Birth

10 Birth Alison Stone & Michael Hauskeller Alison Stone: We all die, and we are all born. Yet philosophers both in the past and today have said little about birth and much more about death. A possible explanation is that death lies in one’s future, and is a source of anxiety,1 or a bad thing that one has grounds to fear, whereas one’s birth lies in the past, so that one has no grounds to fear it.2 Another explanation might be that we are born of women, and women’s voices and experiences have been neglected within the history of philosophy.3 Whatever explanation we adopt, though, the neglect of birth is unfortunate, because our existence is shaped by the fact that we are born as well as by our mortality. We are not only mortals, but also natals – beings who are born. Our condition is one of natality as well as mortality.4 How does birth shape our existence? To answer this question, we first need to clarify what it is to be born. Sometimes we say that someone is born just when they exit their mother’s womb. But I prefer to understand birth more broadly than that, so that we can better appreciate its bearing on our whole condition and mode of existence. On the wider understanding that I favour, to be born is, first, to begin to exist at a certain point in time.5 And, second, our beginning to exist itself occurs in a process by which we are conceived and gestated in, and then leave, someone else’s womb.6 Above I said that we are born of women, which suggests that this ‘someone else’ must always be a woman or mother. But this should be qualified, now that growing numbers of trans men are bearing babies. What matters is coming from a womb, not necessarily a maternal womb. Thirdly, to be born is to come into the world with – or rather as – a particular body, and in a given place, set of relationships with other people, and situation with regard to society, culture and history. 180 9781800082199_pi-289.indd 180 09-Feb-22 11:08:42 How do these facts shape our existence? Let me speak here about just a few ways: dependency, relationality, situatedness and givenness. To start with dependency, to be born is to begin life as a baby, and human babies and infants are acutely helpless at first, utterly dependent on the older people who care for them physically and emotionally. Indeed it has been said that human babies remain foetuses outside the womb for most of their first year of life.7 Essentially, human babies are so helpless because of the ‘obstetric dilemma’.8 Once early hominids became bipedal, their pelvises narrowed while, simultaneously, their brains enlarged. As a result babies had to start passing out of the birth canal much earlier in their development than they had before – and much earlier than the young of our nearest primate neighbours do.9 Moreover, human babies are not just profoundly helpless at birth; human children and young also remain dependent on adult care and education for a long time compared to the young of other species – often right into adolescence and beyond. This is because we require so much education and enculturation to achieve maturity and become full social participants. And this too is an indirect consequence of our unformed and open-ended nature as infants, which means that culture becomes constitutive in our entire formation.10 In sum, to be born is to be dependent on others before one ever becomes independent.11 And because dependency is our more basic condition, we achieve independence – to whatever extent we do – against a background of ongoing and persistent dependency on others. Because we depend so heavily on our first care-givers, our relationships with them influence us hugely. These relationships are intensely emotionally charged and affecting, as we depend on them for everything. Also, having left the womb so early in their development, human infants are very unformed and immature physically and mentally, which gives their first relationships particular power to mould and shape them. But, again because we are so unformed in infancy, we have yet to form a sense of self or any sort of organised personality. Putting these points together, the impact of our earliest relationships is such that they come to structure our most basic sense of self as well as our personalities.12 This may be easier to see in the latter case: our earliest relationships shape our basic dispositions, habits, traits, patterns of emotional reaction, and the organised patternings of these that constitute personalities. But arguably, also, one’s more fundamental sense of having a self at all is formed on the model of the others who surround one during one’s earliest years.13 Thus, to be born is to have a relational self – a self that is constituted the way it is by one’s relationships. BIRTH 9781800082199_pi-289.indd 181 181 09-Feb-22 11:08:42 In being born one arrives not only in a specific set of relationships with care-givers but also, more broadly, in a situation: a place within certain historical, social, ethnic, geographical and generational circumstances.14 One’s initial situation affects every subsequent situation one comes to be in, so that all one’s situations flow down through one’s life from one’s birth. I don’t mean to say that the course of someone’s entire life is already set at birth. At every step along life’s way we respond to our situations, making sense of them and finding possibilities of action in them; these responses bring us into new situations to which we respond in turn. Nonetheless, my whole series of situations is the particular series it is because of how it descends from the initial situation into which I was born. This is the more so as my ways of responding to successive situations are themselves shaped by my initial natal situation. That situation gives rise not only to the series of circumstances I have to respond to but also to how I make sense of these circumstances drawing upon the culture, history, relationships, etc. into which I was born and by which I have been influenced. As we are born, our initial situations are given to us, not chosen. I did not ask or choose to be born; nor did I choose where, when, and in what circumstances and culture I was born. And as soon as one is born one begins to imbibe the culture around one, at a stage when one is very unformed with no capacities to question any of the ideas one is imbibing. So, first and foremost, we receive and inherit culture and history. What is given to us comes before what we make, and we make what we do on the basis of what we have already been given. This does not mean that we cannot change, criticise or reject our cultural inheritances; it means that we can only learn to do this having already received those inheritances in the first place.15 * Michael Hauskeller: Indeed, we are all born, and we all die. ‘All’ includes non-human animals, for we share both our mortality and our natality with them. Unlike non-human animals, however, humans know that they are going to die and know that they have been born, which is to say they know that quite soon they will cease to exist, that