AN EDUCATION IN FEMINIST AWARENESS
I will describe the path that my own feminist awareness took by discussing the books that influenced me the most. Since Susan Griffin had a great influence on me, I highlight her work. I also single out Anodea Judith’s The Global Heart Awakens which locates our present age in terms of the transition from the static masculine phase of our history to the dynamic feminine phase.
Radical Feminism and Ecofeminism
During the blossoming of radical feminism within feminism’s “second wave,” an explosive manifesto The Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone appeared. The year was 1970. In Firestone’s view, human inequality was rooted in biology, since women gave birth and men did not. This was the origin of the power difference that condemned women to second-class status. Therefore, the only solution is for women to be celibate until the technologically advanced future when children could be created without women experiencing pregnancy. Firestone makes the case for radical feminism as the true revolution of our time, superseding those of class and race.
In 1978, Griffin’s Women and Nature appeared and gave a huge impetus to ecofeminism. Like Firestone, Griffin went to the roots of human inequality but she found it in the equation of women with nature. Men have dominated nature in the same way that they have dominated women, suppressing the emotional side of life of which women are the symbol. Men’s fear of death has led them to see both women and nature as threats and to lash out with fury against this imagined threat.
The book was written poetically, and its comprehensive vision presents much material for contemplation. Griffin attempts to look deeply into the dominant male logic of civilization from its underside. She achieves this stunning feat through associative writing based on intuition. Her poetic prose appeals to the sensibility. By showing the patriarchal agenda of religion, philosophy, and science as it has developed throughout Western history, Griffin undercuts the apparently solid ground of reason. She challenges people to come out of the clouds of pure thought and to make their home again on earth. Her deep and fruitful vision of the nature of patriarchy and her call to let dualistic thinking go are inspirational. Her visionary thinking takes us back to nature and the body.
Griffin’s Revolution of Consciousness
Griffin has pointed out in her article “The Way of All Ideology” that denial of parts of the self leads to projection of the denied qualities on the other who serves as enemy. The ideologue longs for a total worldview that can help to defend the acceptable parts of the self and to reject the denied parts. For example, a feminist may deny feelings that conflict with her ideology and, as a result, project these denied feelings on women who do not follow the correct values and beliefs. Reliance on ideology leads to exalting the mind over the body. There is also a preference for safety over risk and the predictable over the surprising. In addition, emotions are tightly controlled. The mind’s idea becomes ruler over what is experienced and what is natural. In this way, an ideology that was originally a liberating tool based on felt oppression becomes the basis for a new form of oppression.
In Griffin’s view, there is a need for a revolution of consciousness as well as for new institutions, since true freedom cannot solely be a gift from the social order. She shows that both politics and psychology play an important role. Politics focuses on the ways in which people are influenced in harmful ways by an unjust social order, while psychology demonstrates that we also shape ourselves and explains how denial of parts of the self produces harmful social consequences.
The mind is located in nature and Griffin calls for healing of the split between individual and world that has produced the ecological crisis. This idea is similar to Bateson’s notion of pathologies of epistemology, since the organism that wins over its environment destroys itself. And in the process, as Griffin notes, women are degraded.
Griffin makes many astute comments. Although Marxist thought and socialism promote social justice and a more equal society, Marxist thought is ambivalent toward nature and even subtly diminishes human nature. For 19th century Enlightenment thinkers such as Marx, nature is a blind, ignorant, and highly unpredictable force. Marx sees the class struggle as inevitably bringing about a classless society and reduces history to the natural forces propelling the working class. Such forces operate in a brute rather than intelligent manner. Griffin makes a very interesting claim: “That Marxist theory did not give birth to democratic forms cannot be separated from Marxism’s claim to a scientific view of human nature, a view that limits the power of knowledge to a privileged few.”
Feminist Critiques of Religion and Science
The feminist critique of science as expressed by Griffin has far-reaching implications. Scientific knowledge has not been valued for its own sake; European culture has used it as an instrument of power. The desire to uncover the secrets of nature is motivated by the hope that we will unlock the secrets of our own mortality and gain control over life and death. This attitude toward nature has made procreation and the female body sources of anxiety and has provoked hostility. Through knowledge of and control over women’s bodies, the source of our coming into being, science assaults life itself. Among the numerous examples of this tendency Griffin singles out in vitro fertilization, genetic engineering, the resort to numerous cesarean sections, hysterectomies, and radical mastectomies plus the mechanization of birth and the driving out of midwives.
Griffin’s notion of religion is arresting. After mentioning all the numerous religions and spiritual traditions that have influenced her from Christianity and Judaism to Buddhism and Gandhi’s Hinduism, from Sufism and Taoism to American Indian and West African traditions, she explains that she no longer believes in the Western hierarchical notion in which a meeting with God is the supreme goal.
Now, Griffin finds God whenever there is meeting, whether of minds or bodies, and the sacred exists when humans meet with animals, plants, and earth. In everyday life, whenever there is communion, there is the sacred, and all such meetings are holy. No one acts or thinks alone, since everything is connected. Our abstract philosophies and the philosophies by which we live our daily lives make up a habit of mind based on separation that is destructive. The only hope for our world is to change this habit of mind and see in our souls that we exist together on this common ground. It is only through exchange that we exist.
