Nietzsche and Natality
Public Philosophy Digest
This month’s APA Blog Substack Newsletter features a discussion with Jennifer Banks, Senior Executive Editor for Religion and the Humanities at the Yale University Press. We discuss her book Natality, Toward a Philosophy of Birth, focusing on birth with seven renowned Western thinkers, exploring one of the most fraught and polarizing issues of our time. Jennifer shares how these thinkers illustrate “how each person, in simply being born, creates an opportunity for history to begin again. Birth helped them see how we are more than history’s byproducts; we are instead creative participants in history, nature and time”.
In this latest Public Philosophy Digest we focus on Nietzsche - an unlikely protagonist in her story. We discuss his project’s effort to shift the intellectual landscape and imagine a world where birth, instead of death, is life’s organizing horizon. We explore natality in the context of his critique of asceticism and revaluation, the responsibility of creation and complicating influences of modern technology.
Jennifer, thanks so much for discussing your engaging book. It strikes a chord because, notwithstanding declining birth rates across the globe, the urgency of natality is still not prominent in the public sphere. Please start by describing why you wrote the book - asking “…what does it mean that the greatest power humans have had - the power to create another human being - has been relegated in nearly all time periods and all places to a secondary status, turned into a task to be performed by an underclass of people assigned to that task on account of their gender?”.
Birth is a recurring topic in the public sphere – and often a heated one – but the discourse about birth has a way of evading the experience it claims to address. In the US, conversations tend to focus exclusively on abortion (the avoidance of birth) or the question of whether to have children. They rarely explore how birth is already always a given. I felt something was missing in the more polemical discussions and I wanted to write a book that approached birth as an open question – one that refuses easy answers – and explored how birth has shaped the human condition. I was as interested in birth as a shared reality, one common to both men and women and to both parents and those without children, as I was in the experience of giving birth.
To better understand how the question of birth could be “humanity’s greatest under explored subject”, please expand on your two theories that could explain its diminished status. First, is it a form of misogyny? As you note, “just as women have been seen, in Simone de Beauvoir’s phrasing, as ‘the second sex’, birth has a sense of secondariness about it; it has long hovered in death’s shadow, quietly performing its under-recognized labor”. Alternatively, is it that death simply is an enduring obsession - humanity’s deepest existential theme?
My book looks at birth’s place in our intellectual traditions. The history of letters was written by men, not by women who were giving birth and raising children. There’s an uneasiness with birth that runs through our intellectual inheritance, an embarrassment even, perhaps attributable to the taboos birth is mired in, like sex or menstruation, or the diminished role most authors have historically played in the experience our survival depends upon. That has changed, of course, over the last few centuries, as more and more women started writing, but many of the biases persist to this day.
Increasingly, I also believe that birth in all its messiness, materiality, and impermanence has offered an affront to the written word as it has often been understood and wielded: abstract, fixed, ordered. As Ursula Le Guin has written, “Writing of any kind fixes the word outside time, and silences it. The written word is a shadow. Shadows are silent.” Childbirth is typically a noisy experience, but in the history of letters, it is muffled or even silenced. For each of us, birth happens long before language acquisition; our lived experience of our own births is pre-lingual, and perhaps there is something in our consciousness that struggles to connect birth and language. It is interesting to me that one of the best predictors of falling natality rates is rising literacy rates.
Speaking of the under explored or misunderstood, let me now turn to Nietzsche as an unlikely protagonist in your story. As you note, “Nietzsche has famously announced God’s death, writing ‘God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.’ But he saw that death as a beginning, not an ending. God’s death created an opportunity for humans to turn away from the afterlife, from the alluring prospect of eternal life after death, toward the earthly, embodied life that comes after birth. Imagine, he challenged his readers: we can immerse ourselves in this earthly existence, accepting our natal and mortal embodiment and even celebrating it. A new spiritual tradition can grow up around birth, life, creativity, sexuality, and procreation”. Please expand on how Nietzsche’s critique of asceticism and proposed revaluation distinguishes him as a natalist - especially in his embrace of Dionysian values.
