Are you searching for hope? Yale University Press Editor Jennifer Banks said she found it in birth.
Researchers and philosophers have a lot to say about the implications of and feelings surrounding death—but what about birth? Death is popular discussion point in research, books, and even classes. But when Yale University Press Editor Jennifer Banks gave birth to her daughter, she couldn’t find anyone who was writing about the experience of giving birth or what it means to bring new life into the world. She decided to start that conversation by writing her book Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth. At the Humanities Center Colloquium on Thursday, February 13, 2025, Banks shared how “birth [is] an integral part of our human experience,” a concept she adapted from philosopher Hannah Arendt’s definition of natality.
The Birth of Natality
Banks explained that her book attempts “to draw on, curate, and share a written tradition about birth that [she] discovered and felt had been underemphasized.” She used Arendt’s definition of natality as inspiration. Arendt, who was not only a philosopher but a World War II Holocaust survivor, defined natality as “the supreme capacity of man, as the miracle that saves the world—the realm of human affairs—from its normal natural ruin.”
This perspective spoke to Banks, who appreciated a focus on finding meaning in beginnings rather than in our inevitable end. She explained, “By virtue of our having been born, [Arendt] believed we are guaranteed the ability to act, and each action is a little birth, spontaneous, unforeseen, risky, error prone, and miraculous.”
The Birth of Language
As she wrote her book, Banks found the words to express her experience with birth, and in this endeavor, she realized how much power language has. She described how language holds the capacity of agency and can ultimately effect positive change in the world. She said, “Language itself [is] involved in a world making that connects us to reality rather than separating us out from it, and such a language affirms how creation is not static but ongoing.”
Banks found comfort in the fact “that our lived experience . . . is not beyond thinking and not beyond language.” She encouraged her audience to join her in the “work of beginning again and of rebuilding a human world” by writing about birth.
Learn more in Banks’s book Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth.