So Many Unmarried Men

> 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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.