For Hannah Arendt it begins with birth. Each of us
is thrown into the world at any single given point of our species’ history. It
so happens to be that the moment of our birth is our point of entry into this
world. Although we are conceived, carried and thought of before our birth, this
is the moment of our first appearance in the world itself. We declare ourselves
alive in this moment, in body and subject; by our first cry, we assert ‘I am
here’. We enter the world as the extra enters the space of performance; the
greatest performance that ever has been or will be – the performance of over
seven billion actors and counting. It is on this stage that our small, short
role will be forever remembered by those closest to us. At least until we all
fade into the dust of pure temporality.
The
same can be said for the mental categories that we use to mediate this stage
with, especially as the script remains perennially unwritten. Between a certain
number of performers, improvising scenes across the stage, the way we grasp the
overall performance makes itself manifest. As with all organic life on the
planet, with the passage of time and the overlap of generations these
categories come to slowly rot and yet equally become the fertiliser for
categories anew. Thus, the way in which we exist in the world - how we act and
how we judge - is directly connected to the manner in which we exist within it,
and how we – our actions and our judgements – become the fertiliser for the
future of the performance.
The
fact of birth is the first quality of the human condition. To exist in the
world somehow, we must be thrown into it. This is the inception of life – to
wail with one’s first breath, to have being thrust upon us, and us onto being.
To play a part in the performance or at very least dip our toes in the pond of
its narrative through a fleeting ‘appearance’, we must always enter it; we must
become alive. From our first moments in the world we are something as yet
unseen, a unique singularity of being. We become instantly the only ones to be,
have been, or will be ourselves. This fact of singular unique being colours the
heterogeneity of our human collective existence; the fact of our individuality,
of our subjectivity, is in tern given breath from this feature of reality.
With
every first breath however comes the second. From here, the path of every one
of us who has ever resided in our world has, and always will, diverge. Some,
sadly, never see this second breath. For them, especially, we must remember
that they too made an appearance, no matter how temporally slight – their being
was made as resolutely manifest as our own. With every breath we take, our
process of subjectivation ploughs on at an increasingly extensive magnitude.
With every passing moment, the divergence of being vested in our capacity to
differ by simply coming into being extends the fact of both our unique
individuality, with every new baby born, and as such, so too increases the
potentiality for human propensity to possibility. This potentiality is a
movement towards fresh existence, of a life between us which is as of yet
unimaginable.
So,
what happens with the birth of every child? Simply put, the very world through which
we are given expression and meaning is recreated in and by us. The world itself
is both actualised and realised in a single moment - through a single ripe gasp
for air. The world is thus the milieu through which we award meaning, and
equally, it presents us a space, a stage, within which we can become its very
defining constituent – its very fabric. This is what to be alive par excellence
as one of the human race equates to – the reforging of the very meaning of the
world through ones bare existence alone, to hold the potential to recast the
performance with every moment we draw breath.
Some
might argue that the fact of our total individuality is a fact of only
imperfection, that our plurality makes us a divided and fallen species. This,
however, is only to cast heterogeneity as a curse, and to ignore the capacity
for the potential which breaks open from such a condition of plurality. Reason
thus follows that the curse must be erased, steering our performance to the
necessary quelling of difference itself as the antidote. In our times,
mass-production and automation characterise the bulk of objects we interact
with as props of performance. In this vein, it is no surprise that such
reasoning of unadulterated homogeneity in production became internalised as a
social rationality. To be all the same would annihilate the spontaneity
synonymous with human life itself.
Yes,
imperfection means that anything becomes possible, and this is an order of
relational anarchy. Nevertheless, this is to neglect the fact that: Yes,
indeed, anything is possible if it can be humanly conceived. Nothing straight
may ever be made from the crooked timber of humanity, but in this style of
crookedness, we are the most visionary of master carpenters.[2] Our timber may be crooked,
but it has sailed us across oceans, connected continents, scaled mountain
ranges and projected our being into the stars.
The unknown rules all, but the unknown is not a deep expanse of void alone, but a void of both ending and new beginning; of all that is imaginable and all that is yet to be imagined. It is in our being human that our being unique rests resolute; and within this is the seed of that which we call ‘creativity’. Birth is the first fact of life, but it is the consequence of this fact which presents us with its meaning, for us all, for the performance which has been and has yet to be seen. So, if birth is the grounding foundation of our collective human existence, what else colours the qualities of its character, of this phenomenon?
[1] Hannah Arendt (1998) The Human
Condition, Second Edition, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, p.9.
[2] “One cannot fashion something
absolutely straight from wood which is as crooked as that of which man is made”
[‘Idea for a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Intent’ 6th principle];
Immanuel Kant (1949) The Philosophy of Kant: Immanuel Kant’s Moral and
Political Writings, Carl J. Friedrich (Ed.), New York: The Modern Library, p.
123.