Fatherhood and philosophy

A sleepless week

I’m Bryan Kam. I endeavour daily to make philosophy accessible and relevant. To that end I write this newsletter and host a podcast called Clerestory. I’m also writing a book called Neither/Nor and I’m a founding member of Liminal Learning. In London, I host a book club, a writing group, and other events. My work looks at how conceptual abstraction relates to embodied life, and how to use this understanding to transform experience.

Five days a father

On Tuesday morning I became a father. Evangeline Véronique Kam Mazitova arrived just before 10am, and my wife and I have been learning what it means to live in a state of perpetual semi-consciousness punctuated by moments of overwhelming joy.

Here is Eva at her cutest (three days old). This look is deceptive. At night, she is also capable of crying so hard that she ends up making Predator-style prey clicks.

l’ll have more to say about Eva later, but here I’ll just leave you with the experience of seeing her face.

Asking for help

If you only read one thing from this newsletter: I’m running a family experiment this year, and we would love to have your support. We’re also incredibly grateful to those of you who have given us so much support in the recent past as well as over the years.

In this experiment, the question is whether it’s possible to do serious intellectual work while living a full life with all too human constraints.

As a partial overview, I’m currently writing a book on philosophy, helping to launch a startup, working a full-time job, doing freelance work, hosting events, and — as of Tuesday — my wife and I now have a newborn. We live in London, and we are not quite making ends meet.

That’s the experiment. Can such a life be lived?

If this experiment interests you, consider supporting us on Patreon, and I’ll post updates on how it’s going here on Substack.

I’m trying to live for philosophy, i.e., to arrange my life and the life of my family to support the pursuit of philosophy. This means producing a new philosophy. However, this is difficult, slow, time-consuming work which does not generally pay. As with most creative endeavours, it’s difficult to support.

It is also possible to live by philosophy, for example, by being paid to teach existing philosophy. Schopenhauer observes the opposition between these two strategies in World as Will and Representation, Chapter XVII, “On Man’s Need for Metaphysics.” For Schopenhauer, living by philosophy means receiving payment to teach philosophy sanctioned by the academy, whereas living for philosophy means producing new philosophy outside the academy:

Among the moderns also those who live by philosophy are not only, as a rule and with the rarest exceptions, quite different from those who live for philosophy, but very often they are even the opponents of the latter. Therefore many a great mind has had to drag itself breathlessly through life unrecognized, unhonoured, unrewarded, till finally after his death the world became undeceived as to him and as to them. In the meantime they had attained their end, had been accepted, by not allowing the man with a great mind to be accepted; and, with wife and child, they had lived by philosophy, while that man lived for it. When he is dead, however, matters are reversed; the new generation, and there always is one, now becomes heir to his achievements, trims them down to its own standard, and now lives by him.

In short, the avant-garde philosophers live for philosophy, but die in obscurity and poverty, whereas the next generation profits by their work.

I hope to live for philosophy, to live an active life of the mind, without selling out. And I hope to help the next generation in doing so. This is why I’m asking for your support to try this. I’ve always found it hard to ask for help. But becoming a father has made it a bit easier, since I’m no longer just asking for myself.

A life in London

But why on earth, you might well ask, would I try to run this experiment in London, one of the most expensive cities in the world?

This is because little has changed since Samuel Johnson wrote, in a letter to James Boswell, 20 September 1777:

Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

“Tired of London, tired of life” is a phrase commonly said amongst Londoners. And I do feel that to move to the suburbs would be a disservice to the intellectual work. After eighteen years here, I still find London the most intellectually thrilling place I’ve ever been.

Yesterday, for example, despite having a newborn, I was still able to meet my extremely supportive writing group in Primrose Hill. I think in the suburbs this would be unthinkable. So would working at the British Library, writing at the London Library, and meeting other writers and philosophers for lunch every week.

