Plato, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer were childless. And so were Kant, Hume, Hobbes, Locke, Kierkegaard and Spinoza -- or, if you wish to include, Descartes and Rousseau. Sartre, Foucault, Adorno, Popper and Wittgenstein remained childless. Augustine fathered an illegitimate child, but then became a celibate priest. Aquinas and the philosophers of the middle age were all churchmen. Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant and Bentham all went unmarried. Berkeley married late but hate no children. Rousseau abandoned all of his five children. Plato, as far as we know, never married. John Stuart Mill had no children of his own. Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre and Wittgenstein were all unmarried and childless. Simone Weil, Hannan Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir were all childless. It could be pure coincidence, but other hypotheses press for consideration. One is that the sheer oddity of philosophers makes them unsuitable life partners. Another is that domestic bliss dulls the philosophical edge. A third is that the problem lies in the nature of the deepest, most fundamental, philosophical work. If genius is the infinity capacity for taking pains, it wouldn't seem to leave much time for anything else. Instead of being bad parents, many of the titans of Europrean existentialism -- Friedrich Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre -- remained childless. Voltaire never married or fathered children. While Voltaire technically died a bachelor, his personal life was a revolving door of mistresses, paramours and long-term lovers. As an adult, Isaac Newton immersed himself in his work, had no hobbies and never married. Although it is impossible to verify, it is commonly believed that he died a virgin. French writer and philosopher Voltaire, who was in London at the time of Newton's funeral, claimed to have verified the fact, writing that "I have had that confirmed by the doctor and the surgeon who were with him when he died" (allegedly Newton stated on his deathbed that he was a virgin). In 1733, Voltaire publicly stated that Newton "had neither passion nor weakness; he never went near any woman". Francis Bacon opens his "Of Marriage and Single Life" essay this way: He that hath wife and children, hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. Certainly, the best works, and of the greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men. Nietzsche agreed with Bacon's conclusion. In fact, Nietzsche remarked the true philosophers never marry and that Socrates did so only ironically. Schopenhauer said that we are driven frantically to push ourselves forward, get good jobs to impress prospective partners, wonder endlessly about finding The One (imagining they’ll make us happy), and are eventually briefly seduced by someone long enough to produce a child, and then have to spend the next 40 years in misery to atone for our error. To marry means to do everything possible to become an object of disgust to each other. Every life history is the history of suffering. After spending a lot of time trying, yet failing to be famous, and trying, yet failing to have relationships, Schopenhauer eventually found an audience who adored his writings.
