1

Inapparency and the Question of Pregnancy

In this paper, I ask what the meaning of a phenomenology of pregnancy is for what

philosophers call ‘the ethical’ when such a phenomenology is understood as a

phenomenology of emergence. I do so because it is the meaning of a phenomenology of

emergence that must be adequately, metaphilosophically, described for any successful

attempt to make the step from the descriptive mode of phenomenology, which is equivalent

to speaking ontologically,1 to the ethical. The reason that the development of such a

phenomenology matters in this way is that such a phenomenology would afford greater

insight into the phenomenon that conditions, and thus limits, the viability of a liaison

between phenomenological description and the ethical.

The limit that I have in mind is what one could call ‘the sphere of the visible,’ where

this is taken to be equivalent to the sphere of ‘phenomenality’ itself. By this I mean the so-

called Geltungsbereich to which Edmund Husserl limited his investigations of presence and

absence and to which Martin Heidegger referred with his notions of the Erschlossenheit of

Dasein and the notion of truth as revelation and concealment, or alétheia. While both of

their navigations of the interplay between presence and absence, or the phenomena of

revelation and concealment, are intricate and beyond the scope of the present paper, it

suffices to say, as Jean-Luc Marion noted in his celebrated if not controversial 1998 book

Étant donné, that phenomenology has often remained confined to the sphere of

subjectivity.2 I agree with Marion on this point, and add that phenomenology has done so

at the expense of the inapparent out of which intuition seems to be generated.

1
Cf. Martin Heidegger. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Niemeyer Verlag, 1967. p. 37-38; Robert
Sokolowski. Presence and Absence: A Philosophical Investigation of Language and Being. Washington D.C.
The Catholic University of America Press, 2017. p. 144-156.
2
Jean-Luc Marion. Étant donné : Essai d’une phénoménologie de la donation. Paris : PUF, 1997. p.
9.
2

Yet, where Marion seeks to recover the important of the inapparent for

phenomenology, where ‘inapparent’ signifies the corollary of ‘apparent’ as the over

saturation of intuition,3 here I aim to describe a deeper sense of the inapparent – i.e. the

ethical, the sense of the not-yet that human beings take as the ‘should-be’ vis-à-vis ‘what-

is.’ Here I follow two philosophers who have engaged extensively with, but ultimately

departed from the strict parameters of phenomenology so as to arrive at what they see as

‘the ethical.’ Said philosophers are Emmanuel Levinas and Enrique Dussel.

My thesis is as follows. First, I argue that phenomenological analyses of pregnancy

must be undertaken to expand the current work being done by phenomenologists on

natality. This is because the current notion of natality is beholden to a notion of the

phenomenon that does not take into consideration the fact of inapparency. Indeed, said

work focuses mostly upon the importance of birth in relation to the phenomenon of death,

identifying the phenomenological validity (Geltung) of birth with natality and death with

mortality.

Second, I argue that the question of the phenomenon of pregnancy, of whether it

should be included as a part of the phenomenon of natality, offers one of the most concrete

test-cases for how we might rethink our relation to the inapparent as the phenomenological

‘site’ of the ethical. The question of pregnancy becomes in my reading one of the most

privileged conceptual locations in and from which philosophers and bioethicists must

rethink basic principles. Said otherwise, bioethical questions regarding pregnancy,

questions such as whether and when fetal imaging ought to be permited, whether, how and

3
Ibid. p. 280-281. See, for example, how Marion describes the phenomenon in terms of intuition. Le
phénomène saturé cannot be made visible, because this phenomenon exceeds – outrepasse – the synthesizing
function of what Kant would ultimately call the transcendental unity of apperception. Yet, insofar as it still
remains an intuition, the saturated phenomenon cannot name the ethical. It can only remain the most basic
sense of presence and absence, le pouvoir donatrice.
3

when abortion services ought to be provided, and whether and when other medical

procedures ought to be conducted on a fetus, open up space to ask certain fundamental

questions about the ethical as such.

In the case of all of the questions mentioned above, for example, the core question is

not actually whether, how and when a given procedure ought to be done. Rather, such

questions are derivative. This is to say that such questions are not only contingent upon a

given set of laws that circumscribe the field of what is possible in a given clinical setting,

nor only contingent upon a given set of acute circumstances and actors – the so-called

‘situation’ of situational ethics. Rather, by ‘derivative,’ I mean that any suitably ethical

answer to such questions will rest upon how one has come to value, has come to tarry or

reckon metaphysically with, what phenomenologists and philosophers critical of

phenomenology have come to call the inapparency of the ethical, as I have described it

above and as I describe in more detail below.

