As she is the first “object” in the consciousness of the child, any ambivalence toward the mother is transferred to all women and to the environment at large—that is, to nature. But rejection of the feminine presence is only half the story of this ambivalent relationship to otherness. The remaining half is a longing for union or merging with it. In the male-dominated society, the female is for the male a symbol of the mysterious Other, inspiring not only the drive to conquer and contain it but also to open to it and merge with it. These are two phases in an epistemic cycle, which begins with opening and ends in closure—properly, of course, to reopen on some new level or in new territory. The fundamental mistake involved in intellectual fixity is to identify knowledge strictly with the closure phase, and with a negative view of the Unknown or Other as something to be isolated, contained, resisted or denied. This cycle may also be understood in terms of the metaphor of assimilation. As food, the known is the part of reality that is already dead, consumed, digested. The unknown part is the fresh and unconsumed, to which we are drawn by appetite and eros.

While all sentient creatures evaluate stimuli, and are therefore capable of pain along with pleasure, only self-conscious beings can be said to suffer, which requires knowledge of one’s condition. The natural state of any organism is perforce one of limitation, mortality, and participation in an evolutionary contest whose rules and playing field dictate the creature’s perception, behavior, and very being. For a self-conscious organism, there is suffering in the awareness of these constraints, in the longing for possibilities it can conceive beyond these (or any) limitations. The very fact of being able to see the natural context of one’s life implies a ground on which to stand apart from it. This imaginative ground is the terrain of the inner subjective world, where the flag of the self is planted. Rebellion breeds in this soil against the constraints of embodiment, and here the plot is hatched to overthrow the humiliating yoke of nature.

Something in the human psyche loathes the indignity of being an organism at all: a convoluted alimentary tube driven by genes to fecundity, eating its way through the world until it too becomes food for literal worms. We have grander pretensions—to be as gods, pure, unbounded, with immortal eyes open upon an infinite horizon. The very concepts of spirit and spirituality deny the limiting animal context. The idealistic belief that what one truly is, despite all appearances, is spirit or soul, expresses a characteristic revulsion at being trapped in the temporal sheath of flesh.

In the system of nature, sexuality, desire and pleasure of orgasm refer ultimately to reproduction. In the system of men, they refer inevitably to the use by males of females as a reproductive resource, as well as a labor resource and now a market resource. Romance and marriage are working compromises established between the genders in the battle of the sexes. Within the masculine psyche, they involve balancing the need for nurturance, companionship, and surrender with the drive for control over society, nature, and women. While the man idealizes the woman, commanding her to stay frozen even in time on the pedestal where he knows he has put her, he defers to her only in the larger context of this control. Should women refuse these relations, what would men do? What will be the partnership between genders if it is not oriented toward reproduction, economic dependency, and the contract that allows men to pay homage to the feminine while retaining power? What would it be like to have a conscious partnership between two truly equal moieties?

Ascensionism is a masculine innovation, which has become the hallmark of all cultural expression under patriarchy. This corruption of spiritual intent magnified men and the masculine at the expense of women, the feminine, and nature; it thwarted whatever chance society had for a peaceful and balanced development. Christianity, Islam, and Judaism have justified male violence, the enslavement of one people or class by another, and the systematic exclusion and repression of women. These evils, of course, began long before the so-called axial religions, which only followed the shift to patriarchy. The subordination of women is already evident in Sumerian records of the third millennium B.C. While women were undoubtedly the first inventors and discoverers of the implements and processes upon which civilization is founded, they were also the first slaves. They developed horticulture and the fabrication of vessels for storing food, but these arts were quickly appropriated by men, following a pattern in which men envy, usurp and transform female functions, beginning with reproduction. But nothing could be more natural than the mother’s authority over the child and nature’s authority over the organism. Both possess us from within—nature through her laws and genetic programming, mother through early dependency. While the female can identify with both mother and nature, the male is disposed to rebel against both. He seeks on other ground to compensate a deficient identity, by mimicking and inverting the authority of the female and of nature over him and within him. He does this first by redefining everything in terms of the interior mental world, which is itself an imitation of the female’s interiority and the immanence of nature. The Ideal is his world, built parallel to hers. Not only is the male reproductive function decreed, as in Aristotle, to be the original and true power of generation, but all creative and generative abilities are redefined as masculine, while the woman is associated with “mere” matter, passivity, and the mortal weight of the flesh. In the beginning was the word, the Logos, the masculine principle of thought, the head, the realm of the spirit, from which the material world of nature is imperfectly copied or descended. Such as we have come to know it in patriarchal culture, ascensionsim is the key reversal through which the masculine has turned the tables on both nature and the feminine.

