Oh Mater, Where Art Thou?

Happy Mother’s Day

The most glaring omission from the university campus’s student pool, the one perspective of life which has been neglected, overlooked, dismissed is that of ‘mothers’. It is something so glaringly obvious, but nothing we even consider. There are of course professors that are mothers, and of course there are the rare mature student, who has returned to higher education, but for the most part, mothers as students, as contributors to academia, are absent from campus. We don’t need to intuit too much why that is. School is expensive, requires a lot of time and resources, and being an 18 year old freshman with baby in tow, is insane. We can also look back historically in how we have treated women and mothers and the legacy of their absence from the participation in the running of societies.

Academia has never been geared towards those with life experience. It like war, seeks new blood, fresh impressionable, angry, ambitious youth, separated from the scarred, temperate wisdom of the past. It’s run on a model as technology is. Innovate and replace.

Keep that in mind, we’ll come back to it….

We are living on the only planet that we will ever inhabit. It is the only planet that has Life and Consciousness realized. It is the essence of Earth; life and consciousness. I think that is safe to say. I am sure every non-essentialist can say of all the planets we are familiar with, Life and Consciousness is at the heart of Earth. It’s what Earth does. Life, life, life, and conscious life. Saturn, who knows? Jupiter, lots of Gas and blocks things from hitting us. Mars, Elon Musk’s future burial site. But here, it’s safe to say, this little blue dot, is the Life and Consciousness place.

On this little blue dot, every single human life, every single conscious human mind comes from a womb, has come from a womb, and lets’ hope will always come from a womb. Creation, life, the concept of unconditional love could be said to stem from this phenomenon. One might label it the Divine Feminine.

Here is where things get tricky and quite confusing. For over 2000 years, what constitutes knowledge, what constitutes reality, what constitutes what a ‘human’ is, has been recited, recorded and presented to the world from only a masculine, logical, and rational perspective, and only from men. What is life, what is known, what is felt, what is experienced has always come from men and their philosophical ‘offspring’. Can that be though? Surely, from antiquity to to present day, metaphysics (reality), epistemology (knowledge), ethics, consciousness, has sought out the musings of fifty per cent of the population and one hundred percent of all human life source. What is life and death? I am positive, someone must have sat with a pregnant mother or new mother, and asked them how they feel or felt risking their own life to procure this human capable of language, conscious deliberation, writing, love, hate, murder. At the very least, I’m sure throughout human history, the sacredness of this ability to keep life going, was treated with a sacred soft touch and reverence, for the future of tribes, kin, cities, nations that lay in this person? No? Maybe? Not a chance?

Where is the 2000 years plus data set of philosophy, knowledge, intuition and experience from Mothers? When I think of ‘women’s intuition’, I think of the physiology of the female human body. I image that a pregnant body that will become relatively immobile, vulnerable to danger, might have an innate quality to have a greater internal sense of perception, of being able to survey her surroundings from a greater distance, to understand the threats of other humans before they get too close. This body, that creates brains, central nervous systems, personalities, inside her body, must have an evolutionary adaptation or Divine design to perceive earlier than others, those who rely on their empirical evidence? I hypothesize that this intuition might not have been met with the same haste from the phallic humans. Sounds crazy, when you think about it. Of course, there is no 2000 plus year investigation by mothers or on their behalf….outside of hushed tea circles.

For over 2000 years, the metaphysical reality of what women and femininity have been defined as irrational, weaker, and subordinate to men and reason, beginning with Aristotle. That was his assessments of the female human. That legacy persisted well into the 19th century. For 2000 years, we have prioritized only one half of human consciousness. We have taken this so much so for granted, that in the 21st Century, mothers have still not been given any authority to define or edify us on what a woman, what femininity is or what life is or where it begins. Academia is not set up to contain the experience of mothers in the undergraduate life, and less likely in the immediately following graduate life. How we have suffered for that.

Where is the wealth of data and knowledge in our books, in our education, in our mythos, in our hearts? Her knowledge comes to us through stories, through dreams, the tears of our Indigenous abuelas, aunties, yayas, nonnas and the whispers of the silenced, raped and murdered. The metaphysical, misogynist legacy from Aristotle has remained through the ages of Semitic monotheism, the Orient, the Enlightenment, modernism and post modernism, from Spinoza, to Schopenhauer, to Hegel, to Nietzsche, to Freud, to Marx, to De Beauvoir, to Michael Foucault, to Monique Wittig, to Judith Butler, to Eve Sedgwick, to Angela Davis to Bell Hooks, to Susan Stryker, to….. Not one of them a mother…..not one of them has grown a brain, a nervous system, a heart inside of their bodies, yet all have shaped, how we define womanhood, all of them in an abstracted, existential non-essentialist sort of way. Nobody is saying you need to be a mother to understand where life begins or what the phenomenal experience of a woman is, but surely if we’ve gone over Two Millenia without including that perspective within the conscious psyche of humans, we cannot have the full picture of human consciousness. Are we saying mothers provide zero insights into the metaphysics of womanhood? Into consciousness? Are we denying that those who bring life into the world, have no added intelligence in these matters? Does it matter? You tell me?

I want to add that I’m not making any legal or political argument here, but just observing and asking, if we need to reframe our human history and how we value academia. How can we omit, from public pedagogy, the value of these women that are rooted in Life and Death and which have a symbiotic, tethered existence to lives outside of their own ego. And what is the cost to this omission? Are we saying there is no value to their contributions? We enter into academia, with fresh eyes, from an age when the ego is being developed, when there is an active resentment and disassociation from family, from authority, from tradition, from values. There is this Nietzschean rip from the old, antiquated values. And although there is immense value in tearing things down, in control burning dead fields, perhaps there needs to be less indiscrimination. We do something similar with war veterans. We omit them from public policy and completely disregard their views when it comes to the realities of war and foreign policy, yet they have a first hand knowledge, a closer glimpse of the cost to our soul, for our violent transgressions. We cannot afford to wait for people to humble themselves through years of hindsight, after years of humility and arrogance. We can not keep soul in the domain of music, literature, dreams and poetry. It must be brought into the light. The human experience is not a technology. It requires interaction from all places and time of consciousness. We cannot afford to wait for every wounded, selfish, daft billionaire to isolate himself from the world, only to come around to his humanity, after being visited from the ghosts of his transgressions on Christmas Eve.

