When Mary Midgley sent her essay “Rings and Books” to the BBC in the 1950s, she pointed out something so obvious we’d all overlooked it: the pantheon of Western philosophy is dominated by unmarried men. Her list read like a who’s who of philosophical greats – Plato, Descartes, Kant – all bachelors who never changed a diaper, never rocked a crying child to sleep at 3 AM, never negotiated household chores with a partner.
Midgley’s observation wasn’t about shaming singlehood. Rather, it posed an uncomfortable question: how might these philosophers’ solitary lives have shaped their – and consequently our – understanding of what constitutes “the good life”? When your primary human interactions are with students and fellow intellectuals rather than toddlers and aging parents, doesn’t that inevitably color your view of human nature?
The names on that list tell their own story. Spinoza grinding lenses alone in his room. Kant taking his daily walk so punctually neighbors could set their clocks by it. Nietzsche wandering the Engadine valleys with no one but his thoughts for company. Brilliant minds all, but minds that moved through the world largely unencumbered by what most people would consider ordinary human responsibilities.
What gets lost when philosophy emerges primarily from lives untouched by the messy realities of caregiving? The Western philosophical tradition prizes autonomy, reason, and detachment – virtues that come more easily to those whose time remains entirely their own. But are these truly life’s highest goods, or simply the ones most visible to those who’ve never had to balance a metaphysical inquiry with a child’s fever or a parent’s failing memory?
Midgley’s simple observation cracks open bigger questions about whose experiences get to define wisdom. The solitary thinker’s insights are real and valuable – but perhaps incomplete. After all, philosophy means “love of wisdom,” not “love of thinking alone.”
The Bachelor Philosophers’ Club
Mary Midgley’s observation about unmarried male philosophers wasn’t just a quirky footnote in intellectual history. When we expand her original list to include Kierkegaard pacing his Copenhagen apartment alone, Schopenhauer famously misogynistic in his solitude, and Nietzsche wandering the Alps between manic writing sessions, a pattern emerges that’s too consistent to ignore. The philosophy department of history reads like an elite singles retreat.
Consider these numbers: during the 18th century when many Enlightenment thinkers flourished, approximately 70% of European men married. Yet among the era’s most celebrated philosophers, that number drops below 20%. Descartes never married, though he fathered a child he barely knew. Spinoza lived quietly grinding lenses. Kant’s daily walks through Königsberg were so punctual neighbors set clocks by them – and so solitary they became metaphorical for detached reasoning itself.
This statistical anomaly begs the question: did these men choose philosophy because they valued solitude, or did philosophy’s demands select for those who could afford uninterrupted contemplation? The answer likely involves both. Without domestic responsibilities that anchored their contemporaries, these thinkers could structure entire days around abstract problems. Hume could spend months crafting a single argument about causation without a child’s fever disrupting his flow. Leibniz developed calculus in self-imposed isolation.
Yet this freedom came at a cost the philosophers themselves rarely acknowledged. When your greatest daily interruption is deciding whether to take your afternoon walk at 3:15 or 3:30 (as Kant did), your view of human nature might skew toward the orderly and autonomous. The messy interdependence of family life – caring for infants, negotiating with teenagers, tending aging parents – simply wasn’t part of their experiential vocabulary. Small wonder their theories often present individuals as self-contained reasoning agents rather than nodes in relational networks.
The bachelor philosophers’ lifestyle wasn’t merely a personal choice; it reflected their socioeconomic privilege. Unlike women of their era who bore society’s caregiving burdens, these men could treat human relationships as philosophical abstractions rather than daily realities. Rousseau, that rare married philosopher, still famously abandoned his five children to orphanages – an act that casts new light on his social contract theories.
As we move through the list – from Plato’s Academy where women were notably absent to Wittgenstein’s solitary Cambridge rooms – we might ask: what might philosophy have gained if more thinkers had known the exhaustion of rocking a colicky baby while pondering consciousness, or the humility of realizing one’s brilliant theory holds no comfort for a grieving spouse? The answer lingers in history’s margins, where the domestic and the profound intersect.
The Hermit Mind: Blind Spots of Unattached Thinking
There’s something peculiar about the way certain philosophical ideas take root. Consider Kant’s meticulously timed daily walks in Königsberg, so regular that neighbors supposedly set their clocks by them. Or Descartes’ famous retreat to a ‘stove-heated room’ for solitary meditation. These aren’t just biographical curiosities—they’re clues to a particular way of engaging with the world that dominates Western philosophy.
The unattached life leaves distinct fingerprints on thought. Autonomy becomes sacred, reason gets elevated above messy emotions, and detachment is mistaken for objectivity. Kant’s categorical imperative demands we act only according to maxims that could become universal law—a thought experiment requiring precisely the kind of abstract distance that child-rearing rarely permits. Descartes’ radical doubt, that systematic stripping away of all uncertain beliefs, resembles the mental luxury of someone who’s never had to trust another person to feed them soup in old age.
