The puzzling loneliness of parenthood: slaves to love

Parenting - particularly in the early years - can be isolating, frustrating, and addictively rewarding. Jessie Munton explores the puzzling loneliness of parenthood and reflects on her own experience to discuss the mother-child dialectic.

The Point is a magazine of philosophical writing on everyday life and culture. Modern life is worth examining.

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Slaves to love

Can LGBTQ+ intellectuals rethink their relationship to political power?

From Derrida to Foucault, much of the thrill of deconstructionist philosophy is its ability to tear down the totems of established thought. Historian Samuel Clowes Huneke looks back on the evolution of queer theory and questions what a non-heteronormative world could look like.

Toward a queer theory of the state

The prism of the philosopher appears again and again in scientific commentary. 

We've always been fascinated with the relationship between knowledge and power. Still, while philosophical treatments are perhaps more systematic, for Michael D. Gordin, the way this plays out in history and literature is much more alluring. From Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to the treatment of scientists in the Soviet Union, he discusses the story of the medieval scholar Faust and the perils of human temptation to wisdom.

One must imagine Faust happy

On the rhetoric of civilizational saviorhood.

In this compelling self-searching essay, Shaan Sachdev, a news editor who worked on an international desk during the Rohingya crisis, provides a compelling reflection on interventionism and empathy.

‘When we gratuitously import the suffering of others into our own self-conceptions, when we resist calculating a hierarchy of wrongs, when we catastrophize an issue rather than deliberate its solutions, when we allow a surfeit of zeal to scuttle pragmatic action, or when we lose sight of individuality — our own or that of the sufferers — in our rush to administer blanket sympathy, then our empathy may be said to have become 'hysterical.'"

Hysterical empathy

Recovering The Lost Daughter.

There’s little forbidden in acknowledging that many mothers are far from perfect. Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman reflect on Maggie Gyllenhaal's film adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s “The Lost Daughter”, and why it's much harder to represent why mothers stay the course, rather than why they might be tempted to leave. 


Motherhood and taboo 

Beyond millennial burnout.

The language of self-care and burnout may seem to be conflicting, but they can also be complementary. There is a propensity to externalize our suffering to our economic circumstances, which provokes an inclination to "take better care" of ourselves after being beaten down by these conditions. Apoorva Tadepalli contemplates her attempts to escape the twin narratives of self-care and millennial burnout and reflects on the political necessity of figuring out how to live a good life beyond politics.

Treat yourself

The creativity, despair and hopefulness of the writing life.

A contorted view of a successful career and denunciations of the writing life, like romanticizations, cause many of us to miss why people actually write. In this personal piece on ambition and the literary life, Apoorva Tadepalli reflects on the trap of conflating issues with capitalist work for a distaste for work overall and highlights the need to believe in your craft.

“I was happy to be redeemed, politically, for disliking my job — and we all ought to be allowed to dislike our jobs and to say as much — but I didn’t actually want to dislike my job. It is important to decry work culture, but what about the fact that we all work? And what about the fact that in order to decry work culture importantly and publicly, we were all obviously finding the motivation and the inspiration to work hard, to maintain the discipline required to write? We must have done it, and continue to do it, because we like writing, and we’d like to put in the effort and produce work that we’re proud of and that other people appreciate and retweet (a perfectly acceptable thing to want, as long as it is not the only thing we want).”

Careerism

“If I were a man, I’d be interested in fertilizing you.”

Elizabeth Barber’s grandfather, who is nearly ninety, wrote an erotic novel and mailed it to her. Unsurprisingly, she didn’t know what to expect when she read the book by a man who was “way too weird”. 

Alongside the themes of malpractice insurance, the worthlessness of religion and the so-called tragedy that is the existence of condoms, Elizabeth unravels the truths of her own childhood and queries the influence a parent has on a child.

Hot or not

A reflection on the culture of complaint.

What is complaint, and what would it mean to see it as “infallible”? Philosophers Kant, Aristotle and Nietzsche were all dismissive of emotional and physical distress, a sentiment that follows us in adulthood as we outwardly disregard our feelings. Agnes Callard an associate professor of philosophy reflects on the philosophy surrounding complaint and its importance in relation to pain, empathy and protest.

Why am I being hurt?

How should we engage with philosophy?

As students start at or return to university, this article explores how university institutions shape the teaching of philosophy. Philosopher Jennifer A. Frey reflects on the work of Laurie Santos, a cognitive scientist who is a star psychology professor at Yale, in how universities should be a community of scholars and students seeking the truth together as a common end.

Frey integrates the popularity of the psychology professor's course as a commentary on contemporary university. "Philosophy, the traditional home of serious reflection about the good life, is marginalized in most American universities, including Yale. Treated as just one discipline of study among many others, it is not understood as central to university education; the prevailing assumption is that it can be safely ignored by most students."

The universe and the university

How the like button has transformed the very root of culture.

The desire for recognition is not a modern development. But social media and recommendation systems have hypercharged these desires and caused them to dominate our social stratospheres. Daniel Silver explores the 'Logic of the Like’ — how social platforms have transformed the complexities of society into simple processes and has redefined modern culture. He argues that this social development has also caused the magical depth of every life to plateau. What can be done to change this? In this deep reflection, Silver turns to two twentieth-century philosophers that offer ways to reinvigorate the richness of human experience.       

