Natality and Community: Overcoming Deathcenteredness of the Classical Metaphysical Thinking

Article

Abstract

[In English]

The paper is dedicated to the clarification of the very sense of the transition from the deathcentered thinking to the birthcentered one. The author argues that shifting from death and mortality to birth and natality as a fundamental motivation of philosophical reflection is the principal feature of the paradigmatic transition from the philosophy of the solipsistic subject to that of being-with-oneanother. Historically the paper is based on two intellectual dispositions: Diotima-and-Socrates and Heidegger-and-Arendt. Analyzing them the author tries, first, to clarify contributions of Diotima and Arendt to the natal turn of the philosophical thinking and, second, to provide a conceptualization of birth which could prove the overturning potential of this phenomenon in regard to the classical metaphysical tradition.