In Griffin’s work, feminism cannot be separated from philosophy and religion, ecology, the pursuit of social justice, peace studies, and American history and geography. She also includes many personal stories in her books so that it becomes impossible to classify them according to genre. The story of her taking care of her mother in the last few months before her mother’s death is especially moving. She has forgiven her mother for badly treating her as a child, even though her resentments still occasionally surface. And selfless giving to her mother has become enjoyable. This story illustrates a larger point. Those last few months of togetherness were highly intimate as both were present to each other and experienced love. Griffin became very aware that she had come from her mother’s body and had even once been part of that body. Humans are one, and yet through difference, meeting and love are possible.
Griffin’s unified approach to the problems of our time is very attractive. She writes about Western men fleeing from nature into abstraction and using knowledge as power. Her own writing is exemplary since it tends to be concrete, often poetic, and appeals to both hemispheres of the brain. Lived experience is no less important than argument. The brilliance of her argument about the causes of women’s oppression is equaled by the beauty of her insights and the poetry of her expression. Griffin writes about the social and political dimensions in relation to her personal life and skillfully weaves her life and her ideas together.
Transpersonal Approaches to Feminism
Transpersonal authors like Ken Wilber, Richard Tarnas, and William Irwin Thompson during the 1980s and 1990s provided a deeper understanding of how patriarchy has produced not just the oppression of women but has narrowed the possibilities for the growth and development of both women and men.
In his 1981 Up from Eden, Ken Wilber, following Joseph Campbell, described a profound cultural shift several thousand years ago from mythologies centered on the great mother and mother nature to a valorization of rationality and the ego. This is the historical origin of patriarchy. Previously, mind and body were not fully differentiated but as the self became alienated from nature and from the great mother, dissociation of mind and body occurred. The result was mind-body dualism: the self became specialized and divided. The ego uses concepts and reason in a static manner and controls behavior, whereas the body realm is characterized by instinct, immediate feelings and responses, spontaneity, and processes of change. Mind-body dualism accompanied the rejection of the great mother and the great goddess. Thought was conceived as separate from and superior to nature and instinct was subordinated to reason.
In 1991, Richard Tarnas came out with The Passion of the Western Mind in which he traced the history of Western thought from the ancient Greeks to the present day. He pointed out that the Western intellectual tradition has been created by men and expresses mostly masculine perspectives. The Western worldview centers around “a questing masculine hero, a Promethean biological and metaphysical rebel who has constantly sought freedom and progress for himself and who has thus constantly striven to differentiate himself from and control the matrix out of which he emerged.”
In the West, the creation of an autonomous rational ego has been achieved at the cost of separation from its original unity with nature and the repression of the feminine. “Whether one sees this in the ancient Greek subjugation and revision of the pre-Hellenic matrifocal mythologies, in the Judeo-Christian denial of the great mother goddess, or in the Enlightenment’s exalting of the coolly self-aware rational ego radically separate from a disenchanted external nature, the evolution of the Western mind has been founded on the repression of the feminine — on the repression of undifferentiated unitary consciousness, of the participation mystique with nature: a progressive denial of the animus mundi, the soul of the world, of the community of being, of the all-pervading, of mystery and ambiguity, of imagination, emotion, instinct, body, nature, woman.”
The masculine striving of the modern Western mind has reached its one-sided extreme of total isolation and has limited all conscious intelligence to the rational ego. So the only possible resolution of this crisis is to return to the feminine outlook. Tarnas states that “the deepest passion of the Western mind has been to reunite the ground of being.” He finds many signs that this masculine crisis is in the process of resolution: feminism, ecology, the idea of human unity, and the reevaluation of the body, emotions, intuition, imagination, and the unconscious.
William Irwin Thompson also perceives the possibility of a resolution to the current masculine crisis. In his 1996 Coming into Being, he contrasts the declining industrial civilization based on masculine values such as accumulation of wealth, economic expansion, and war with the feminine orientation we find in Daoist anarchism. The Dao is subtle, delicate, and soft, everything is in process, and there are no hard, fixed objects located in space. The Daoist vision implies decentralized villages in which each person is connected to the cosmos through inner awareness and the recovery of his or her original nature. Thompson reminds us that the world’s first universal religion was the religion of the great goddess. Now faced with a declining industrial civilization, we have a choice: the masculine path of militarism and hierarchy governed by big science or feminine spirituality and anarchist philosophy.
What all these transpersonal accounts have in common is the notion that pure thought has been an instrument of rational control of self and nature. As Tarnas points out, we are now trying to create a new reality in which reconciliation with feminine unity does not require the suppression of masculine ideals that have long characterized the Western worldview. In affirming and transcending both masculine and feminine orientations, a larger whole and a new synthesis is created. Man is overcome yet also fulfilled through union with the feminine.
