A child is feeling unwell on a school day. The father, in his typical fashion, insists, ‘You must go to school. School is important, and it’s your duty.’ This rule applies universally and objectively, just like the biological fact that he is the child’s father.
The mother, however, responds differently. ‘Look, he’s clearly not feeling well,’ she says. ‘Why does he have to go to school today? Let him rest!’ Her perspective is situational and relational. Secure in her role as the mother, she can afford to relativise and adapt; she doesn’t need to rely on rigid facts about school or identity.
Yet, in her response, the mother is not entirely free of absolutism. She questions the father’s authority by implying that everything is relative, that truth and rules should adapt to the situation. But this very claim is universal: ‘everything is relative’ is itself a rigid principle, one that she applies without exception to her interactions with the father’s authority. In this way, mother and father are like two sides of the same philosophical coin.
This domestic tension captures two contrasting approaches to morality and knowledge — a tension that runs through the whole of philosophy. In this post, I will look at the philosophies of Immanuel Kant and Martin Heidegger in particular. In Kant, we see the father’s emphasis on certainty and universality; in Heidegger, the mother’s relational, context-sensitive understanding of existence — yet neither without self-contradiction.
Kant: Father of Ethics, Mother of Knowledge
Immanuel Kant’s philosophy embodies the tension between how we know the world (epistemology) and how we should act in it (ethics). In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argues that our knowledge of reality — including the reality of being a child’s father — is inherently subjective, structured by the mind’s own categories like time and space. We don’t know reality ‘as it is’; we know it as it appears to us through our human faculties. Like the mother’s adaptive approach, Kant’s epistemology acknowledges the limits of certainty and embraces a kind of flexibility. Knowledge, for Kant, is filtered through subjective experience, shaped by each person’s cognitive structures.
But in ethics, Kant becomes more like the father in our family scene. He insists on a strict, universal rule: the categorical imperative — ‘Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.’ For Kant, ethics is absolute, transcending individual desires or circumstances. Like the father’s demand that the child go to school because it is the ‘right thing to do’, Kant’s ethics impose an unyielding principle of duty. In Kant’s view, our moral obligations are as objective and necessary as the father’s certainty in his role; they are not subject to personal feelings or situational context.
Heidegger: Father of Knowledge, Mother of Ethics
Martin Heidegger, writing a century later, adopts almost the reverse approach. In Being and Time, Heidegger moves away from subjective knowledge and delves into the question of Being itself. He introduces the concept of Dasein, or ‘being-in-the-world’, which he treats as a shared, universal structure of human existence. Heidegger’s view of Being is impersonal, something that applies to everyone, transcending individual lives. Like the father’s certainty in his ‘biological’ role, Heidegger’s concept of Dasein imposes a universal framework on existence, as if there’s a single ‘natural’ way to understand the nature of Being itself.
Yet, when it comes to ethics, Heidegger is more like the mother in our scenario. Instead of laying down a strict moral code, he calls for authenticity, a deeply personal and relational approach to life. Heidegger’s idea of thrownness — the notion that we are ‘thrown’ into specific contexts, with unique relationships and limitations — highlights the relational nature of existence. To live authentically is to take responsibility for one’s specific circumstances, rather than conforming to external norms. Just as the mother argues that it’s not ‘authentic’ to go to school when you’re sick, Heidegger’s ethics encourage a subjective, compassionate understanding of each situation.
In this way, Heidegger’s ethics reflect a ‘maternal’ morality, rooted in the relational fabric of life. He sees the ethical life as responsive to the individual, adapting to the specificities of each person’s context rather than adhering to universal rules. Heidegger’s ethics lack the rigidity of Kant’s categorical imperative, focusing instead on a kind of moral flexibility that values personal meaning over fixed principles.
Philosophy’s Old Prescriptive Endeavour
The contrast between Kant’s fatherly ethics and Heidegger’s motherly ethics suggests that philosophy, despite often claiming to be purely descriptive, is always prescriptive. Each thinker’s approach to knowledge and ethics reflects unconscious kinship dynamics that are much older than philosophy.
Kant’s ‘maternal’ flexibility in knowledge is countered by his ‘fatherly’ rigidity in ethics, suggesting a world where human understanding is subjective but moral principles are universal. His categorical imperative is like the father’s insistence on attending school — a moral anchor on how the world ‘is’ regardless of personal circumstances. Heidegger, meanwhile, treats Being and knowledge with a fatherly authority, laying down a universal structure, but counters it with a motherly ethics that values authenticity and personal responsibility. Heidegger’s ethics, like the mother’s care, are flexible and relational, emphasising a responsiveness to context rather than strict adherence to universal facts or rules, even if he himself has laid them out.
This brings us back to the origins of philosophy and to Socrates, whom many consider the ‘father’ of the discipline. Yet Socrates himself held a more ambivalent position. On the one hand, he believed that true fulfilment required self-examination, famously declaring, ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’. This statement set a standard for philosophy as a search for how to live well. On the other hand, Socrates knew that he ‘knew nothing’ — or rather, he admitted that he knew nothing about how to live in any absolute sense. This self-awareness reveals philosophy’s essential tension: it claims to guide life yet offers no final answers, remaining instead an endless dialogue, like an old family conversation caught between competing moral perspectives.
Conclusion
Philosophy is the modern, historical expression of a dialogue with no ultimate resolution, a ‘morning fight’ between the opposing interests of two parents — with you, the individual, as their child. Each philosophical position, like each parental perspective, intellectualises its desires, prescribing values and behaviours in ways that often say more about their own needs and fears than about any universal truth. Psychoanalysis, as a science rooted in family dynamics — a realm philosophy has historically overlooked, along with the experiences of children — exposes philosophy’s limitations. It suggests that philosophy, in its quest for objective answers to how we should live, is akin to myth, not to science. Beneath its obsessive pursuit of knowledge, philosophy is less about finding truths and more about reflecting our deepest conflicts and desires.