Modern care ethics exposes what’s missing here. Eva Kittay’s work on dependency argues that being cared for isn’t some exceptional human circumstance—it’s our first and lasting state. The infant needing diaper changes, the stroke survivor relearning speech, the aging parent requiring assistance—these aren’t deviations from some mythical independent ideal. They’re the human condition that much philosophy has airbrushed out of the picture.
Imagine Heidegger, that brooding poet of Being, having to interrupt his ponderings of Dasein to pack peanut butter sandwiches for a kindergarten lunchbox. Would ‘being-toward-death’ have competed so fiercely with ‘being-toward-parent-teacher-conferences’ in his ontology? The thought isn’t entirely frivolous. When Virginia Woolf wrote of needing ‘a room of one’s own’ for creative work, she simultaneously acknowledged how women’s traditional responsibilities made such space nearly impossible to secure—an awareness most male philosophers never had to cultivate.
This isn’t to say solitary thinking lacks value. The uninterrupted contemplation that produced Spinoza’s Ethics or Wittgenstein’s Tractatus has its own majesty. But we might question why philosophy has historically treated the hermit’s insights as universal while dismissing the wisdom gained from years of negotiating bedtimes or nursing sick relatives as merely ‘personal experience.’ The dividing line between profound truth and domestic trivia appears suspiciously aligned with gender roles and domestic arrangements.
Perhaps philosophy’s most persistent blind spot isn’t metaphysical but biographical: the unexamined assumption that those free from intimate dependencies see reality more clearly, when they may simply see it differently. As Iris Murdoch—both philosopher and novelist—observed, ‘Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.’ That realization comes easier to some lives than others.
Married Minds and Female Voices: The Untold Stories of Philosophy
The philosophical canon we’ve inherited often reads like a chronicle of solitary genius – men who supposedly found truth by distancing themselves from the messiness of human relationships. But what happens when we turn the page to philosophers who knew the weight of a child in their arms or the demands of a shared life?
John Locke, that rare married philosopher, penned Some Thoughts Concerning Education while serving as personal physician and tutor to the Shaftesbury family. His writings on child development carry an intimacy foreign to Kant’s rigid schedules: “The little and almost insensible impressions on our tender infancies have very important and lasting consequences.” One can’t help but wonder if Locke’s hands-on experience with children shaped his more relational view of human nature compared to his celibate contemporaries.
Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality – the philosophical significance of birth and new beginnings – emerges from a mind that refused to separate thought from life’s tangible realities. Her observation that “the new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws” carries particular resonance when we consider she wrote it as a woman who’d navigated marriage, stepmotherhood, and exile. Where Sartre saw hell in others, Arendt found possibility – not through abstraction, but through lived engagement with what she called “the web of human relationships.”
The recent rise of care ethics in philosophy didn’t occur in a vacuum. As more women entered academic philosophy (comprising nearly 30% of philosophy faculty in U.S. universities by 2020), questions once dismissed as “domestic” gained philosophical legitimacy. Eva Feder Kittay’s work on dependency challenges the myth of radical autonomy, arguing that “to be human is to be, at times, profoundly dependent.” This perspective didn’t emerge from isolated contemplation, but from Kittay’s experience raising a daughter with significant disabilities – a reality few classical philosophers ever faced.
Contemporary philosophers like Judith Butler have shown how parenting can reshape philosophical practice. Butler’s reflections on precarity and interdependence gained new dimensions after adopting a child, noting how caregiving “alters one’s sense of time, priority, and what counts as thinking.” The crying baby, the sick parent, the grocery list – these become not distractions from philosophy, but its raw materials.
Perhaps philosophy’s future lies in admitting that wisdom grows not just in the silence of the study, but in the noisy interplay of lives entwined. As more voices from different life experiences enter the conversation, we might finally answer Midgley’s implicit question: What truths become visible when philosophy gets its hands dirty?
Philosophy Beyond the Ivory Tower
Judith Butler’s office at Berkeley looks nothing like the sparse studies of classical philosophers. Stacks of student papers compete for space with children’s drawings pinned to a bulletin board. A half-drunk juice box sits beside her dog-eared copy of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. This is where gender theory gets made between parent-teacher conferences and soccer practice.
The author of Gender Trouble once described how rocking a colicky baby at 2 AM reshaped her understanding of performativity. “When you’re repeating the same lullaby for the forty-seventh time,” she remarked in a 2015 interview, “you realize how much of existence consists of rituals we didn’t choose but sustain anyway.” This from the thinker who taught us that gender is a repeated social performance.
