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Being Born
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Studies in Feminist Philosophy is designed to showcase cutting- edge monographs and collections that display the full
range of feminist approaches to philosophy, that push feminist thought in important new directions, and that display
the outstanding quality of feminist philosophical thought.
STUDIES IN FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY
Linda Martín Alcoff, Hunter College and the CUNY
Graduate Center
Elizabeth Barnes, University of Virginia
Lorraine Code, York University, Toronto
Penelope Deutscher, Northwestern University
Ann Garry, California State University, Los Angeles
Sally Haslanger, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Alison Jaggar, University of Colorado, Boulder
Serene J. Khader, Brooklyn College and CUNY
Graduate Center
Helen Longino, Stanford University
Catriona Mackenzie, Macquarie University
Mari Mikkola, Humboldt University, Berlin
Sally Scholz, Villanova University
Laurie Shrage, Florida International University
Lisa Tessman, Binghamton University
Nancy Tuana, Pennsylvania State University
Published in the Series:
Settingthe Moral Compass: Essays by Women Philosophers
Edited by Cheshire Calhoun
Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self
Linda Martín Alcoff
Women and Citizenship
Edited by Marilyn Friedman
Women’s Liberation and the Sublime: Feminism, Post-
modernism, Environment
Bonnie Mann
Analyzing Oppression
Ann E. Cudd
Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location
Lorraine Code
Self Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized
Bodies
Cressida J. Heyes
Family Bonds: Genealogies of Race and Gender
Ellen K. Feder
Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics, Sec-
ond Edition
Margaret Urban Walker
The Moral Skeptic
Anita M. Superson
“You’ve Changed”: Sex Reassignment and Personal
Identity
Edited by Laurie J. Shrage
Dancing with Iris: The Philosophy of Iris Marion Young
Edited by Ann Ferguson and Mechthild Nagel
Philosophy of Science after Feminism
Janet A. Kourany
Shifting Ground: Knowledge and Reality, Transgression
and Trustworthiness
Naomi Scheman
The Metaphysics of Gender
Charlotte Witt
Unpopular Privacy: What Must We Hide?
Anita L. Allen
Adaptive Preferences and Women’s Empowerment
Serene J. Khader
Minimizing Marriage: Marriage, Morality, and the Law
Elizabeth Brake
Out from the Shadows: Analytic Feminist Contributions
to Traditional Philosophy
Edited by Sharon L. Crasnow and Anita M. Superson
The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial
Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant
Imaginations
José Medina
Simone de Beauvoir and the Politics of Ambiguity
Sonia Kruks
Identities and Freedom: Feminist Theory Between Power
and Connection
Allison Weir
Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist
Philosophy
Edited by Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers, and
Susan Dodds
Sovereign Masculinity: Gender Lessons from the War on
Terror
Bonnie Mann
Autonomy, Oppression, and Gender
Edited by Andrea Veltman and Mark Piper
Our Faithfulness to the Past: The Ethics and Politics of
Memory
Sue Campbell
Edited by Christine M. Koggel and Rockney Jacobsen
The Physiology of Sexist and Racist Oppression
Shannon Sullivan
Disorientation and Moral Life
Ami Harbin
The Wrong of Injustice: Dehumanization and its Role in
Feminist Philosophy
Mari Mikkola
Beyond Speech: Pornography and Analytic Feminist
Philosophy
Mari Mikkola
Differences: Rereading Beauvoir and Irigaray
Edited by Emily Anne Parker and Anne van Leeuwen
Categories We Live By: The Construction of Sex, Gender,
Race, and Other Social Categories
Ásta
Equal Citizenship and Public Reason: A Feminist Polit-
ical Liberalism
Christie Hartley and Lori Watson
Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist
Ethic
Serene J. Khader
The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability
Elizabeth Barnes
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Being Born
Birth and Philosophy
ALISON STONE
1
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3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Alison Stone 2019
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2019
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
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above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2019941468
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Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction: Towards a Philosophy of Being Born 1
1. Birth and Natality in Feminist Philosophy 25
2. History, Inheritance, and Vulnerability 55
3. Dependency, Relationality, Power, and Situatedness 85
4. The Radical Contingency of Being Born 118
5. Birth Anxieties 151
6. Natality and Mortality 182
7. Temporality, the Gift, and Being Born 210
Bibliography 237
Index 261
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Acknowledgements
:I am very grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for awarding me a Major
Research Fellowship, which funded two years of research leave (2017–19)
during which I wrote this book.
:I am also grateful to many people who have commented on earlier drafts
of this material or discussed its ideas with me, including Anu Aneja, Victoria
Browne, Lewis Coyne, Simon Gillham, Stephen Houlgate, Kate Kirkpatrick,
Clare Palmer, Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, Christina Schües, Fanny Söderbäck,
Bob Stern, Bron Szerzynski, Angus Taylor, Veronica Vasterling, Jon Webber,
Steve Wilkinson, and Kate Withy. I particularly want to thank Tanja Staehler,
for reading several draft chapters, and the two anonymous referees for Oxford
University Press, whose extremely helpful, detailed, and constructive com-
ments enabled me to make many improvements to the book. I thank Peter
Momtchiloff at Oxford University Press for his support for this project. Above
all, my thanks to John Varty for his help and support.
:I put forward much earlier versions of some of the ideas in Chapter 6 in
‘Natality and Mortality: Rethinking Death with Cavarero’,inContinental
Philosophy Review (2010) 43: 353–72, and ‘The Relationality of Death’,in
On the Feminist Philosophy of Gillian Howie, ed. Daniel Whistler and
Victoria Browne (Bloomsbury, 2016).
:This book is dedicated to my daughter Elinor Varty Stone and to the
memory of my parents, Hannah and Patrick Stone.
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Introduction
Towards a Philosophy of Being Born
:I. Main Themes
:All human beings begin life by being born, and all human beings die. In
these two ways we are finite: our lives are not endless, but they begin
and they come to an end. Historically, however, philosophers have concen-
trated their attention on only one of these two ways in which we are finite:
our mortality. Philosophers have asked whether death is bad; how one might
die well; how our existence is shaped by our mortality; whether there is life
after death and what it might be like; whether immortality is possible or
desirable; and much more besides. In contrast, philosophers have said little
about being born and how that shapes our existence. There are exceptions to
this neglect of birth, notably in some recent work in feminist philosophy.
But even here attention to being born has often been overshadowed by a
focus on the experience and politics of giving birth and the maternal body.
:My aim in this book is to contribute to overcoming the neglect of being
born by philosophers. To this end I draw on feminist philosophy. I also take
up the existentialist project of inquiring into the structure of meaningful
human existence, but unlike other existentialists I explore how human
existence is natal, that is, is as it is because we are born. I use the terms
natality and being born as synonyms: to be born is to be natal, and our
existence is natal in that we exist as beings that are born.¹ Taking natality
into account transforms our view of human existence. It sheds new light on
our mortality, foregrounds the extent and depth of our dependency on one
another, and brings additional phenomena—such as our relatedness to
others and the temporal shape of human life—together in a new way.
:What does being born consist in? For a human being, to be born is (i) to
begin to exist at a certain point in time, by (ii) coming into the world with
and as a specific body, and in a given place, set of relationships, and situation
in society, culture, and history, while (iii) doing so by way of being conceived
and gestated in and then exiting from the womb. Historically, this has
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almost always been the maternal womb, although this is changing with the
rise of transgender pregnancies and it is becoming complicated by new
reproductive technologies and practices such as surrogacy.
:Regarding (iii) particularly, we can distinguish narrow and broader senses
in which the expressions ‘birth’and ‘being born’are normally used. Most
narrowly, to be born is just to exit the womb of the person who gestated me.