I proceed to make my argument in the following manner. First, I sketch out the

shared critique of phenomenology as a discipline preoccupied with the visible according to

Levinas and Dussel. Second, I address how pregnancy has been approached in terms of the

phenomenon called natality. I then discuss how natality remains confined to the sphere of

apparency and why this might be, following Levinas and Dussel, a problem for ethics. To

illustrate this point, I examine how Frederik Svenaeus treats the question of fetal imaging

and how James Mumford describes the phenomenon of pregnancy in his Ethics at the

Beginning of Life. Following Svenaeus’ description, and in agreement with my readings of

Levinas, Dussel, O’Byrne and Mumford, I argue that what is at stake in bioethics overall,

philosophically and theologically speaking, is the status of the inapparent as such.

4

Methodologically, then, my goal is to approach the question of the relation between

phenomenology and the ethical, and more specifically questions regarding abortion and

pregnancy, from the standpoint of philosophy. This is to say that I approach the question as

a matter of how the transition from perception/being to ethical meaning can be thought in

the ‘abstract.’ Yet, to do so requires an engagement with the concrétude with which such a

thinking is concerned from the perspective of the everyday, in this case, the everyday

situation in which a bioethicist (to say nothing of the medical doctors and patients) is faced

with the decision of whether, if and how a service such as fetal imaging should be provided.

The phenomenon of pregnancy, and the attendant ethical questions related to this

phenomenon that arise with the question of fetal imaging, can, when seen in this light,

function as just such a moment of real-time in relation to the more universal, philosophical,

points that I seek to draw.

As one final introductory point, I note that I refer to pregnancy and birth in two

ways. First, I refer to the fact of birth and pregnancy. This is to say that I will refer to birth

and pregnancy as phenomena. By this I intend events or realities that are natural. As

natural, these phenomena are constitutive presuppositions of what everybody – the koinon

of intersubjective rationality – understands by human being from a transcendental-

phenomenological perspective – i.e. intelligibility qua intelligibility in the sense of what ‘is’

or ‘can be’ from the standpoint of certain conditions of possibility shared by all people.4

Phenomenologically, birth is what the phenomenon of ‘natality’ names in this way. I will

4
The category of ‘human’ is of course not so simple when sociopolitical, racial and other historical
considerations are brought to bear upon the how the category has been legally, and thus ‘ontologically’
constructed. On this point, for example, Cf. Enrique Dussel. Filosofía de la liberación. Segunda reimpresión.
Ciudad de México: Fondo Cultura Económica, 2018. Chapter 1; Enrique Dussel. “Meditaciones Anti-
Cartesianas: Sobre el Origen del Anti-Discurso Filosófico de la Modernidad.” Tabula Rasa. Bogotá-
Colombia, No. 9: julio-diciembre 2008.
5

expand the definition of natality in my paper, arguing that pregnancy must likewise be

incorporated into the phenomenon of natality.

Second, I refer to how these phenomena, take as facts in a phenomenological

manner, can be considered as constitutive of ethical decision making. This is to say that I

will speak to how birth and pregnancy, as sheer or natural presuppositions of human being,

are likewise presuppositions of ethics. At stake here is the shift from the phenomenological,

or ontological, to the ethical. Where too often a vague understanding of the relationship

between the phenomenological and ethical is presupposed in philosophical discussions of

‘an ethics of X,’ here I follow philosophers for whom such a relation is ambiguous at best.

§ I The Phenomenology of Pregnancy and the Ambiguity of the Ethical

Phenomenologically speaking, the ‘validity’ (Geltung) of a phenomenon does not

mean its ‘occurring’ as one event amongst others, such that it could be located with equal

value as ‘one occurrence among many’ on some list of equally meaningful occurrences.

Rather, as Julia O’Byrne notes following Heidegger, the meaning of the phenomenon of

natality, like mortality, has to do with its presence as a conditions for one’s here and now,

our sense of temporality, our orientation as timed and timing beings (we are not,

phenomenologically, ‘in’ time). This is to say that phenomena are transcendentally

conceived, not entitativity conceived.

