Must Philosophers Be Parents?

Before I proceed to estrange my reproductively proficient allies, let me begin by saying that I love kids; those who know me know that when I am around them, they delight in my comical ways, and after I'm gone they beg their parents to invite me over again. I have godfatherly and quasi-avuncular relations with numerous little ones, and real avuncular relations with one who is no longer so little. I think they're all great. In fact, I'm on record as saying that childhood is, so to speak, where it's at, and that adults are but the phantoms of former children. I love kids, and I love childhood. This is not an anti-kid screed.

It is, however, anti-natalist, and therefore goes against a prevailing conviction among my peers that the life that fails to cycle back upon itself in kind if not in number, as Aristotle put it, is the life not worth living. 

I hope no one will take this the wrong way, but I am concerned about the way in which the public display of one's parenthood is increasingly a part of the expected career path of the professional philosopher. I often hear of all the great new insights colleagues have had since becoming parents, how this has advanced their thinking about language acquistion and a priori knowledge, about the ethics of care, or the metaphysics of personhood. Sometimes the insights are theoretical in nature, while sometimes the importance of parenthood is celebrated on the grounds that it advances a philosopher in his or her practical project of philosophy as a way of life.

I have been explicitly told three times over the past year, by young philosopher parents, that there are philosophical insights that one simply cannot have without living through the fundamental experience of parenthood. That such an expression of pronatalist normativity exactly mirrors the sort of bias philosophers are by now so well trained not to express, about other quodlibetal forms the intimate life can take, is something that is surely in need of explanation. I suspect it has something to do with the recent, massive success of the campaign, which I support, to deheterosexualize the idea of parenthood. Once this goal was largely reached, at least within pockets of our society, the academics who found it desirable felt comfortable reverting to an evidently innate sort of conservatism. The family unit has been shaken up a bit, and the role of fathers reconceived, but in the end the nearly compulsory philosopher-dad-with-kid pictures that now clutter the faculty profile pages of departmental websites are every bit as conventionally pro-family as the 'at home' pictures on the now-defunct Romney-for-President website. They send the message that to be a philosopher is largely, even principally, to be invested in the bringing up of the next generation, to be doing it all 'for the children'. 

Every one of these pictures shows a figure that Nietzsche, for one, would have described as 'comic'. Thus he tells us what he things about the domestic life in The Genealogy of Morality:

Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer-- they were not married, and, further, one cannot imagine them as married. A married philosopher belongs to comedy, that is my rule.

Now Nietzsche was of course a raving and sorry case, who precisely failed to implement philosophy as a practice of the good life. But his historical point is unassailable, and the truth of it helps us to bring into relief the exceptional situation of current academic philosophy. The life of the philosopher was traditionally something akin to life in a monastic order; it placed an extremely high demand on its initiates, and forced them to choose between different and competing fundamental goods.

This is particularly clear in the Indian tradition, where the choice was explicit between being a 'householder' and being a 'world-renouncer', as the two ways of expressing Hindu devotion. It was also explicit that the former figure would necessarily be prevented from advancing as far as the latter in matters of illumination. Philosophy was an askesis, and as such was incompatible with the domestic life. Of course these days the fashion is to reconceptualize domesticity so as to fit whatever image we prefer to maintain of ourselves, so that, for example, when a new mother has to cut back on her yoga sessions, she can announce that she is now engaged in 'the yoga of being a mom'. I have read Patañjali's Yoga Sutras, and I have not found anything about that.

Nor have I found any convincing evidence that the figure of the philosopher can be transplanted from the cloister to the household without serious deformation, let alone any evidence that --again, as I've been told three times over the past year-- one cannot fully realize one's potential as a philosopher unless one is a parent.

Implicit in this presumption is the idea that adults learn things from the children in their lives, that the children give the adults a way of imagining themselves into forms of perception and awareness that are largely off limits to us tired old phantoms. Yet remarkably some of the best writing on childhood by philosophers comes from before the era in which parenthood was part of a philosopher's public identity, and was written by philosophers reflecting on their own childhoods. In many cases, these writers were themselves childless, but nonetheless were able to find within themselves resources of imagination and Einfühlung that completely belie the conceit that there are states of awareness that the childless cannot know. I am thinking for example of Richard Wollheim, who had children, but who never would have thought to write about them in his memoir, instead preferring to focus on his own first years. In his memoir, Germs, he describes his own monumental achievement in learning to use toilet paper, and confesses: "It is what I think of when I hear moral philosophers discuss responsibility."

