Natality and Mortality

 The terms come from a Greek Jewish Philosopher named Hannah Arendt. She gave natality the definition of the fact that we are born as a counterpoint to the popular term mortality which means the fact that we die. Mortality first appeared in the ancient Greeks vocabulary as a man being simply mortal. For example, they said “All men are mortal, Socrates was a man, Therefore Socrates was mortal. Mortality also showed up a lot in Hannah’s teachers views. Hannah’s teacher was Martin Heidegger and he was pretty much obsessed with death just like most people in the world today. Opposing her teachers views Hannah focused in on the natality of humans rather than mortality.  What made Hannah dive into natality was that she believed the origin of life from inorganic matter is so infinitely improbable that it prefigures every action. Hannah’s turn from mortality to natality really changes the way we think about birth and death in todays times. She takes natality and breaks it down into several different factors and stages. The different stages that she breaks it down into starts with the ability of humans to preform something so unique that with every birth something new comes into this world. Then comes admiring the baby after birth, Hannah really focuses on this stage of our lives by saying during these times the way we act could change the outcome of history in the slightest way. Then Hannah goes to talk about the development stage in the baby’s life when they start putting things together and developing their own ideas and thoughts. I could keep going down the line of what comes next in life but just doing this little amount of research and reading on natality makes you stop and think about the topic as a whole. To me this was an eye opener because as mentioned earlier most people in the world fascinate over death. So as all the stages in life start to wind down, we come to the end of the time we have here on earth and eventually face mortality. So, mortality in philosophy is such a very vague topic that can go many different ways while talking about it but one topic within mortality caught my attention.

Jeff Mason argues that the concept of death has no subjective meaning. Philosophers and non philosophers stand on a level of equality with respect to death. There are no experts on death, for there is nothing to know about it. Not even those who study the death process have an edge on the rest of us. We are all equals in thinking about death, and we all begin and end thinking about it from a position of ignorance.

Death and its concept are absolutely empty. No picture comes to mind. The concept of death has a use for the living, while death itself has no use for anything. All we can say about death is that it is either real or it is not real. If it is real, then the end of one's life is a simple termination. If it is not real, then the end of one's embodied life is not true death, but a portal to another life.

Having no content, we must speak of death metaphorically. For those who think death is real, death is a blank wall. For those who think it is not real, death is a door to another life. Whether we think of death as a wall or a door, we cannot avoid using one metaphor or another. We often say that a person who dies is relieved of suffering. However, if death is real, then it is metaphorical even to say that the dead do not suffer, as though something of them remains not to suffer. As there are already many speculations about some sort of  next life, (https://www.philosophersmag.com/opinion/17-death-and-its-concept)

The reason this concept was so interesting to me is because I think this is the question that crosses most people minds at least once when it comes to death, what happens once my time comes. Maybe its something to just put aside and figure it out once the time comes because we have no control over it. 

Dylan Love 

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