Birth has been thought in precisely this way in 20th and early 21st century

phenomenologies. Following the work of Hannah Arendt and a desire to reorient

philosophy away from its necrophiliac focus upon mortality as the defining phenomenon of

finitude, the concept of ‘natality’ has taken on the role of balancing the focus upon the end

of life. Natality thus appears, as Arendt writes in The Human Condition, as the capacity of
6

human beings for creation, “the action they are capable of by virtue of being born.”5 In

terms used later by Arendt’s colleague at The New School, Reiner Schürmann, natality

names the ‘thetic’ drive, or the drive to posit, conceptualize, and to instantiate stability and

law.6

As Julia O’Byrne writes in her 2010 Natality and Finitude, the impetus for the turn

to natality on the part of phenomenologists can be seen as an expansion of the ontological

difference, the distinction between being and beings, that undergirds Heidegger’s thinking

generally, and which formed the basis for his understanding of the concepts of thrownness

(Geworfenheit) – the coming into existence from without one’s own intentionality and

volition – and being towards death (Sein zum Tode), the futural oriented sense of being-in-

the-world as the phenomenon of care/meaning, the directedness of our intentionality-as-

experience toward its un-experienceable end. What is at stake for the examination of the

phenomena of mortality and natality is, to follow but expand O’Byrne’s view, the liminal

dividing line in perception between visibility and non-visibility, being and non-being,

presence and absence.7

Yet, such a formulation seems to restrict the analysis of life with which

phenomenology has always been concerned to the events of birth and death. Such a

restriction does, however, makes sense. It makes sense because both natality and mortality

are given in the emergence and cessation of a life, which is to say that natality and mortality

are ‘seen’ most discretely, even though not exclusively, in the event of somebody else’s

birth and the event of somebody else’s death (even admitting that medical definitions of

death are contested). Yet, this notion of phenomenality being wed to discrete occurrences,
5
Hannah Arendt. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998. p. 247.
6
Reiner Schürmann. Des hégémonies brisées. Mauvezin : Trans-Europa-Press, 1996. Cf. General
Introduction.
7
Anne O’Byrne. Natality and Finitude. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. p. 1-11.
7

and more precisely, the exclusion of pregnancy from the phenomenon of natality, presents a

number of problems.

In the first instance, the emphasis upon discrete occurring seems to contradict the

avowedly transcendental character of the phenomenological method. By this I mean that

the transcendental function of phenomenology is to disclose particular phenomena of life in

a way that is not exclusively a matter of literal visibility, but rather inclusive of the

coincident of presence and absence in the disclosure of any discrete ‘thing.’ Indeed, this is

the notion of phenomenology as conceived by Martin Heidegger during his early period in

which he wrote Sein und Zeit. As Heidegger is the thinker to whom O’Byrne points as the

originator of the phenomenological notions of natality and mortality, the exclusion of

pregnancy, or at least the only indirect treatment of pregnancy, by phenomenologists

remains an audaciously undertreated phenomenon.

Yet, as O’Byrne notes, the phenomenon of pregnancy, which names the relation

between the mother and a potential child, the fetus, “is crucial to our natal being.”8 Indeed,

how would any description of the phenomenon of natality make sense if not inclusive of the

more precise phenomenon, and all of its constitutive ‘moments,’ that immediately precede

the event of birth? This question can be pushed still further. Other than the emergence itself

of an infant, the fact that the infant emerges still attached to the mother demonstrates that

the dividing line between the phenomenon of pregnancy and the phenomenon of birth are

materially linked.

Still further, this material connection between the two phenomena illustrates that the

dividing line between the apparency of birth and the inapparency of the fetus –

8
Ibid. p. 162.
8

inapparency that, as Mumford notes,9 characterizes the phenomenon of pregnancy – is

ambiguous at best. What is not put out of question by the ambiguity of the relation between

the two phenomena, however, is that the visibility of the phenomenon of birth depends, is

phenomenologically founded upon (in the sense of ‘founding’ and ‘constitution’ used by

Husserl) the inapparency that coincides with the hiddenness of the potential child. This is

the ambiguity of presence and absence, of presence made possible by virtue of absence.

