> In the 1950s, the philosopher Mary Midgley did something that, according to philosophical orthodoxy, she wasn’t supposed to do. In a BBC radio script for the Third Programme (the precursor of BBC Radio 3), she dared to point out that almost all the canonical figures in philosophy’s history had been unmarried men. To most, Midgley’s attempt to discuss the relationship status of our most cherished philosophers would have been discarded as irrelevant, even scandalous.
I don't have to rack my brains very hard to recall similar observations that are much older:
> Thus the philosopher abhors marriage, together with all that might per- suade him to it, – marriage as hindrance and catastrophe on his path to the optimum. Which great philosopher, so far, has been married? Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer – were not; indeed it is impossible to even think about them as married. A married philosopher belongs to comedy, that is my proposition: and that exception, Socrates, the mischievous Socrates, appears to have married ironice, simply in order to demonstrate this proposition. (Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality)
I have found this to be a very common motif: a news article presents someone saying something so REVOLUTIONARY it had to be suppressed, that nothing before was ever like this said or done...which is almost never the case; it is very popular for some reason to manufacture these examples of suppression above what really did occur. (I recall a similar HN article about the secret suppressed queen Semiramis, who was proverbially famous until we abandoned classics education.) Although the peculiar anglo attitude towards philosophy probably didn't help, maybe she was just not that interesting: the idea that a philosopher's ideas were really just a distillation of his personality, way of life, and physical health weren't novel.
Another great example is later in the article, where pregnancy is held to refute Cartesian skepticism. Somehow, we are expected to accept that a strong feeling something is true is the same thing as something being true. I am not a Cartesian by any means, but obviously Descartes anticipated this line of argument: this sort of thing is taken care of by his “evil demon” interfering with our feelings and sense perceptions. Even more broadly, we don’t accept this style of argument in general: the testimony of those who have experienced God on acid trips is not taken as confirmation of his existence.
The subject of the article just doesn’t seem to have said much novel or interesting, but the author seems insistent that she deserved more attention anyway, and the only explanation is some sort of deliberate oppression as with the BBC example for malicious reasons. (Which itself is overstated: they would have disdained Nietzsche saying the same thing.)
I’m not saying that they were wearing eye shadow while writing or anything like that, in fact I think that the burden of being different weighed on them very heavily, hence the philosophy.
"Honey, are you going to the store like you said? Or are you too busy thinking about the human condition again? The kids need to eat!"
"Yes dear, just about to leave the house. Will finish this 800 page draft of very mediocre thoughts later."
Yeah, come to think of it, the problem is probably the quality of my thoughts rather than family..
I don't buy this for a second. I think it's easier to swallow the very opposite.
Since our divorce, I haven't spent any energy pursuing another lady, and I'm unsure if I will ever do so.
I have no desire to ever be in a relationship again. I am thriving now career-wise and health-wise.
I cooked better than my ex-wife could ever imagine. I keep a cleaner home than my ex-wife could ever imagine. While married, I handled everything in our house except for her laundry. She wouldn't allow me to do her laundry, or I would have done that too.
I handled all the automobile and home repairs. Now, I can do that all for myself and my son while having the time and freedom to pursue interests without offending someone else.
For a 43-year-old man like myself, I see no benefit in being in a relationship. I spent my formative years running wild in the Caribbean, burning through women as a plow cut through the snow. I'm glad I got all that out of my system as a young man. Now, all I'm focused on is providing my son with all the opportunities and experiences I never had as a child.
My mother was married 4 times, and I was forced to live with 3 different step-fathers. There is no way I would ever put my son through something like that.
All of the fun I had as a young man served as a constant reminder that my marriage was a downgrade from my life as a single man.
Being married to someone means that you have to take their baggage and their family's baggage.
I grew tired of being the only competent man for five women to rely on. Not only did I have to solve my wife's problems, but I had to solve her mother's problems. And her single-mom sister's issues. And the issues of her two best friends.