More broadly, to be born is to be conceived and gestated in that person’s
womb and finally exit it. A still broader view treats the process of birth as
continuing into psychological birth during the infant’s earliest years.
I favour the middle, broad but not maximally broad, understanding, as
I think that talk of ‘psychological birth’over-extends the concept. But as
one cannot exit the womb without having first been formed and grown
within it, it is helpful to grasp this process as a whole, thus under the (broad)
concept birth.²
:To examine how we exist as natals is to explore how our being born in
aspects (i) to (iii) gives rise to some structuring features of our existence and
affects others, so that our existence is the way it is only because we are born.
In exploring these features, we at the same time clarify what it is to be born
in the first place; for instance, when we explore what it is to be situated, we
shed light reciprocally on what it is to begin existence in a particular socio-
cultural-historical situation. Thus, our inquiry is at once into what being
born consists in and into what follows about human existence from our
being born, in mutually informing ways.
:In particular, when we take into account that we are natals, beings that
enter the world by being born, the following features of our existence are
thrown into relief. One is dependency. The initially acute helplessness of
human babies and infants, and children’s prolonged need for care and
education, mean that we begin life profoundly dependent on the other
people who care for us physically and emotionally. By social convention,
this care is often given by children’s mothers, usually their biological
mothers. We become more independent over time, but never completely
or permanently so: dependency on others persists throughout human life to
varying degrees.³ We depend on others, for instance, for much of our means
of subsistence, by virtue of the organization of work and the division of
labour, and through processes of collective administration that supply us
with such goods as clean water, electricity, and sanitation. The depth and
extent of our dependency have been underestimated in much mainstream
philosophy, which has foregrounded the figure of the autonomous rational
agent—although our dependency is recognized within recent work in care
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ethics (e.g. Kittay 1999), on vulnerability (e.g. Mackenzie, Rogers, and
Dodds 2014a), and by MacIntyre (1999). Building on this work, I aim
specifically to show how dependency is connected with natality. We are
most deeply dependent on others in our infancy and childhood, but, in
addition, many of the ways in which we remain dependent on others in later
life retain continuities with our childhood dependency. For example, we
depend on language, which is communally shared—it organizes our thought
and experience, the world of meaning in which we operate, and our com-
municative relations with others—but we first acquire language in infancy,
and the language we speak retains a wealth of connections with this child-
hood context. Not all the elements of our dependency derive directly from
our being born, but some do, while others remain connected with birth in
various ways. Reciprocally, part of what it is to be born is to come into
existence in a state of deep dependency which has life-long ramifications.
:Another feature of our existence as beings that are born is our relation-
ality. Informed by psychoanalytic thought about the formative impact of our
early relationships with our first care-givers, I will argue that these relation-
ships constitute a person’s basic sense of self as well as their concrete
personality structure. To have a sense of self is, however implicitly, to ascribe
all one’s experiences and acts to a single locus and so experience them as
being one’s own. According to Jessica Benjamin (1988) and Daniel Stern
(1985/1998), babies form a first, rudimentary sense of self over their first few
months through their interactions and constant ‘being-with’their central
care-givers; thus, the self is constituted all along as a self-with-this-other.
Personality structure is more concrete, including emotional dispositions and
character traits, and taking shape over our first years of life as we internalize
aspects of our relationships with those who give us care. Thus, our early
relationships constitute and do not merely qualify who we are. In turn, the
relationality of our early lives shapes the nature of our subsequent relation-
ality: throughout our lives, we are open to later relationships in ways
patterned by our previous relationships. Furthermore, our first relationships
impact on us so heavily because of our acute dependency as infants and
children; thus, relationality, dependency, and natality are intertwined.
:To be born is also to be inescapably situated. In being born one arrives in
a situation—historical, social, ethnic, geographical, etc.—which is unique for
each individual, because in each case it is comprised of a unique convergence
of factors transmitted through that individual’s birth, for instance through
their parents’religious allegiance and place of residence.⁴One’snatal situ-
ation, then, comprises the specific set of circumstances and relationships
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into which one arrives by birth. How far this aspect of our natality affects our
entire lives may be debated. Everyone can agree that by birth we all begin life
in specific situations, some more advantageous than others. But some may
argue that by exercising our innate freedom we can transcend whatever
disadvantages we started with—or, conversely, fritter away any advantages.
In this book I defend an alternative view of situatedness, informed by Jean-
Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger: that individuals only ever make choices
from within their pre-given situations, without which they would not be
presented with the particular possibilities they face, under the meanings
those possibilities carry. One’s situation thus infuses every choice one makes,
and each new situation that results from a choice carries the stamp of both
one’s previous choice and one’s previous situation; likewise, with one’s next
situation, and so on. Consequently, situatedness—and with it the initial
situating force of one’s birth—remain ever-operative in one’s life, across
the series of choices one makes, which would not be this particular series
were it not for the specificities of one’s natal situation, and of the situation
that arose out of one’s response to that situation, and so on.
:One important factor with respect to which we are situated, by birth and
subsequently, is social power relations. These include power relations of
gender, race, class and economic position, age, and disability, to mention
just a few. These power relations begin straightaway to be transmitted to us,
however obliquely, through our relationships with our first care-givers—for
example, the language they speak may be the dominant one in our country
of residence or a minority language, and may be spoken in the country’s
standard, ‘official’style or in a minority variant or dialect. To be born is to be
always embedded in social power, from the outset, so that power relations
affect us before we have any possibility of or capacity for criticizing or
questioning them. Once we take being born into account, then, we come
to see power as a normal and constitutive rather than aberrant or accidental
feature of human life. This does not mean that criticism of power relations is
impossible, but that such criticism is always dependent on and made
possible by power relations, even perhaps the same ones against which it
is directed.
:Dependency, relationality, situatedness, and embeddedness in social
power—all these features of our existence have been scrutinized before,
but more-or-less separately from one another, respectively by feminist care
ethicists, psychoanalytic and feminist theorists of the self, existentialists
such as Sartre and Heidegger, and Foucauldian and feminist theorists of
power.⁵My aim here is to show that all these features are connected with our
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being born, and that these connections affect how these features manifest
themselves in our lives.
:In addition, to be born is to be vulnerable in various ways. We begin life
helpless and vulnerable to distress and harm if or when our care-givers do
not meet our needs; as relational beings, we are vulnerable to being damaged
by failures of care in our very selves and personalities; and because we arrive
in existence within natal situations, we are vulnerable to coming into more-
or-less adverse, disadvantageous, and even disastrous ones. We remain
vulnerable to all sorts of harms throughout our lives; nonetheless, I’ll suggest
that the kinds of vulnerability to which we are subject as adults retain
continuities with our vulnerability in infancy and childhood.
:To be natal is also for it to be radically contingent who one is in each case.
There is a root contingency to my being born as this particular embodied
individual, and in turn my living this particular life as it unfolds out of a
specific natal situation. One can ask, ‘Why is this the life I am leading?’or
‘Why am I this individual?’Such questions are genuine, I believe, and do not
merely reflect metaphysical or grammatical confusion. A variety of answers
come from Western and Eastern religious traditions: for instance, that God
created the soul that I essentially am and infused it, at or soon after
conception, into a particular body. I submit instead that there is no explan-
ation of why we are each born the particular individuals we are; this is just a
fact—an ultimate fact for which no explanatory grounds can be supplied.