This connection between apparency and inapparent at the level of pregnancy mean,

thus, that any ethical decision regarding a fetus and a pregnant human being will be made,

conceptually and concretely, with regard to this ambiguous or liminal space in which

apparency and inapparency simultaneously seem to coincide and diverge. Any attempt,

then, so deny or to downplay this fact will prove fatal to any attempt to draw ethical

conclusions from phenomenological description of contingency, which is what natality

names as a phenomenon. Yet, this point is not exclusive to the specific nexus of visibility

and invisibility that characterizes pregnancy and birth. No, in fact, it is just such a

coincidence of visibility and invisibility, of the ambiguity of where the one stops and the

other begins, that seems to characterize the ethical itself when considered

phenomenologically.

As Hernán Inverso has recently argued, phenomenology is capable, and has been

capable since Edmund Husserl’s development of phenomenology as both an idea and

praxis, of tarrying with such liminality.10 I concur generally with Inverso, but with the

addendum that the liminality in question with regard to the ethical is not exactly reducible

to the ambiguity of presence and absence. To be sure, again, the ambiguity of where the

9
James Mumford. Ethics at the Beginning of Life: A Phenomenological Critique. London: Oxford
University Press, 2013. p. 22-24.
10
Hernán Inverso. Fenomenologia de lo inaparente. Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2018. p. 21-22.
9

hiddenness that characterizes fetal Existenz ends and where the visibility of birth begins is

the concrete, real-time, location that conditions ethical decisions regarding both the fetus

and a corresponding pregnant woman. Yet, the sort of inapparency that characterizes ethical

truth is of another sort, removed in-itself, despite its givenness in specific concrete

situations, from the parameters of the visible and invisible where these are correlated such

that they constitute the field of phenomenality as a whole.

I posit, in accord with Inverso, then, that rethinking the inapparent is of the utmost

importance for phenomenology generally, and more precisely important for establishing the

non-identarian, or the critical-ethical, character of phenomenology itself.11 This is because,

as Emmanuel Levinas and Enrique Dussel note, ethics is not a matter of what is perceptible,

not a matter of what ‘is’ when taken as modes of presence or even absence (the so-called

indeterminate dyad upon which dialectical totality is traditionally founded). Rather, the

ethical emerges only because our sense of what should be, and it is for this reason described

by both Levinas and Dussel as eschatological, in contrast to what is sheerly, empirically-

genetically, historical. What is at stake is not the inapparency that names the converse of the

visible, but the inapparency that names the transcendent character of the Other vis-à-vis the

same, the element of alterity that negatively corresponds to, and thus sets ethical decision

making at odds with, any number of given states of affairs that are called ‘unjust.’

For Levinas, for example, phenomenology provides the way to see how alterity that

characterizes the ethical negatively appears within the sphere of the visible, the sphere that

Levinas, just as Husserl and Heidegger both do, renders as the sphere of signification. This

is a point Levinas makes well in his book En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et

Heidegger. “The manifestation of the Other (autrui) appears, in the first instance,

11
Ibid. p. 20-21.
10

conforming to the fashion by which every signification is produced. The Other is present in

a cultural ensemble and is illuminated by this ensemble, as a context for the Other.”12 The

concrétude of various historical and cultural contexts, then, allows for the element of

alterity to manifest. This is the phenomenological concept of the Lebenswelt, or for

Levinas, le monde.13

Immediately following this passage, however, Levinas writes the following. “Yet

the epiphany of the Other carries its own significance independent of this significant

received from the world. The Other does not come to us only by way of context, but

without mediation, it signifies itself.”14 The use of theological language is not meant to

displace the focus upon phenomenality. The transcendence of the Other, the alterity that

constitutes the ethical, is not opposed to the visibility and invisibility that constitute

phenomenality in the way that, in some theological traditions, the infinite God is set totally

against the finitude of the world. Rather, the language of epiphany speaks to the way ethical

sensibility seems to arrive as if ex nihilo. The presence of the Other, Levinas notes, “comes

close to us to make an entry [into the world].”15 Levinas refers to this entry into the world

of phenomenality as the face of the Other, la visage. He refers to the act of the

manifestation of the Other in the sphere of phenomenality as visitation.16

Yet, despite the entry of the Other into the world, where ‘the world’ names again the

array of phenomena that are taken together as the field of phenomenality and signification,

Levinas is clear that this phenomenal showing of the Other does not capture its essence in

the way that phenomenality exhausts objects through a purely imaginal prism of sense.
12
Emmanuel Levinas. En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger. Paris : Vrin, 2016. p.
270.
13
Ibidem.
14
Ibidem.
15
Ibid. p. 271.
16
Ibidem.
11

