Temporality, the Gift, and Being Born

This chapter explores how birth bears on the temporality of human life. Temporally, lived human existence is future-oriented towards death and past-oriented towards birth. When we take our natal orientation towards 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. The chapter also considers whether birth can rightly be said to be a gift given to us by our mothers. Although that view has problems, thinking of birth as a gift illuminates some connections between our natality and the relational setting of our ethical lives and obligations. Finally, the chapter sums up the book’s main theses about how human existence is shaped by the fact that we are born.

Introduction

The introduction sets out the project of this book, which is to explore how our existence is shaped by our being born. This is an exploration of how human existence is natal, that is, is the way it is because we are born. Taking birth and 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 the relationality of the self and the temporality of human life—together in a new way. The introduction sketches these topics and explains how this inquiry is located within and draws on existentialism, psychoanalysis, and feminist philosophy.

Birth Anxieties

This chapter looks at some forms and sources of birth anxiety. Our beginnings are mysterious to us, and because of infantile amnesia we can remember neither being born nor our formative years, which leaves much of our own personalities and motivations opaque to us. The chapter incorporates psychoanalytic insights into birth anxiety provided by Rank and Freud, and interprets separation anxiety as an anxiety that we suffer because of our natality. It also shows that Sartre’s and Kierkegaard’s existentialist views of anxiety leave room for certain kinds of birth anxiety. One is anxiety that we cannot honour all the obligations that come from the attachments we have inherited from birth; another is anxiety to be caught up in the wrongs of the society around us where, having been born, we are deeply shaped by these wrongs and cannot readily extricate ourselves from them.

Dependency, Relationality, Power, and Situatedness

This chapter looks at four features of human existence—dependency, the relationality of the self, embeddedness in social power, and situatedness—and shows how they are connected with birth. We are dependent both as infants and children—natal dependency—and also to varying degrees throughout life. Because we begin life dependent on adult care, we attach to our care-givers very intensely; these attachments shape our selves and personality structures, partly through processes of identification as they are theorized in psychoanalysis. This makes us highly receptive in early life to social power relations, which even shape our possibilities for criticizing social power in later life. Finally, at birth we begin life situated within the world with respect to many variables, including culture; gender, race, class, and other social divisions; geography; history; body; and placement in a specific set of personal and wider relationships such as kin networks and generations.

Birth and Natality in Feminist Philosophy

This chapter sets out the views on birth and being born of Irigaray, Cavarero, and Jantzen. Irigaray’s feminism of sexual difference and her attention to the maternal body lead her to consider birth. She argues that we have psychological difficulties around birth, difficulties that have found expression in canonical works of philosophy. For Irigaray, these expressions help us to piece together what is in fact involved in being born, and to remember our debts to the mothers from whom we are born. The chapter also looks at Cavarero’s understanding of natality, which is informed by Arendt as well as Irigaray, and at how Irigaray, Cavarero, and Jantzen criticize Western culture for being preoccupied with death and mortality while neglecting birth and natality.

Natality and Mortality

This chapter reconsiders mortality in view of its connections with birth and natality, arguing that mortality is a relational phenomenon. Because we are relational beings, when someone dies who was important to us, we lose part of our own selves, and so different people’s deaths shade into each other. We have grounds to fear our deaths because they spell the end of our relationships and because on death we will cease to be in the world as one that we share with others. To elaborate these ideas, I draw on Beauvoir’s work and on Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein’s supposedly non-relational mortality, which can nonetheless help us to draw out what implications follow if our mortality is in fact relational. One implication is that mortality loses the priority over natality that Heidegger accords it; another implication is that fidelity, as well as authenticity, is important in our ethical lives.

The Radical Contingency of Being Born

In this chapter I argue that there is a radical contingency to one’s being born into one’s particular life as it unfolds from one’s birth onwards. For each of us, it is an ultimate fact that admits of no further explanation that I am born the particular individual I am and no one else. Using Sartre’s work, the chapter examines this radical contingency along with the connected phenomena of facticity and groundlessness. However, the chapter criticizes Sartre’s conception of radical freedom and puts forward in its place an idea of sedimented sense-making. On this basis, situatedness is re-interpreted to say that we are situated in that we continually make sense of our circumstances in sedimented ways. Autonomous choice and reflection are just one subset of ways in which we can make sense of the succession of circumstances that come down to us from birth.

History, Inheritance, and Vulnerability

This chapter describes the complex relations amongst being born and birth-giving, mothers, women, and child-caring, and then defends the view that Western culture has concentrated narrowly on death at the expense of birth, taking existentialism’s focus on mortality as a case in point. Three aspects of natality are then examined. First, reception and inheritance: in dialogue with Camus and Beauvoir, it is argued that to be born is to receive and inherit the meaningful fabric of our lives and involvements from others around and preceding us. Second, vulnerability: the chapter distinguishes vulnerability in being born—coming into existence in more or less advantageous locations in the world—from vulnerability by virtue of being born—as infants who are helpless and so depend on adult care-givers. Third, negativity: being born is not an exclusively positive condition but has a negative side, in part through its links with vulnerability.