A list of names

Q: What do Plato, Diogenes, Epicurus, Augustine, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Francis Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz, Isaac Newton, Berkeley, Voltaire, Hume, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Kant, Schopenhauer, J.S. Mill, Kierkegaard, Herbert Spencer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Wittgenstein, Popper, Adorno, Arendt, Sartre, Beauvoir, Simone Weil, Barthes, Turing, Jaynes, Guattari, Foucault, and Badiou have in common?

A: None of them had children.

Perhaps there’s something about intellectual work that doesn’t mix well with changing nappies at three o’clock in the morning.

Or perhaps trying to raise a child and do rigorous intellectual work is an exercise in superfluity, adding one arduous goal to another, and risking doing neither well.

Or perhaps — and this is what I’m hoping to find out through this experiment — having a child might actually teach me something about the relationship between theory and practice that all these childless geniuses missed.

Part of the experiment is seeking to establish what childlessness misses. Having no children has obvious advantages in terms of time and sustained attention to intellectual work. But I’m asking the opposite: what are the disadvantages of such an approach? For one, it misses the developmental aspect of philosophy. How does a young mind come to know?

Interintellect Hostcast

The same day my wife went into labour, I recorded a podcast with João Mateus for Interintellect’s Hostcast series. You can listen to it here.

We talked about my upcoming salon with Stephen Batchelor on The Buddha, Socrates and Us, my Neither/Nor book, and how hosting salons connects to my broader philosophical interests in bridging abstract thinking and embodied experience. (You can get tickets for this online salon at the Interintellect.)

You might expect that now, five days into fatherhood, I would discover that everything I thought I knew about the relationship between theory and practice has been overturned. Instead, I feel that my work on Neither/Nor, which emphasises embracing uncertainty and alternating between embodiment and intellectual activity, has actually been a great preparation for what’s going on before my eyes.

For her part, Eva has only just begun opening her eyes. On her first day she could seemingly only flutter them occasionally. On the third day she could keep her lids open for longer, but her eyes tended to roll back; she did not seem able to keep them staring straight ahead. Today was the first time she looked straight at me for an extended period (though she still seems very unfocused). During that time I sang her four or five songs — she loves “Annie’s Song,” a John Denver song which my mother sang to me, which always made me cry as a child — and she just stared in the direction of my face. This evening, she’s started to track faces a little more. Now, when two faces are in her field of vision, she flicks back and forth between them with a slightly bewildered interest.

My wife doesn’t particularly like my singing, but it calms Eva so immediately and dramatically that it’s comical. The only more potent drug for her is breastfeeding, which can bring her from a panicked shriek to profound tranquility in a fraction of a second.

Confirmation bias

From my interactions with her so far, Eva seems to have what I’m calling proto-conceptual perception. She can reliably differentiate between comfort and discomfort, between our presence and absence, but this does not seem to involve concepts. She knows when we leave the room even though she can’t really see us yet, responding to smell and sound more than sight. It seems to contain some of the seeds of later abstract thought. And each set of categories has grey areas between them. This lines up with the explanation that Thomas Kuhn gives in his Last Writings, arguing that concepts arise not out of the grouping of objects in the world, but out of the need to differentiate feeling states.

The most surprising thing is how much we have to figure out socially, to figure out together. She doesn’t know what she needs — she doesn’t have a concept of “breast,” but when it is present, she calms. She certainly shows gratitude, and seems “blissed out” after feeding, but she has yet to display any of the “envy” aspect that I wrote about here:

For the most part we don’t know what she needs either, at least not instinctively. It’s basically all trial-and-error, an intersubjective social discovery process of co-regulation, finding out what feels better and what doesn’t. Sometimes midwives or other parents give us tips. But what works for them has also been ascertained by trial-and-error, only over longer periods. There is no handbook.

That it isn’t instinctive is shown by how much childrearing advice varies across cultures and over just a few decades within a single culture. (Tonight we watched Bergman’s 1958 Brink of Life, which I would highly recommend not watching to anyone who is expecting — but it’s a good example of how much has changed in how pregnancies are handled.)