Rather, unlike the image and unlike sounds that are produced or reproduced and then fade

in a certain way, the manifestation of the Other is the manifestation of life. Its essence, thus,

always confounds the parameters of visibility, where visibility includes the absence

required for the presence of any ‘thing’ from one perspective or another.17

Drawing on this concept in later works by Levinas, Enrique Dussel relates Levinas’

notion of the Other, and the corollary notions of epiphany and visitation, to the

phenomenon of pregnancy in his 1978 Filosofía de la liberación. As with Levinas, Dussel

notes that ethical relations are not a matter of phenomenal appearing, at least not

exhaustively, but rather a matter of epiphany.18 Yet, this ethical relation characterizes human

relationships from the first moments of life. Dussel notes that we cannot even be said to be

born into ‘nature,’ because we are always-already bound together, physically and otherwise,

with others. Indeed, we emerge from an Other, and we are nourished, in one fashion or

another, by an Other.19

For Dussel, human being is constituted not only by the phenomenality accorded to

the presence and absence of entities. Human being, Dussel will write, has to do with the

originary proximity we share with each other, the sort of proximity that evident in our

emergence at birth. This sort of originary proximity has to do with the ethical dimension of

our being. That we care for each other is synonymous with what we are as human beings.

Convivencia names human being, not in the neutral, but in the unequivocal sense of

knowing when something is wrong, of knowing when somebody needs help.20 The ethical

relation is “unequivocal” because it cannot be reduced to the parameters of presence and

17
Ibidem. “Sa vie consiste à défaire la forme où tout étant, quand il entre dans l’immanence, c’est-à-
dire quand il s’expose comme thème, se dissimule déjà.”
18
Enrique Dussel. Filosofía de la liberación. Segunda reimpresión FCE. Ciudad de México: FCE,
2018. p. 44-45.
19
Ibid. p. 46-47.
20
Ibid. p. 50.
12

absence – in this sense, Levinas and Dussel both note, it is metaphysical and not

ontological.

This is all to say that our sense of our responsibility toward each other, which

‘appears’ only as our sense of relatedness, is itself invisible, but in a sense that is again

beyond the dyad of presence and absence. It is the sense of being either at odds or in

collusion with a given arrangement of power, the sense of pressure to ‘figure out’ the best

possible decision for an Other, for the sake of humanity as a whole.21 Insofar as this is true,

I am arguing only that clarity regarding the meaning (sentido) of the inapparent is required

at all times when bioethicists, or philosophers, attempt to speak to what is at stake ethically

with regard to both pregnancy and birth; two levels of invisibility, phenomenal and ethical.

Returning to O’Byrne’s analysis, it is right to say that we are birthed, and thus, that

we live in the world as – we ‘world’ precisely because we are (estamos siendo) – those who

are birthed humanely. We do not create ourselves. Rather, we come on to the scene, so to

speak, only as birthed, and this fact, which phenomenologically appears as a condition of

our sense of temporal being, is called ‘natality.’ Similarly, we do not choose that we must

die, though some of us choose when to do so. The fact of the phenomenon called death,

which is phenomenologically rendered as the presence of the condition of our lives called

‘mortality,’ is the converse condition of our temporal orientation called natality. I do not

experience my death as a completed occurrence, for its occurrence ends the possibility of

my experiencing itself. Yet, I do experience my death as the futural end to which I am

ceaselessly ‘given,’ as a necessary condition of experience, despite the fact that, in

occurring, death will end my experiencing.

21
Ibid. p. 107. “Lo cierto es que el que posee la pulsión de alteridad o amor al orden nuevo en cual el
pobre y oprimido pueda habitar en la justicia, se transforma, aun contra su voluntad, en el principio activo de
la destrucción del orden antiguo.”
13

For both the events of my birth and death, their being for me is clouded by a lack of

visibility. I will not experience my death in the sense of its completion, just as I did not

experience all of what is called pregnancy prior to my consciousness. The meaning of these

phenomena, as phenomena, is not, thereby, dissipated. To the contrary, the meaning of these

phenomena as phenomena is constituted by the veil of invisibility. This fact regarding the

phenomenal notion of inapparency, then, already means that any ethical decision is situated

around how to interpret not only what is right in front of our eyes, but what precedes and

succeeds a given phenomenal showing. We thus gain more insight regarding birth and death

as phenomena if we attended to the both the non-visual quality of everything and

everybody involved.

