kinship

Freedom and the Unloved

Imagine you could go back in time tens of thousands of years, to a time that represents the vast majority of human existence as a species. You find yourself alone in the wilderness, self-sufficient, when a band of hunter-gatherers spots you. What happens next?

Assuming they don’t kill you, they are likely to offer you a gift.

This seems paradoxical. To a modern person like you, a gift is a gesture of genuine hospitality—something you can accept and then continue living your independent life, perhaps trading with these people occasionally. However, in this ancient world, nothing could be further from the truth. For this world is ruled by kinship, and to engage peacefully with you means that you must be their relative somehow. The gift is an expression of ‘love,’ traditionally understood: to refuse it is to insult your brothers and sisters; to accept it is to enter into debt for the love received.

Indeed, in this world, there is no such thing as freedom as you understand it. You are either kin—bound by reciprocal debt and stories of blood relation—or you are something else entirely—a god or an evil spirit. So, naturally, you accept the gift. And then they begin to search for who your relatives might be, or invent some for you. Perhaps they invite you to a ritual dance, where you will be initiated and given a proper identity. You will be a brother, a daughter, or perhaps a husband and father. But you will not be ‘free.’ There is not even a word for it.

The Unloved

Fast forward to about 4,000 years ago. You land in a place no longer populated by nomadic bands, but by larger tribes of farmers and herders. Now, you can refuse the gift—and live—but at the cost of becoming another exploited animal.

This Indo-European context is where the root pri- arises, which forms the etymological foundation of words like ‘free.’ As before, pri- means to be loved and tied to your kin, not independence. However, now it becomes necessary to name this condition, because for the first time, there is something to compare it with: slavery.

With slavery, a new category of human emerged: the unloved—those not belonging to a tribe or family, but captured in war or by conquest. Slavery was not an unfortunate byproduct of civilization, but the other way around: it was the condition that enabled the growth of cities and empires. It allowed societies to expand beyond the limits of love, to extract labor from those who did not require respect or reciprocity. People like you.

Hence, as a slave, you helped build an empire, such as Egypt or Persia, where the concept of freedom began to evolve into something more transactional, something you might achieve one day. By becoming ‘free,’ you were restored to a place of belonging. You could accept the gift of marriage and start a family within one of the local tribes that paid tribute to the Emperor or the Pharaoh. And so you remained in debt—both to your relatives and to your symbolic Father.

The Unloved, Loved

In Ancient Greece, the concept of freedom took a definitive turn. Consider what two Spartans—Sperthias and Bulis—told a Persian general who offered them comfort and favor under the Great King:

You know well how to be a slave, but you, who have never tasted freedom (eleutheria), do not know whether it is sweet or not. Were you to taste it, you would not advise us to fight for it with spears—but with axes.
(Herodotus, Histories 7.135)

There is so much new in this passage. First, the Spartans are refusing a gift and telling the general—not an actual slave—that he is, effectively, a slave for accepting it. Second, they are inviting him to taste something different, which they call eleutheria. This is a gesture of recognition: if the general felt as they do, he would act differently. And third, this feeling is defined precisely as not being ruled.

This defiance of traditional authority changes how your Greek masters relate to you. Imagine you end up serving a father alongside his wife, children, and other slaves. This man is eleutheros, a freeborn Athenian. Again, this means he belongs in the city: he is able to speak and vote because he was born legitimately to Athenian parents. But it also means that no other man rules over him like a father.

So, one day, this man decides to free you. Now, you are not returning to a state of belonging—to being ‘loved.’ That kind of belonging is as degrading as the Persian general’s condition. Instead, there is a recognised state of individuality, however imperfect. You remain bound in some ways to your master, but as a freedman, you are someone Athenian men identify with. You are valued and given a place in Athenian society.

The same is true for the metic—a freeborn Hellene who does not belong in Athens, but who is accepted for their contributions, perhaps as a tradesman or craftsman. The polis is not an extended household or a tribe. It is a public space where lineage begins to dissolve, where citizens are held together not by descent but by law, debate, and mutual visibility. Something fundamental has shifted. For the first time in human experience, freedom as liberation no longer excludes you from the circle of love and recognition. You can now be unbound without being cast out.

