A short version of Aristotle's treatises on ethics might be, "Easy does it! Not too little, not too much, but the golden mean."
Amplification: Don't be rash or reckless, but don't be a coward, either. How many good friends should you have? Not too many, but not too few, either. Wondering how much to give to charity? Enough, but not too much. Et cetera.
I wonder whether anyone at the Lyceum ever thought to ask him how many mistresses a married fellow should have. Four could be expensive. Just one and you run the risk of being lonesome when the wife is out of town. So probably two or three. Moderation in all things.
Seriously, speaking of marriage, and philosophers, it's surprising how little the latter have to say about the former. Maybe it's because so few of them knew anything about it, first-hand. Here is a list of philosophers who never married:
Immanuel Kant
Friedrich Nietzsche
Rene Descartes
John Locke
David Hume
Baruch Spinoza
Thomas Aquinas
Arthur Schopenhauer
Soren Kierkegaard
Jean Paul Sartre
Gottfried Leibniz
Thomas Hobbes
Adam Smith
Jeremy Bentham
Henry David Thoreau
Ludwig Wittgenstein
No doubt the list is incomplete, due to my limited knowledge and disinclination to do research while the Twins are on. Jonathan Wolff, here, mentions that Plato never married "as far as we know" and that, as to big-thinking women, Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, and Iris Murdoch were all childless. If you don't sweat the details, you could almost say it's the philosophy department's entire syllabus, sans Aristotle, Marx, and Hegel. Maybe there could be a separate category for philosophers who married only late in life and had no children: this evidently would capture John Stuart Mill and George Berkeley. The mating habits of A.J. Ayer and Bertrand Russell make them the exceptions that prove the rule.
My only theory about this connects with something I recall reading about Einstein--that his friends disapproved of one of his marriages on the ground that his bride wasn't his intellectual equal, a standard that would narrow the field somewhat. It's probably true that geniuses are bad candidates for marriage, and the great philosophers, being reflective, may have figured that out about themselves beforehand, so were spared from learning the hard way. According to one of the above bachelors (Nietzsche), marriage is "a long conversation," and he probably would not have been satisfied with what works for Amanda and me (or, at least, me):
Shall we have Subway or Chinese?
I can't believe you forgot to remind me about 4th grade curriculum night.
What's so interesting about your phone? Do you even realize the Twins had bases loaded, no outs, and didn't score?
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