This is the first part of a four-part series commemorating International Women’s Day 2018 written by Charles O. Anyiam-Osigwe and Michael Igaga.
INTRODUCTION
As we mark International Women’s Day 2018, this paper focuses on a very important aspect of the whole construct of being and consciousness – the woman. The focus of our discourse here is in furtherance of the recovery process of the human race from a misconception of reality in which the wrong premises lead to obviously bland, insipid and vacuous conclusions; conclusions that are antithetical to generating the appropriate matrix for holistic development.
The misplacement of womanhood stems from a misconception of the ontological placing of the woman in the octave of consciousness and existence. This paper sets out to appropriately situate the woman not just as a component of the existential creed, but as that fundamental identity within the compass of being and non-being in which divinity itself finds completeness. We will also assert that the woman is not just key and fundamental to the divine personhood, she is the constitutive aspect of divinity in bringing to being. This academic and mental locale of womanhood if achieved, the helpfulness of womanhood in peace building will become self-expressive.
WHO IS THE WOMAN?
Drawing from the social psyche and the knowledge that it conveys, women are the weaker vessels. For some, the woman is just an object of emotional pleasure for the man. In other cases, the woman is a help-mate who is supposed to receive instructions from the husband and offer the devotion of blind obedience. In some cases, the woman is a beast of burden. She works with blind obedience behind her husband and has no space for complains. Her complains could lead to serious beating and torment.
Even in our religious component, in Christian cosmology, the woman was created out of the rib of the man. She is just one of ten ribs that the man possesses. She was created by God in that regard to serve the needs of the man. In intelligence, she has nothing to offer. Being one of nine ribs, she is one tenth of the man in mental intelligence, psychological composure and intuitive capacities. It is within this construct that the woman or womanhood has been denigrated.
Being conscious of the inhuman treatment which women are subjected to, including battery, sexual abuses and wild brutal damage to the psyche of the woman, the United Nations has, through UN Women – the global champion for gender equality, is working to develop and uphold standards and create an environment in which every woman and girl can exercise her human rights and live up to her full potential.
This paper appraises here within the construct of the submissions of Sage Philosopher Emmanuel Onyechere Osigwe Anyiam-Osigwe the identity of the woman and to that effect the personality of womanhood.
In the view of Anyiam-Osigwe, ultimate being, the unexplainable factor in the component of consciousness is divinity. It is that being that has no beginning and has no end. It is that being that is the primary source of being and becoming. Anyiam-Osigwe locates that being within a construct which he defines as the quadrant identity of divinity. In the quadrant phenomenon of divinity, Anyiam-Osigwe notes that divinity is a single component which manifests a quadrant expression. These expressions he identifies as the masculine principle (the father principle), the feminine principality (the mother principle, the woman, womanhood), the son principle (a generation of the combined creative potency of the masculine and feminine), the spirit principle (the ethereal – manifestations of the immanent capabilities of divinity, the capacity of divinity to be felt, seen or experienced in all places at the same time. It is the potency of divinity to manifest and oversee all in existence at the same time. It is the mystique of divinity in being omnipotent and omnipresent).
To that effect, divinity is not only masculine, and when it is so defined it is not complete. The completeness of the God principality includes the masculine and feminine principality. It is in this duality that divinity finds existential expression. Divinity, in its fundamental identity finds expression within the inter-aligning and generative potency of the absolute oneness of this duality expressed in the most infinite form of harmony and oneness.
Drawing from Christian ontology, it has always been expressed from the pulpit that the man was first created and then the woman. This is a wrong derivation of the placing of the materialisation of the human personhood as stated in the Bible. From the book of Genesis 1:26-27:
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth26. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God created he him; male and female created he them27.
Here, it is clear that in the formative stage of man as a manifestation of divinity, he was actually formed in a singularity, in which was an identity of two consciousness, the male and the female. It is in this identity that divinity finds expression. The process of bringing into being expressed in the book of Genesis is a mere separation of two fundamental identities that primordially co-inhere in a bonding monism. Genesis 2:21-22 avers: And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh instead thereof21. And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man22.
The process here expressed takes construct from the woman already created but latent in the meta-conscious of the man as clearly postulated in Genesis 1:26-27.
To that effect, in all materials particular, the woman in the context of the pristine and the primordial is not inferior to the man neither did the man precede the woman in the manifestation of consciousness. The woman and the man are formative causes that were not caused. They are integrals of the first cause that underpin being, consciousness, non-being and non-consciousness. Divinity finds expression, definition and identity in the component of the feminine and the masculine, the negative and the positive.
Charles O. Anyiam-Osigwe is the Co-ordinator General of the Osigwe Anyiam-Osigwe Foundation and Michael Igaga is the Administrative Secretary of the Foundation.