The Dog Is Your Father

In Plato’s Euthydemus, a young man named Ctesippus is trapped by a sophist (paraphrased from Plat. Euthyd. 298e):

You have a dog? — Yes, a mischievous one.
And the dog is a father? — Of puppies, yes.
So the dog is a father. And you have a father? — Yes.
So you have a father, and the dog is a father. Therefore, the dog is your father.

Plato’s Euthydemus is, on the surface, a comedy. It is full of logical fallacies, verbal gymnastics, and the kind of wild, circular reasoning that seems designed less to enlighten than to bewilder. Readers often come to it as one of the “lighter” dialogues, a playful satire of sophists and their absurd arguments. One of those arguments, perhaps the most absurd of all, is the one you have just read.

But Plato is not likely to be joking. He himself took these arguments seriously in future dialogues, such as the Sophist, the Parmenides, and the Theaetetus, where he confronted the deep ambiguities of identity, falsehood, and non-being. What begins in Euthydemus as an attempt to ridicule his opponents, the sophists, becomes the foundation of a philosophical crisis in Plato’s later work.

So in this tentative blog series, I begin by taking the statement seriously: what if the dog really is your father? Or is the father your dog? Euthydemus may be a comedy, but comedy is not necessarily the opposite of seriousness. It is, often, another path to what we cannot say directly, especially when it involves our parents and kin.

The structure of Euthydemus reinforces this reading. Socrates recounts the dialogue to Crito, who tells Socrates that he is worried about his own son being educated by sophists. Meanwhile, Cleinias, the beautiful boy at the center of the discussion, is positioned between the sophists and Socrates like a child caught between competing fathers. This layering is significant: Socrates is not merely defending philosophy from sophistry; he is also, in a deeper sense, trying to justify fatherhood itself. Socrates defends the unity of being, wisdom, and kinship against a rhetorical hydra that spawns a bewildering multiplicity of “father-heads.” (Plat. Euthyd. 297c) Who is a father—or perhaps, who is Father?

Indeed, in Ancient Greek, as in many languages, terms like “father” are used both to denote a specific individual and to name a general role. Children (big and small) don’t usually say, “my father is in the kitchen,” let alone “a father is in the kitchen.” They say, “Father/Dad is in the kitchen,” and we, as their interlocutors, are happy to respond, “Tell Dad I said hello.” But this means that Dad could be anyone’s father, including ours! Could Plato’s philosophy — and by extension, all of philosophy — be an attempt to come to terms with human kinship? In the Euthydemus, the sophists effectively tell us that we are fatherless, because if the child’s father is Father, then ours cannot be Father too.

So who is our father, then? The dog, perhaps. And maybe now we can understand why Socrates always swore “by the Dog!”

The State and its Blood Ties

Moving to Finland and acquiring Finnish nationality were, for me, decisions I made freely, choosing my own path as an individual. However, when I notified my country of origin, it didn’t take it very well. Spain gave me an ultimatum: sign a declaration of loyalty to the fatherland or lose my nationality.

That’s right — according to Spanish law (Article 24.1 of the Civil Code), citizens who acquire a foreign nationality such as the Finnish must declare, within three years, their intention to retain Spanish nationality, or else they’ll lose it. In other words, Spain treats my decision not as that of a free and responsible adult entering into social contracts — as claimed by the liberal spirit of its Constitution — but as the betrayal of a son abandoning his parents, or a married man abandoning his wife. This revealed something important about our institutions.

As can be seen in that same article of the Civil Code, Spain tolerates dual nationality with many Latin American countries. This is due to historical ties that go back to conquest and colonization — essentially, an extended family forged by baptism and the sword. Spain also tolerates dual nationality with Portugal, though in this case for reasons of neighborhood, culture, and religious affinity. But my acquiring Finnish nationality seemed to Spain like marrying outside the family. Finland, after all, belongs to the European Union, a union of liberal democracies inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution. Spain’s reaction, however, seemed closer to the mentality of the Ancien Régime, clinging to a sense of dynastic loyalty rather than embracing the contractual freedom of modern citizenship.