This is the facticity of my existence. ‘Facticity’, a concept of Sartre’s, partly
encompasses the reality that my being me and my arriving in the world in
my particular situation within it are, for each of us, ultimate facts behind
which we can penetrate no further. Insofar as there is no explanation for my
being born the individual I am, this is a radically contingent event, and one
that is groundless. Moreover, because each subsequent situation of mine
flows down from the one before it, and because it is radically contingent
what my original natal situation was, a thread of radical contingency and
groundlessness runs through my entire life. Likewise, my life always has an
aspect of givenness (this is facticity’s other meaning for Sartre): the given-
ness of all that I inherit at each moment from my past, and ultimately from
my birth. In this way facticity is also bound up with our natality, as are
inheritance and reception.
:The fact that there is no explanation for who I am, or why I am leading
the life I am, can be a source of existential anxiety, because there is an
element of impenetrable mystery about my own life. This, I suggest, is one of
several forms of natal anxiety to which we are disposed: anxiety about
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discomforting and troubling features that our existence has insofar as it is
natal. Another of these features is that we cannot remember the formative
years and events of our lives—the phenomenon of ‘infantile amnesia’—but,
because those years were formative, we are left opaque to ourselves in
important ways. Often, we simply do not know why we act and feel as we
do. We are not masters in our own houses and this is, in part, because of our
natality.
:As I’ve stated, I want to help to correct the historic imbalance within
Western attitudes to death and birth. But it is not my intention to argue that
being born and not being mortal is central to our existence—my aim is to
re-balance, not reverse, our attitudes. On this I disagree with some feminist
thinkers of natality—such as Adriana Cavarero and Grace Jantzen, con-
sidered below—who favour a cultural re-orientation towards birth rather
than death. Instead I take it that birth and death structure human existence,
and in ways affected by one another. Although I focus on birth because it has
been the more neglected pole, I also discuss mortality, suggesting that it
looks different once we take natality into account. Thus, I address the
interdependence of death and birth from the side of birth. Admittedly,
some might dispute my claim that birth has been the more neglected of
our two ‘ends’, given the trend in Western modernity since the nineteenth
century to deny or repress our awareness of death (a trend documented in
particular by Ariès 1974). Perhaps birth was once neglected compared to
death, but now death has succumbed to repression too. Even if so, we need
not react to this undesirable trend by re-emphasizing death and not birth.
Instead, by attending to natality, we can pave the way for an honest, as well
as more balanced, approach to mortality.
:More specifically, taking natality into account shows, I believe, that our
condition is one of relational mortality. Because our selves and personalities
are relational through and through—because we are born—our deaths,
too, are relational and shade into one another continuously. A more indi-
vidualistic view is that my own death and the deaths of others are radically
different; one version of that view is found in Heidegger’sBeing and Time.
I argue instead that each individual’s death is bound up with the deaths of
the others with whom that individual has had close relationships—so that if
one of these others dies, then part of me dies, while when I die, part of those
others dies too: death is always shared. Consequently, my death and those of
others are to be feared because these deaths spell the end of our relation-
ships, the point when we will be separated forever. In disagreement with
Heidegger, then, I argue that facing the prospect of our deaths does not
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‘individualize’me but ‘relationalizes’me, bringing into relief the fundamental
importance for me of the relationships that I care about.⁶
:The temporal direction of our lives is involved in many of these preced-
ing aspects of our natality. My birth and death both shape the temporal
character of my lived experience. As my starting-point, my birth is the
organizing pole towards which my past runs back, while my death is
the organizing pole towards which my future runs forwards. For instance,
the succession of situations in which I find myself over the course of my
life runs back to my initial natal situation, and my earliest relationships
provide the template for my history of subsequent ones. But, although
my life-history runs back to my birth, I cannot remember being born or my
early childhood, so that my birth structures the temporal shape of my life
as an absence or vanishing point. Nonetheless, my birth and my past are
inescapably linked, so that in attending to birth we see how the past is just
as fundamental as the other temporal dimensions—contrary to Sartre, who
accords ultimate priority to the present, and Heidegger, who assigns
ultimate priority to the future.
:My exploration of these aspects of natality throws up ethical issues. I am
critical of the central value placed on autonomy and independence in much
Western moral and political thought. I also believe that features of our natal
condition generate a case for equality: for natal equality as an ideal goal,
admittedly a very broad and general one. At present we are born into natal
situations that are not only very different but also very unequal, especially on
a worldwide scale. Whereas death is, to an extent, an equalizer—for it is a
fate we will all suffer—birth is an unequalizer—such benefits as we enjoy by
birth are very unevenly distributed.⁷But, given our radical contingency,
there is no reason why anyone arrives by birth in the particular situation
they do. For while there is in each case a chain of causal factors that explains
why a given embodied individual is born in a certain situation, there is no
reason why I am this individual, why you are that individual, and so on.
Nothing therefore justifies its being me who enjoys benefits by birth com-
pared to others, if I do, or conversely who shares in very few of these
benefits, if not. This is where a case for natal equality arises.
:As I hope this preliminary summary makes apparent, I shall not attempt
to derive every aspect of our existence from birth in a linear way. Rather, the
features of our existence that I consider—such as dependency, relationality,
facticity, situatedness, contingency—are connected with birth along mani-
fold paths. By taking birth into account, we discern a web of connections
amongst these features where the ramifications of birth run through and
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imbue the whole web in complex ways. In this interwoven and circuitous,
rather than linear way, we exist as beings that are born.
:To complicate this picture a little further, let’s recall that for a human being
to be born is (i) to begin to exist at a certain point in time, by (ii) coming into
the world with and as a specific body, and ina given place, set of relationships,
and socio-cultural location, while (iii) doing so by way of being conceived and
gestated in, and then leaving, someone’s womb. To exist as someone who is
born, or who is natal, is for a wide range of structuring features of how we
exist to be shaped or affected, however circuitously, by our being born in
senses (i) to (iii). But some features are affected more by aspect (i); others by
aspect (ii) or (iii) or their combinations. For example, our first relationships
impact upon us so formatively, partly just because they come first, which
they do because we have beginnings (from i); partly because we come into
these relationships straightaway (from ii) before we have formed any ability
to criticize or stand back from them; and partly because of our acute
dependency and helplessness as babies and infants, which derives from
(iii) in the particular shape that being conceived, gestated, and expelled
from the womb takes in the human species. Namely, because of the obstetric
dilemma—the combination of big brains and narrow pelvises due to
bipedalism—human babies need to be born very immature to pass through
their mothers’birth canals. Hence human babies begin life as acutely
dependent as they are.⁸The fact that being born is internally multifaceted,
then, complicates how it affects other features of our existence.
:I can now clarify two further aspects of this inquiry. First, I am concerned
with birth as it figures in human existence. Yet features (i) to (iii) of birth
might seem to apply equally well to other viviparous species, albeit that we
might wonder whether non-human animals are ever born into ‘socio-
cultural-historical’locations (other than humanly produced ones). However,
as I’ve just indicated, (iii) is realized in a particular way in the human species,
such that we are born extremely immature, with very unformed bodies and
brains. In consequence, we are specially open and receptive to our initial,
and in turn subsequent, surroundings: we are specially cultural beings who,
being at first peculiarly unformed, become correspondingly deeply formed
by what others around us do, doings that we transmit to others in turn.
