BBC Radio 4 2016-07-19

Dying is the one thing that somebody else cannot do for you - so argued the philosopher Martin Heidegger - and because of this, he said, facing death is the thing that most picks us out as individuals. Maybe that’s why human beings are sometimes called mortals, especially in religious literature - because death gives life its quality of mine-ness. Maybe that’s why Frank Sinatra’s My Way is still one of the most popular requests at funerals.

But I don’t entirely buy Heidegger’s argument. Yesterday morning I was sitting in St Thomas’ hospital, over the Thames from the Houses of Parliament, and staring at blurry twisty image on a computer screen. Kidneys ok. Heart ok. Fingers ok. Did we want to know the gender? Yes, we said. It’s a boy, she said. And my wife and I cried. We would have cried if it was a girl too. But knowing the gender made the whole thing more specific, more particular, more real.

At the same time that Heidegger was developing his particular brand of existentialism, he started a relationship with a young Jewish student called Hannah Arendt. And she took a totally different line to him – what, she wondered, if we think of human beings as natals not as mortals. What if we see human life from the perspective of its beginning not from the perspective of its end?

For whilst it makes some sense to think of death as something that nobody else can do for you, it makes absolutely no sense to think of birth that way.

Mortals may be individuals, bravely facing the full existential consequence of their particularity – but natals, by contrast, don’t first exist as solitary individuals. Even before birth they are intimately sustained by another whose life is indivisible from their own. And after months of dependency, they are born into a pre-existing network of relationships.

Arendt doesn’t use much overtly religious language. Nevertheless, her argument feels deeply religious to me – that we are grounded in something bigger and wider than ourselves, that the connection we have to each other is more properly basic than the distance between us. And it’s significant to me that her early work was on St Augustine’s concept of love. Because in my more optimistic moments I think of love as the ultimate reality of the universe, the cement that binds all things together.

Maybe I’m being sentimental. Maybe news programmes like this one require a more hardheaded estimation of reality. If it bleeds it leads, and all that. And what with Nice and Turkey and the shootings in Baton Rouge, the news has been particularly death filled of late. And there’s little that’s newsworthy about a new heart beating and tiny fingers reaching out for love. Indeed, there are nearly five births a second. And each one of them suggests a more positive estimation of reality, another flicker of resistance to the pervasiveness of despair, and further encouragement to the belief that love is stronger than death.