Nietzsche felt the culture he was heir to was haunted by death and driven to decay. He blamed Christianity, which he saw as the “embodiment of disgust and antipathy for life… a yearning for nonexistence… fatigue, sullenness, exhaustion, impoverishment of life.” He attempted to overturn this tradition, to put birth where death had been in a Western intellectual tradition since the time of Socrates. Dionysius, the Greek god of the earth, fertility, rebirth, and the grape harvest, would be the avatar of this creative impulse. For Nietzsche, Dionysus was the anti-Christ— more primal and life-affirming than any morality, an expression of the “unbounded lust for existence and delight in existence” we need to survive.
Perhaps this all makes him a natalist, but his natalism was conflicted and ambiguous. Was birth just a metaphor for cultural and spiritual renewal, or was he concerned with the birth of new human beings? Even as he celebrated the creation, sustenance, and flourishing of real, embodied, mammalian life, he never had any children of his own, and he grew increasingly hostile to women and to the wider human community. He lived more and more like an ascetic, hiking alone in the mountains, resenting the masses’ resentment.
His natalism was both celebratory and filled with disgust. Take for instance, these lines from Twilight of the Idols, where he offers one of his most succinct and positive definitions of the Dionysian, a definition that is full of birth and female sexuality. The Dionysian was:
“The triumphant Yes to life beyond all death and change; true life as the overall continuation of life through procreation, through the mysteries of sexuality . . . Every single element in the act of procreation, of pregnancy, and of birth aroused the highest and most solemn feelings. In the doctrine of the mysteries, pain is pronounced holy: the pangs of the woman giving birth hallow all pain.”
These are extraordinary lines coming from a man who lived celibately for most of his life. Compare them with these lines from Thus Spoke Zarathustra:
“Whoever has to give birth is sick; but whoever has given birth is unclean. Ask women: one does not give birth because it is fun . . . You creators, there is much that is unclean in you. That is because you had to be mothers. A new child: oh, how much new filth . . . whoever has given birth should wash his soul clean.”
Whenever I’m tempted to try and reconcile these competing views, to solve the conflict, I remember Hannah Arendt’s observation that “Such fundamental and flagrant contradictions rarely occur in second-rate writers; in the work of the great authors, they lead into the very center of their work.”
To expand on this ambiguity and the topic of misogyny, you note that Nietzsche wrote many uncomfortable things about women - which branded him as an antifeminist. However, you also suggest he was uniquely attuned to female experiences, especially as he paid close attention to birth. As Nietzsche is often misconstrued, please discuss how he perceived the paradoxes of sex, where birth positioned women “somewhere between gods and beasts”.
It is a strange thing to encounter in the work of a writer known for his concept the Ubermensch, or “superman”: a persistent preoccupation with birth, an experience that has long been understood as female. From the distance of his relative celibacy and the remoteness of his alpine hikes, he somehow crept close imaginatively to experiences he was excluded from by virtue of his gender and solitary existence. As I see him, he was hitting his head against the wall of his own biological limits, philosophically expounding experiences he was physically removed from. But somehow those limits and that exclusion allowed him to step outside the gender norms of his day and explore ideas and experiences other thinkers avoided - pregnancy, nursing, motherhood, and more.
Nietzsche critiqued his culture’s sexual practices in ways that were sympathetic to the plight of women, writing, “This wild avarice and injustice of sexual love has been glorified and deified so much in all ages— indeed . . . this love has furnished the concept of love as the opposite of egoism while it actually may be the most ingenuous expression of egoism.”
I suspect he wanted children, a desire that drove him to both idolize women and resent them for what they had not given him.
Turning more directly to the notion of creation, your book resonated with me as I wrote several APA Blog pieces that explored the significance of creativity. Specifically, I construed technology as part of nature and our aesthetic fate, building on a discussion with Brian Leiter exploring Nietzsche’s thoroughgoing naturalism. In a recent Substack Newsletter, I reiterated the case that creativity is our essence in the sense of how Brian described Nietzsche’s Essentialism, where our nature is constricted to a trajectory governed by facts or psycho-physical realities that can only be sculpted, not changed entirely. A tomato plant, to use Brian’s analogy, will not produce a different fruit, but it can be cultivated. In this vein, I maintained that the creation of technology should be seen in evolutionary terms as our essence - defining our course, although we can (and must) control its evolution.