Humanity therefore comes to revise and rework its shared ways of life over
time in an ongoing process of collective self-alteration and self-making. The
resulting phenomena—culture, open-endedness, and with them collectively
shared and shifting horizons of meaning—are thus characteristically human
phenomena that pervade how we exist. Therefore, numerous elements of
our natality—such as situatedness, relationality, beginning, and coming into
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the world—obtain in our lives in particular ways that are bound up with
their meaningfulness. So, whereas features (i) to (iii) apply beyond humanity
when viewed in very abstract terms, in their concrete, lived character they
are particular to human beings.⁹
:Second, concerning aspect (iii) of being born, I spoke of ‘being con-
ceived and gestated in, and then leaving, someone’swomb’.But‘some-
one’s’sounds vague and evasive. To date, almost all people have been born
to women, their mothers. So perhaps being born should be defined with
reference to gestation in and departure from the maternal womb. How-
ever, that would make invisible the pregnancies of trans fathers and the
complications introduced into maternity by adoption, surrogacy, and new
reproductive technologies (see Chapter2,SectionI,ofthisvolume).One
solution might be to talk of gestating bodies (with Fanny Söderbäck 2018)
and so the gestator’s womb. But sometimes the resulting locutions would
be clumsy, for instance if being born were said to involve ‘gestation in the
gestator’swomb’. Moreover, historically and culturally, women, mothers,
and gestation have been profoundly linked and these links should be
remembered. Given that there is no perfect solution, then, I speak of
sometimes ‘the gestator’swomb’and sometimes ‘the maternal womb’.
Sometimes, too, I use neutral talk of ‘the womb’. Such talk is also imperfect
(and so I don’t use it all the time). It abstracts the womb from both the
whole body of which it is part and from the living person who has and is
that body, and this seems implicitly to reduce those persons to support-
functions for the babies that they gestate and bear. That kind of reduction
of mothers as embodied meaning-making subjects to mere supports for babies
has been widespread in Western culture (a reduction that I criticized in
Stone 2011): ultrasound images of foetuses in utero are a graphic instance,
in which the maternal body containing the foetus is reduced to empty
space (see Rothman 1986: 114). Even so, neutral talk of ‘the womb’some-
times works best, firstly because it sidesteps the choice between ‘mothers’and
‘gestators’, and secondly because it helps us to focus on being born from
the perspective of the one undergoing it, not that of the one gestating and
giving birth.
:II. Intellectual Sources and Location of this Inquiry
:In developing the themes of this book, I will be building on work in several
intellectual traditions, amongst them feminist philosophy, especially those
authors within it who have sought to ‘give birth to a new philosophy of
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birth’, in Mary O’Brien’s words (1981: 13). They include Christine Battersby
(1998), Cavarero ([1990] 1995) and ([1997] 2000), Lisa Guenther (2006),
Luce Irigaray [1987] (1993b), Alison Martin (2002), Anne O’Byrne (2010),
Robin May Schott (2010a, 2010b), Christina Schües (1997, 2008), Söderbäck
(2014a, 2018 and forthcoming), and many others.¹⁰Irigaray and Cavarero
deserve mention first, because their ideas on birth and being born motivated
and inspired my inquiry here.
:Irigaray and Cavarero address birth within their broad and ambitious
projects in regard to sexual difference. They believe that the Western
symbolic order has precluded any possibility of a positive female or feminine
identity. Irigaray holds that this order is matricidal—not literally but sym-
bolically, in that it insists, usually tacitly but at times overtly, that individuals
must break psychically from their mothers and from the maternal, bodily
realm of infancy to enter into language and communal life. Consequently,
for Irigaray, we generally suffer from unresolved psychical difficulties
in relation to our mothers. We have broken away from them without
mourning or emotionally processing this break, and we tend to push
these unresolved issues away defensively, resulting in a culture that shores
up its boundaries against the maternal realm by glorifying death, violence,
and war. One of Irigaray’s goals, in contrast, is to try to remember our
maternal and uterine origins and explore how our unresolved preoccupa-
tions with them reverberate in philosophical texts. She wants to remind us
that we have been born, and to prompt us to grapple with the emotional
ramifications of this, rather than pushing these matters aside as we are
accustomed to do, including when we concentrate philosophically on
death and not birth.
:Developing Irigaray’s ideas further, Cavarero argues that the Western
symbolic order has foregrounded death rather than birth—as in its slogan
‘all men are mortal’—and that this reflects a fear and rejection of maternal
power. Regarding birth’s positive significance, Cavarero maintains that we
each have narratable life-stories that begin when we are born and constitute
who we are as unique individuals. In setting out these ideas, Cavarero draws
heavily on Hannah Arendt’s work (esp. 1958). Indeed, as it is Arendt who
introduced the concept natality into philosophy, it may have seemed curious
that I have not mentioned her already. For Arendt, however, being natal
means at times being born, at times being unique and new by virtue of being
born, and at other times being able to initiate new acts and words in the
political realm. As a result, natality has only an ambiguous connection with
physical birth for Arendt, as I’ll argue in Chapter 1 of this volume (and as
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other feminist philosophers have already argued; for example, Schott 2010b:
52–7, Söderbäck 2018). My account of natality is therefore different from
Arendt’s, notwithstanding her importance in naming the phenomenon,
identifying some of the ways that being born shapes our condition, and
influencing Cavarero and other feminists concerned with birth.
:Although Irigaray’s and Cavarero’s work raises many questions, it forms
my starting-point. And it has already occasioned other feminist engage-
ments with birth. For one, the philosopher of religion Grace Jantzen pursues
Irigaray’s and Cavarero’s critique of the Western symbolic order as focused
on death and violence. Jantzen recommends a socio-cultural turn towards
natality as a way of recovering possibilities for leading peaceful and flour-
ishing lives (1998, 2005).
:Natality also figures into Christine Battersby’s project, which is to rethink
personal and individual identity, taking female embodiment to be normal
rather than anomalous. Asking what follows about the self if giving birth is a
constant, normal possibility (1998: 2, 9–11), Battersby answers, first, that we
are natals: beings who are born, who do not appear in the world out of
nowhere but from the bodies of our mothers. Second, because we are natals,
we are dependent beings: we begin life dependent on our first care-givers.
This dependency is asymmetrical, so that we are from the outset embedded
in power relations and inequalities. Power relations are thus normal and
constitutive of human existence, not a deviation from a supposed normal
condition of equality. Third, because we begin life radically dependent upon
and entwined with our carers, we only gradually become fully distinct
individuals. There is no sharp self/other division. Rather, each self is in a
continuous process of emergence from the ‘intersecting force-fields’of its
power-laden relations with others. Fourth, the self is embodied, and specif-
ically emerges from this field of ‘fleshly continuity’with others. Fifth, the
self is ‘monstrous’, in a productive rather than horrific sense: crossing over
and blurring the boundaries between autonomy and dependence, self-
containment and relatedness, agency and passivity, mind and body.
