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 humil… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit afoolinschool.substack.com