But consider that you model healthy relationships for your son more than anyone else, and "giving up women for my son's benefit" is a strong signal.
My parents are divorced as well. It's definitely affected my willingness to enter into long-term relationships.
I don’t know how this gets fixed. Women don’t want to self reflect and men don’t want to lower their standards for commitment.
People are selfish, self interested, & caught up in their own lives. Many people suck at consistently thinking about someone other than themselves, and are not good at sacrifice or compromise. It's truly a special thing when you find someone willing to put in equal effort.
Majority of men struggle to even date, never mind getting married..the epidemic or male loneliness is a serious issue of our time.
Unfortunately, your experience does not match the reality of many men these days, divorce is often catastrophic for them, heck even dating is impossible now. I hope you recognize and appreciate your luck and previlage.
It sounds like you’re at peace, I’m genuinely happy for you and I hope the status quo remains.
dude had a crazy crappy home life growing up from the sounds of it, and then partied pretty hard.
he managed to have a stable relationship that ran it's course and ended reasonable well, while maintaining stability for his kid.
all things considered a pretty decent hand to be dealt.
My first marriage was a training experience that lasted five years and ended peaceably. I learned what not to do. My second has lasted 34 years, with a six month separation 15 years ago that clarified for both of us that life is intolerable without each other.
Respect is the blood and vitality of a marriage. Respect is an aphrodisiac and all-purpose cure. Respect inspires service.
That said: my ex-wife is a narcissistic and introverted human who does not appropriately interact with any other human, including her children; she views relationships as transactional (i.e., what’s in it for her).
While I am beyond damaged from my 25 year relationship with her and all of the insanely hurtful things she did to my emotional and mental well-being as well as my financial stability being she gets an absurd amount of alimony and all of the money she stole from the family over the years, particularly in preparation for divorce, my children need to see what a healthy relationship looks like and by focusing on them as the central point of my being, they may have that opportunity should I find someone else.
You are looking at it from a child and self-protectionist point of view and I’m looking at it from a healing one. They both have merit, but I just wanted to point out that living without a partner isn’t necessarily the only option post-divorce.
Yet, those sorts of behaviors could easily displace the development of relationship. Part of my being in relationship is also being supportive and doing the work but keeping it balanced has us discussing priorities and leaves us thinking, emoting, and creating together. The question isn't whether I can make a partners life good (I can) but whether they really want to know and partner with me. You may want something else though. Good luck with navigating life, it's tricky, complicated, and nuanced. I have no idea the right path but it stays worth trying to find better paths.
Don’t judge the bitterness; offer support and care as they heal.
And every foreign group that comes into a westernized country ends up having their birth rate dropped below replacement within a few generations too (at least that is the trajectory for those that aren't there yet).
Society will adapt. There are positives to work from. For example the horizon for every exhaustible consumable recedes as population growth slows.
No, sorry, I don't quite agree that trending towards population and demographic collapse is "neutral".
I don't think it's neutral either that younger generations will have a painful fiscal responsibility to support the older generations who got to live their lives out already.
>exhaustible consumable
Stop with the fixed pie fallacy, that's not how our world works. We innovate and adapt. Look at how renewables are trending, electric cars are growing in market share, poverty rates lowered significantly as population grew the last 50 years, etc.
better to have a couple more extra kids in case some of them croak at 8 or 13. with the plus side that now you have extra hands to work on the farm / shop / artisanal cooperage, etc.
Bias is unavoidable. It's a fact of life, every philosopher puts their own bias into their work. You know that, you account for that.
Where it's a problem is when someone claims to be free of bias. To present the one true view, and all others are tainted. That's impossible, all they're doing is saying their bias is more valid than others.
And the trouble is when people buy that, and forget to question it. Which seems to have been the case for, oh, several decades.
Rome, British Empire, America (and many others besides) all usurped by an ideal that they are and must be the only true light of life and civilization and no goodness or success can be had outside of their rampantly materialistic perspectives.
It hasn’t just been decades, my friend. It’s the perpetual war with an insidious evil that is captured in the aphorism: all that glitters isn’t gold.
