Fatherhood: Familiar, but undefined.

Before my son was born (nearly three years ago) I showed very little interest in children. I was not 'anti-', just indifferent in the way that I am still indifferent about, say, Nascar racing, clubbing, or (I apologize to my academic friends) wine-tasting. On a glorious late afternoon after I got my flu-shoot I was walking along the Brouwersgracht (see here for a picture, but imagine less leaves on the trees), grateful for the lack of rain and thinking about various deadlines. When I walked by a crowded playground (see here, but imagine lots of children), I stopped and looked at the kids absorbed in their play. Before I knew it I was filled with joy, fatigue and innumerable number of other recently familiar feelings. After a moment's immersion in the scene and the accompanying feelings, it occurred to me that some kind of associative mechanism had done its work.

While I have an impossible-to-find publication that argues there are fatal problems in Hume's account of the associative mechanism, I never doubted that we do associate. But this may have been the first time I felt the mechanism's existence as a kind of brute force that could overwhelm a prior disposition otherwise. But this realization did not please me; rather, I was reminded of another fact--I completely lack a vocabulary for the recently familiar feelings that accompany the recurring mixed joy-fatigue state. (Not all of these are joy.) Echoing Socratic midwifery, Hume famously describes the fate of his philosophical works with parent-child metaphors, but it occured to me that many of the  philosophers (e.g., Plato, Hobbes, Spinoza, Hume,  Adam Smith, Nietzsche) that I have been thinking about during the last fifteen years, or so, died childless (or at least without acknowledging their children). A few of them had very intense experiences tutoring young men, but their accounts of the passions  do not offer me the concepts to name the feelings. Reading Rawls or other more recent philosophers and economist hasn't helped. Has, say, feminist philosophy made a difference on this score? It ought to, so I would love to hear from informed readers.

As it happens, I just read George Eliott's Middlemarch. I suspect that the novel made me more aware of this particular gappiness in my ability to account for my emotions because so many other kind of feelings are described and shown with such unerring accuracy, not just with sympathy, but also irony and an anatomical profundity. But the novel does not offer glimpses of fatherhood. For some reason I doubt that reading up on the latest neuro-scientific brain-scanning evidence nor a re-read of The Red and the Black or, say, The Sheltering Sky will fill the gap.