259. Is a married philosopher a…joke?
In his book The Genealogy of Morals (part 3, section 7), Friedrich Nietzsche writes:
“Every animal, including la bête philosophe [philosophical animal] strives instinctively after an optimum of favorable conditions, under which he can let his whole strength have play, and achieves his maximum consciousness of power; with equal instinctiveness, and with a fine perceptive flair which is superior to any reason, every animal shudders mortally at every kind of disturbance and hindrance which obstructs or could obstruct his way to that optimum (it is not his way to happiness of which I am talking, but his way to power, to action, the most powerful action, and in point of fact in many cases his way to unhappiness). Similarly, the philosopher shudders mortally at marriage, together with all that could persuade him to it—marriage as a fatal hindrance on the way to the optimum. Up to the present what great philosophers have been married? 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; as for that exception of a Socrates—the malicious Socrates married himself, it seems, ironically, just to prove this very rule.”
I am a philosopher and, well, I’ve been married since 2005. Am I, then, a joke?
Perhaps. But I have a powerful rebuttal to Nietzsche which may allow me to avoid this comic fate: Aristotle, certainly one of the greatest philosophers in history – if not the greatest – was married…twice!