Unfortunately philosophical mastery would seem to require full participation in life (to fully appreciate the human experience), making this level of sacrifice a potentially self-defeating proposition.
Is this really an accurate description of “feminist theories of knowledge?” It seems to pretty heavily lean on a somewhat stereotypical characterization of women as the more intuitive/less rigorous gender, which doesn’t seem like a trope feminists would be enthusiastic to go along with.
The dominant modes of epistemology tend to privilege some facts over others. Facts that can be fit into simple, constrained models are superior to those that require complex models.
You can see this in the distinction between "hard" and "soft" sciences. The hard sciences are considered "better", and the people who practice them considered smarter. Less-hard sciences like biology are relegated to "stamp-collecting", and sciences that study human behavior are disputed as sciences at all.
In such epistemologies, vast numbers of facts about the universe go from "hard to model" to "not important" to "nonexistent". You lack the ability to be rigorous about them, but that doesn't make them non-facts, just a limitation of how we practice epistemology.
Noticing this is not fundamentally feminist, and there are lots of other philosophers taking different approaches. Compare Kuhn and Feyerabend's work on theory-ladenness: everything we can possibly know about the world is limited by how we conceive the world to take measurements. Things that we don't know how to measure simply don't exist -- more, we don't even think about them long enough to dismiss them. The things we choose to measure are social constructs, not facts of the universe.
Feminist epistemologists note the way this kind of thinking affects marginalized groups of people. Things that matter to them are dismissed as non-facts, and the social construction of facts shuts the entire question out of existing.
This isn't to say that it's easy. The entire point is that we've been engaging in an epistemology of things that are easy. They're asking us to reconsider the assumptions, and that's going to appear "less rigorous" because "rigor" has been defined to exclude things that are hard.
"The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term" — Wilfrid Sellars, an American philosopher in the 20th century.
Ouch. It hurts. I'm a terminally unmarried man, and probably a "philosophical adolescent" as she puts it: I see a family as a bad thing for health, all these people at my home, or all these obligations to visit relatives who I do not know really and do not care of. And probably because of this I cannot understand what is she talking about. For example, she talks about Descartes wondering do other people exist:
> Now I rather think that nobody who was playing a normal active part among other human beings could regard them like this. But what I am quite sure of is that for anybody living intimately with them as a genuine member of a family … their consciousness would be every bit as certain as his own.
Probably they would be be certain, but why does it matter what they are certain of? They can be mistaken. All these relatives always want something from you, or idk like my parents have a great hopes for my life, which I cannot fulfill and I wouldn't even try, but still they will make me feel guilty about it. Of course in such an environment you cannot think straight, and you have no time to think about some abstract things, you'd prefer practical solution to ignore a question from which follows no practical implications. It is even a rational thing to do, but it doesn't make them right automatically.
So, it seems, that being an unmarried man I'm not qualified enough to understand what is this about. Yeah, it hurts. Luckily she wrote a book about it, probably the book will have a clearer message.
Of course plenty of caveats apply, but mostly I have sufficiently good social skills, no handicaps and I am able to provide for myself or : I don't need a the family safety net.
I really like the friend relationships I maintain now and I am also happy that what is asked of me is only basic human decency (a standard that is curiously applied to strangers but not always to relatives and parters...).
Also I feel able to be much more generous towards others since little is expected of me. Thus I try to model intimate relationships on the basis of friendship as much as my partner emotional needs and cultural norms allow for. Intimate and beautiful relationships are possible outside of marriage. I am not looking forward gettging married nor starting a family. Getting to spend time by myself is amazing too.
The set of life experiences that a bachelor can experience is smaller than the set of life experiences that a married man with children can experience.
I don't think this is a particularly offensive thing to say, but instead, given that she's from a group whose voice has been historically subdued, I think it's a witty reparatee to refer to that philosophy as "adolescent". I don't think she's calling bachelors adolescent, but for the word of a bachelor with most likely more limited life experience, I do think it's fair to call out that it perhaps isn't the most rounded point of view.