I think of E. M. Cioran, and Andrea Dworkin. I even think of Derrida, whom I ordinarily can't stand, but who captured the experience of childhood eloquently and touchingly in his 1991 essay, 'Circumfession'. These philosophers wrote profoundly on childhood, without having to trumpet their own parenthood. Childhood, they understood, is a source of answers to fundamental questions about what it is to be human, but one can ask these questions perfectly well without having to lapse into a conventional pronatalism that, notwithstanding the efforts to ornament it with the seriousness of a philosophical project, is in the end only an afterecho of the very most conventional values that we, as critics of our society and our age, spend most of the rest of our time kicking against.  

Comments

[omar]

Indian tradition expected renunciation, but wasnt the enlightenment that was expected itself fairly conventional, or at least conventionally unconventional? And in most cases the roles were sequential rather than exclusively one or the other?

The rant against pro-natalist philosophy department members stills stands. But were these departmental colleagues that far from conventional life before they had children? How many Platos and Spinozas can there be in the world at one time? Probably not as many as the number of teaching positions in university philosophy departments.

[DES]

Suffering succotash! How fashions change --- which is, of course, the nature of fashion. There was a brief flurry of affirmative action-inspired hiring of women in philosophy departments in the 1980s, and well do I recall the solemn admonitions to never display pictures of offspring, if any, on the grounds that it wouldn't be professional; even a photograph of one's significant other was suspect. We were to be brains in vats, or something along those lines.
And now you tell me parenthood is required for certain levels of philosophical insight? Delightful.

[elisa freschi]

As Omar suggests, the two roles are generally sequential in Indian thought (apart from the case of Jainism, Buddhism and some currents of Vedānta).

As for the rest, I am afraid that the tendency you lament is typically American. Personally, I am in favour of a strict separation of competencies. The fact that X is a good husband does not speak in favour of his being a good president. And there are good or bad philosophers both among the ones who have children and among the ones who have not.

[Emina Melonic]

I agree. I see a similar phenomenon even among PhD students (I am currently working on my PhD in philosophy). Suddenly, this new portal opens, and I am sure on some level it does. But to exhibit an implicit moral superiority because they have children is something I really don't care for. And this, of course, transcends the academic world; American parents tend to worship their children. People have been having kids since the dawn of time, as they say, so what makes this age so special, and what makes philosophers so special as well? You either have kids or you don't. Very simple stuff. But philosophers (in the academy) tend to overthink the simplest and most practical of tasks, and it seems that parenting falls under that category as well.

[Patrick Lee Miller]

An interesting but flawed article. Three problems stand out to me.

First, Aristotle and Augustine were fathers, besides being great philosophers, so the askesis argument is weak. It is surely no coincidence that these philosopher-dads also developed the richest accounts of love in antiquity.

Second, the article's point about Wollheim et al. -- that they learned lessons about childhood by recollecting their own -- is fallacious, because retrospective accounts of one's own childhood are mostly fantasy and confabulation.

Third, the article makes a deep point, albeit in the wrong way. It's not that one must choose between philosophy and parenthood (a la St. Jerome) but that a philosopher considering having children must choose between two different ways of being a philosopher.

As a parent, one sacrifices massive amounts of time that could be devoted otherwise to one's philosophical expertise. It's a real loss, and I feel it every day. But there is a gain of something else, something that it would be hard to acquire any other way.

Part of this gain is what I suspect you are hearing your colleagues talking about: indelible lessons about humanity in its infancy. It's not that one cannot read about these lessons, they are communicable, but when one lives them every day for years they do generate a new perspective, especially when they are combined with the experience of selfless love in which one learns them. In any case, the childless miss that gain.

As every parent recognizes, you can't do it all. However, our generation of philosophers is the first -- in all of history, I believe -- to be parents and to be involved in parenting on a widespread scale. I suspect that the ideas emerging from this novel situation will be our contributions to the tradition.

[ano]

Not quite accurate about the Indian traditions. I tried to think of a few Indian philosophers, being careful to think of philosphers first and then wonder if they were married, to avoid sampling bias: so Vedanta Desika and Appayya Dikshita both appear to have had children, Jagannatha Panditaraja was married (or at least had a mistress), couldn't find anything about Abhinavagupta and Anandavardhana but they *probably* were married, the stories about Bhartrhari say he was married before giving it up, Mandana Mishra was married, Adi Shankara was an ascetic from a young age, and hoping for details of personal lives of philosophers before that is probably pointless. So yeah, at least of those that came to my mind, there is no positive correlation between being unmarried and being a philosopher.