Entre el ser y la vida: el concepto de natalidad en Hannah Arendt y la posibilidad de una ontología política

Abstract

Although Hannah Arendt’s conception of natality was not properly addressed by her early readers, from the ‘90s to the present a consensus has been developed on the centrality of the category to the extent that —in some cases— specialists refer to Arendt’s work as a «philosophy of natality». In this article —through the reconstruction of the genesis of the concept— we will trace the connections between her doctoral dissertation The Concept of Love in Saint Augustine and her later work and argue that the postulation of natality as «the central category of political, as distinguished from metaphysical, thought», sets the philosophical foundation of Arendt’s commitment to a political ontology that understands men as plural and holds spontaneity and contingency as roots of freedom.