Life & Mortality Quote by Susan Griffin

Griffin drags philosophy down from the seminar room and plants it in the messy, nonnegotiable facts of having a body. The provocation is deliberate: if your ideas can’t account for birth and death, they’re not “deep,” they’re evasive. Her line takes aim at a long Western habit of treating the body as a distraction from the “real” work of reason - a hierarchy that has often mapped neatly onto gendered and political hierarchies, where abstraction looks neutral but quietly smuggles in whose lives count as the default.

The intent here is corrective, almost diagnostic. “Connected” is doing more than pleading for relevance; it’s a demand that ethics, metaphysics, and politics submit to the constraints of biology: vulnerability, dependence, reproduction, aging. In that frame, society isn’t built first from rights-talk or market logic but from care, nourishment, and limits. Griffin’s subtext is that any system pretending otherwise tends to become cruel: it will legislate as if people are disembodied workers, citizens, or consumers, and then act surprised when childbirth, illness, disability, and ecological collapse show up as “special cases.”

Contextually, this fits Griffin’s ecofeminist and anti-dualist critique: the split between mind/body and human/nature isn’t just a philosophical error; it’s a cultural permission slip for domination - of women’s labor, of nonhuman life, of the planet itself. “Begin from nature and the body” is not romantic pastoralism. It’s a political baseline: start where life is made and unmade, and you’ll design institutions that reckon with care, mortality, and ecological interdependence rather than outsourcing them to the margins.