The logic of the like

How the vital functions of culture have changed.

What does the politicisation of society mean after the Trump era? In this deeply reflective piece, Greg Jackson considers how the past eight years of politics have launched an entirely new meaning behind the “personal is political” and how our cults of thinking have become our way of life.

Sources of life

A new strategy for dealing with damnation.

Writer Meghan O'Gieblyn reflects in The Point magazine on the elasticity of Hell as a concept, exploring why it still remains one of society's most resilient metaphors for the evil both around and within us.

This story was originally published in The Point in November 2014.

"The various depictions of hell over the centuries tend to mirror the earthly landscape of their age. Torture entered the conception of hell in the second century, when Christians were subjected to sadistic public spectacles. Roman interrogation methods included red-hot metal rods, whips and the rack — a contraption that distended limbs from their joints. The non-canonical Apocalypse of Peter, a product of this era, features a fierce and sadistic hell in which people are blinded by fire and mangled by wild beasts. Dante’s Divine Comedy has traces of the feudal landscape of fourteenth-century Europe. Lower hell is depicted as a walled city with towers, ramparts, bridges and moats; fallen angels guard the citadel like knights. The Jesuits, who rose to prominence during a time of mass immigration and urban squalor, envisioned an inferno of thousands of diseased bodies 'pressed together like grapes in a wine-press.' It was a claustrophobic hell without latrines, and part of the torture was the human stench."

Hell

What is so special about humanity and our ability to think?

Reflecting on the book "Thinking and Being", by Israeli philosopher Irad Kimhi, associate researcher at Worcester College in Oxford, Steven Methven, argues against a whole tradition of philosophical thought.

"Why is thought so special? Consider the natural world, which consists just of things and how they are: the breeze is warm, the lawn is lush, the bees buzz. Thinking, however, is not only about how things are — the warm breeze and the buzzing bees — but also about how they aren’t. Though the weather is fine, I can think of it being grim — I can think what is false. And while the breeze is warm, I can think, truly now, of many ways that it is not — for instance, chilly — simply by thinking that it is 'not' chilly. When I entertain a falsehood, or consider how things are not, what I think is not anywhere out there in the world. So it seems that thought, which involves what 'is not' as well as what 'is', may be nowhere in nature. In which case, what is it?"

Parricide

Greil Marcus’ book offers insight into the distinctly crass and fleeting modern American dream.

Inspired by Marcus' book "Under the Red White and Blue: Patriotism, Disenchantment and the Stubborn Myth of the Great Gatsby", Jackson Arn reflects for The Point magazine on the seemingly intrinsic connections between F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic, "The Great Gatsby", and American patriotism.

"This little book about another little book wouldn’t be worth the trouble if Marcus weren’t right on the main point: the recent history of the American Dream is a history of people reading The Great Gatsby. To tell stories about wealth, passion, crime and power is to stand in Fitzgerald’s shadow, whether you know it or not. But not all Gatsby-infused art is created equal, and the recent examples, taken together, suggest some disturbing truths: that the pursuit of happiness, celebrated for its own sake and unchecked by duty to family, community or God, leads to a country of three hundred million islands; that, if we’re not at that point yet, we’re pretty damn close; that no country can go on this way for long. Marcus knows this, or at least senses it. But his response, by and large, is to do what previous generations have done: mourn the American Dream so intensely he winds up worshipping it."

American greatness

Analysing the sexual liberty of the Weimar Republic. 

In a world that both celebrates queer sexual freedom yet ruthlessly punishes the slightest perceived infraction, historian Samuel Clowes Huneke reflects for The Point magazine on how we can learn from the homosexual rights movement of 1920s Berlin.

Seduced by respectability

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to lead a life of abstinence?

"The life of the monk is a life of longing, of not yet entirely consummated love for God. The ecstatic eroticism of the Song expresses something of the intensity of the soul’s love story with God." In this personal piece for The Point magazine, Cistercian monk Edmund Waldstein reflects on his love of God, as well as his chosen life of celibacy.

A deeper longing

A marvel that stops us in our tracks only becomes apparent when explained.

"Therein lies the paradox of wonder: it is the beginning of inquiry (Descartes remarks that people deficient in wonder 'are ordinarily quite ignorant'), but the end of inquiry also puts an end to wonder." Lorraine Daston considers the consequences that transformations of wonder have for scientific inquiry.

Wonder and the ends of inquiry

Exploring the late David Graeber's thoughts on why we work.

"His book, Bullshit Jobs, is one of many contributions to this rethinking. Slapdash and anecdotal, it reads like a parody of a pop-business manual, an anarchist take on Charles Duhigg or Malcolm Gladwell." Jonah Galeota-Sprung analysis of the late David Graeber's writings offers as much wisdom now as it did upon publishing in 2019.

Bullshit jobs

A reflection of the worker and the artwork.

Sophie Beck toiled over Joan Miro and his work. She was looking for something worth telling about the Catalunyan artist who kept working without pause from age 19 to 90 — interestingly, it is in this precise detail that she understood how the incomprehensible can also be beautiful. She explains how for The Point magazine.