not long ago they did not yet exist, and that their existence is, consequently, just a brief interlude between two eternities of non-existence. There is no indication that any other animal has this kind of understanding.16 Non-human animals might be dimly aware of the possibility (though not the necessity) of death because many of them spend much of their life warding off threats 182 THE THINGS THAT REALLY MATTER 9781800082199_pi-289.indd 182 09-Feb-22 11:08:42 to their continued existence, but it strikes me as very unlikely that they have any idea that they were born and that once they did not exist. Since they won’t be able to remember their being born, let alone coming into existence, it must seem to them as if they have always been around. It is true that we do not remember our birth or conception either, but we have others who teach us (and the mental capacities to understand) that we, like everyone else, only came into existence a short while ago, which is almost as unfathomable, although perhaps less frightening, as the fact that we will soon, once again, not exist. However, the fact that we are aware of our natality just as much as we are aware of our mortality is not the only aspect of our own natal situation that is specific to our human condition. There are of course many other animals that come into the world we share with others just as unformed, helpless and dependent as we do, although it usually takes them less time to grow out of that state of dependency. Yet there are also countless animals, including some mammals, which enter this world fully formed and ready for action, equipped with all the abilities and skills they need to survive in a hostile environment with little or no support or protection from others. And yet, these animals are born too. Being born, therefore, is not the same as being born helpless and dependent, unless what we mean by ‘being born’ is our being conceived, in which case we are indeed all initially helpless and dependent, since nothing can bring about its own existence, and a certain amount of development always needs to take place to generate something as complex as a living organism. Yet there is still a difference between our being conceived helpless and dependent and our being born (in the narrow sense) helpless and dependent, because the latter is consciously experienced while the former is not. It is also likely to affect what you call our relationality in different ways because only if we are born helpless and dependent are we dependent not only on certain biological processes taking place undisturbed, but also on other people (or animals) and what they choose to do or not to do. In any case, it seems to me that when we try to understand how our natality shapes our existence, we need to carefully distinguish between the fact that we came into existence at some point in time, the fact that we know we did, and the fact that we came into existence in a particular way, namely in the way humans traditionally come into existence, with nine months of gestation in the maternal womb, followed by a sudden expulsion from this comparatively safe place into a shared and, in contrast to us, fully formed world for which we are ill equipped when we are forced to enter it and in which we can only survive for many years to BIRTH 9781800082199_pi-289.indd 183 183 09-Feb-22 11:08:42 come with the support and care of others. Each of these facts may shape our existence, in terms of both the way we are and the way we understand ourselves in our relation to the world in which we find ourselves. However, they may well shape our existence in different ways. To find out how exactly those facts shape us, let us imagine things are different than they are. There are at least three scenarios to consider. First, what would change for us if our existence had no beginning? Is that even conceivable?17 And would an existence with no beginning also necessarily have to be an existence with no end? Is there, then, a (logical or ontological?) connection between our natality (in this sense) and our mortality? Second, what would change if our existence had a beginning, but one that was very different from what it is now? Let’s say we didn’t slowly grow into this world, but started our existence fully formed, with all the physical and mental abilities that an adult human typically enjoys, like the androids or ‘simulacra’ in Philip K. Dick’s novel We Can Build You18 who come into (conscious) existence abruptly with no extended transition period during which nothing (or almost nothing) gradually becomes something. What would that be like? How would it shape our experience of the world?19 And finally, what if we came into existence the way that humans have always come into existence, but had no awareness of it at all? Would we then be different than we are now? * Alison Stone: You are absolutely right to point out that unlike other animals we are aware that we will die and have been born. This is important for considering how birth shapes our existence, for the following reasons. When philosophers say that our ‘mortality’ shapes our existence, ‘mortality’ encompasses both the fact that we will die and our awareness of the same. For it is only through that awareness that we will die that this fact comes to shape our whole existence. If we weren’t aware that we will die, but just in fact did when the time came, then that fact would have no bearing on our whole way of leading our lives up to the point of death. So the question arises whether something parallel holds for birth. Does birth, too, affect the shape of our lives only through our awareness that we were born? There seems to me to be an asymmetry between death and birth here. Birth leads to the helplessness and dependency of human babies and infants, which in turn shapes the relationality of our selves. But that helplessness and dependency obtains without babies and infants yet being aware that they have been born – they only learn this later, from older human beings. Thus birth begins to shape our existence 184 THE THINGS THAT REALLY MATTER 9781800082199_pi-289.indd 184 09-Feb-22 11:08:42 straight away, before we yet have any understanding of it. Birth also has immediate shaping effect because being born places one immediately into a particular situation in the world. This, again, happens and begins to affect one’s life before one is at all aware of having been born. This asymmetry between birth and death is a consequence of their temporal asymmetry. Because my birth is in my past – it has already happened by the time I am in existence – it has already begun to have effects on me by the time I form the mental capacities to be aware of it. Conversely, because my death is in the future, and hasn’t yet happened, it can only affect my existence through my anticipation of it. You are also quite right that, as the case of ‘precocial’20 animal species shows, a being can be born, i.e. gestated and expelled from a parent’s womb, without that necessarily resulting in the level of helplessness and dependency we see in human infants. I