NewPhilosopher Loving and letting goSoon after I became a father, at
some pointintothefirstfewmonths
of sleepless nights and earlier-than-
early mornings,I foundmyselfthink-
ing that my son – my tiny exqui-
site implacable son, who so often I
couldn’tsoothe throughhis hoursof
tears –waslargerthanme.
I felt insubstantial, old, starting
to breakapart;whilehehadsomuch
time andpotentialcoiledinsidehim,
waitingtobecomeandtokeeponbe-
coming,tocontinueseeinglongafterI
had closedmyeyes.It wasanodd,ver-
tiginoussensation,andalsoa restate-
ment ofthecrushinglyobvious.
There was nothing here I hadn’t
knownformyentireadultlife.Birth
and deathareasuniversalasit getsin
terms of the human experience.Yet,
when the universal comes knocking,
the veryfactthatit alsoindeliblyap-
plies touscanstillbeshocking– be-
cause, fromtheinside,theuniverseis a
resolutelypersonalandsingularexpe-
rience.Onelife,onechancetoliveit,
floatingindarkness.
by TomChatfield
Philosophy doesn’t need to teach
us how to die. Dying is, after all, one
of the only things every single one of
us will manage to achieve no matter
what. What I find surprising, how-
ever, is how little philosophy has to
say about something equally central
to the future of our species: children
and parenthood.
This may be because so many
of the key thinkers in this tradition
were childless men, or men who had
little to do with the raising of their
children. But it also points to a phe-
nomenon I continue to experience
in my own field, technology, and the
ways in which children enter the im-
aginations of its practitioners: not as
utterly dependent beings whom we
love, but rather as nascently rational
consumers and data points, as prob-
lems to be solved, as citizens to be
moulded and taught, as employees
who will need certain skills, as either
blank slates awaiting education or
anarchistic savages awaiting taming.
They are, in other words, projects
for the rest of us to undertake in the
hope of imprinting our wills upon the
future. We are the masters of the mo-
ment. And they are just like us, or willbe. What matters is that our works live
on in those who come next.
In his book about parenting, chil-
dren, and identity, Far From The Tree,
the author and psychologist Andrew
Solomon writes about the painful
impossibility of aiming at this kind
of immortality. “Parenthood abruptly
catapults us into a permanent re-
lationship with a stranger, and the
more alien the stranger, the stronger
the whiff of negativity. We depend
on the guarantee in our children’s
faces that we will not die. Children
whose defining quality annihilates
that fantasy of immortality are a par-
ticular insult.”
Difference gives the lie to the fan-
tasy. Even in the tightest embrace of
familial love, parents and their chil-
dren remain divided, inexorably dis-
tinct. However desperately we may
wish to see in our children a promise
of our own continuity, in the end we
must love them and let go – or, hav-
ing failed fully to pull off the first,
nevertheless succumb to the second.
On the outbreak of the Second
World War, the poet WH Auden –
then in his early thirties – conjured in
his poem September 1, 1939 one of theLoving and letting go