1. Introduction

Motherhood has been adopted specifically by the contemporary feminist mainstream to emphasise the peculiar aspect of feminine life, although it has also been criticised by some feminists just because it bears in itself a historico-cultural negative axiology for women, and has prevented them from the human freedom they might recover out of the masculine sovereignty. On the contrary, the main potential motherhood has begot (as a metaphor) is an ethical framework for many French phenomenologists like Jean-Paul Sartre and Emmanuel Levinas (though from different perspectives) to figure out a way out of the egoistic structure of humanity inherited from modernity. The latter phenomenologist, namely Emmanuel Levinas, has given a primordial priority towards a) human sensibility thereby indicating the most significant –and simultaneously ignored- human existential aspect, that is to say b) affectivity (i.e. ‘feelings and emotions’). There is a common and the same axiological modality within the affective consciousness: “one-for-the-other”. As a paradigm case for human ethical existence, motherhood has been considered to be positively compared as equal in axiological modality to the fundamental sensibility (and sensitivity) of me in encounter with the other. In this paper, I will pursue Levinas’s phenomenological route of putting motherhood on the highest level of ethical subjectivity. 

2. Ethical Structure of Motherhood and Maternity

Levinas’s strategy of ethicalising his phenomenologisation of motherhood rests clearly on the insight that it refers, without any reductionism, to the otherness or alterity of the other from the perspective of gender-laden experientiality (see Levinas, 2013: 23). By describing feminine possibilities of human existence, his ethical elucidation of motherhood transforms into an emotional and feeling-based description of motherly life. In this explicit depiction, mother is specified by Levinas’s insistence on being motherly passive and affective of other family members (esp. children). Consequently, motherhood is taken into his account as the most ethical instantiation of vulnerable sensibility of (and sensitivity to) the other because mother is always concerned from her deep inside about other family members’ quality of life, and her situatedness within the nexus of family interrelations makes her more anxious than others. Referring to the possibility of (physiologically) giving birth to a child, maternity serves as a pointer to something more fundamental: substitution. Accordingly, motherhood has been put forward by Levinas as an event “like a maternal body” (Levinas, 1991: 67) which provides the possibility of being substituted for the born-of-mother child in his/her needs and faults. Motherhood, in this sense, can axiologically be equivalent to ‘being-a-maternal-body-for-the-other’. What opens up Levinas’s discussion of motherhood towards the realm of religiosity is that he reinterprets Moses as the mother of Israelites because he showed the ethical quality (i.e. responsibility) of mothering for the other.

3. Religious Description of Motherhood and Maternity

Levinas adopts motherhood as an ethical paradigm case from Judaism (see Davis, 2007: 187-188). He describes the relationship between God and the ethical subject as an event in which the subject encounters the other –just like a mother faces her newly born child for the first time- in the very material world. The most significant possibility that being a woman brings about is to give birth to a child (= maternity). That is why Levinas rereads the traditional Judaic stories about Moses’s mother and sister: Moses’s mother and sister characterise the main route of “the history of Judaism” (Levinas, 1990: 31) because they have been introduced as acting in accordance with the axiological modality mentioned in the previous sections, that is to say, “one-for-the-other”. In fact, the feminine in Judaism characterises the ethical status and position of human species in the world to the extent that Levinas claims that the ethical history of Judaism stems from responsible actions of Moses’s mother and sister. For him, it is an ethical reality that even God’s compassion or kindness (rachamim) makes sense of itself in light of the maternality of the mother.

4. Final Considerations 

Levinas’s peculiar objective of the description of motherly living is to put forward an alternative (or a possibility) for ethically living. Motherly experience of such particular situations as pregnancy and parturition –as the possibilities of ‘being-for-the-other’ brought about by maternity- can place women’s status on a highly-admired priority to depict the ethical rootedness of humanity in emotions and affections (vs pure rationality). In conclusion, I intend to make a holistic picture of the ethical situation of motherhood by stating that mother(hood) can be compared to a tree whose a) roots are in the feminine body (since it means having a womb to bear the face of the other thereby referring to the bio-physical dimension of motherhood), b) trunk lies in the feminine existence thereby referring to a life full of emotions and feelings ( = the experiential and subjective dimension of motherhood), and ultimately c) branches come to reality as an event of openness/receptivity-toward-the-other and then as the axiological modality “one-for-the-other”.

References

-      Davis, Colin, (2007) daramadi bar andisheye Levinas, Trans: Masoud Olia, Tehran: Iranian Institute of Philosophy (IRIP). [in Persian]

-      Levinas, Emmanuel, (1990) Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, Trans: Sean Hand, London: The Athlone Press.

-      Levinas, Emmanuel, (1991) Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, Trans: Alphonso Lingis, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

-      Levinas, Emmanuel (2013) zaman va digari, Trans: Maryam Hayatshahi, Tehran: Naqde Afkar Publication. [in Persian]