Griffin on Writing, Poetry, and Knowledge
The same ideas have been expressed in more personal and poetic form by Griffin and she comes closer to achieving an appreciation of the unity of form and content in her writing. In Made from This Earth (1983), she speaks about writing, poetry, and knowledge. Griffin explains that writing poetry is the process of discovering feelings buried in our bodies. Through this process, we discover the self in its wholeness and our connection with others. The light of reason alone can make us insensitive and ignorant, whereas entering the darker regions of the subconscious mind through poetry allows us to recognize and reveal our natural and lost self. In this way, we free ourselves from our circumscribed social identities.
Writing is a mysterious process that requires faith. It is an entrance into the unknown, into the subconscious mind at whose deepest level the truth resides. As feelings come out, words arise to give them meaning. The whole process is a creative act that takes the writer into new territory and surprises as it enlightens. The music of the words guides the writer and the only proof of the veracity of what is created is the deep joy the writer experiences.
The knowledge that Griffin expresses in her writing has entered her being in times of silence. She experiences her basic kinship with everything that lives, feels a mystical unity with all existence, and is no longer a divided self. She writes from the space of her experience of presence.
When Griffin was engaged in writing Women and Nature, she was unable to set in place the structure she wanted. Instead, the work took on its own shape, a reflection of the universal patterns it was describing. In shamanism, you meditate on the object until you become that object. The knowledge that arises is the opposite of scientific knowledge, since you enter and become the other rather than impersonally observe the object.
In her description of how she writes and of how poetry brings knowledge, Griffin challenges those who fear loss of control over the creative process to go deeper and have faith.
Judith’s Feminist Theory of Historical Development
In The Global Heart Awakens (2006), Anodea Judith makes a major recent contribution from a spiritual perspective to feminist discussions of a future egalitarian society. In her cultural philosophy, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny as historical development goes through stages that parallel those in the development of the individual. She believes that humanity at present is in the stage of cultural adolescence. Therefore our present challenge is to become adults so that we can co-create a world in which human beings will not only survive but also take the future into their own hands. She presents a dark picture about the traumas that humanity is likely to experience before the dawning of a new spiritual age.
In Judith’s estimation, the immediate human future is bleak. The West lacks social and environmental conscience and is driven to recklessly consume, creating a world with increasing inequalities of wealth as well as vast social divides. In addition to the threat of environmental collapse, the world is also facing unsustainable population growth. Therefore enormous obstacles lie ahead. From Judith’s vantage point, healing our collective wounds requires deep historical awareness so that we can recognize how we have arrived at this perilous point in our evolution as a species.
Judith divides our collective history into four distinct social patterns: the static feminine which existed in the era of the Great Mother; the dynamic masculine which overthrew the static feminine and initiated gender hierarchy and domination; the static masculine which evolved from the dynamic masculine and is characterized by a rigid law and order orientation; and the emerging dynamic feminine based on free-flowing creativity and emphasizing relationship and community.
Her distinction between the dynamic and static masculine phases focuses our attention on an important difference. In her view, the dynamic masculine age is, despite its hierarchical orientation, a time of power and innovation which enables people to move in new directions, whereas the static masculine is a period of order and stability. The static masculine emerges when the dynamic masculine forces become rigid as they protect their revolutionary new order based on the religion of the sky gods in place of earth mysteries. As a result dynamism is lost since empires come to be governed by strict rules and regulations according to written laws established with reference to universal principles backed by reason and logic.
A process of consolidation and stagnation occurs after a revolutionary order becomes firmly institutionalized and heavily codified thereby inhibiting any fundamental social growth and development.
An Androgynous Future
From Judith’s standpoint, as modern people intensify the repression of the feminine elements of life and move toward total control over nature through technology, they reach a dead end. Trapped in ideologies of unending progress through transformation of the material world, the result is “the disaster of modernity.” Our problem is that we no longer have a connection with our sacred ground which consists of the earth together with our bodies and souls. Although we have reached beyond nature’s limits, we no longer know how it feels to experience nature’s majesty. We have left superstition behind but have no myths to live by. Privacy has been gained at the expense of community, and people feel like part of the machine, unable to feel deeply. The present moment is supreme. In the manner of adolescents, we are powerful but not wise.
Judith insists that humanity must experience a rite of passage from the love of power to the power of love. The masculine principle, despite its liberation of the individual and the rational mind, threatens the very survival of the human species and must give way.
Judith’s dynamic feminine stage will usher in the new era. And Judith foresees an androgynous future. “The journey of separation that split everything apart is changing direction — reuniting divorced archetypes in a new synthesis with love as the integrating principle: men and women in partnership as equals, mind and body holistically integrated, matter and spirit mutually interwoven.”
Judith is focused on assisting the birth of a new era in which wisdom, peace, and love are paramount. Her book is an important contribution in this regard, since it serves as a guide for a very challenging and exciting undertaking. Despite her lack of training in historical research and methodology, a wild love for this world compelled her to write The Global Heart Awakens. It was something she felt that she just had to do.