In the sense of viewing the production and creation of technology as necessarily purposeful, my question goes to the import of creativity generally - how creation and birth imply accountability. Speaking of Nietzsche chronicling the death of God, you said it “…necessitated a new understanding of human beings, one that charged them with newborn powers. God hadn’t simply been done in by infirmity or old age, after all. God had been murdered, and not by some devil or warring deity, but by the humans he had created as his own beloved children. This murder created ethical, spiritual, and existential problems for humanity. On the one hand, if humans could murder their own creator, this must testify to their great power”. Please discuss how the void left by Nietzsche’s project and focus on birth translate into responsibility. Rather than Heidegger’s famous idea of being “thrown” into the world, “being toward death”, as you say, the “miracle of our creative beginnings are what indelibly shape us and prove our capacity to creatively act in the world”. If, as Arendt said, birth is the “miracle that saves the world”, in what ways would shifting our intellectual life make us more accountable?
Nietzsche wanted humankind to be accountable to life itself, to work out a relationship with human instincts, desire, hunger, and pain that wasn’t based on evasion. But he offers few clues about what practices, commitments, or programs such accountability might entail. I don’t see Nietzsche as a great guide to human accountability, at least when it comes to birth. He affirms human life, for instance, but is simultaneously an elitist, minimally invested in large swaths of humanity – a contradiction that is not unique to his natalism.
To better understand the relationship between birth and accountability, I turn in my book to Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Sojourner Truth, Adrienne Rich, and Toni Morrison. All these writers had children of their own and some were also responsible for other people’s children. They consequently created and affirmed human life within the hard bounds of human limits and under the pressure of other people’s needs. Their ideas about birth were disciplined by those limits and responsibilities, whereas Nietzsche’s were blinded by his drive to “overcome.” For our thinking about birth to make us more accountable to each other, we need to attend carefully, in specific detail, to how birth is experienced by the people charged with the greatest responsibility for it.
My final question on creation takes this notion of responsibility to its logical conclusion in asking whether the fervor of Nietzsche’s vision amounts to a kind of religious conception. For example, to draw on another APA Blog piece with Jacob Howland, where we discussed his book on Kierkegaard and Socrates and whether philosophical eros could lead to faith, Jacob compares his revaluation to Kierkegaard’s faith:
“The wonder of faith, as Johannes de Silentio writes in Fear and Trembling, is that it “preserves an eternal youth” in the face of life’s challenges. In other words, the joyful and resilient way of living that faith makes possible is not absurd, and I think Nietzsche and Wittgenstein would agree. Recall that Zarathustra does not disabuse the old man who sings and praises God. He does not tell him that God is dead - for God is not dead for him.”
Or, capturing a similar perspective from Nietzsche’s critique of positivism in Beyond Good and Evil:
“…livelier thinkers who are still thirsty for life…trying to win back something that was formerly an even firmer possession, some part or other of the old domain of faith of former times, perhaps the ‘immortal soul’ perhaps ‘the old God’, in short ideas by which one could live better…more vigorously and joyfully, than by ‘modern’ ideas…”
Thirdly, to support this recasting of Nietzsche from a passage in your book, in letters written immediately after his breakdown, you note that in Nietzsche’s “…insanity he had achieved the unification of all souls that he had long dreamed of. He continues with this astonishing assertion: ‘With the children I have put into the world too, I consider with some mistrust whether it is not the case that all who come into the kingdom of God also come out of God’. Nietzsche likens God to a birthing mother, a powerful entity which brings forth children out of herself.”
My question, then, is whether these selective passages and the elevation of birth support a more nuanced view of Nietzsche’s “secular” project. Specifically, whether his prescriptions, including the Ubermensch and the affirmation of the Eternal Recurrence, where mankind inherits the role of God, can be loosely understood as a religious vision?
As I read him, Nietzsche was an intensely spiritual thinker. Those letters written in the weeks immediately after his breakdown – the “Letters of Insanity” – offer clues as to what his spiritual vision was. They are signed, alternatively, “The Crucified,” “Nietzsche,” or “Dionysus.” This was his trinity, the three realities or experiences he was trying – perhaps unsuccessfully – to reconcile: the god who had been crucified by his fellow humans; the human self; and the god of earthly, fertile rebirth. Although he relentlessly attacked Christianity, for what he saw as its hostility to life, I don’t think he ever completely left Christ behind. To the degree that he held to Christianity, it was to a Christianity that celebrates Christmas instead of Easter – the birth of a human child rather than the death of a mortal god whose divinity could only be affirmed by resurrection.