To expand the sense of the phenomenon of natality to include its inapparent and

founding phenomenon – pregnancy – is to draw our attention back to the basic sense of

phenomenology itself. This is because such an expansion is tantamount to a revision of the

neglect of inapparent in phenomenology. This is so where what is inapparent is registered

phenomenologically as presently apparent in being apparently absent, but also with regard

to the different, metaphysical, sort of inapparency that characterizes our ethical sensibility.

In short, and following O’Byrne’s own argument, said phenomenal inapparency may be

said to name the liminality that characterizes, as a requisite condition of, any discrete

image, entity, or presencing, just as metaphysical inapparency characterizes the origin of

the ethical in our sense of alterity or transcendence.

§ II Fetal Imaging: The Site of the Ethical

The bearing of these two notions of inapparency on natality, and the reason for the

necessity of including pregnancy as a founding phenomenon of natality alongside of birth,

can be illustrated though an examination of one particular issue that has emerged in the
14

field of the bioethics of pregnancy. I am referring to the question of whether, how, and

when fetal imaging should be practiced. The centrality of the imaginal, or phenomenal, for

such a practice is obvious. What is at stake is whether, how, and when to make the fetus, a

being characterized, phenomenologically up to now, by its being apparently hidden,

apparently present through the parameters of an image.

More precisely, what is at stake is whether the inapparency that characterizes

pregnancy should be breached. As Fredrik Svenaeus notes, there has been a privileging of

the visible over the invisible in phenomenology generally, a privileging that is also present

in clinical settings.22 That phenomenologists have failed to adequately speak to pregnancy,

even while emphasizing the importance of natality, would seem, thus, to be partially

explained by this larger privileging of vision over the other senses. All of this poses a

problem for how the inapparency of the phenomenon of pregnancy is to be approached.

For Svenaeus, the matter of the privileging of visibility is of crucial importance for

approaching ethical questions regarding abortion. This is because the possibility of vision,

which is mediated through the technical apparatuses of equipment in clinical settings, both

limits our thinking regarding what ‘counts’ as something worthy of our careful – in the

sense of care – attention. The ocular-centrism of phenomenology is, in this sense, matched

by a more general reduction – namely, the reduction of ethical meaning to what is presently

apparent.

The focus upon vision that characterizes certain clinical practices can be viewed as a

development of this larger reduction of ethical meaning within occidental thinking to the

parameters of vision, and thus, to the exclusion of that which is not present, that which does

22
Fredrik Svenaeus. “Phenomenology of Pregnancy and the ethics of abortion.” Medical Healthcare
and Philosophy. 2018. No. 21. p. 81.
15

not be, within the field of apparency. For Svenaeus, such practices include not only the

capacity of providing of a rendering of the fetus during pregnancy in increasingly realistic

images, but the drive, or feeling of need, to do to so. More problematically is the insistence

upon the importance of such imaging as a best practice for screening for abnormalities that

would provide the reason for a decision to abort. What is taken as primary in that equation

is the presence or absence of a visible disorder.

Yet, what is actually at stake is how one will interpret the hitherto hidden fetus, the

inapparency of which has been breached through the process of constructing an image-

representation or a simulacrum, on the basis of the visibility of the image. When the matter

of the inapparent is left out, or made secondary, there is an automatic, even if pre-

argumentative, discursive downgrading of the status of the fetus. Or, at least, this exclusion

of the inapparent opens the possibility for its degradation. In the end, before and during any

ethical deliberation regarding whether to image the fetus, the matter revolves around how

one will interpret the inapparency of the fetus, how one will care or value it.

The nature of this hermeneutical situation is apparent when one considers how

differently people respond or make use of such images. On the one hand, there are families

for whom such images are used to make a decision to abort on the basis of any fetal

abnormalities such images disclose. On the other hand, there are families for whom the

fetus is without abnormalities, and thus, who then often include said photos in family photo

albums as the ‘first’ photo of the newborn.

This latter use of the image complicates the strictly diagnostic picture for Svenaeus.