should have been clearer: when I offered a definition earlier of what being born consists in, I took this to be what being born consists in for human beings. Moreover, in the human case, we are conceived and gestated in someone else’s womb and then expelled from that womb at a relatively early point in our development compared to our nearest primate neighbours, who are precocial – that is, establish a significant degree of independence very quickly after leaving the womb. This relative ‘earliness’ on our part is why we begin extrauterine life so helpless and dependent. I completely agree with you that being born has a number of components that are usefully distinguished, each with different ramifications for our existence. As you say, a first component is coming into existence at a given point in time – and a given place in space – while a second component is coming into existence in the particular way we do as human beings, through nine months of intra-uterine gestation terminating in a prolonged period of postnatal infantile helplessness. The first component means, for one thing, that we have beginnings, hence that certain events come first in our lives; for another, it means that we are situated in time and space and, in consequence, with respect to other variables such as nationality, ethnicity and history. Meanwhile the second component shapes our dependency and helplessness. And these sets of consequences in turn interact: for example, being situated and dependent means that we start off situated in a particular set of relationships with the other human beings on whom we at first depend. I must confess that I struggle with counter-factual scenarios about birth. I’m interested by your point that the simulacra in Dick’s novel come into existence very differently from ordinary human beings. Once switched on, the simulacra come straight into fully formed, adult, BIRTH 9781800082199_pi-289.indd 185 185 09-Feb-22 11:08:42 conscious and cognitively complex experience. They experience deep horror at having sprung suddenly in the world with its overwhelming presence and richness, and also at the magnitude of the transition they have just made.21 It is because the simulacra have come straight into fully-formed, conscious adult existence that they become immediately aware of having made that transition, and of how mysterious and mindboggling it is. I had previously thought that the simulacra’s plight was suggestive about the potentially traumatic nature of being born generally – given the magnitude of the transition both from non-existence to existence and from conception through gestation into extra-uterine existence. But perhaps instead the simulacra’s plight illuminates the contrast with human birth. We shade into existence gradually, during gestation, which makes the transition into existence correspondingly less stark and absolute. And we already have experience before leaving our parent’s womb so that, abrupt and overwhelming as exiting the womb may be, it is much less abrupt and overwhelming than what happens to the simulacra. And unlike them, we have years to develop cognitively and acquire adult mental capacities at the same time as we gradually get to grips with the world around us. * Michael Hauskeller: We ‘shade into existence gradually’ – I like that. It captures very nicely the fact that being born (that is, coming into existence for a living being) is not an event but a process. Existence does not come as a surprise to us: once we realise that we exist, we have already got used to it. Death, on the other hand, seems to be sudden: an event, not a process. One moment we exist, the next moment we are gone. Although perhaps that is not always true. Just as, at the beginning of our life, we go through a process of physical and cognitive development that eases our way from non-existence into existence, we can also undergo a comparable process of physical and cognitive decline at the end of our life that may help us get to grips with the approach of non-existence. In that case, death also becomes a process, mirroring the process of birth: a gradual shading, or fading, out of existence that makes the dying of the light22 more tolerable.23 Perhaps, then, there is less asymmetry between birth and death than we thought. You have pointed out that while birth shapes us directly, death can only shape us by being anticipated because it still lies ahead of us, while our birth has already happened. We are born, but we have not 186 THE THINGS THAT REALLY MATTER 9781800082199_pi-289.indd 186 09-Feb-22 11:08:42 died yet. That is true of course, but I am wondering whether death really needs to be anticipated to have an effect on us. Is it only the knowledge of death rather than death itself, or more precisely the fact of our mortality, that shapes our existence? We identified helplessness and dependency as direct effects of our being born (the way humans are). But what do we mean by that? Are we not helpless and dependent on others precisely because we do not have the means yet to keep ourselves alive? For a newborn child, death is just around the corner, and the only thing that stands between the child and death is other people who are willing and able to come to the rescue and, to the best of their abilities, protect it from dying. And even then their existence is still precarious.24 Our extreme helplessness and dependency at the beginning of our life is therefore just as much a function of our mortality, that is, our being able to die (which is a fact whether or not we are aware of it), as it is a function of our natality, our having been born. So maybe there is indeed a strong connection between our natality and our mortality, which are not so much opposites but rather two sides of the same ontological coin. Yet however that may be, the fact remains that we are born, and that we are born helpless and dependent. That state of dependency is our original position, our starting point in life, but also our default position. We remain dependent throughout our lives, not only on other people, but also on our environment in general, for our survival and flourishing. Not necessarily to the same extent as we do in early childhood, but some degree of dependency is always there, and it often increases again considerably when we approach the end of our lives. But as you have made quite clear, and rightly so, we are dependent on other people and on there being a fully formed world not only because without it we would not be able to last very long and would perish almost immediately after arriving in it, but also because we would not be able to make sense of the world. Indeed, we would not even be able to make sense of ourselves. Because we are new to this world when we get here, we rely, like an amnesic traveller who suddenly finds herself stranded in a foreign land about which she knows nothing and whose language she does not speak, on the land’s native inhabitants to guide us and show us the way. Without them we would be lost, and so we have no choice but to trust them.25 We learn their language