Eva’s crying isn’t intentional in any meaningful sense, just a direct response to how she feels, which I don’t think she understands. And yet it’s functionally perfect — her pitch evolved over generations to be exactly the right frequency to command our attention. How can something be functionally perfect but without a purpose? I would argue that Darwin provides a great answer to this question, and it’s one of the central themes of Neither/Nor.

Even something as simple as nappy discomfort shows how non-categorical and non-purposive early human life is — and how quickly it comes to seem categorical. At three days old, she now has the category of “wet nappy.” But this category cannot be basic, because nappies aren’t basic. Modern disposable ones are from 1947, and infants seem to have been swaddled back to at least 4000 BC. But in hotter climes and ancient times, before fabrics existed, parents read an infants’ cues directly, intuitively timing waste elimination to occur in an appropriate place, a practice called elimination communication. The cue is more basic than the nappy, but we mistake the nappy for being basic. The nappy is the effect of a cultural process, not a natural one — though because of its link to a natural process, it has the illusion of seeming basic. If it seems obvious that this kind of discomfort is basic, I will note that Althusser argues — and I agree — that obviousness itself is a sign of ideological thinking.

Eva and I are both part of an ecological system that neither of us controls, where patterns emerge through our mutual attunement rather than through individual agency on either of our parts. This challenges so much of what Western philosophy assumes about knowledge, intentionality, and the primacy of abstract reasoning. Her total dependency isn’t a deficiency, but deeply related to the fundamentally human capacity for behavioral flexibility and social coordination that makes human learning possible. Other animals have stronger instincts from a younger age, but these prove less flexible in the long run. Her helplessness, in other words, is related to her ability to learn.

The ratio of labour to joy can sometimes feel, as other fathers had warned me, rather high. There’s a lot of practical work involved in keeping a tiny human alive and comfortable. But at the same time it’s neither overwhelming nor drudgery. It’s all somehow fascinating and often quite funny, and not as hard as people had warned us, even on an hour and a half of sleep. When Eva settles into my chest while I’m singing, or opens her eyes and briefly appears to see me for a moment, so much of Western philosophy seems utterly beside the point — and my own philosophical work seems somehow more urgent than ever. (I’m happy to report I’m still, on average, writing just over 1,000 words per day on Neither/Nor.)

The experiment continues

This is an honest account of what it’s like to think and write while strapped for time, financially uncertain, and sleeping between one and five hours per night. If you want to support this experiment in doing philosophy while living a life with real constraints, contributions to Patreon would be especially welcome right now. We get a few hundred pounds per month from supporters, which is incredible. But with a newborn and the economic realities of freelance intellectual work, we’re still not covering our costs.

If you’re in North London and feel like dropping off a meal, we’ve also got a meal-train going while Zarina recovers from her caesarian. Please email me if you’d like to participate. Thank you so much to Noah for starting off this meal train, and to Pen and Jess who have contributed. Each of the three cooked and delivered food to us, which made our first week easier to handle and made us feel the love.

For now, though, I’m just grateful to be in this liminal space, in this strange exhaustion and wonder. As my friend Mike told me, “I expected it to be not that much work, and that I wouldn’t like doing it. Instead it’s a ton of work, and I absolutely love it.” As I think my friend Maggie told me, everyone warns you about the difficulties, but nobody tells you about the love and the magical high of having created a living being.

I thank the childless philosophers for pursuing intellectual work above all else. I share with them an overriding obsession to make sense of it all. But I also suspect they missed something crucial about how knowledge actually works, why we need it in the first place, how concepts actually form, and how thinking actually emerges from the irreducibly social, embodied, contingent business of being human.

• Please consider supporting my philosophical work financially, either here on Substack, or on Patreon.

• You can listen to the podcast with João here.

• The salon with Stephen Batchelor happens September 4th at 3pm GMT; tickets here.

• If it’s easier for you, please support us on Substack:

Five days old and loving life.