For the last several years, Susan and I have been collaborating on a philosophy of parenting. It is an application of a more general philosophy, and that philosophy is the instauration of an intuitive faith which is the substance of our marriage — the heart of our shared enworldment. (For background see the autobiographical endnote.)

This parenting philosophy (like the general philosophy and all its various applications) is a relationship-centered philosophy.

The job of a parent is the intentional development of a parent-child relationship from one of inequality and dependence to one of equality and independence. Within this relational matrix (the essence of matrix) — within this social womb — an adult personality takes form, in stages, from relative passivity to active partnership in configuring the relationship. Adulthood is achieved when from this process, a new adult emerges who is capable of equality relations with the parent and with others, and of performing the job of parent.

Parenting is a strange craft.

In every craft a crafter collaborates with a material until a work is formed and fully actualized, often, in the process transforming the crafter. But in parenting, what is actualized is a fellow-crafter. Parent craft begets parent craft.

What makes the craft of parenting so challenging, fascinating and unnerving is that the process of crafting iteratively changes its own conditions and inner logic, often radically. It is like a game whose object is to transform the game itself; and with with each move, the game and the rules by which the game is played are reinvented.

Susan gave this philosophy an elegantly self-descriptive name: Raise-to-Relate.

Autobiographical endnote:

“…that philosophy is the instauration of an intuitive faith which is the substance of our marriage — the heart of our shared enworldment.”

This enworlding faith began forming the minute Susan and I met and began fighting about religion.

I was a standard-issue spiritual-but-not-religious liberal materialist with a rebellious curiosity about religious understandings. I grew up in UU milieu. UUs prided themselves on religious tolerance, but that tolerance seemed both incurious and impotent. Even at ten years old, it was obvious to me that these UUs lacked all means of effective intolerance. Wherever they had the power to pull it off, they were more than eager to suppress opposition. The primary locus of this suppressive power, of course, was with youth. Even the faintest trace of intolerance would not be tolerated. And as I got older, beginning with a conclusion that religion is something to tolerate, and never seriously questioning or challenging that premise, struck me as a mark of shallowness, immaturity and boringness.

Susan was a lapsed Catholic on a mission to recover her faith and reenchant her disenchanted world. Growing up, she was a strange child, and was persecuted by scandalized nuns for the heretical mystical rituals she invented and taught on the playground. College shattered many of her naive beliefs about the world, and her religion shattered with it. She wandered into light libertinism for a few years, but quickly became disgusted and demoralized by it, and had begun systematically reforming her religious life to get back in order. Disenchantment is relative, though, and, by my standards, Susan was still so saturated with enchantment that her being hit me like a heroic dose of acid. Her weirdness and her discipline were magically alien.

Within our first half-dozen clashes she turned my own intellectual conscience against my facile utilitarian morality with a simple devastating appeal: “You can certainly argue utilitarianism, but does it account for the intensity of your disgust toward immorality? Do you really care that much about the smooth functioning of the social order? Really?” I was used to butting heads with philosophical opponents, but Susan hit from the heart. She won that round decisively and permanently.

We have been locked in machloket l’shem shamayim ever since.

Whatever I learn is set in our marriage crucible, and whatever I say or make pours from its lip. My philosophy comes from something deeper than philosophy. It can be expressed generally, but it can also be focused into defined domains of activity like design or parenting, and perhaps this is where it becomes most comprehensible.