and do as they do until we have become one of them. That is the situatedness and givenness that comes with our natality. When we enter this world, everything is new to us, even we ourselves. But the world we enter is not new. It is an old world, with people who arrived before us and who already know their way around and can teach us how things work around here. Learning from them, we complete BIRTH 9781800082199_pi-289.indd 187 187 09-Feb-22 11:08:42 our transition from non-existence to existence. We become someone, a particular someone, by absorbing what is already there and using it for the formation of ourselves. We can only become who and what we are with the help of a world that is already in place. The new needs the old. The old, however, may also need the new, and I think we should talk about this too. We have already acknowledged that our having been born shapes our existence in various ways. But how does the fact that people keep being born – that after we have arrived on the scene other people arrive, and that they will continue to arrive even after we have left it – shape our existence?26 Just as we are affected not only by our own mortality, but also by the mortality of other people (most acutely by those that are dear to us), we may also be affected by other people’s natality. When we enter the world we are new and the world is old. But then, after a while, we become part of that old world, and others arrive as the new new ones. We teach them our ways as we have been taught by others. But perhaps there is also something that they can teach us, something that we, the old, rely on them for. Perhaps the dependency that defines our existence is not as one-sided as it initially appeared. Perhaps the old needs the new just as much as the new needs the old.27 * Alison Stone: I agree that death, like birth, is a process – at least for the majority of us in industrial societies who live long enough to die through gradual decline, loss of capacities, illness and ageing. Moreover, during these processes of dying, of going gradually out of existence, we are liable to become very heavily dependent on care from others once again, as we were in infancy and childhood. So it can be helpful to consider death in relation to birth, with an eye to their parallels. Doing so brings out features of death that have been rather sidelined in philosophical discussion of death, which has mainly focused on being dead, i.e. non-existence. If it is helpful to view death in connection with birth, then should we also, when considering natality, keep its interaction with mortality in constant view? Perhaps so, given for instance that our infantile dependency is shaped by our mortality as well as our natality, as you rightly observe. Yes, we are born helpless; but this means that we cannot satisfy our basic physical needs through our own efforts, and so are vulnerable to suffering and, in the end, dying in the absence of help from others. Mortality is likewise at work in our dependency on others more generally, throughout adulthood. I cannot meet my physical needs through 188 THE THINGS THAT REALLY MATTER 9781800082199_pi-289.indd 188 09-Feb-22 11:08:42 my own efforts alone; I am dependent on others through networks of production, distribution, exchange and communication which, among other things, keep shops supplied with food. I also depend on others – as the coronavirus pandemic has made clear – to use these networks in a considerate way, say by not buying up all the pasta in the supermarket. Adult dependency has continuities with infantile dependency, for in both cases we cannot meet our physical needs unaided. Thus adult dependency is connected both with natality, through its continuities with infantile dependency, and with mortality, in that if our needs go unmet what we are vulnerable to, ultimately, is dying. As you also point out, in infancy and early childhood our mortality affects our dependency, and so our existence, without us having any awareness of death – so I moved too hastily in saying that mortality only affects our lives through our anticipation of it. Perhaps we can say the following. While we are vulnerable and dependent through our lives, we are especially so in infancy and early childhood. But while the very young are especially vulnerable to dying, they are not yet aware of death. From later childhood onwards we become less vulnerable – we become ordinarily rather than especially vulnerable – but now we are aware of death, and once acquired this awareness inevitably mediates how we treat our ongoing vulnerability and dependency. From all this, does it follow that natality ought always to be addressed in connection with mortality?28 I hesitate to say ‘yes’, for two reasons. First, our philosophical reflection on death is so much better developed that it tends to crowd birth out as soon as death is brought on-stage. Second, only once we have begun to grasp how natality structures our existence can we start to see how these natally-shaped structures are simultaneously shaped by mortality. But to reach that point, we first need an account of natality, and getting it into initial view is most easily done by tackling it in its own right. We need, as it were, a twopart account: part one concerning natality in its own right, and part two reconsidering natality in its connection with mortality. As you say, to be born is to come as a newcomer into a world that is already old. One aspect of this, which I take from Hannah Arendt, is that the arrival of new people is a source of hope for those already there in the world.29 Being new, these people carry the promise that they will do new things, renewing and refreshing the world – not ploughing the same old furrows but swerving aside and thereby making things better. Being born unformed and open-ended, the newcomers are full of possibilities, hence again giving hope. Yet newcomers must take on the traditions that hold in the parts of the world into which they are born. Without these BIRTH 9781800082199_pi-289.indd 189 189 09-Feb-22 11:08:42 traditions of meaning-making and interpretation we would have no way of making sense of the world at all. This combination of novelty and tradition can be handled in many ways. From a conservative and traditionalist standpoint, one might be hopeful that newcomers will inherit existing traditions, keep them alive, and carry them forwards. From a more revolutionary perspective, one might hope that they will overthrow outworn traditions. Or one might hope that the newcomers will do things that at last fulfil the previously thwarted hopes of past generations. Alternatively again, one might view the arrival of newcomers more bleakly, thinking that inevitably over time these individuals will imbibe more and more tradition, accrue more and more of the past, until they are so weighted down with history that all the open-ended possibilities are crushed out of them. Perhaps here a responsibility arises for older people relative to each generation of newcomers: that we don’t so overburden the young with the weight of