Lying awake at 1:40 this morning and reviewing the arc of my
life, I had a really odd thought, one that revealed to me the absurd randomness
of our existence. It occurred to me that
I do not regret a single thing I did, a single movement of my limbs, a single
breath I took at any time in my life up to May, 1969. Why?
Because in that month, on some evening, I know not which, my second son
was conceived. One among the millions of
sperm struggling toward that egg made it and the resulting fertilization became,
in the fullness of time, Tobias Barrington Wolff, just as a similar conjunction
two years earlier had become Patrick Gideon Wolff. Any revision of my previous existence might
have resulted in a different sperm winning the race, and that would have meant
that Tobias and perhaps Patrick would not now exist.
I would not give up one of those random happenstances for
anything I can imagine – not world peace, not immortal fame, indeed not genuine
immortality itself. Oh, no doubt if
something, anything, had been different in my life until then, I would have
sired two other children, and had I done so, I am sure I would have loved them
as completely as I love Patrick and Tobias.
But that sentence is in the subjunctive, and Patrick and Tobias are in
the declarative.
I spend much of my time seeing the deeper necessary causes
and conditions of the world and its evils.
It is sobering to reflect that what matters to me most of all is accidental,
inexplicable, and yet utterly essential to my life.
Would not trade for world peace? A curious moral stance.
ReplyDeleteNo, I would not trade one of my sons for world peace. There it is. Feel free to disapprove. Do you have children?
ReplyDeleteYou wouldn't be trading your sons for world peace. It's not like Abraham sacrificing Isaac for world peace. You'd still have sons, but they would be different.
ReplyDeletePerhaps J. Bogart isn't familiar with the story of the judgment of Solomon?
ReplyDeleteProfessor Wolff,
ReplyDeleteYou may appreciate this short essay. The argument ultimately doesn't work well, but it's an interesting rumination on kin versus world peace divide.
https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/05/do-i-have-the-right-to-be/
I do not see the value in your ad hominem remark.
ReplyDeleteWhy would your child be more valuable or more important than all the other children in the world? How do you get any kind of transpersonal moral values into place? Is it just a version of Hume you are committing to?
Hobbes might disagree and your father might feel the same way about you
ReplyDeleteThere's a nice little sci-fi movie about this called About Time. A young man gets the ability to travel through time, but realizes that after he has children, he can't use the ability to go back before his children are born, because it would mean having a different child after he returned.
ReplyDeleteA question:
ReplyDeleteWho first offered the "necessity of origins" argument about human conception ["just that egg and that sperm producing just that person"]? Was it Saul Kripke in "Naming and Necessity?
I think the post as phrased may be overstated inasmuch as a fair amt of what you did before May 69 has no bearing on the particular circumstances that led to your marrying your first wife and conceiving your children. One could hold those circumstances constant, so to speak, and still regret certain things, such as e.g. studying the violin when you would rather have studied the French horn or whatever (that's hypothetical, obviously, but conveys the general pt). The "don't regret a single thing" language assumes that everything is connected to everything else, which seems at least not demonstrably true.
ReplyDeleteProfessor Wolff,
ReplyDeleteYou must realize that you are the richest man in the world. If everyone in the world were to give you their money in exchange for permanently taking one of your son's away from you, you would immediately & automatically reject such a deal. So you see you are the richest man in the world.
Indeed, as the Good Book says, in Proverbs, their price is above rubies.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is that every event is related to every other event.
ReplyDeleteSo if your life is not to be modified to any degree, then all of history must not be modified. That means you accept the Holocaust, slavery, child labor in the mines, etc., which I doubt that you want to accept.
Think: this is the blog of a World Famous Philosopher, a man known, among many other things, for his ability to reason. Do we not just this once suspend our ever-driving need for reason and accept this thinly veiled poem from the very heart of our ever-rational host? Why can we not simply read this post as a father’s paean to the two beings for whom he has now and has always had unconditional love? Are we not, in fact, privileged to read this, his nocturnal, lupine public declaration THAT HE LOVES HIS SONS BEYOND REASON? [In point of fact, even here he shows the good sense to recognize that his love would be equally fierce for a different progeny had the zygote happened differently]. This is the one post which does not need to pass the censorship of the aggregate magnifying glasses. Read and reread it for the purity of the father’s love for his sons.
ReplyDeleteSimply perfect, decessero.
ReplyDeleteIndeed. Bravissimo!
DeleteHad the title of your Post any reference to Dr. Young's book," Night Thoughts"--- a work both Boswell and Johnson esteemed?
ReplyDelete