Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
also said, we can get at it only indirectly, through other people
46
—still,
my having been borne and born are surely as constitutive of my life as
is my “going to die.”
Schutz did not probe this phenomenon any more than these scant
references. Still, his words have to be taken quite seriously, for in a
clear and compelling way it is the primal experience of being (or having
been) borne and born that constitutes the crucial other side (other
than death) of the central experience of growing old together, and of
our being-with-one-another—of what he terms the “tuning-in rela-
tionship” or intersubjectivity. We could not experience ourselves as
growing older together, if we did not begin to be—that is, if we did
not come at some always-already-ongoing time in our lives to find
ourselves as having-already-been-thrust-into life: birthed and thereby
worlded.
To be born as human, but more specifically as myself, is to have
received
life, to
have been given
my life—the first and fundamental sense
of
gift
. And in this, it seems clear as well, lies a fundamental paradox of
freedom: while a prime condition for morality (choice, responsibility,
and so on), I do not choose to be free, but, as Jean-Paul Sartre saw, I am
not free to choose to cease being free. Hence, an ethics that focuses on
giving is seriously incomplete without a complementary reflection on
the ethics of receiving; the latter may indeed be the more fundamental
phenomenon.
The primal other, in short, is the mother, the one with whom each of
us in the first instance grows older, in Schutz's words; and the initial and
primal
place
or habitat is her body, her womb. She is the one who gifts
me with myself and is progressively the one who gifts me with herself.
From her we receive culture, history, world, mainly through giving the
key stories by which we come to know ourselves.
I am not only, then, a being-toward-death but surely just as funda-
mentally a being-
from
-birth—indeed, in a sense my being is always
already a being-before-birth, being already within the mother's body; this
is thus the originating sense of my becoming. What and who I
am
, is
what and who I in multiple ways
become
, and this is first set in motion
in the essentially mysterious and accidental ways of every birth.
This returns me to Ben.