tradition that they become unable to fulfil their promise of bringing renewal. * Michael Hauskeller: The arrival of new people in the world can indeed be, and often is, a source of hope for those who are already in it. The promise of renewal, but also of continuity, of the world and (human) life not ending when my life and my world come to an end, is, for many of us, a strong incentive to seek, support and promote the continued arrival of new people. This is why the birth of a new person is, every time it happens, generally experienced as such a momentous event by those who are involved in it or witness it. There is mystery here, and great wonder, because what we are witnessing is not a mere transformation of matter, but the coming-into-existence of something genuinely new, something that was not there before, not even in a different form: where there used to be nothing, now there is something. This is both very ordinary, because it happens all the time, and, in its utter incomprehensibility, absolutely extraordinary, and its being so common makes it even more extraordinary. It is the closest we get to a miracle, with the possible exception of death, which is equally miraculous in that it reverses the situation: where there used to be something, now there is nothing. We pop into existence like a rabbit out of a conjuror’s empty hat, and then, after hopping about for a while, we vanish again (or are vanished) into thin air. But unlike death, and despite the pain and hardship that the process of giving birth usually involves for the mother, the birth of a new person is generally seen as a cause for celebration. Not always, of course, because there are 190 THE THINGS THAT REALLY MATTER 9781800082199_pi-289.indd 190 09-Feb-22 11:08:42 circumstances that may turn the arrival of a new person into a misfortune, but in most cases we tend to see birth, the appearance of a new person in our midst, as a happy occasion. However, this welcoming attitude towards birth is far from universal. For some, the arrival of new people in the world is a source not of hope but of despair, or something close to it. You mentioned the promise that new people carry, and they do. Yet what we may see as a promise, others may see as a threat, since a threat is simply the promising of something that the one to whom the promise is made would much prefer not to come to pass (‘I promise, you will regret this!’). New people carry the threat that they will soon push us, the old, aside, staking a claim to what we, through luck or hard work, have managed to secure for ourselves. They serve as a potent reminder of our ephemerality, as if the birth of others tolls the death knell for us. This negative attitude towards birth, or at any rate the birth of others, is particularly prominent among transhumanists and generally those who think of death, and especially their own death, as ‘the greatest evil’, and who consequently urge us to do everything in our power to rid ourselves of the scourge of ageing as soon as possible so that our lives can be extended indefinitely, before it is too late and we are forever deprived of our existence.30 Once we have achieved this goal, we no longer have to concern ourselves with bringing new people into existence to carry the torch of humanity into the future. Once death is no longer inevitable and becomes increasingly rare, the exception rather than the rule, we may have to severely restrict the number of births, but that would be okay and pose no major problem because, it is argued, we would no longer need new people.31 If renewal is needed or desired, we can always take care of it ourselves, with the help of a presumably never-ending supply of new technologies and thus opportunities for transformative experience. This professed indifference towards renewal through birth (the continued coming-into-existence of new people) masks an underlying resentment that, I think it is fair to say, is also palpable in the anti-natalist movement promoted by philosophers like David Benatar who try to convince us that it would have been much better for us if we had never been born, or, more precisely, had never come into existence.32 This is supposedly so even if our lives happen to be really quite wonderful. According to Benatar, even the happiest and luckiest among us would have been better off if they had never existed. The fact that no life is completely without pain or suffering is believed to be enough to tip the balance against existence.33 Crucially, we are not meant to infer from this – as it would seem quite natural to do – that it would also be better for us if we died BIRTH 9781800082199_pi-289.indd 191 191 09-Feb-22 11:08:42 as soon as possible, because even though it would not have been bad for us never to have existed, it allegedly is bad for us to stop existing. This is rather convenient for those who profess to believe that it would have been better for us never to have existed because it allows them to keep living their lives comfortably instead of having, for consistency’s sake, to commit suicide. Birth, they claim, is an evil, but so is death.34 Obviously, however, while it is possible for us to stop existing, it is not possible for us never to have existed. Our birth has already happened, while our death has not. This means that the only practical conclusion we can draw from all of this is that, for one thing, we should stop letting new people come into existence, and, for another, we should try to hold on to our own existence as long as possible. Anti-natalism thus provides a moral justification for making sure that we stay in charge and that the old get older still. * Alison Stone: I am intrigued by what I take to be your suggestion that transhumanism and anti-natalism are bedfellows, united in part as ways of propping up the privileges of the old. I am sympathetic; I do think that Western societies are becoming increasingly gerontocratic – the recent crop of US presidential candidates being one reflection of that. My sense is that you are not much taken with either anti-natalism or transhumanism. I have doubts about them too. Beginning with Benatar’s philosophical anti-natalism, he argues that for each of us it would always have been better had we not come into existence. Existing always involves at least some pain, which is bad, whereas non-existence involves the absence of pain, which is good. This is non-existence here not in the sense of being dead but in the sense of never having come into existence in the first place. To be sure, existence always involves at least some pleasure as well, which is good; but nonexistence involves the absence of pleasure, which is neither good nor bad. Thus the net balance of pains and pleasures favours non-existence, for Benatar, so that it is always wrong to bring someone into existence through procreation. I am not convinced. If the absence of pain is good (for someone, the one who would otherwise have existed), then correlatively the absence of pleasure must be bad for them rather than neither-good-norbad. Still, this would only level existence and