This is because the justification for aborting a fetus made on the basis of such imaging

would seem to be contradicted by the way these latter parents take such images, when

abnormalities are not present, as images of a future child (in potentia), as the first images to
16

be included in a collection of other images.23 In short, the images can be both justification

for the abortion of a non-person and images of a person who is in the process of

emergence.24

I agree in the main with Svenaeus’ analysis. As is evident from the above, the

ambiguity to which Svenaeus points is an ambiguity in how the inapparency of the fetus,

which (the inapparency) is rendered as apparent though the medium of a digital image, is

interpreted. What appears or does not appear through the mediation of a given medical

technology is thus ‘taken’ in contradictory ways. Hermeneutical and ethical confusion are,

thus, oriented around the same point – namely, the inapparency of the fetus. Its status,

having been rendered ambiguous by a default privileging of visibility, is by default

ambiguous.

What the specific character of this ambiguity reveals, as a fundamentally

hermeneutic ambiguity regarding the status of the inapparent, are the limits of

phenomenology and ontology for offering ethical insight. The ambiguity in question is, I

argue, more precisely the ambiguity that was mentioned earlier in this paper – namely, the

ambiguity of the relation between what is disclosed (as either apparently present or

presently absent) and the ethical ‘ought’ of what should be but is not yet. In rendering the

status of the fetus ambiguous, the default interpretation of ambiguity, or inapparency, is to

at least open the possibility for its degradation. Yet, it is far from clear that this prejudice,

even where it is only allowed as a possibility, is warranted.

All that has been shown is that the inapparency of the fetus has been accorded a

lesser status than what is visible, even though it is the inapparent that is at stake. In such a

23
Ibid. p. 82.
24
Ibidem.
17

situation, ethical decision making is seemingly attached first to what is apparent and only

secondarily to what ‘might’ become visible. Such a connection between visibility and

ethical decision making is, however, an inversion of the ethical in its most basic sense –

namely, as the sensibility for the inapparency of what should be, of care that goes beyond

the sense of visible similitude with oneself.

§ Conclusion: Inapparency as the Site of the (Bio)Ethical

To summarize, there are two levels of inapparency that I have sought to make clear

as conditions for both ethical decision making – the being of the ethical itself – and

conditions for the specific phenomenon of natality and pregnancy. Following Levinas and

Dussel, I argued that humane ethical sensibility is engaged with the sphere of

phenomenality and culture, but ultimately, metaphysically, not reducible to the play of

phenomena. As such, inapparency metaphysically is a part of ethical decision making.

Phenomenologically, I also argued that pregnancy must be included, as a founding

phenomenon, of the phenomenon called natality, a point that reinforces the importance of

inapparency at the level of phenomenality.

As I hope to have demonstrated with my brief discussion of fetal imaging, these two

senses of inapparency can be seen as playing out in everyday medical settings. Not only do

these two senses of inapparency conditions the decisions that physicians and patients need

to make, but so too the situations in which bioethicists find themselves as they attempt to

make decisions regarding what to do in any given situation. In the case of fetal imaging,

this point is evident given how the entire ethical question depends upon how the

inapparency of the fetus is discursively valued or interpreted.

Insofar as all of this holds as true, the bioethical can thus be said to name the site of

the interpretation of inapparency, which is to say, the ethical overall. Conversely,

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inapparency names the site of the bioethical. Decisions regarding what to do to save,

maintain, kill, or change organic tissue fundamentally and always involve the interpretation

of a kind of inapparency, be this phenomenological or metaphysical. As such, bioethical

thinking has to begin from this position of recognizing the importance of the inapparent as

the site in which bioethical decision making and thinking occurs.

Works Cited

Hannah Arendt. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Anne O’Byrne. Natality and Finitude. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.

Enrique Dussel. Filosofía de la liberación. Segunda reimpresión FCE. Ciudad de México:

FCE, 2018.

Emmanuel Levinas. En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger. Paris : Vrin,

2016.

Jean-Luc Marion. Étant donné  : Essai d’une phénoménologie de la donation. Paris : PUF,
1997.

Martin Heidegger. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Niemeyer Verlag, 1967.

Reiner Schürmann. Des hégémonies brisées. Mauvezin : Trans-Europa-Press, 1996.

Robert Sokolowski. Presence and Absence: A Philosophical Investigation of Language and

Being. Washington D.C. The Catholic University of America Press, 2017.
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Fredrik Svenaeus. “Phenomenology of Pregnancy and the ethics of abortion.” Medical

Healthcare and Philosophy. 2018. No. 21.