Being & Be-ing in Mary Daly | by Esmée Streachailt

As most feminist philosophers notice, man's philosophical tradition prefers to think in things, solids, ideals, permanence — to make obviously chaotic complexity of the world a stellation of glittering abstractions. (There are exceptions: Bergson, Deleuze, Derrida, Merleau-Ponty.)

Yet!!! There is change, growth, decay, death, and the fallible and squishy body. How? How is this insult to our eternal soul/consciousness-of-ideals possible?

Martin Heidegger wrote a very long book called Being and Time to work this out. You don't need to read it.

Paradox is really hard for man's philosophy to grasp (mostly because paradoxes create/encode instability). How can a thing, say MAN, both be and be-different?

Enter the both/and logic of feminist metaphysics.

If we stop asking things to BE STILL, we simply do not have this problem. Besides, this conundrum persists largely because BEING is coded male and impermancence or BECOMING is coded female ever since ever and men are terrified of being anything like that other thing they have so denigrated and villified in their paranoid denial of common human need and vulnerability.

Be-ing is a short-hand for process relationality from before that term existed.

So one thing many feminist philosophers did was take up that denigrated position, Woman, Becoming, Change, Vulnerability, Relation, Body, and see what happens when we describe and interrogate both the world and man's philosophy from that position.

Turns about that Male Exceptionalism really is the problem:
Daly, Doherty, Griffin, Eisler, Irigaray, Jones, Millet, Plumwood, Streachailt.

Political philosophers pick up this both/and/process/non-linearity:
Bailey, Crenshaw, Collins, Davis, hooks, Jackson, Lorde, Nash, Rich.

We see it when the mental gymnastics come in, the illogic takes over as Male Philosophers to everything they can imagine to keep Her below and servile. We see this now in the ongoing denial to our (nearly?) universal matriarchal ancestry or in the Epstein Class supported circularity of 'evolutionary' psychology. If showing your work is basic to intellectual inquiry, well, these guys cannot provide that proof.

Because they are making shit up.

Anyway, Daly is a huge fan of change and becoming and all that composting mess of life. It was the world-view of our matriarchal ancestry as far as anyone can discern, and a view that reaches as far back as we find cultural artefacts. See my "Myth of the Forever Patriarchy" and the iconography of the Goddess figurine of Hohle Fels – it's all about process-becoming-relation.

All the symbols carved into this Goddess related to the ways elements of the world relate and connect to each other. They are about making, creating, movement, vibration, intensification, contact, mingling, ... When European and settler philosophers like me talk about embodiment and re-embedding ourselves fully in the context of the super/natural world, this is what we're talking about. Re-membering.

But that was not the only reason. Daly also emphasized the Verb because her project had both a critical and an imaginative dimension: to write a philosomythology of women's intellectual, bodily, psychological, and sexual evolution out of patriarchy. She called this process Leaping Sprial Galaxies. Listening deeply inward while feeling and moving Outward is the direction. The Unknown that resonates and harmonizes is the sweet spot. Therese Doherty's "Asymmetriacl Re-Worlding," the source of the In-Yo symbol we use so often, is another description of this loosening up into the great improvisation.

Medusa Rising owes much to Daly. Our reaching back to deep time to reach forward for the next hand-hold. Our inistence that the center is rotten and we must move to the margins. Our unabashed comfort with both the materiality and the spirituality of the world. Our desire to create more connection and interaction between the worlds of feminists. As Kimble reminded me through the words of Glennon Doyle, We are not the resistance. We are the everflow of becoming. These patriarchs are the resistance to life, the stones blocking the rivers, these fire ants trying to contain oceans. Our pain at the distances and separations so many of us cling to. Our unmitigated rage at the ongoing and deliberate betrayal and destruction of girls, women, nature, Goddess.

Esmée Streachailt is the founder/editor of Medusa Rising.

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