Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical

The Childless as Anthropological Danglers

The Austrian philosopher and Vienna Circle member Herbert Feigl wrote about nomological danglers.  Mental states as the epiphenomenalist conceives them have causes, but no effects. They are caused by physical states of the body and brain, but dangle nomologically in that there are no laws  that relate mental states  to physical states.

The childless are anthropological danglers.  They are life's epiphenomena. They have ancestors (causes) but no descendents (effects). Parents are essential: without  them we could not have come into fleshly existence.  But offspring are wholly inessential: one can exist quite well without them.

There is a downside and an upside to being an anthropological dangler. 

The downside is that it unfits one for full participation in the life of the community, removing as it does weight and credibility from one’s opinions about pressing community concerns. As Nietzsche writes somewhere in his Nachlass, the man without Haus und Hof, Weib und Kind is like a ship with insufficient ballast: he rides too high on the seas of life and does not pass through life with the steadiness of the solid bourgeois weighted down with property and reputation, wife and children.  What does he know about life and its travails that his say should fully count?  His counsel may be wise and just, but it won't carry the weight of the one who is wise and just and interested as only those whose pro-creation has pro-longed them into the future and tied them to the flesh are interested.  (inter esse)

The upside to being an anthropological dangler is that it enables one’s participation in a higher life by freeing one from mundane burdens and distractions. In another Nachlass passage, Nietzsche compares the philosopher having Weib und Kind, Haus und Hof with an astronomer who interposes a piece of filthy glass between eye and telescope. The philosopher's vocation charges him with the answering of the ultimate questions; his pressing foreground concerns, however, make it difficult for him to take these questions with the seriousness they deserve, let alone answer them.

Someone who would be "a spectator of all time and existence" ought to think twice about binding himself too closely to the earth and its distractions.

Another advantage to being childless is that one is free from  being an object of those attitudes of propinquity -- to give them a name -- such as embarrassment and disappointment, disgust and dismissal that ungrateful children sometimes train upon their parents, not always unjustly.

The childless can look forward to a time when all of their blood-relatives have died off.  Then they will finally be free of the judgments of those to whom one is tied by consanguinity but not by spiritual affinity.

This opinion of mine will strike some as cold and harsh.  But some of us experience more of the stifling and oppressive in our blood relations than the opposite.   I do however freely admit that the very best human relations conceivable are those that bind people both by ties of blood and ties of spiritual affinity.  If you have even one blood relation who is a soul mate, then you ought to be grateful indeed. 

Related: SEP entry on Herbert Feigl

Sadness at the Transience of the World

"I am grieved by the transitoriness of things,"  wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in a letter  to Franz Overbeck, dated 24 March 1887. (Quoted in R. Hayman,  Nietzsche: A Critical Life, Penguin, 1982, p. 304)  

What is the appropriate measure of grief at impermanence?

While we  are saddened by the transience of things, that they are transient shows that their passing is not worthy of the full measure of our sadness.  You are saddened by loss, but what exactly did you lose?  Something that was meant to last forever?  Something that could last forever?  Something that was worth lasting forever?  

Sadness at the passing of what must pass often indicates an inordinate love of the finite, when an ordinate love loves it as finite and no more.   But sadness also bespeaks a sense that there is more than the finite.  For if we had no sense of the Infinite why would we bestow upon the finite a value and reality it cannot bear?  

Sadness thus points down to the relative unreality and unimportance of the world of time and change while pointing up to the absolute reality and importance of its Source.

But Nietzsche, of the tribe of Heraclitus, could not bring himself to believe in the Source.  His bladed intellect would not allow it.  But his heart was that of homo religiosus. So he had resort to a desperate and absurd measure in reconciliation of heart and head:  the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, as if the redemption of time could be secured by making it cyclical and endless.  

This is no solution at all.

The problem with time is not that it will end, but that its very mode of Being is deficient. The problem is not that our time is short, but  that we are in time in the first place. For this reason, more time is no solution. Not even endlessly recurring time is any solution. Even if time were unending and I were omnitemporal, existing at every time, my life would still be strung out in moments outside of each other, with the diachronic identifications of memory and expectation no substitute for a true unity.

To the moment I say, with Faust, Verweile doch, du bist so schön (Goethe, Faust) but the beautiful moment will not abide, and abidance-in-memory is a sorry substitute, and a self diachronically constituted by such makeshifts is arguably no true self. Existing as we do temporally, we are never at one with ourselves: the past is no longer, the future not yet, and the present fleeting. We exist outside ourselves in temporal ec-stasis. We are strung out in temporal diaspora. The only Now we know is the nunc movens.

But we sense and can conceive a nunc stans, a standing now. This conception of a standing now, empty here below except for the rare and partial mystic fulfillments vouchsafed only to some, is the standard relative to which the moving now is judged ontologically deficient. Time is but a moving and inadequate image of eternity. 

So we of the tribe of Plato conceive of the divine life as the eternal life, not as the omnitemporal or everlasting life.

We too weep with Heraclitus, but our weeping is ordinate, adjusted to the grade of reality of that over which we weep.  And our weeping is tempered by joy as we look beyond this scene of flux.  For as Nietzsche says in Zarathustra, "all joy/desire wants eternity, wants deep, deep, eternity."  All Lust will Ewigkeit, will tiefe, tiefe, Ewigkeit!

This longing joy, this joyful longing, is it evidence of the reality of its Object?  Great minds have thought so.   But you won't be able to prove it one way or the other.  So in the end you must decide how you will live and what you will believe.