Natality & forgiveness
Forgiving, promising, beginning anew — with Hannah Arendt.
“That we may trust in the world and hope for it is perhaps expressed most succinctly and most beautifully in the words with which the Christmas oratorios announce the glad tidings: ‘A child has been born unto us.’”
– Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
Natality is Hannah Arendt's counter-concept to hopelessness: because human beings are born, the possibility of a new beginning comes into the world with each of them. To act means to be able to begin.
Two capacities make beginning politically possible: the promise, which creates reliability in an uncertain future — and forgiveness, which does not erase the past but loosens its finality. Forgiving is not forgetting, and it does not call the deed into question: it is the question of whether letting go is possible, so that something new can come into being.
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