Contemporary philosophy increasingly bears the fingerprints of lived experience. Martha Nussbaum’s work on capabilities theory deepened after caring for her aging mother. Kwame Anthony Appiah’s cosmopolitanism took on new dimensions when navigating multicultural parenting. The ivory tower grows porous when philosophers carry diaper bags up its steps.
Consider the practical wisdom emerging from these blended lives:
- Interruption as epistemology: The parent-philosopher learns that profound thinking doesn’t require monastic silence, but can emerge amidst the cacophony of competing needs. As Sara Ruddick wrote in Maternal Thinking, caregiving cultivates a unique “attentive love” that notices what abstract reasoning misses.
- Bodily philosophy: Changing bedsheets for a sick child teaches what Merleau-Ponty only theorized – that consciousness is always already embodied. There’s no Cartesian split when you’re scrubbing vomit at midnight.
- Temporal realism: Parental time contradicts Heidegger’s Dasein. Instead of being-toward-death, it’s being-toward-the-next-snack, a perpetual present tense that nonetheless accumulates meaning.
This isn’t to romanticize domesticity or suggest philosophers should procreate. Rather, it reveals how exclusionary our vision of “the philosophical life” has been. The ancient dichotomy between vita contemplativa and vita activa crumbles when we acknowledge that Kant’s daily walk occurred precisely at 3:30 PM because his servant Lampe ensured it could.
So here’s a question to carry into your next philosophy reading: Which great thinker would benefit most from spending a week in your shoes? Imagine Nietzsche carpooling to ballet practice. Picture Schopenhauer negotiating screen time with a teenager. Visualize Kierkegaard trying to explain existential choice to a toddler demanding chicken nuggets now.
The most radical proposition in philosophy today might be this: Truth doesn’t live further up the mountain, but right here in the messy valley where ideas bump against grocery lists and flu seasons. As Midgley hinted decades ago, we’ve mistaken solitude for profundity too long. Perhaps wisdom was in the diaper bag all along.
Mary Midgley’s 1950s BBC essay ‘Rings and Books’ contained an observation so obvious we’d stopped seeing it: the pantheon of Western philosophy overwhelmingly consists of unmarried men. She listed them like ingredients in some intellectual bachelor stew – Plato, Descartes, Kant – names we recite with reverence but rarely picture doing laundry or soothing a colicky baby. The pattern holds when we add Midgley’s omitted cases: Kierkegaard pacing his Copenhagen apartment alone, Nietzsche’s mustache twitching over solitary ink pots, Schopenhauer glowering at children from café windows.
These men gave us towering theories about human nature while experiencing a narrow slice of it. They wrote treatises on ethics without navigating the moral labyrinths of parenting, contemplated existence untouched by the visceral reality of caring for aging bodies. Their brilliant isolation raises uncomfortable questions: Does wisdom grow best in quarantine from life’s messy dependencies? Or have we mistaken privilege – the historical accident that allowed certain men to avoid domestic labor – for profundity?
The numbers still startle centuries later. In 18th-century Europe when marriage was near-universal, philosopher bachelorhood rates exceeded 80%. Compare Locke’s measured marital pragmatism (‘Conjugal society made by a voluntary compact between man and woman’) with Kant’s monastic daily walks so precise neighbors set clocks by him. The discrepancy suggests more than personal choice – it reveals philosophy’s unexamined premise that truth lives furthest from the nursery and sickbed.
Yet cracks appear in this intellectual edifice when we notice who’s missing. Married philosophers like Rousseau (who paradoxically abandoned his five children) framed social contracts while wrestling with actual relationships. John Stuart Mill’s partnership with Harriet Taylor softened his rigid utilitarianism into something recognizing human complexity. And the few women who breached philosophy’s boys’ club – Hildegard of Bingen writing theology between abbey chores, Hannah Arendt developing her ‘natality’ concept while fleeing Nazi Germany with her mother – brought perspectives shaped by caregiving realities most male philosophers could intellectually dismiss.
Perhaps philosophy’s most persistent blind spot isn’t metaphysical but logistical: the assumption that deep thinking requires freedom from interruption. The great unmarrieds wrote of autonomy as life’s highest good while never having theirs ruptured by a toddler’s nightmare or parent’s medication schedule. Their celebrated solitude looks different when we ask: Is detachment really wisdom’s prerequisite? Or just the luxury of those spared from care work?
Midgley’s provocation lingers: We’ve let certain lives define ‘the examined life.’ What might philosophy become if more of its practitioners had known the interruptive grace of small sticky hands, the humbling wisdom of changing sheets for incontinent elders? Not better or worse necessarily – but certainly more textured, like truth itself.
Is Solitude a Thinker’s Superpower or Unacknowledged Privilege?