How can all of our philosophical, academic, political contributions come from a pathway that limits the wisdom, the humility, the pain, the lived experience of mothers……on Earth?

Now I’m not an authority on anything, nor can I comfortably comment on certain political issues, when it comes to gender and bodily autonomy. I do agree that bodily autonomy is and must always be legally protected, but I need some things to make sense. If societies have abdicated from valuing the preciousness of life and women who procure life and consciousness and community, and continue policies that effectively make living so difficulty, how do we not expect a rejection of this aspect of our existence. Margaret Olivia Little, who is a philosopher and mother, makes an argument in a somewhat nature. The intimacy and embodiment of motherhood is so precious, that we cannot force such a powerful responsibility and relationship on women. It goes beyond pro life and pro choice. It is less about advocating for rights to abortion, as much as honouring the value and significance of this intimate gestation and motherhood.

I remember learning about women's studies, particularly on abortion and gender. Two mega giant philosopher women, who helped make a case for abortion are Judith Jarvis Thompson and Mary Anne Warren and Peter Singer. Thompson wrote “A Defense of Abortion”. a brilliant piece, that has some amazing insights, arguments for women’s bodily autonomy. Again a philosophical genius but had never had a child.

Mary Anne Warren wrote “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion” again, this woman runs circles around my brain. Produces a mega strong argument here. Also childless. There was not a lot of literature, from a mother’s perspective, on either end of the philosophical argument. Some main proponents against abortion from morally and philosophical arguments are Francis Beckwith, Don Marquis, Robert George, Patrick Lee and John Ennis.

We discussed both of the above women in my class, and my Professor, who is a brilliant philosopher, also has two children I believe. Now I imagine they came about after her education, but I never asked. Anyhoo, I made some arguments in favour of Thompson, but it had never occurred to me, to ask then, if there have been extensive studies from the perspective of mothers. I think I would have also liked to ask her, when she felt life began and if her philosophical views change pre-mother to post-mother.

Again, I’m not attempting to say when life begins, but should we ask a million mothers what they experience, or should we continue this debate, in abstraction? Can we not find mother-led legislators to come up with a financially viable system that ensures the necessities for successful Life and encourage and nurture an education that fosters an environment that promotes the intimacy and sacredness of this embodied experience, and make that as prioritized as the military…..or energy, or how about just road maintenance?

When it comes to the understanding of women and the reality of what women are, there is virtually zero input from mothers? Explain this to me. Tearing down a patriarchy with…..an all engrossing, augmented patriarchy? Overthrowing a hyper individualistic, materialist, fascist society, with a hyper authoritative, controlled utopia, both sourced in literature written from centuries of men who devalued the intelligibility of women and mothers. We’re only playing with a half a deck. Even less. We have historically silenced voices and now further silence those voices. We are on the fourth wave of an incarnated ideology that forgets the barren desert that preceded it. Conservatives are fighting to maintain something that has never existed, and progressives rally against something that has never existed. And mothers are in the crosshairs. The mother, who has never had a voice can either fight to return, as a dutiful handmaid, or be turfed into oblivion, while the neutered State raises her children.

Final Thoughts

The study of consciousness, Philosophy of Mind and the study of what constitutes the understanding of women, women’s studies/gender studies, their social roles, their histories, their existence are rooted from the ideas of men, and passed on to the domain of students, who could not reflect from their own phenomenal experience of giving life. To enter into this foray of higher education, was to sacrifice something that has been received and treated as the ultimate burden and prison sentence, but that, in itself, is the legacy of thousands of years of only one accepted perspective. We can surmise, what centuries of being confined, ignored, belittled, second guessed, minimized, objectified and commodified does to the mind and body of a woman and subsequently mothers. WE have all experienced how these challenges can manifest into how we are raised. WE live in an era where we are trying to redefine, what a woman is, what a family is, when life begins, and still the experts, the authorities on these matters have never made children, never incubated LIFE…..on this Planet of LIFE and CONSCIOUSNESS.

We have eradicated this essential intuition, reduced it to a function of reproduction, a feeling, an expression, a loose identity. Where is this equality of human consciousness? This is the essence and legacy of the patriarchy; it had reduced something so rich and essential to our embodied experience of this planet, and made it into something arbitrary. We have amputated a part of our soul.

I want to express a deep Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers out there, especially my own. I realize a huge obstacle in how I’ve seen the world, when I was at my most adolescent, stems from this veil of misogyny that has obstructed my worldview. The word matter, itself is rooted in mater, mother. How we view this planet, women, connection, love, has root in the Feminin energy, and I have struggled to access it and the value hidden within it. The treasures there. I feel we need to understand that more, and that was what my last post was about. I think young men need to. We need to understand what is worth protecting, worth fighting for and worth living for. I think the future of our society depends on it.

It took me years, to begin to look beneath, to see my mother as a human being, in and of herself, a woman who has suffered such great emotional and physical traumas, that have stolen opportunities, vitality and energy from her life. Things I have taken for granted, things I have overlooked and minimized because I could only see how they affected me. I will be exploring this more as I go forward, but for now I just want to say I love you mom. Happy Mother’s Day.

To be continued……..