:To mention a few of the others who have written about birth, Bracha
Ettinger (2006) suggests that pregnancy exemplifies how the self is always-
already in relation with others, relations that are constitutive of and not
merely accidental to who we are—as the embryo is, from the very first, in
relation with the maternal body. Pregnancy has also been described—for
instance by Tanja Staehler (2016a, 2016b), within the emerging field of
phenomenology of pregnancy¹¹—in terms of the mother’s tactile encounter
with an other who is irreducibly different from her, unknown to her, and
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exceeds her horizon of thought and all her imaginings and anticipations
regarding them. For Lisa Baraitser (2008), something similar extends into
post-natal maternity: a mother is oriented towards a child whose temporal-
ity is oriented away from her, towards the child’s own future, which lies
beyond the mother’s horizons.¹²
:Whereas for Irigaray, Cavarero, Battersby and others reflection on being
born remains partly enfolded within reflection on birth-giving, Christina
Schües distinguishes as I do between giving birth (Gebären) and being born
(Geborensein), and concentrates on the latter (2016). Schües starts with the
fact that nobody can remember being born. She argues that this is because
birth (taken narrowly as the exit from the womb) is the condition of
possibility for experience in the first place. To be born is to make an absolute
transition, and come into the world and relations with others. Schües takes
the ‘world’to be not primarily a bare physical realm but rather the context of
interrelated involvements, meanings, and values which is shared with other
people, every element of which is interwoven—such that the world is a
whole, and one in which we always-already find ourselves, prior to any
possibilities for individual meaning-making. She is informed by Heidegger,
for whom the world is constituted as a world of ‘the context of references
[Verweisungszusammenhang]...as significance [Bedeutsamkeit]’([1927]
1962: 121/88).¹³ It is only by abstraction from the lived, meaningful, shared
world that we come to conceive of the bare physical world that subtends it,
whereas in everyday life the physical is always-already imbued with mean-
ing. Schües’s argument, then, is that intentional experience, which is dir-
ected towards items in the world as specific items picked out against the
background of a total set of meaningful relations, first becomes possible
through being born as the transition by which we enter the world. Being the
necessary precondition of experience, birth cannot itself figure directly in
experience (Schües 2016: 214). This, Schües concludes, is why being gestated
and born necessarily cannot be remembered afterwards. Here birth, for
Schües, forms a conduit into a number of ways in which our experience as
individuals is pervaded, shaped, and framed by conditions that we nonethe-
less cannot take up or incorporate explicitly within that experience. Central
amongst these, for Schües, are our ‘generative’relations with others, which
are both intergenerational and with our rough contemporaries: we always
come from somewhere and from someone, and are delivered by birth into a
given time along with our co-generationists. Thus, no subject is self-
constituting; rather, we are constituted by a wealth of prior generative
relations.
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:Ifind Schües’s conception of generative relations important and insightful,
but I am not convinced that (narrow) birth is the precondition of experience.
During the later stages of gestation, foetuses in the womb already have sentient
experience: for example, they respond to music and voices, and they can
detect changes in levels of light and noise in the outer world. Indeed, Schües
herself accepts that late-stage foetuses have experience, within the womb
and whilst leaving it; thus, she acknowledges, ‘The one born was necessarily
present at their birth’(2016: 12). But she preserves her view that exiting the
womb is the precondition of experience by characterizing pre-natal existence
as being-towards-being-in-the-world, being-towards-intentionality, and being-
towards-being-there, whereas post-natal existence is intentional and in the
world, properly so (1997: 246). Now, certainly, after leaving the womb I am
more fully in the shared world in my own right, rather than only through the
mediation of the person gestating me. Yet given the extent of our neonatal and
infantile dependency, one’s post-birth participation in the world is still very
heavily mediated through one’s care-givers. Conversely, something approxi-
mating intentional experience already begins during late gestation, for instance
in that the mother’s voice stands out as a particular and especially salient one.
That is evidenced in that three-day-old newborns prefer their mother’stoother
voices; these ‘perceptual preferences...are profoundly affected by auditory
experience before birth’(DeCasper and Fifer 1980: 1176). So, dividing pre-
and post-natal existence into being-towards-being-there versus (fully) being-
there makes too sharp a cut. What remains true is that being born in the broad
sense that includes conception and gestation is the precondition of experience;
obvious as this may sound, it is still worth remarking.
:Moving away from feminist work on birth as such, I also draw on care
ethics, in which authors such as Eva Kittay (1999) have highlighted our
dependency on one another, in and beyond infancy, and how dependency
precedes and outstrips interdependency. Feminist theorists have also had
much to say about power, its ever-presence in our lives, and how it consti-
tutes our mental and bodily powers, even our powers to criticize the same
workings of power which have formed us (see, especially, Butler 1997). And
in philosophy of mind, feminists have argued in various ways that the self
is constitutively, not accidentally, relational (Brison 2017); they have insisted
that we all begin life as children and that this bears on the nature of
the self (Baier 1985); and they have largely eschewed the abstraction of
much philosophy of mind, instead attending to how our early and later
relationships and experiences, and their social settings, shape our selves in
the concrete.
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:Another intellectual tradition by which I am guided is psychoanalysis,
because of its attention to the key formative impact of our earliest relation-
ships and experiences in infancy and early childhood. Psychoanalysis is
commonly seen as foregrounding the role of unconscious forces and motiv-
ations throughout our lives. But it equally foregrounds the fact that we all
begin life as children and we never entirely leave our childhood behind—it
continues to shape us, even when we cannot remember it. Freud originally
focused, of course, on the Oedipus complex: our relations with ‘the father’,a
figure as much imaginary and symbolic as real and empirical, and virtually
equivalent to basic laws that regulate social life. Subsequent psychoanalysts,
especially in the object–relations tradition, have re-emphasized the import-
ance of the mother and of our actual, empirical care-givers. But on either view,
our early relationships with parental figures are central for our lives, and they
indelibly stamp our characters as individuals. Thus, much of what psycho-
analysis examines—how our earliest relationships get inside and shape us—in
fact pertains to our condition as beings that are born and so whose lives
begin—as they continue—under the formative aegis of our first care-givers.
:The third principal tradition to guide this book is existentialism, espe-
cially that of Sartre, Camus, and Beauvoir, but also Heidegger in Being and
Time—whom we can include under the existentialist heading so long as we
construe it broadly enough.¹⁴I take up the existentialist inquiry into what
makes for a meaningful life and into the structure of human existence as a
whole and, to some extent, I follow such existentialists as Sartre, Beauvoir,
and Camus in looking to fictional characters and their situations to illumin-
ate, concretely, our ways of navigating our lives.¹⁵However, most authors in
the existentialist tradition see human existence as being fundamentally
structured by mortality rather than natality. This is true, in different ways,
of Beauvoir, Camus, and Heidegger. For instance, Beauvoir argues that,
while death may be bad, being mortal is the condition of a meaningful life,
so that immortality would be worse. To this extent, existentialism adheres to
the Western philosophical vision in which ‘all men are mortal’rather than
‘all human beings are born’. Death does not figure so prominently for Sartre,
yet he believes in radical individual freedom construed as autonomy: one’s
freedom to choose one’s own values and commitments, choices that over
time shape the self—who I am is who I make myself through my freely
undertaken commitments. This view underestimates such aspects of natality
as the formative force of our early relationships and our dependency on
others (even though Sartre can also help us think about those phenomena).
While I am informed by existentialism, then, I try to re-orientate it to take
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account not only of death and endings but also of birth and beginnings, and
thereby also to accommodate dependency, relationality, and the weight of
the past alongside freedom, individuality, and the lightness of the future.
:The sources that inform my analysis of being born—recent feminist
thought, psychoanalysis, and existentialism—may now seem so numerous
as to tell against my claim that the Western tradition has overlooked or
marginalized birth, and to suggest that the tradition is more variegated than
I’ve claimed.¹⁶Certainly, the Western tradition is variegated.¹⁷Nevertheless,
it is possible to identify dominant currents in Western thought, and a focus
on mortality rather than being born is amongst these. Even those authors
whose work sheds light on being born, such as Sartre and Freud, generally
do not put birth at the centre of their frameworks or conceive themselves to
be investigating birth—being born instead comes into their frameworks
sideways-on. And in, say, Heidegger’s case, he illuminates being born
despite explicitly arguing that mortality has priority over how one ‘exists
as born’(existiert gebürtig; 1962: 425/373). Whereas death has had an
explicit and central presence in Western thought and culture and has been
the direct subject of a flood of writings philosophical, literary, and religious,
then, birth’s presence has been more indirect and oblique. Not altogether
absent, it has nonetheless been in the background, behind death in the
foreground. That said, and as I’ve indicated, there has been a growing
trend to bring birth into the open, with feminist philosophers at its forefront;
it is this trend that I wish to take further.