non-existence – although even that presumably entails that one may bring a new person into existence by procreating. We could go further, though, to say that positive 192 THE THINGS THAT REALLY MATTER 9781800082199_pi-289.indd 192 09-Feb-22 11:08:43 pleasures – taking these to encompass the various goods of human life – weigh more heavily in the balance than mere absences of pain. Along such lines we might conclude that, other things being equal, it is better to come into existence than not, and that it is a good thing for someone to exist.35 Popular anti-natalism often has an environmentalist aspect. The thought is that we ought to avoid populating the world with yet more human beings who will pollute it, deplete its resources, contribute to habitat loss and species destruction, continue habits of over-consumption, and so on. I wonder whether this form of anti-natalism, by depriving possible future people of the good of existence, makes future generations pay the price for the environmentally damaging activities of those currently in existence. One might object that until someone has come into existence they are not there to be deprived of its goods. But if someone can be benefited by not ever coming into existence – as per Benatar’s reasoning – then conversely someone can be deprived by not ever being brought into existence. Still, an environmentalist anti-natalist could say that what good there is in existing, for any individual human being who comes into existence, is outweighed by the environmentally harmful consequences of that person existing. That is, whereas for Benatar existing is primarily bad for the human individual who exists, for the environmentalist antinatalist it is primarily bad for the rest of the natural environment. I find this an unnecessarily pessimistic view. We could regard the birth of new human beings optimistically, thinking that some of these people will grow up – as Greta Thunberg has done – to challenge environmentally harmful practices, to demand change to these practices, to come up with alternatives, and to inspire and motivate others to change. But instead the anti-natalist view is that the overwhelming environmental harmfulness of these future people existing outweighs all the positive and hopeful possibilities those people might come up with. Implicitly, then, the further thought seems to be that human beings cannot possibly change our ways of life and learn to live in ways that allow the rest of the planet to flourish as well. Thus, given that we cannot change, it is better for us to remove ourselves – or rather remove our future successors – from the scene. I like to have more hope and trust in new and future generations than this. Finally – transhumanism and the project of making existing human beings immortal. I find it plausible that death is a bad thing, because it deprives us of the goods of existence. But I am also open to the idea that, bad as death is, immortality would be worse.36 By ‘immortality’ I mean BIRTH 9781800082199_pi-289.indd 193 193 09-Feb-22 11:08:43 actually living forever, as distinct from living for a few hundred years or so. Simone de Beauvoir, for one, suggests that if I were immortal I would never face any real choices. Since I would know that in the future I could come back to every option and possibility, there is nothing at stake now when I decide amongst them.37 With a mortal life, when I make choices, I am making a real commitment through which I come to be one sort of person rather than another, and end up leading just this one life rather than any other. The options I decide not to take are ones that thereby become closed off to me forever. Were this not the case, none of the courses of action I ‘decide’ upon would carry any real meaning for me, as I would have nothing invested in them; my ‘choices’ would be weightless. Beauvoir’s thought, then, is that even though death is bad because it deprives me of those things I value in my life, immortality would be worse. Death, at least, deprives me of those things only when I die, while the prospect of my death enhances these things’ value to me as long as I remain alive; indeed, arguably, my mortality is necessary to their having meaning and value at all. Immortality, on the other hand, would strip these things of meaning and value while I am (endlessly) alive. So whereas as a mortal I enjoy meaning and value for a limited time, as an immortal I would never enjoy any meaning and value at all. I take it that you are raising a different concern about transhumanism, though. Namely, that if those of us already in existence became immortal, then we would no longer have any reason for procreating and giving birth. Even if we still did so, the meaning of new births would be completely changed, and the balance between old and new generations would have been disrupted. It is not clear how newcomers could bring any renewal into the world, as the old with their pre-existing meanings and habits would never be going out of it. Once again, this seems to point to the interdependence of natality and mortality, such that eliminating the latter would deprive us of the former as well. * Michael Hauskeller: You are right that, like you, I am not buying the transhumanist glorification of lives that never end, and neither am I buying the anti-natalist vilification of existence. Existing is neither better nor worse than not existing. The dead are not worse off than the living, nor are they better off; nor are those who have never lived better or worse off than those who have lived, mostly because non-existence is not a state one can be in.38 Even though we are used to talking that way, there is not really anyone who is dead, just as there is not anyone who has not come 194 THE THINGS THAT REALLY MATTER 9781800082199_pi-289.indd 194 09-Feb-22 11:08:43 into existence (yet or ever). Assertions that he or she doesn’t exist have no referent. ‘Good’ and ‘bad’, however, are predicates of being. Nothing is good or bad for us before we come into existence, or after we have ceased to exist. There are only ever better and worse ways of existing. Some lives are better than others, not only in terms of the net balance of pleasure over pain, but also because they are richer, more connected, more lived perhaps. Life, and lives, must be judged on their own terms, including lives that are so bad that they appear no longer worth living. Every (individual) life has a beginning and an end. You and I have been talking a lot about death. We emphasised connections between natality and mortality. But one aspect that we have not yet mentioned is the radical contingency of our existence, and at first glance at least this is an aspect that is based more firmly in our having being born than in our having to die. There is a real difference here, in that while each of us, at least for the time being, must die one day, it seems that none of us had to be born. Death has always been a necessary part of human existence, and it probably always will be. In contrast, there is, for all we know, nothing necessary about our