110 Ancient Ideals
understood (we assume) in its primary form. Nature is about
competition. Nature is about survival of the fi ttest. But, as Emerson
suggests, the true thinker will not submit readily to having one
of his main sources of inspiration and enlightenment so quickly
closed off.
The thinker is often a wanderer. He aspires literally or meta-
phor ically to the un- housed condition. So marriage and family are
potential poisons to him. In The Genealogy of Knowledge Nietz sche
insists on the bachelor status of the true phi los o phers: Plato,
Aristotle, Descartes, Leibnitz, Kant, Schopenhauer. What about
Socrates? The one phi los o pher whose life has become legendary
was married to Xanthippe, who was shrewish and prone to temper
tantrums. She supposedly fl ung a dish of urine at Socrates when he
displeased her. Socrates married, Nietz sche says, as a sort of existen-
tial joke. It was a test of his more than human power to concentrate
on what matters despite all the blockages the Self and the world of
Self hood could cast in front of him. “If I can bear Xanthippe,” he
is reported to have said, “there is nothing that I cannot bear.”
Marriage and children take the thinker away from eternal mat-
ters and plant him fi rmly in the dense common soil of the everyday.
He must observe the conventions; he must hew to the collective
path. (Or pay for it.) Here he risks becoming satisfi ed, complacent.
In The Symposium Plato tells us how the thinker converts the ener-
gies of his sexual desire into the energies he needs to pursue the
understanding of beauty and of Truth. When those energies are ab-
sorbed into the (perhaps) real but mundane pleasures of marriage,
they have less chance to inspire celestial fl owerings. Then there is
the constant pressure of domestic distraction: the barking of the
family dog, the illnesses of the children, money worries, the Lilli-
putian triumphs of requiting the mortgage and keeping the taxman
away from the door. Schopenhauer actually spent a quotient of his
intellectual energies teaching us how to keep these antagonists at