When Socrates pondered the immortality of the soul, Gopnik argues, he should have considered the sort of afterlife that parents can obtain through their children. Similarly, she thinks moral philosophers ought to take greater cognizance of the empathetic bonds between generations, and that those skeptics who wonder how we can ever attain certain knowledge of the outside world would do well to consider the mechanisms by which children learn. As for the meaning of life, readers will not be surprised to hear that Gopnik suggests a large part of the answer is (if you have them): children.Or maybe we want more control over our "eternal destiny" in this sense. Check out The Philosophical Baby.
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Gopnik notes that parenting in today’s middle-class America is unusual, because comparatively few people are involved in the care of each child and so parents are more intensely involved in it. Extended family, older siblings and neighbors play a smaller role than they did in the past and elsewhere. She interestingly suggests that this shift helps to explain why many American parents now make such a song and dance about the formerly unremarkable activity of child-rearing. One might go further and regard our absorption in our own offspring as a flimsily disguised form of narcissism.
In a related work, the entire scientific revolution may be credited to a man who went in search of better answers than religion had to offer when he lost his only child to scarlet fever at age five:
In his deceptively simple seventy-eight-page essay, Discourse on the Method, this small, vain, vindictive, peripatetic, ambitious Frenchman destroyed 2,000 years of received wisdom and laid the foundations of the modern world. At the root of Descartes’ “method” was skepticism: "What can I know for certain?" Like-minded thinkers around Europe passionately embraced the book--the method was applied to medicine, nature, politics, and society. The notion that one could find truth in facts that could be proved, and not in reliance on tradition and the Church's teachings, would become a turning point in human history.Check out Descartes' Bones. I probably won't. :(
In an age of faith, what Descartes was proposing seemed like heresy. Yet Descartes himself was a good Catholic, who was spurred to write his incendiary book for the most personal of reasons: He had devoted himself to medicine and the study of nature, but when his beloved daughter died at the age of five, he took his ideas deeper. To understand the natural world one needed to question everything. Thus the scientific method was created and religion overthrown. If the natural world could be understood, knowledge could be advanced, and others might not suffer as his child did.
