I am concerned with the differences and the similarities between children of flesh and blood and “brainchildren”, or rather between the purpose of both. My opening contention is that both physical and spiritual propagation amounts to the passing-on of information: in the first case, genetic information, in the second, intellectual information.
Nietzsche, for example, never had any actual children, but he begot many brainchildren, his books, to which he indeed repeatedly referred as his “children”. My actual issue is formulated by him thus:
“Every animal, including also la bête philosophe [the philosophical beast] instinctively strives for the optimal beneficial conditions in which it can let out all its power and attain the strongest feeling of its strength. Every animal in the same instinctual way and with a refined sense of smell that “is loftier than all reason” dislikes any kind of trouble maker or barrier which lies or which could lie in its way to these optimal conditions (I’m not speaking about its path to “happiness” but about its way to power, to action, to its most powerful deeds, and, in most cases, really about its way to unhappiness). Thus, the philosopher dislikes marriage as well as what might persuade him into it—marriage is a barrier and a disaster along his route to the optimal. What great philosopher up to now has been married? Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer—none of these got married. What’s more, we cannot even imagine them married. A married philosopher belongs in a comedy, that’s my principle. And Socrates, the exception, the malicious Socrates, it appears, got married ironically to demonstrate this very principle. Every philosopher would speak as once Buddha spoke when someone told him of the birth of his son, “Rahula has been born to me. A shackle has been forged for me.” (Rahula here means “a little demon”).”
[Genealogy of Morals, III, 7.]
Do not actual children imperil the philosopher’s brainchildren? Does intercourse (in the widest sense) with an actual woman not mean unfaithfulness to Sophia, Wisdom?