Under our noses, and against common sense, the mechanist paradigm has taken over the whole means of production, reorienting it away from people’s ability to directly provide for their own needs, toward factory production controlled by the few. “Production” itself has been redefined as making money and consolidating economic power. The modern financial world proclaims a deceptively neutral-sounding ethos of “investment,” an artificial ecology. Behind a benevolent facade, global financial institutions are tools to increase the share of those who control them, by impoverishing nature and society at large. The ideal of plenty for all, envisioned by Bacon and Marx, is subverted to the dreams of the few for personal power and gain. The past two hundred years have confirmed common sense: that economic mechanism can only bring a loss for most people of the means of production as well as of the rewards.

Because men have defined cultural norms, androgyny tends to masculinize women far more than it feminizes men. Men do attempt to assimilate the powers of women, but indirectly, in their highly masculine ways, through technology and bureaucratic structures of power. They do seek access to the feminine, but in the objectified bodies of women. In order for men to achieve a balance within themselves between action and passion, between exteriority and interiority, between culture-making and surrender to the mysteries of life, femininity must first be distinguished from woman and sex. It must be understood as a mode of human being, a sensibility, a stance in regard to reality, nature, the Unknown, the Other. The masculine and the feminine are forces in the human psyche, apart from changing sexual and social arrangements between males and females; they ought to be honored as such rather than projected onto the persons of men and women. While individuals participate in the dialogue between masculine and feminine principles by communicating with each across gender lines, and by falling in love, there remains the task of an alchemical synthesis within the individual. Men have envied women for their mysterious abilities and otherness, not quite understanding that the essence of femininity lies within them too. They have tried to access feminine subjectivity through their wives and lovers, sisters and daughters, and through homosexuality. Or they have avoided it altogether because the external-oriented mind sees only objects to affect and resists surrender to being affected. Having differentiated themselves as masculine, men have feared woman’s otherness as alien, inscrutable, threatening. Accordingly, they have defended their hard-won identity through exclusions and actions against women—who, on the contrary, have been more motivated to adopt the winning masculine ways that predominate in culture. He resists the feminine and she is all too willing to assimilate the masculine. But men must embrace the feminine sensibility itself, along with the woman, for their own benefit and the world’s benefit, as well as for political correctness and the needs of women. Above all, men must listen to actual women, as oracles and conservators of the feminine principle, and heed them while we are groping to find the feminine voice within ourselves. Women could help in that, not only by tuning in to the “goddess within,” but more importantly perhaps, by tuning out the corrupting elements of the consumer culture, which blinker men and women alike. By channeling a feminine as well as a feminist vision for the future.

The body, the individual phenotype, is the genotype’s pawn, which humans have the peculiar ability to experience as though it were something other than one’s self. It is the body that is the playing piece in the game of natural selection and which binds one’s subjective experience to the premises of the system of nature. It is understandable, then, that the human consciousness could turn not only against the natural world as the body’s environment, but against the body itself as the immediate environment for consciousness—one’s own body, and the corporality of the world in general. The notion of transcendence and the rejection of the body are suggested by the interior subjective space that seems to be distinct from it and from the external world. Withdrawal into the realm of mind, spirit, and the Ideal expresses alienation from the body. But such withdrawal is not logically or psychologically inevitable; it is far more a masculine than feminine theme. The developing consciousness of the male collective—as of the male child—finds expression in ascensionism, asceticism, and mortification of the body; in intellectualism, metaphysics, and spirituality; in the rejection of the feminine, and domination, if not hatred, of women.