birth. On the contrary, for each of us it was, before it came to pass, extremely unlikely that we were going to exist. If the slightest thing had gone differently than it did, we would not be here today. If your parents hadn’t met, if they hadn’t fallen in love and hadn’t had intercourse, if they hadn’t had it at that particular time and a different sperm had fused with a different egg, you would not exist. It is true, your parents might have had a child and that child may have been given your name, in which case someone bearing your name would still exist, but that someone would not be you, just as your brother or your sister is not you, unless we want to assume that, before we are born, there already exists a (not yet embodied and possibly eternal) soul waiting for its opportunity to be born, and then seizing it eventually, using any genetic makeup that happens to become available to it. In that case, however, what we take to be the beginning of our existence would not really be that at all. Birth would be a transition to a new form of existence, which is very different kind of thing; perhaps a new beginning of sorts, but not a radical new beginning. It is a new bottle, but still the old wine. If, however, there is no such thing as a pre-existing soul and we truly come into existence when we seem to – new wine in a new bottle – then there is no necessity to our existence, which is owed to pure chance. Each of us has made the transition from non-existence to existence against all the odds. Once again, this aspect of our being born informs our entire existence. We are contingent beings, not only in the sense that we could easily not have existed, but also in the sense that we can just as easily cease to BIRTH 9781800082199_pi-289.indd 195 195 09-Feb-22 11:08:43 exist at any time. We usually feel quite secure in our existence, as if we couldn’t possibly not be, but we also know very well, in an abstract kind of way, that one day it will all be over and, more importantly, that we cannot be certain that that day is not today. For all we know, today may be the last day of our lives, and that is because nothing in this world makes it necessary for us to be here. These days we can quickly be propelled back into non-existence if we happen to come too close to someone who, unknown to us, is carrying a virus, or if we happen to touch something that they touched earlier. That is all it takes. One day we are fit and healthy, a couple of days later we are in intensive care and dead shortly after. Once again, then, the fact and the circumstances of our being born, in this case its contingent nature, prefigure a life that is characterised by the possibility of ending at any given time. Yet the contingency of our birth is not only a permanent feature of our being there in the first place. It also extends to the circumstances into which we are born and that shape our existence, first relating to that we are, but then also to what we are and how we are. We are contingent beings not only in the sense that we could just as well not be, but also because we could conceivably be very different from the way we are, namely if we had been born into other circumstances. I could be speaking a different language and be raised in a different tradition and belief system. As a consequence, I could have developed different interests, different culinary preferences and different moral convictions. The interests, preferences and convictions that I in fact have make me who I am, but it is by accident of birth that I have become the person that I am now. It is also by accident of birth, at least partly, that my life has turned out the way it has. We don’t all enjoy the same starting conditions. Some are born with a silver spoon in their mouth, others with a plastic spoon, and some with no spoon at all. In this respect, some are luckier than others. If death is the great equaliser, birth is the great differentiator. I like to think that realising this, the radical contingency of our being born at a particular time and place and in a particular (cultural, social, political, religious, familial, etc.) situation, may make people more tolerant and understanding, more open to other ways of life and other ways of looking at the world. We have all, after all, been thrown into our existence39 without being asked, randomly and apparently without any particular purpose. We did not choose to be born and we had no say in the where and when of it. We don’t know why we are here, where we come from or where we are going. Yet we have been born, and we are not dead yet. Necessary or not, we do exist, and we have the potential to shape the world, as we have been shaped by it. And that is no small thing. 196 THE THINGS THAT REALLY MATTER 9781800082199_pi-289.indd 196 09-Feb-22 11:08:43 Notes 1. For example, Françoise Dastur claims that ‘[t]he question of the origin of things is indeed a source of disquietude for our understanding, but the question of their end constitutes the torment of our entire being’ (Death, 36). Likewise, for many existentialist philosophers there are structural connections amongst anxiety, mortality and the future (for instance Heidegger, Being and Time). 2. On fear as properly directed towards the future see Svendsen, A Philosophy of Fear, 39, 43, who refers in support of his argument to Aristotle’s Rhetoric, where the latter defines fear as pain arising from the expectation of a coming evil. 3. For this explanation for philosophers’ neglect of birth, see particularly Cavarero, In Spite of Plato. 4. The concept of natality goes back to Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, although in her view natality has only an ambiguous link with physical birth. 5. Again, Arendt emphasises ‘the new beginning inherent in birth’ (The Human Condition, 9). 6. Cavarero stresses, partly against Arendt, that one is always born from someone, in whose womb one is generated, so that intra-uterine gestation is part of birth in the broader sense (In Spite of Plato, 59). 7. Montagu, Touching, 54–7. 8. Recently some zoologists such as Dunsworth have challenged the widely accepted idea that the obstetric dilemma accounts for the helplessness of human young (Dunsworth et al., ‘Metabolic hypothesis for human altriciality’). Nonetheless, explanatory appeal to the obstetric dilemma remains standard. 9. According to zoologist Adolf Portmann (Biologische Fragmente zu einer Lehre vom Menschen), human babies would have to be born at 18 to 21 months if they were to have the level of independence on leaving the womb of the young of our nearest primate neighbours – chimpanzees, orangutans and bonobos. 10. See Gehlen, Man, 24, who argues that because of our unformed nature on leaving the womb we are especially open-ended, ‘undetermined’, ‘world-open’ beings. 11. The extent of our dependency has also been highlighted by Kittay (Love’s Labor) and, in her wake, MacIntyre (Dependent Rational Animals). Kittay makes the point that dependency is prior to independence. 