:One might ask why feminists have spearheaded the attention to birth.
Part of the answer is that feminists try to articulate women’s experience, and
women tend to have a relatively vivid awareness that all human beings are
born; that other people bear them; that infants are dependent and need care;
and that our earliest relationships shape us very deeply. This is not primarily
because of women’s biological capacity for child-bearing but because of
their social position as the presumed, and often actual, main carers for
children. However, in feminist reflection—as we saw from my brief account
of some of its currents above—there has been a tendency to run exploration
of being born together with exploration of birth-giving along with the
experience and politics of reproduction, pregnancy, maternity, and child-
care.¹⁸One reason is that, for feminists, to be born is not to pop into the
world out of nowhere, or pull oneself into life by one’s own bootstraps, but
to be gestated and born from the mother’s body. Here, though, I shall
consider maternal and gestating bodies solely as they bear on being born
rather than in respect of birth-giving.
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:Another question arises here. If our existence is structured by our being
born, then how can we possibly have neglected our birth? If its role in our
existence is so central then surely it must force itself on our notice, we might
think. Yet there are cases when, as Hegel remarks, ‘the familiar as such,
because it is familiar, is not known’([1807] 1977: 18; my translation).
Sometimes it is just when something has a pervasive role in our experience
that we take it for granted to the point of overlooking it. This is the case with
our being born. Moreover, arguably we also have emotional reasons for
shying away from birth: Irigaray and Cavarero argue that we are motivated
to avoid birth because of unresolved difficulties with our mothers and fears
of maternal bodily powers. The result, for Irigaray, is that we live in denial of
our natal condition even though it nonetheless shapes our lives.
:Let me indicate some neighbouring fields of inquiry from which this book
stands aside. I won’t directly engage in feminist debates about the experi-
ences or politics of pregnancy, motherhood, and parenting. Nor do I enter
into debates about parental rights and obligations or the pros and cons of
assisted reproductive technologies.¹⁹I bracket all this because it pertains
more to giving birth than being born—to what birth-givers are obliged to do
or refrain from doing and what further (especially parental) obligations their
birth-giving creates for them. I will, however, criticize David Benatar’s anti-
natalism (2006), the view that it would always be better for one not to have
been born. This is a new manifestation of a longer-running stream of anti-
natal pessimism distilled in the ‘wisdom of Silenus’which Nietzsche reports
in The Birth of Tragedy. King Midas hunts down Dionysus’s companion
Silenus to ask him what is best for human beings, and Silenus replies:
:Wretched ephemeral race . . . why do you force me to tell you the very thing
which it would be most profitable for you not to hear? The very best thing
is utterly beyond your reach, not to have been born, not to be,tobe
nothing. However, the second best thing for you is: to die soon.
(Nietzsche [1872] 1999: 23)
:We could reverse this slogan: ‘the best thing is to be born, the next best is to
die as late as possible’—although I’ll argue that this would overstate matters.
On the other hand, taking another saying, ‘as soon as a man comes to life, he
is at once old enough to die’,²⁰we can reverse it to yield a slogan that I do
endorse: ‘right up until a person dies, she is young enough to have been
born’. That is, right through one’s life, one’s birth and its ramifications are
still with one, shaping where one is each step of the way—and this remains
true for however long one’s life continues.
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:It might seem surprising that I do not discuss debates about genetic
enhancement or ex utero gestation.²¹ For some critics, these both threaten
to transform for the worse the very character of human existence. Although
such feminists as Shulamith Firestone (1970) and Marge Piercy (1975)
championed ectogenesis as liberating women from their gestational powers
and their exploitation, others fear that ectogenesis would take away the
relational and affective context in which gestation occurs within the womb
of a mother or some other person. (As I noted above, for human beings,
intra-uterine gestation—under aspect iii of being born—is already a way of
coming into a specific set of relationships—under aspect ii.)
:My reasons for not discussing such issues are several. First, even should
ectogenesis became widespread (which is doubtful, given its resource-
intensiveness and the value many parents place on intra-uterine gestation),
parents would surely still maintain relationships with their externally devel-
oping foetuses—by watching them, talking to them, playing them music,
and so on. At least in ways such as this, foetuses would continue to be held in
and inducted into relational, emotional, and meaning-laden settings. Aldous
Huxley in Brave New World ([1932] 1994) imagined a wholly ectogenetic
society in which foetuses are grown in bottles and decanted rather than
born, under a mass-production system that removes foetuses, infants, and
children from any intimate relationships. The family has been eliminated;
the words mother and father have become obscenities. That system might
well transform our condition radically—for Huxley, it yielded people ‘bliss-
fully ignorant of passion . . . plagued with no mothers or fathers; they’ve not
got wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about’(194). But ectogenesis
in reality would be unlikely to take that form and have that effect, for human
beings are deeply attached to gestation’s relational significance and would
surely preserve and adapt it to ex utero circumstances.²²
:Second, as regards genetic enhancement, if selection for certain traits in
embryos became widespread or even if traits began to be modified directly, it
is not obvious that this would strip us of our natality as, notably, Habermas
argues (2003). He understands natality on broadly Arendtian lines, as our
being born as in each case someone radically new relative to everything that
has happened before, such that we have a capacity for initiating new actions.
Habermas grasps these two kinds of newness together under the idea that
as natals we have ‘open futures’. But, he claims, genetic enhancement
eliminates this by encoding specific parental expectations into the child’s
biological body and so preventing the child from being able to see herself as
unique by birth such that she can act autonomously vis-à-vis society. Rather,
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she sees herself as inherently a product of society, as mediated through
parental expectations and the technologies that have shaped her.²³ I’ll argue,
however, that part of the newness of each child arises from the irreducibility
of their first-person existence to its causes and conditions viewed third-
personally. It is not clear that that irreducibility can be affected by any
technological developments and so, contra Habermas, I am more hopeful
that the newness of the natal is here to stay.²⁴
:Third and most importantly, to assess how far genetic enhancement,
ectogenesis, or any other actual or potential reproductive technologies
might transform our existence, we first need some understanding of how
being born has shaped and continues to shape that existence so far. I’ll
refrain from assessing the possible impact of reproductive techniques on our
existence as natals, then, because we cannot assess that impact until we
already have some understanding of that existence and how it is natal—an
understanding which it is my aim to develop.
:Lastly, I bracket religious perspectives on birth and death. This is not to
say that I think the only viable approach to birth, or death, must be secular
or atheistic. At the same time, I want neither to offer a theology of birth nor
to attempt a rational evaluation of different religious perspectives on birth,
on the doubtful presupposition that reason can arbitrate neutrally here. To
do justice to questions of birth and religion they would need to be tackled in
their own right, and, worthwhile as such an undertaking would be, it is not
my project here.²⁵
:III. Chapter Synopsis
:In Chapter 1 of this volume, I explain how Irigaray and Cavarero bring birth
into philosophy, including through Cavarero’s engagement with Arendt on
natality. I also explain how Jantzen takes forward these views on birth and
being born. In Chapter 2 of this volume, I consider some objections that
might be raised to the whole family of approaches to being born which
emerge from Chapter 1. While considering these objections, I introduce two
aspects of our existence which are connected with our being born: vulner-
ability and inheritance. Through Chapters 1 and 2 together, then, I aim to
motivate this project and establish its scope, to bring on stage some of its key
intellectual inspirations, and to start to discuss some aspects of what it is to
be born.
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:In Chapter 3 of this volume, I explore dependency, the relationality of the
self, and situatedness, including situatedness within social power relations.