To add irony to injury, Spain automatically claims my daughter as Spanish — a child born in Finland to a Finnish mother — while threatening to disown me, the very one who gives the child her “Spanish blood.” This reveals the depth of this logic of kinship: to be a son or a citizen is fundamentally a contract imposed by nature — a threefold contradiction in terms.

Historical Origins of the Family-State

For most of human history, individuality was unthinkable. People were subjects of gods and rulers, and before that, they were children of their clan or family. The Enlightenment began to challenge these inherited authorities, dismantling divine kingship and the dominance of the Church. But even Enlightenment thinkers, although they imagined the citizen as an adult capable of signing existential contracts, could not fully break away from this old legacy. The state proposed by Rousseau and others remained, in many ways, an expanded household.

Rousseau’s philosophy is filled with this psychological tension between family and individual. On one hand, Rousseau imagined a kind of natural anarchy as the true condition of man. He saw early humans as solitary, self-sufficient beings, free from the family obligations that would later alienate them. Yet at the same time, Rousseau proposed a solution that was, paradoxically, a return to the very structure he seemed to critique. His concept of the “general will” was not a community of freely associating individuals, but a moral collective, a reinvented family. He effectively asked people to give up their individual freedom and dissolve themselves into the will of the collective, promising that in doing so they would recover their true liberty.

This tension began to resolve itself when, in 1793, a thinker like William Godwin, writing in the wake of the French Revolution, articulated the first formal expression of anarchism. Godwin asked the obvious question: if we are truly adults, why do we remain under the parental authority of Father or Mother State? Why should we stay married to someone we never chose? Godwin extended his critique of the state to a critique of marriage itself, recognizing that both are institutions that impose an arbitrary and visceral loyalty, even when they appear to be based on a contract.

In a way, this was merely the latest chapter in a deeper and longer historical struggle: the gradual and relentless questioning of the family, from the divine authority of the Church challenged by the Reformation, to the fall of kings, and finally to the state itself.

The Test of Experience

Today, for most people, life seems to unfold within a legitimate and modern framework of nation-state. They feel part of an existence that appears contractual, rational, one that — in theory — has left behind the arbitrariness of the past: the tyranny of kings, the impositions of the Church, or the forced bonds of family lineage. But this illusion quickly fades the moment a man — or a virus — puts the system to the test.

When I decided to acquire Finnish nationality, I did so as an adult seeking happiness, but also with the desire to break these historical chains. Yet in the eyes of the Spanish state, and in part my own parents, this was seen as a betrayal: as if, by becoming the “child” of another nation, I had also become the “husband” of another home, deserting the exclusive bond that my ancestors had intended to maintain with me and my descendants.

The parallel with Godwin’s critique of marriage is striking. He did not reject the free bond between people, but rather the institutionalization that turns spouses into each other’s exclusive property — just as states turn their citizens into the exclusive children of one “fatherland.” In both cases, absolute loyalty is demanded, and signing other contracts is condemned as an unforgivable infidelity.

And so, almost ironically, my action aligns with the ideal of freedom that Godwin and Wollstonecraft defended over two hundred years ago. Clearly, this is not a rejection of cooperation or human bonds, but a refusal to let those bonds be dictated by a hypocritical ideal of kinship and “nature.” My choice to marry and naturalize in Finland was, at heart, a practical affirmation that the truest bonds do not spring from blood or coercion.

The ‘real’ father

Daughter: “What if you’re not my real dad? Like, what if someone else is my actual dad?”

Dad: “Why do you say that? What made you think of this?”

Daughter: “I don’t know… I just think I’d feel sad if you weren’t my real dad. I’d begin to like the other guy, even if I didn’t know him. He’d feel like part of me.”

Dad: “Even if that other guy was someone you didn’t like? Or just some random man, like that one sitting over there on the bus?”

Daughter: “Yeah, I think so.”

Dad: “That’s interesting. Do you think having conceived you makes someone special?”

Daughter: “Maybe… like he’d be part of me.”