The question lingers like dust motes in a philosopher’s study: does the solitary life grant special access to truth, or does it simply reflect a particular kind of freedom unavailable to most? Mary Midgley’s observation about unmarried male philosophers points to something deeper than marital status—it reveals a fundamental assumption about where wisdom originates.
Consider the daily rhythms of these celebrated thinkers. Kant’s legendary punctuality—his afternoon walks so regular neighbors set clocks by them—required an existence undisturbed by sick children or aging parents. Descartes’ meditations unfolded in a stove-heated room, not at a kitchen table sticky with jam. This isn’t to say domestic life guarantees insight, but its absence creates specific conditions for thought. The uninterrupted hours, the freedom to follow mental threads wherever they lead—these become the invisible scaffolding supporting entire philosophical systems.
Yet privilege often masquerades as virtue. What gets labeled as ‘pure reason’ might simply be the product of never having your train of thought derailed by a toddler’s tantrum. The philosophical canon’s reverence for autonomy and detachment starts to look different when we notice whose lives made such perspectives possible. As feminist philosophers have noted, the ‘view from nowhere’ prized in traditional philosophy often turns out to be the view from a particular somewhere—a quiet study belonging to someone unencumbered by caregiving responsibilities.
Modern psychology offers an interesting counterpoint. Studies on creativity suggest breakthrough ideas often emerge not in isolation but through social interaction and diverse experiences. The image of the lone genius—so central to philosophy’s self-mythology—may actually hinder certain kinds of understanding. Wisdom about human connection arguably requires being humanly connected.
Perhaps the most telling gap lies in what these philosophers didn’t write about. Search their works for discussions of childcare, domestic labor, or intergenerational dependency—the fabric of most people’s existence—and you’ll find startling silences. When Kant describes human dignity, does he imagine it persisting through diaper changes and bedtime negotiations? The questions themselves feel faintly absurd, which precisely proves the point.
This isn’t about discrediting great thinkers but about recognizing how life circumstances filter reality. Like any lens, solitude magnifies certain things while blurring others. The challenge for contemporary philosophy becomes how to integrate these partial visions into something more complete—a wisdom that knows both the clarity of mountain peaks and the complicated warmth of valleys where people actually live.
The Cries at 3 AM: Where Philosophy Meets Reality
Mary Midgley’s observation about unmarried male philosophers lingers like an unanswered question in a dimly lit lecture hall. That list of names – Plato to Kant – represents more than biographical trivia; it’s a lens through which we might examine the very texture of philosophical wisdom. When we consider that these thinkers rarely interrupted their meditations to soothe a crying infant or tend to an aging parent, their collective emphasis on autonomy and pure reason begins to feel less like universal truth and more like a very specific perspective.
The ancient Greeks coined the term ‘philosophy’ as ‘love of wisdom,’ but modern philosophy departments might as well hang a sign: ‘No sticky fingers allowed.’ There’s an unspoken hierarchy that places the abstract above the mundane, as if profound insights couldn’t possibly emerge from the chaos of domestic life. Yet anyone who’s navigated the sleep-deprived maze of early parenthood knows it demands its own kind of philosophical rigor – a constant negotiation between self and other that Descartes never addressed in his cozy stove-heated room.
Consider the practical epistemology of midnight feedings. Where Kant wrote of synthetic a priori judgments, a parent walking circles with a colicky baby develops a different kind of knowledge – the embodied understanding that some truths can’t be reached through reason alone. The philosopher’s prized solitude becomes impossible luxury when faced with the irreducible reality of another human’s immediate needs. Perhaps this explains why so many foundational ethical systems struggle to account for care and interdependence.
Contemporary philosopher Eva Kittay challenges this tradition when she writes, ‘Dependency is the human condition.’ Her words hang in the air like a counterpoint to centuries of self-sufficient ideals. The philosophy that emerges from lived responsibility often sounds different – less about radical freedom, more about sustainable connection. We hear it in Hannah Arendt’s concept of ‘natality,’ her insistence that new beginnings (literal and metaphorical) disrupt our abstract systems. We see it in John Locke’s educational writings, where philosophy descends from the metaphysical clouds to consider how children actually learn.
Maybe wisdom doesn’t always wear a professor’s robe. Sometimes it appears in the exhausted eyes of someone who’s just negotiated a toddler’s meltdown while contemplating the nature of will. The stains on its shirt suggest that certain truths only reveal themselves when we’re too tired for pretense, when our carefully constructed theories meet the uncompromising reality of another person’s hunger, pain, or fear.
Midgley’s challenge remains: What might philosophy sound like if more of its practitioners had known the weight of a sleeping child in their arms? If more metaphysical arguments had been composed with one ear tuned for coughs in the next room? We’ll never know – but the increasing diversity of voices in contemporary philosophy suggests we’re beginning to find out. The wisdom born at 3 AM may yet have its say.