In Chapter 4 of this volume, I turn to the contingency of one’s being born
the particular individual that one is. As I outlined earlier, although we can
each ask, ‘Why am I me?’, I could not possibly have been leading any other
life, so that the question is unanswerable, and the contingency of my being
born in my unique situation is fundamental. As a result, a dimension of
contingency flows down through our entire lives. To understand this radical
contingency along with two related aspects of natality, groundlessness and
facticity (roughly, givenness), I use Sartre’sNausea and Being and Nothing-
ness. His work also shows how situatedness is transmitted down at each step
in our lives from our initial (natal) situations. However, I reject his strong
conception of individual freedom, and forward in its place an idea of
sedimented sense-making: in how we respond to our circumstances, we are
always taking forward inherited horizons of meaning and value.
:The radical contingency of my being born the individual I am, in what-
ever unique situation I find myself, can provoke deep anxiety, because it
exposes a dimension of mystery at the heart of my existence. This is one of a
number of forms of birth anxiety which I explore in Chapter 5 of this
volume. Psychoanalytic theorists—notably Otto Rank, author of the 1924
work The Trauma of Birth, and Freud himself—connected birth with anx-
iety on the grounds that being born is traumatic. I’ll examine these psycho-
analytic views somewhat critically, but I’ll take from them an insight into the
lasting power in our lives of a kind of separation anxiety. Because the people
whom we love and on whom we depend are different individuals from us,
with minds of their own, they can always hurt or leave us or thwart our
wishes. We register this mixture of dependency and vulnerability, related-
ness and difference, in anxiety—in adulthood as in childhood. Overall in this
chapter I argue that whereas existentialists—Heidegger particularly—link
anxiety with mortality, natal anxiety is real as well.
:In Chapter 6 of this volume, I set out my account of relational mortality,
against the background of two alternative approaches: Cavarero’s imper-
sonal view of death as material re-integration into the cosmos, and Heideg-
ger’s prioritization of my own death over those of others. In contrast,
drawing on Beauvoir’sfiction and memoirs, I explore two ways in which
our mortality is relational: our deaths shade into one another, and much of
what death will deprive us of matters to us specifically because we share it
with others. In this last respect, I focus on how we are attached to the world
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insofar as it is intrinsically shared and is the medium of our lives together
with others.
:In Chapter 7 of this volume, I draw out how temporality has figured into
the preceding discussions. Temporally, lived human existence is future-
oriented towards death and past-oriented towards birth. When we take
our natal orientation to the past into account, we see that when we project
forward and create meaning we are always extending inherited horizons that
we have received in and from the past. I also consider whether birth can
rightly be said to be a gift given us by our mothers. Although I am doubtful,
thinking of birth as a gift illuminates some connections between our natality
and the relational setting of our ethical lives and obligations. Finally, I sum
up my main theses about how human existence is shaped by the fact that we
are born.
Notes
1. Others use the term natality differently. For instance, Grace Jantzen distin-
guishes the mere fact of being born from natality understood as our entire
condition and way of existing insofar as it is shaped by our being born (e.g.
2004: 111). I take it instead that since our natal condition flows out of our being
born, and since being born is not a mere physical fact but a way of coming into
existence that is consequential for the entire existence that comes out of it, we
can equate ‘being born’and ‘natality’. Another distinction is made by Christina
Schües between being born (Geborensein) and natality (Gebürtlichkeit) under-
stood, following Arendt, as the human capacity to initiate new actions spontan-
eously and freely (initium) (Schües 2016: 14, 401). Arendt calls this capacity
‘natality’because it realizes the newness that is inherent in each of us insofar as
we are born. But sometimes Arendt instead equates ‘natality’simply with ‘the
fact that human beings appear in the world by . . . birth ’(Arendt 1978: 217), and
sometimes again she uses ‘natality’to pick out our newness by birth or our
condition of appearing to plural others in a shared world by birth. That is, for
Arendt, ‘natality’variably encompasses (i) being born, (ii) arriving new by birth,
(iii) our human condition as beings who are born, and (iv) being able, because of
(ii) and/or (iii), to initiate actions. I follow Arendt on (i), (ii), and (iii), but not
(iv), as will emerge later. I therefore equate natality directly with meanings (i) to
(iii) without giving it the connotations of political action that Arendt does.
2. Feminist philosophers use ‘birth’in all three levels of breadth at different times.
For example, narrowly: Cavarero says that to be born is to come into the public
world and become exposed and appear visibly to others. Broadly: Irigaray, whilst
exploring the lasting psychological impact on us of being born, includes here the
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subtle and hidden impact of our tactile relations with the maternal body in the
darkness of the womb. Maximally broadly: Irigaray treats post-natal psycho-
logical self-differentiation from the mother as the mental continuation of the
bodily exit from her womb. On all these, see Chapter 1 of this volume. For
myself, although I understand ‘birth’broadly I will sometimes use the term in its
narrower sense, highlighting this at the time unless it is self-evident.
3. And, of course, some people with disabilities always remain heavily dependent
on their care-givers, as Eva Kittay points out (1999). This dependency is not an
isolated case, but is indicative of the broader dependency of all human beings.
4. Feminists and critical race philosophers have done much to explore situatedness,
and I will draw on their work, including Alcoff (2006). I particularly build on
Alcoff ’s idea of horizons of meaning, for which she in turn is indebted to
Gadamer, although I use Alcoff ’s rendition.
5. See, amongst others: on the self, Barvosa (2008), Baier (1985), Brison (2003) and
Meyers (1997); and on power, Allen (1999) and Butler (1997).
6. Throughout, I discuss death in the sense of non-existence, or being dead, rather
than of dying. However, one might object that, when we reconsider death in light
of being born, the processes by which we die come into view: we die by way of
ageing and becoming ill, injured, and incapacitated, and these bring in their wake
levels of dependency and vulnerability that parallel those of infancy and child-
hood. So perhaps a natal view of death should be one in which dying looms
larger than non-existence. I focus on non-existence, though, to show how death
as it has predominantly been considered philosophically—that is, as non-
existence—looks different when viewed in light of birth; and how our final
‘end’—death as non-existence—looks different when considered, not as exhaust-
ing our finitude, but as just one of its two poles, the other being birth.
7. But of course ‘death inequalities’exist, within nation states and globally. The
worse-off are in general more likely to die early, whether from illness, accidents,
or violence, and they are at greater risk for certain causes of death: for example,
lower-income Westerners have higher risks of dying from heart disease.
8. The young of many species are, like young humans, ‘altricial’—that is, helpless at
birth—but they don’t remain dependent for as long as young humans, even as a
proportion of their overall life-span. This difference arises because young
humans have more mental and practical skills to develop, as I explain in
Chapter 3 of this volume.
9. I agree to an extent, then, with existentialists such as Kierkegaard, Sartre and
Heidegger for whom existing is unique to humans. Existing as meaningful is
characteristically human, but culture, meaning, etc., aren’t necessarily entirely
exclusive to human beings. There may be a higher-altitude, more abstract level of
meaningful existence in which other animals share, although identifying it would
be well beyond this book’s scope. In this connection I should in fairness note
Heidegger’s remark that Dasein ‘names something that is by no means
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coterminous with human being’([1961] 1991: vol. 1, 26). That is: Dasein does
not mean what human being means. The last category is of a universal kind,
humankind, to which particular instances (human beings) belong on the basis of
their essential properties (reason, speech, sociality). That is, human being is a
traditional metaphysical category, as Dasein is not (allegedly). Nonetheless, the
scope of the notions Dasein and human being is the same, because non-human
animals are, unlike Dasein, ‘poor in world’(Heidegger [1929–30] 1996:
Chs. 3–5). Thus Dasein is after all a rough proxy for ‘human beings’.
