? You've heard of Mother Earth, but what about Mother Air? I'm currently in Germany where air is a way of life. You have to air out your apartment every day, no matter how cold it is and taking in the air is considered important for maintaining health. There's one French feminist philosopher, Luce Irigaray, who thinks that the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger forgot air.
She has a whole book critiquing Heidegger called The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger. And for Irigaray, Heidegger's philosophy, which is all about earth and the world and dwelling, fundamentally forgets the source. You know, that we're constantly breathing, which is air. Air makes the world habitable. Air is essentially connected to earth.
And so she, in critiquing Heiddeger, is also critiquing the way that we tend to take the air for granted. She thinks that we have a kind of ingratitude towards air. Without it, we would be unable to breathe. Forgetting air means forgetting the source we come from, what gives us the gift of existence. And Irigaray also associates that with the feminine, she thinks that the forgetting of air in Heidegger is also a forgetting of the feminine.
For more on this, check out the Overthink episode on Air. We did a four element series and air is the last one.