I just had a similar conversation with my 9 year-old daughter. It got me thinking about the layers of meaning we ascribe to parenthood, biology, and identity. My daughter’s reflection, akin to daydreaming, reflects something profound: an almost magical importance attributed to biology, even in relationships that have no direct emotional or experiential basis. Where does this come from? How do biology, culture, and psychology shape the way we perceive kinship?

The Paradox of Discovery

My daughter has two step-siblings who have a different father. This might be related to why she suddenly thought of her origins in this conscious way—besides the fact that her father is interested in these topics! If this wasn’t the case, these thoughts would probably be more repressed.

It’s fascinating how the mere possibility of a different biological connection suddenly introduces a strange emotional complexity. Why would someone we’ve never met, whose existence is entirely hypothetical, feel so significant to a child? It’s not as though the biological connection itself provides tangible love, care, or support. And yet, for my daughter, the knowledge of a biological link would be enough to create a bond—or at least a sense of its necessity.

My daughter’s thoughts may have been influenced by her relationship with her two step-siblings, whose father—someone she doesn’t particularly like— is indirectly present in our lives. Still, she told me she would feel a connection to him if he were her biological father. This highlights the symbolic power of biology: even someone she dislikes, or a stranger, could become likeable simply through the idea of shared origins.

Biology or culture?

There is an interesting biological angle to consider. Research on epigenetics suggests that some traits or tendencies can be shaped by the experiences of previous generations. While speculative, it’s possible that family history leaves a subtle imprint that influences how we perceive relationships. Could this explain why children sometimes feel a mysterious connection to biological relatives, even those they’ve never met? Perhaps—though the cultural and psychological layers of kinship are undoubtedly more influential.

Humans are cultural beings, and kinship is fundamentally a linguistic phenomenon. Anthropologists have shown that many societies define kinship through social roles rather than genetic ties. Among the Trobriand Islanders, for example, the mother’s brother often plays a central role in raising children, overshadowing the biological father. However, the biological link remains crucial. Indeed, children are not expected to call their uncle, father, or mother by their personal name, but by a term of kinship whose meaning (father, mother, uncle) relates to the facts of reproduction.

A Child’s Developing Sense of Origins

Reflecting on our conversation, I’m reminded of Jean Laplanche’s psychoanalytic theories. Laplanche argued that children are constantly interpreting the ‘enigmatic messages’ they receive from adults. These messages are unconscious, sexual, seductive. My daughter’s feelings toward these hypothetical biological fathers might thus be less about her biological past and more about her efforts to construct a coherent story that shapes her future and that of her descendants. For her, the idea of a “biological father” fills a gap in a narrative having to do with the facts of reproduction, which will condition the way she conducts her life and how she will go about having children of her own.

This interpretation resonates with the broader question of how and why human beings make sense of the world. The search for origins is not just biological but deeply psychological, tied to the human need to endure beyond our lifetime.

Concealed Ovulation and Paternal Uncertainty

Another fascinating aspect of human kinship is the evolutionary ambiguity of paternity. Unlike many animals, humans have concealed ovulation, meaning men cannot be certain about their biological offspring without modern technology. This has likely shaped human reproductive strategies, encouraging long-term pair bonding and social fatherhood rather than opportunistic mating.

In this context, it’s worth asking: do women have an unconscious awareness of their choice of a father for their children? This is relevant to the question of biological origins and the child’s theory of themselves. Her real father is the father their mother unconsciously (or semi-consciously) chose, not the one whose role was culturally assigned, or the man who ended up cooperating with their mother in raising the child.

This introduces the psychoanalytic element again: the daughter has inherited her mother’s ‘Jocasta complex’ of seeking a father through her children. As I speculate, this may have to do with the fact that we are self domesticated animals: we strive to control our offspring’s reproductive choices so as to maximise our descendants. This phylogenetic process is probably more effective if it remains unconscious.

The Psychological Weight of Parentage

Ultimately, my daughter’s reaction highlights the deeply symbolic nature of parenthood. Biology might play a role, but the feelings she describes—of sadness, love, and connection—are shaped by her developing sense of self and the cultural meanings attached to family. Parenthood, as humans experience it, is a fascinating interplay of biology, culture, and psychology.