Mothers, Fathers, and Others: New Essays

"It’s by Siri Hustvedt. She’s neither a scientist nor a philosopher in the technical sense – she’s well-known as a novelist and essayist – but I do think of her as a philosopher and feminist thinker. She reads and writes influentially about science , and is deeply aware of how it matters. (An interview I did with her for The White Review is relevant to our topic, as it happens.). She is in fact highly respected in the scientific world for her insights, which are also the output of an artistic mind – she writes astute art criticism as well. I had a hard time choosing one book, but I want to mention just the latest collection of essays, Mothers, Fathers, and Others . It’s about many things, but a lot of it is about motherhood, which matters supremely, and needs to be considered in a different way from the public discourse about it: all of us have mothers, insofar as all of us were contained in someone else’s body. The first essays explore the worlds of her grandmother and mother, and they travel on, as we all do – from begetting, influencing, becoming, to reading, writing, feeling, retelling, recalling. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . One particularly powerful essay here is called “Open Borders: Takes from the Life of an Intellectual Vagabond”, which explores the cultural, epistemic and psychological need for defining borders, and the danger inhering in erecting them. She traces misogyny to this need for borders, for a separation between enclaves that in turns translates a fear of pollution. How do we represent the world, she asks, wondering what the hybrids and therianthropes represented in 40,000-year-old cave art are: “Did those people perceive and represent animals more or less the same way I do?” Since perception depends on context and knowledge, perceptual biases inform many beliefs, and take the shape of imaginary borders, delimitations that may help us classify and analyse, but also lead to artificial disciplinary categories, and, as we are seeing now, to distortions, hatred, bigotry, fear of the imagined other, horror of the begetting woman and begetting mother. She has been writing about research in embryology, which shows how interwoven mother and foetus are, and about the placenta, that neglected in-between organ. I agree with her critique of the delusory view that cognition can be a disembodied brain in a vat – that is, of the functional or computationalist views of the mind, views that neglect the fundamental role of the body in shaping us, that see borders everywhere. That critique was particularly developed in her important essay “The Delusions of Certainty”, which was first published in a previous collection, Women Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex and the Mind (2016). I’m certain, as she is, that this is a complete fantasy – she sees this picture as a male fantasy, which arises out of the male difficulty of accepting that he is born of a woman. Yes, and in fact mainstream philosophy has been male-oriented even since Plato and Aristotle. This is changing, at last. But there are still many assumptions and intellectual habits that we need to examine in light of this new, welcome awareness. The work has only just begun. It’s about how the self studies itself, and loses itself. My starting point is the embodied sense of self. I wrote it precisely against the Cartesian framework that prevailed for so long in philosophy and cognitive science. I wanted to understand what is going on when we lose track of who we are. So I ended up sitting in on the weekly clinical sessions of patients in a neuropsychiatric unit at a Paris hospital, and was privy to the examinations and medical discussions. The patients consulted there because they had diagnoses that were ambivalent or unclear. I picked out of the many I saw those that presented something most interesting with regard to the sense of self. To try to understand these people I drew on cutting edge work in psychology and neuroscience about the embodied sense of self, particularly in relation to interoception. Yes, that’s exactly it. But I realized while I was in the room with those patients that very little of this cutting-edge neuroscience was actually brought to bear on the clinical cases. Doctors don’t have the time to deal with this theoretical stuff. Neurologists in particular are just trying to understand what’s going on with these patients, and what may be going on in the brain, especially – they’re not really looking at the body more generally. The lack of attention to the body besides the brain did puzzle me, though, because a lot of the problems that I saw in the room are what we call ‘functional’ and don’t have a clear organic basis in the brain. So what is going on, really? I got very interested in how recent science can help us understand this. And then while I was writing, I realized that my own mother could have been one of the patients because she was starting to develop dementia, which presented clinically as an Alzheimer’s. So the book also became a memoir about that experience which, sadly, so many people share. The question of what the embodied sense of self is, and how it is tied into memory, became very pertinent for me. And the process of writing by ignoring disciplinary borders helped me cope with it all – as did books such as the five I’ve chosen to talk about here."