I think you learn to bear the load more gracefullly as you age and mature. It also puts life more into perspective.
My main point is you learn to handle it, which is actually a good form of personal growth.
I hope you're working at a startup that you own, otherwise you're just helping fund some executive's Disney vacation with his four kids, while you end up an evolutionary dead-end.
but maybe you'll write something that everyone will use for a couple years, then replace, right?
In short bursts this is probably fine (and I followed a similar strategy early in my career) but I am personally happy to have not fallen into the trap of focusing on my career to the detriment of my personal life throughout my entire youth.
Advancing your career may seem important now, but will you feel that way on your deathbed looking back?
Is this... right?
A cursory scan shows a fair number of major philosophers like Aristotle, Socrates, Berkeley, Spinoza, Reid, Hegel, Heidegger, Montesquieu, Husserl, Rousseau, Mill, Bacon and Machiavelli were married.
Perhaps none of them are among the greatest though.
Heidegger was with Hannah Arendt for a while, and had several kids from previous relationships. Dude had a few affairs, and one of his kids probably wasn't his.
Machiavelli had like 7 children!
Based on the comments we are seeing an extremely curated view of the subject, and the lens through which we are seeing it is colored dramatically.
For all that the core statement is interesting and valid.
It is very likely that the type of people who actively study and write academic philosophy (especially in pre-modern times), were very likely rather "neurodivergent" at best, but more probably on the spectrum.
In order for a philosophy to be completely applicable to human life, one has to have lived the experience, not just viewed it from afar.
And, as with all comprehensive philosophies, compassion must be at its root, or it's irrelevant nonsense constrained solely to the physical world, not the human world.
"Make the easy things hard and the impossible things possible." Women in government was thought to be impossible not just a few thousand years ago, and now it's rule not the exception.
Just another example of how simple (in description, not implementation) tech can change social norms.
Obviously (to me, at least) this behavior is all centered around bullshit. I think it is somewhat common for those who experience anxiety over a lack of control to try and define or categorize what others are thinking, and to find a mild sense of closure or superiority after having done so. But life just isn’t that simple. So I (rightly or wrongly) think of philosophy as a dead field full of old lifeless straw-men.
Something I found helpful was finding schools of thought which emphasized putting the thinking to work as actions in the real world. Some philosophers argue that philosophy is useless or harmful if it isn’t manifested in action, and I agree with that. Reading a lot of philosophy without implementing change in your life isn’t a good use of time. It sounds like you might have encountered the kind of people who do that.
Philosophy should enrich your life and even change you in ways you didn’t think were possible. It should open your mind and teach you about yourself, people, and society.
The worst kind of philosophy and philosophers are those which bring ego and overconfidence to the practice. But there’s so much out there which isn’t like that, and so many people who aren’t as well.
One of my favorite philosophy teachers described philosophical criticism as the process of being supremely gracious--of granting your opponent all manner of fanciful and absurd things, and then of peering through the cloud of absurdity and taking small issue with just one thing, preferably a small one, and politely, such that as much as possible of the absurdity collapses. And then you see how big of a thing can be built in such an environment.
I can see how people trying to play this game and doing so poorly might end up being cruel, but the core of is making space for each other's thoughts and playing along for a while, which is anything but.
OP's post comes off as an angry man yelling at clouds, imagining himself being persecuted by a cabal of philosophers who are telling him what to think.
In truth, there is a great deal of philosophy which has nothing to do with the philosophy of mind. There is enough in the fridge for anyone to find something useful and enlightening, but with an attitude like OP's, it will be rejected out of bias and spite before given a fair chance.
Some philosophy is fundamental to developing a mature understanding the world that surpasses that of previous civilizations. Some philosophy deals with core issues like the very nature of existence, or the nature of ethics. Stuff that will completely change how you choose to interact with the world and live your life. This is why people feel compelled to educate others who adopt such an anti-science or anti-philosophy stance.
