Parenting As Philosophizing

My daughter turned five a little over two weeks ago. Like most ‘new’ parents, my wife and I duly made expressions of surprise at how fast these five years had rolled away: long days, short years, and all the while, a rapidly transforming human being and person to marvel at. My daughter has changed physically and psychologically; her metamorphosis in this half-decade has provided adequate basis for the claim that personal identity is a mystery, a chimera to only be helplessly grasped at; her physical appearance and dress, which still provokes many to ‘misidentify’ her as a boy, speaks eloquently to how we may construct gender through minor changes in external presentation. Her verbal capacities have grown, and so a steady stream of pronouncements that amuse, perplex, delight, and confound us, issue forth on a daily basis; she has elementary reading and writing skills, and is thus pointing in the direction of a whole new world that she will begin to explore this year. There is much here to wonder at, clearly.

She’s not the only one changing though. My daughter has been changing me even as she does. These changes cannot be captured by the usual ‘look at all the gray hair I have now’ proclamations; many of them are merely tiny moments of astonishment at oneself, at coming to face with a capacity or incapacity or cruelty or kindness not hitherto noticed; yet others are quieter, slower transformations into a newer way of understanding my place in this world now that so many of my older priorities, anxieties, and urgencies have been reconfigured. Some are made sharper and more demanding and insistent; yet others have been quietly relegated to obscurity and irrelevance. Some anxieties about unrealized professional ambitions have eased; I have found new objectives in parenting to draw me onwards and upwards. I have stopped cursing the lack of time for reading and writing; I have learned to recognize that I read and write differently–and often, better–now because of the presence of my daughter in my life; this is a blessing not to be discounted. (Needless to say, reading Freud as a parent is a novelty all its own.)

My daughter is, most crucially, making my philosophizing an actual lived activity; in bringing up my daughter, I have had a chance to see philosophical doctrines that I have only theorized about previously spring to life; I understand them anew as a result.  Indeed, the truth of some is only ‘conclusively’ established in the laboratory of parenthood; the child is where all too many philosophical theories come to grief. My many political standpoints are informed by my role as a parent, as are my ethical ones. I find occasion to wonder, all over again, about the central existential issues that drew me to philosophy in the first place, and notice that my deliberations are marked by an acknowledgement of the meaning and value that my daughter has already brought to my life. I see things differently now; I’m a different kind of philosopher, interested in directions and possibilities I had not considered before, possessed of a voice and imagination that seems new to me; I thank my daughter for making me so.