溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
Is the Debt of Love a Child Owes a Parent, in Principle, Never Fully Payable?
Can love between two unequal people still be called friendship, in the same sense as love between equals?
A child could never repay a parent in full measure.
Aristotle's insight into an unrepayable love led to different conclusions in later ethics. The Roman Cicero, in On Duties, used it to elevate duty to one's parents as the most sacred of all duties. Modern contractarian ethics, by contrast, questioned the very concept of an unrepayable debt, arguing that relationships should be reconstructed on mutual consent instead. Is the parent-child bond a special category unlike friendship — or can it, like every relationship, be equally reconstructed? This question remains open even now.
Even today, when equal relationships are the ideal, this insight — that the parent-child bond alone does not quite fit that frame — still holds.
Aristotle framed friendship as something between equals, but left the parent-child bond as an exception.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
Aristotle framed friendship as something between equals, but left the parent-child bond as an exception. A parent is the very cause of a child's existence, so however much the child repays, it can never match the scale of that origin. I find, oddly, comfort in this cold observation. Not being able to repay in full is not because my love falls short, but because this love was never a debt measurable by repayment in the first place. Only in admitting I cannot repay it do I finally feel released.
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