A curious tendency among Western philosophers?

Here are two groups of Western philosophers. We’ll call them Group A and Group B. Here’s Group A:

Plato, Epicurus, Plotinus, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Francis Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Newton, Leibniz, David Hume, Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, Schopenhauer, Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Jean-Paul Sartre, Kurt Gödel, Karl Popper, Jeremy Bentham, Alan Turing, Saul Kripke.

And here’s Group B:

Aristotle, Socrates, Descartes, Bishop George Berkeley, Rousseau, Heidegger, Hegel, Marx, Frege, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, Albert Camus, Frantz Fanon, John Rawls, Willard Quine.

Okay, so: what distinguishes these two groups?

Answer under the cut, but… stare at those two lists. Take a moment; give it a try. Do you see it?

Hints: It’s something pretty straightforward. Frege is an edge case. And while Rousseau is formally part of Group B, he really belongs with Group A.

If you have a guess, put it in a comment, then come and look.

Group A never had children.  Group B did.

Frege is an edge case because he and his wife had two children that died in infancy, but then years later they adopted a boy and raised him as their own.  Rousseau is formally part of Group B because he did have children, but then he abandoned them as babies to an orphanage.  But I set the bar low, at “had kids” rather than “raised kids / acted as a parent”, because it was more clear and simple, so he slips in. 

This was triggered by this Aeon essay about the late Mary Midgley.  Midgley was a feminist philosopher who pointed out that most Western philosophers were not only men, but single unmarried man.  This, she suggested, led to some deep problems with their thinking:

“None of these [great] philosophers … had any experience of living with women or children, which is, after all, quite an important aspect of human life. I wrote [‘Rings and Books’] drawing attention to this statistic and asking whether it might not account for a certain over-abstractness, a certain remoteness from life, in the European philosophical tradition.”

Midgley apparently took particular beef with Descartes and the “problem of other minds”:

I wonder whether they would have said the same if they [philosophers like Descartes] had been frequently pregnant and suckling, if they had been constantly faced with questions like, ‘What have you been eating to make him ill?’, constantly experiencing that strange physical sympathy between child and parent … if in a word they had got used to the idea that their bodies were by no means exclusively their own? That, I suggest, is typical human experience. But you don’t get it in examples in the textbooks. It is supposed to be an irrational topic.

Okay, so that got me thinking.  The biological experience of motherhood — pregnancy, nursing — isn’t available to half the human race.  But the social experience of parenthood?  Of engaging with and raising a young human from infancy to adulthood?  That is at least potentially available to almost everyone, and always has been.  In fact, for much of human history, most adults were either parents, or trying to be.

Yet if you look at those two groups — which includes the top 25 philosophers from this list (h/t Brian Leiter), along with a scattering of others — you’ll see that Group A is comfortably larger, by about 3 to 2.  A clear majority of “canonical” philosophers have been childless.  And this has been true for a very long time.

— Let me pause here to note while Midgley focused on marriage, unmarried and childless are two different things.  A startling number of philosophers, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, were married but had no children. (Which raises its own set of interesting questions, but never mind that now.)  Meanwhile Descartes never married, but had a daughter with one of his servants.  (And _pace_ Midgley, he seems to have been reasonably engaged with the daughter, maintaining a relationship with her until his death.)

So.  Do we see any patterns?  Well, a couple of names in Group A were priests.  But only a couple; and plenty of priests had children, and then of course there’s dear old Bishop Berkeley.  And a number of names are either known or generally believed to have been asexual or gay.  But again, only a few.  We could remove these guys, and Aquinas and Scotus too, and Group A would still be very large.  

So the question remains: why were so many major Western philosophers childless?

One simple and obvious answer is that philosophy requires solitude for thought.  Children are a huge distraction!  Basically the Room Of One’s Own argument. 



I don’t buy it for a moment. 

Multiple reasons.  First, Virginia Woolf was talking about writing.  Writing is an inherently solitary action.  Thinking is not.  You can do philosophy in a crowd.  Socrates and Plato did exactly that!

Second, look again at Group A.  Many of those guys lived very busy and active lives, full of friendship, correspondence, professional achievement, and every sort of social interaction.  Bacon was a lawyer, courtier, diplomat and Member of Parliament who served for years as Attorney General and then Chancellor.  Hume was a diplomatic secretary, university librarian and historian who had a network of friends spread across two continents; his correspondence fills volumes.  Leibniz was a diplomat and courtier who was deeply involved in politics for forty years.  Sartre was an international celebrity and political activist who was always juggling affairs; he was constantly making public appearances and had sexual relations with over a hundred women.  These guys didn’t need long hours of solitude to generate philosophical thoughts.

And third, for most of Western history, fatherhood was much, much less demanding than motherhood.  Consider Karl Marx.  He had four children who survived infancy, and he seems to have been a moderately affectionate parent.  But he could spend as much or as little time with them as he cared to, because the heavy lifting of child care was done by his wife and the occasional servant. 

And this was true of almost every man in Group B.  Fathers could walk away.  It seems very unlikely that Heidegger or Bertrand Russell ever changed a diaper.  And if Hegel or Dewey or Camus needed a room of his own, he could always find one.

Keep in mind that I’m setting the bar really low here.  Bad dads, deadbeat dads, dads who neglected their kids… I mean, I let Rousseau in.  The qualification for Group B is just, have a kid.  One kid.  Yet a clear majority of major western philosophers couldn’t manage that.

Finally, I don’t think we see this level of childlessness in other intellectual or creative professions.  Consider… oh, composition of classical music.  That’s a highly intellectual and creative endeavor that really does require long periods of solitary concentration.  I grabbed a randomly chosen list of “greatest classical music composers of all time” off google.  Here are the first 20.

No kids:  Beethoven, Hildegard von Bingen, Vivaldi, Tchaikovsky, Haydn, Schubert, Chopin.  (Two people in religious orders, one gay man.)

One or more kids:  Bach, Mozart, Monteverdi, Handel, Debussy, Schumann, Elgar, Verdi, Wagner, Strauss, Mahler, Saint-Saens, Stravinsky.

Among composers, parents outnumber nonparents almost 2 to 1.  Okay, let’s pick a different intellectual profession.  How about, let’s say, physicists?  Grab a random list, pick the top 25?

No kids: Newton, Maxwell, Faraday, Meitner, Pauli, Fourier, Kelvin, Carnot

One or more kids:   Galileo, Einstein, Curie, Feynman, Fermi, Bohr, Rutherford, Dirac, Planck, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Bose, Weinberg, Boltzmann, Poincare, Michelson, Gauss

Kids outnumber no-kids two to one.  Apparently physicists and composers could consistently find time to have children.

So I’m really not impressed by the idea that philosophers simply couldn’t do philosophy if kids were in the house.  If Einstein and Mozart and Galileo and Gauss and Bach and Socrates could get the job done while being a parent, surely Wittgenstein or Bentham could have managed it too. 

More seriously, while all professions are going to include both parents and non-parents, the proportion of non-parents among philosophers seems unusually high.  And this was true even in premodern societies where most adults were parents.  And it seems to have stayed true well into the 20th century.

This leads to a number of other interesting questions, such as “has this had an influence on Western philosophy, and if so, what”.  But let’s leave that for the moment.  First: is this a correct observation?  Historically, have philosophers really tended to be childless at an unusually high rate? 

And if so… why?