire. We have no need to fear now, because we have, literally, nothing to fear. Yet the passage suggests that precisely nothingness is quite capable of inspiring fear all by itself, so what Lucretius saw his contemporaries experience when they expressed a fear of death was a proto-Pascalian fear in the face of empty eternities of not being. What we respond to when we fear death, he realized, is the thought that our being is finite.2 OBYRNE_final_pages.indd 2 7/28/10 2:39:20 PM Introduction s  In this sense, Lucretius’s comparison misses my point: it is true that before we had any existence, all the affairs of the world meant nothing to us because we were incapable of knowing or thinking or grasping meaning; it is also true that when we are dead all the things that will happen in the world will also be a matter of indifference to us since we will not exist to experience or suffer or even grasp them. But the thought of finitude (in the form of the fear of death) happens now, in this...