Don’t worry; I’m on break now, so at some point I will post something other than a quote. But, until then, from the third essay of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality, in which he’s discussing the importance of the “ascetic ideal”:
Thus the philosopher abhors marriage, together with all that might persuade him to it,—marriage as hindrance and catastrophe on his path to the optimum. Which great philosopher, so far, has been married? Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer—were not; indeed it is impossible to even think about them as married. A married philosopher belongs to comedy, that is my proposition: and that exception, Socrates, the mischievous Socrates, appears to have married ironice, simply in order to demonstrate this proposition.
I just love the idea—particularly in light of having recently read the Symposium—of Socrates getting married ironically (the world’s first hipster?).
Emily Rutherford 