Dialectics of Father and Son

Dialectics of Father and Son

The dialectical method employed in this passage is used to draw some rather specious claims, in my opinion. There are some contradictions to the logic of the arguments created that the author seems to embrace as proof of is assertions. First, the author asserts that the father sees his death in the life of the son, and that the son sees his father's death in his own life, too. This occurs because the father devotes his life to the son's. Already, there is a flaw apparent in this dialectic; it presupposes that the father devotes his life to the son and that this constitutes an end to life. Not all fathers automatically devote themselves to their sons, and few fathers -- if any -- actually completely devote their lives to the lives of their sons to the point where it constitutes a literal sacrifice of life. Such a statement about relationships, divine though they may be, simply cannot be borne out by reason or observation. But even allowing for the altruistic hypothetical of a father living completely and solely for the son, this still does not necessarily constitute a sacrifice. There is also the philosophical problem of choice. If choice exists, then the father is choosing to devote his life to his son and it can hardly carry the negative and oppressive stigma of death that the author attributes to it. If choice does not exist, then the father's life was always and already subject to some other will, and there is no real change with the birth of his son.

At first, it seems like this might be answered by the next step of the dialectical argument, which asserts that the son is also the continuation of the father's life specifically because the father's life was sacrificed to the son. That is, the father's devotion to the son constitutes death for the father, meaning the father can only perceive this death through the birth of the son (there is a problem already with this claim; there are many other scenarios that might force a person generally and a father specifically with their own mortality, but assuming for a moment that this perfectly devoted father exits in an isolated bubble with his son, we will continue). Because the father sees his death as attached to the coming to life of the son, the son's life is also representative, or so the author claims, of the father's return to life, and even his immortality. The logical leaps required to make this claim are legion. First, it must be assumed that the father sees his son's life as a continuation of his own because the son's life caused (through requiring sacrifice) the father's death. This is akin to saying that if a car runs over and kills a cat, the car -- as the agent of death -- somehow takes on the life of the cat. The coincidence of causation is not enough, to most minds, to imply a continual relationship of the sort ascribed to fathers and sons here. The author of this tract goes even further, though, not only asserting that this relationship will be automatically perceived by the father, but that it actually exists, without offering a shred of metaphysical argument beyond referring to Plato. He then emphasizes that the individuals that make up a relationship -- in this case, the father and the son -- are not real, but rather that only the invisible relationship itself is. The question of how the relationship can exist without individuals to share it is not really addressed. The idea that the relationship defines the individual more than vice versa is not new, but it has never seemed incredibly rational, either -- no one is a member of only one relationship; even at a specific moment we are sons/daughters, mothers/father, lovers, students, teachers, philosophers, employees, etc., etc., etc. Though the immortality and divinity attributed to relationships here is nice, it is hardly the result of a logical train of thought.