12. As Brison (‘Relational selves and personal identity’, 218) has put it, ‘selves exist only in relation to other selves, that is, that they are fundamentally relational entities. On this view, persons or selves . . . are what Annette Baier has called “second persons”.’ 13. For this distinction between one’s basic sense of self (or ‘core self’) and one’s concrete personality structure see Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant. 14. Situatedness has been discussed in two main bodies of philosophical writing: first, in work by Sartre, Heidegger and other existentialists and phenomenologists, where my situation is understood as the background against and out of which I engage in making sense of the world; and second, in work by feminist philosophers, especially epistemologists, foregrounding how our social locations with respect to various axes of power affect what we can know. 15. On the idea that we can only criticise power relations and social arrangements from within them, not outside them, see for one Butler, The Psychic Life of Power. 16. Note that I am not assuming here that non-human animals could not possibly have a concept of death, as is often claimed. There is now in fact ample empirical evidence that many social animals do have some understanding of what the death of others means and that it is irreversible. For a brief overview of the evidence see Anderson, ‘Comparative thanatology’. Perhaps some species can even, as Monso has argued (‘How to tell if animals can understand death’), understand that they are mortal in the sense that they themselves can die. However, to understand that one must die sooner or later requires not only a level of abstraction but also a knowledge of history and biology that seems to go far beyond the abilities of even the most social of nonhuman animals. The same is true for the knowledge that one was born. 17. O’Byrne (Natality and Finitude) has argued that our having been born is just as relevant, if not more so, for our experience and our understanding of finitude as the knowledge that we are going to die, not least because it highlights the importance of our relations to others for our lives. 18. Dick, We Can Build You. 19. I have analysed this situation with reference to Dick in ‘What is it like to be a bot?’. 20. The distinction between ‘altricial’ and ‘precocial’ species is between those that are helpless at birth and those that are more independent. Human beings are ‘secondarily altricial’: having BIRTH 9781800082199_pi-289.indd 197 197 09-Feb-22 11:08:43 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 198 earlier in our evolutionary history been precocial, the developments that resulted in the obstetric dilemma led to our being born ‘early’ and thus becoming altricial. See Gould, Ever Since Darwin, chapter 8. Dick, We Can Build You, 77–8. Dylan Thomas: ‘Do not go gentle into that good night./ Rage, rage against the dying of the light’ (The Poems of Dylan Thomas, 239). This is what Leon Kass (‘L’Chaim and its limits’), raising concerns about the wisdom of radical life extension, has suggested: ‘Who would not want to avoid senility, crippling arthritis, the need for hearing aids and dentures, and the degrading dependencies of old age? But, in the absence of these degenerations, would we remain content to spurn longer life? Would we not become even more disinclined to exit? Would not death become even more of an affront? Would not the fear and loathing of death increase in the absence of its harbingers?’ According to Hans Jonas (The Phenomenon of Life, 83), it is precisely this precarious balance between being and non-being and the resulting need to stave off non-being at every turn that constitutes the very essence of life. Life and death, then, are inextricably intertwined. This is particularly evident in the newborn child, whose existence unites ‘the self-accrediting force of being already there and the demanding impotence of being-not-yet’ and thus has to be understood as a ‘suspension of helpless being over not-being, which must be bridged by another causality’ (The Imperative of Responsibility, 134). Compare my own ‘The ontological ethics of Hans Jonas’. See Harris, Trusting What You’re Told. In Death and the Afterlife, Samuel Scheffler speculates that the prospect of humanity’s imminent extinction shortly after our own death (‘doomsday’) would affect us more than the knowledge of our own mortality currently does. If we knew that all human life would disappear from the face of the earth 30 days after we die, this would render much of what we do today meaningless. As Jantzen (Foundations of Violence, 38) puts it: ‘with each new infant, new possibilities are born, new freedom and creativity, the potential that this child will help make the world better. Freedom, creativity, and the potential for a fresh start are central to every human life and are ours in virtue of the fact that we are natals.’ It is worth noting that whereas some feminist philosophers such as Cavarero and Jantzen have favoured giving centrality to birth and not death, reversing the traditional order of priorities, other feminist philosophers have disagreed, advocating re-balancing rather than reversing the importance of birth and death. See Clack, Sex and Death, and Heinämäa, ‘Phenomenologies of mortality and generativity’. Arendt, The Human Condition, 177–8, 247. See for instance Bostrom, ‘The fable of the dragon tyrant’. From a transhumanist perspective, bringing new people into the world is at best unnecessary and at worst a threat to one’s own supposed right to immortality. Brent Waters (This Mortal Flesh, 109–10), drawing a connection between natality and mortality, argues that transhumanists have no interest in natality because ‘the birth of a child serves as a reminder of necessity’s death and decay’. For a concise summary of the transhumanist attitude to continuing procreation see Cruz, ‘Transhumanism and the fate of natality’. Grey, ‘Aging, childlessness or overpopulation’. Benatar, Better Never to have Been; Benatar and Wasserman, Debating Procreation; Benatar, The Human Predicament. Benatar, Better Never to have Been, 48: ‘[A] life filled with good and containing only the most minute quantity of bad – a life of utter bliss adulterated only by the pain of a single pin-prick – is worse than no life at all.’ Benatar, The Human Predicament, 110: ‘[D]eath is an evil and thus part of the human predicament.’ I am informed by, amongst other critics of Benatar, Harman’s ‘Critical study: David Benatar, better never to have been’, and McLean’s ‘What’s so good about non-existence?’. This is, of course, argued by Bernard Williams in ‘The Makropulos case: reflections on the tedium of immortality’. A similar argument was made by Beauvoir in fictional form, in her 1946 novel All Men are Mortal. See Schott, who states Beauvoir’s view in these terms (Birth, Death and Femininity, 3–6). See Johansson, ‘Two arguments for Epicureanism’ and Taylor, ‘Why death is not bad for the one who dies’. The concept of ‘thrownness’ was introduced and developed by Heidegger in Being and Time. 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