These lines from The Antichrist give us Christ and his message as Nietzsche believed they should be understood:
“The ‘glad tidings’ are precisely that there are no longer any opposites; the kingdom of heaven belongs to the children; the faith which finds expression here is not a faith attained through struggle – it is there, it has been there from the beginning; it is, as it were, an infantalism that has receded into the spiritual… Such a faith is not angry, does not reproach, does not resist: it does not bring ‘the sword’ – it simply does not foresee how it might one day separate. It does not prove itself either by miracle or by reward and promise, least of all ‘by scripture’: at every moment it is its own miracle, its own reward, its own proof, its own ‘kingdom of God.’ Nor does this faith formulate itself: it lives, it resists all formulas.”
Nietzsche was a secular thinker, concerned with earthly rather than otherworldly realities, but he approached the question of how to live in this world with religious fervor, devotion, and awe. Even his Ubermensch was imbued with sacredness – the sacredness of a newborn child. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he explains that the Ubermensch must go through three transformations of spirit, the last of which turns him into a child. He writes, “The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred ‘Yes.’ For the game of creation… a sacred ‘Yes’ is needed.”
It is interesting how you note that he may have never left Christ completely behind. Although too gracious and no doubt controversial, at times, I have understood him as a kind of wayward pastor. Shifting to the themes of my series on Philosophy and Technology, I would like to explore how modern technology impacts natality. Relatedly, an APA Blog piece on cryonics reinforced the lengths people take to extend life. Indeed, more generally, the search for authenticity is driven to extremes by modern consumerism and the hegemony of private capital. At the same time, as always, there is a flip (positive) side to scientific advancements and I would like to understand your perspective on how technologies, such as IVF, can support a culture of birth and families. Do you believe technology can be a force for good in changing views on birth and natality?
I support using technology or medical advancements to assist people in the process of embodied, biological birth, but I worry about the use of technology outside the disciplining limits of human bodies. So, for instance, the upsides of artificial wombs seem far outweighed by their potential perils. I also don’t share the transhumanist fever dream of birth without pregnancy, birth without infancy. That doesn’t look like liberation or progress to me.
In this vein, to ask a final question in the spirit of my APA series, please speculate on the role of philosophy in supporting natality. Your book is titled toward a philosophy of natality - so what are the possible trajectories for changing the discourse? For example, will necessity, in the form of a fertility crisis, be the mother of invention - overcoming the lack of historical traction? If, as you note, Nietzsche believed the purpose of philosophy is not to prepare for death, but “…to teach one how to survive and how to live”, can the discipline make a difference and are you optimistic?
I have minimal formal training as a philosopher and I don’t have any strong personal stake in the discipline, although I certainly respect and appreciate its practitioners. I use the word “philosophy” not in a disciplinary sense, and for lack of a better word. Hannah Arendt wrote about how for the ancient Greeks philosophy was rooted in a shocked sense of wonder at the miracle of being alive, an enraptured feeling of being plugged into reality. In my book, I was trying to return our thinking – and our thinking about birth – to that sense of shocked awe.
Awe won’t take care of our children, stave off the fertility crisis, or slow down the technological reinvention of birth. But I hope it helps readers perceive birth as great human art – an art not unlike poetry – that expresses and participates in life’s richness. As I confront our various crises, I keep hearing these lines by D.H. Lawrence, which awaken me over and over to the wonder and mystery of birth:
“If humanity ran into a cul de sac and expended itself, the timeless creative mystery would bring forth some other being, finer, more wonderful, some new, more lovely race, to carry on the embodiment of creation. The game was never up. The mystery of creation was fathomless, infallible, inexhaustible, forever... The fountain-head was incorruptible and unsearchable. It had no limits. It could bring forth miracles, create utter new races and new species, in its own hour, new forms of consciousness, new forms of body, new units of being… To have one's pulse beating direct from the mystery, this was perfection, unutterable satisfaction. Human or inhuman mattered nothing. The perfect pulse throbbed with indescribable being, miraculous unborn species.”
Is that a hopeful vision for how we might live? Not exactly. But it makes me happy to be alive.
Jennifer, indeed, astonishment is hopeful and, as you note, genuinely philosophical. I was fascinated when you told me some of your friends were not pleased with including Nietzsche as an unlikely protagonist, especially after reading your thoughtful and honest account. It was a privilege to explore his attempt to shift the intellectual landscape and celebrate an embodied life. Thank you so much for making time to discuss your enriching book!
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