10. The above are some of those whose approaches to birth and birth-giving accord
most closely with mine. Indicatively, some others include LaChance Adams and
Lundquist (2010), Cohen Shabot (2017), Heinämäa (2010), Held (1989),
Johnson (2014), Kristeva ([1974] 1984, [1983] 1986a), Mullin (2005), Oksala
(2004), Roberts (1993), and Warren (1989). Other relevant authors will be
mentioned along the way.
11. See Iris Marion Young’s now-classic paper ‘Pregnant Embodiment’([1984]
2005b) and since then, inter alia, Bornemark and Smith (2016), Levesque-
Lopman (1983), Lundquist (2008), Lymer (2016), and Svenaeus (2017). There
has also been growing and much-needed attention to miscarriage: see Browne
(2016), Cahill, Norlock and Stoyles (2015), and Scuro (2017).
12. At times one might worry that feminist explorations of pregnancy and birth are
idealized, for example when pregnancy is described in terms of an original
hospitability (see, e.g. Gray 2012) or when the placenta is described as a medi-
ating ‘third term’that enables foetus and mother to co-exist peaceably (Irigaray
1993c: Ch. 4). At best, though, feminist accounts confront and make sense of the
difficulties of mothering (as does, e.g. Baraitser 2008) and the troubling side of
pregnancy and giving birth (as does Staehler 2016b). Also, for contrasting views
that highlight the conflicts of interest between foetuses/infants/children and
mothers/parents, see Trivers (1974), Haig (1993), and (with a feminist inflection)
Hrdy (2000).
13. Throughout, when quoting texts originally published in languages other than
English, I use standard English translations whenever available, occasionally
amended without special notice.
14. And after all Camus denied that he was an existentialist, while Kierkegaard—a
central influence on Sartre, Heidegger, and Beauvoir alike—wrote before the
label was invented. For a defence of Heidegger’s inclusion under the label
existentialism, see Staehler (2012).
15. Having become unpopular during post-structuralism’s heyday, existentialism
has since enjoyed rediscovery: see, for example, Farrell Fox (2002) and Webber
(2010b). Amongst the manifold reasons for this are the return of philosophers to
questions of the ‘meaning of life’(e.g. Landau 2017); a growing recognition of
Beauvoir as a major philosopher; and the helpfulness of existentialism for
understanding racial oppression (e.g. Gordon 1995).
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16. And, after all, Schües (2016: pt. 1) traces the history of ideas of birth in Plato and
Nietzsche, the Enlightenment, Heidegger, and Husserl; O’Byrne (2010) examines
the phenomenological contributions on birth of Heidegger, Dilthey, Arendt and
Nancy; and Heinämäa (e.g. 2010) explores those of Levinas, Arendt, and
Beauvoir.
17. Not only has this ‘tradition’never been ‘one’, it has never been only ‘two’—that
is, Graeco-Christian—either: the ancient Greeks already took much from the
Egyptians and Phoenicians (Bernal 1987), not to mention such ‘other’strands as
Judaism and Arabic philosophy. On these issues, see inter alia Goswami (2014)
and Stone (2017).
18. Feminist writing on these matters is extensive; classic contributions include
Firestone (1970), O’Brien (1981), Rich (1976), Roberts (1997). A focus of
criticism has been the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth (see Stone
2007: Ch. 7). Discussions of mothering specifically include Craddock (2005),
LaChance Adams (2012, 2014), O’Reilly (e.g. 2004), Ruddick (1989), Stephens
(2012), and Stone (2011).
19. See,inter alia, on procreative and parental rights and obligations, Benatar and
Wasserman (2015), Brighouse and Swift (2014), Conly (2016), Gheaus (2012),
Hannan, Brennan, and Vernon (2016), Overall (2012), and Weinberg (2016).
Philosophical arguments for and against genetic enhancement include those by,
again amongst many others, Agar (2004), Buchanan (2011), Sandel (2007),
Savulescu (2006), and Wilkinson (2016). Feminist writing on new reproductive
technologies is also vast, including Callahan and Roberts (1996), Lublin (1998),
McLeod (2002), Nsiah-Jefferson and Hall (1989), Parks (2009) and Roberts
(2009). For critics, such technologies: (i) extend patriarchal control over mater-
nal and female bodies; (ii) consolidate a ‘reproductive caste system’that values
and promotes the reproduction of white women while discouraging that of non-
white women (Roberts 2009: 784); (iii) treat reproduction as normal, desirable,
and ‘natural’for women (or, at least, white women)—that is, ‘reinforce the idea
that women need to be mothers in order to feel fulfilled’(Strickler 1992: 119);
(iv) approach in- or sub-fertility in medical rather than social terms; and more
besides. On the ‘pro’side: (i) many women have deep-seated desires to mother,
which assistive techniques may help them to fulfil; (ii) the availability of ARTs
enlarges women’s set of reproductive options; (iii) ARTs can be enabling for
lesbian, gay, and queer families and trans individuals and have encouraged a
diversification of forms of family and kinship.
20. This is how Macquarrie and Robinson translate the saying that Heidegger
([1927] 1962: 289) takes from Johannes von Tepl’s late medieval German
poem, ‘The Ploughman and Death’:‘als balde ein mensche geboren wirt, als
balde hat es den Leikauf getrunken, das es sterben sol’(Tepl [c1401] 1969:
Ch. 20). A Leikauf was a contractual drink of wine that brought commitments
in its wake.
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21. The latest development towards the latter has been the successful bringing to
term of very premature lambs in an artificial uterus made of a fluid-filled plastic
bag; see Hamzelou (2017).
22. It’s worth recalling again here that, under my above definition of being born, the
womb in and from which one is born (point iii) need not be maternal; nor does it
have to be natural. And, if a foetus gestated ex utero were still inducted into
relationships, this would satisfy part (ii) of being born (coming into a relational
situation in the world). Thus, foetuses gestated ex utero would still be born; their
existential condition would still be natal; and they would still be dependent and
relational in ways that flow out of their births. Huxley, however, purposely
stipulates that foetuses are grown, not gestated, in bottles, not wombs, and are
decanted, not born (narrowly). Further, they are not inducted into relationships
during gestation, thus not satisfying (ii). That is, while in reality ex utero foetuses
would still be (broadly) born, in Brave New World they are not, so that the novel
provides useful counterfactual speculation on what would change about our
condition if we were not born—for one thing, that we would not be the relational
beings we are.
23. For a relatively sympathetic reconstruction and assessment of Habermas’s argu-
ments, see Pugh (2015). For other cautionary arguments about genetic enhance-
ment which appeal to our natality, see Reader (2017) and Schües (2014).
24. For other arguments that genetic modification need not deprive us of our
newness and originality at birth, see O’Byrne (2010: 148–64) and Oliver (2011).
25. One theologian who discusses being born, interpreting it as indicating the nature
of the Resurrection, is Falque ([2004] 2013). Having said that I bracket religion,
I will discuss certain religious ideas on birth when they are relevant, such as the
idea that each birth is a rebirth. That idea, found in Western and Eastern
traditions, might seem to challenge my whole conception of birth as one’s
beginning; but it need not. For it is only as this particular body with its distinctive
powers and history that I can be this psychological individual that I am, with my
personality and character traits, continuity of memory and experience, and so
on. So even if some core part of me will survive my death and undergo
subsequent rebirth in another body, that part cannot be identical with me as a
psychological individual: the latter, being essentially embodied, cannot survive
my death or precede my birth. Indeed, philosophers of rebirth generally accept
this (see Phillips 2009: 110–11, 119–30). Even if we embrace a metaphysics of
rebirth, then, my birth is still the beginning of my existence as the concrete
psychological individual that I am.
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