The Family - Encyclopedia #518-522

Robbert Veen's Hegel Podcast

When Hegel speaks about the family, he has a very specific form of family life in mind. We call that the petty bourgeois family. In our time we can no longer consider the family essential as an economic entity, nor the larger community of blood relatives. The organization of economic life has limited the various functions that the family can fulfill.

This has meant, for example, that in the family the personal relationship of a sexual and affective nature has become the most important. With in addition a permanent function in the education of children.

However, this does not mean that we can ignore Hegel's views as historically irrelevant. After all, Hekel tries to express in the form of the concept what is essential for the realization of freedom. His question is: what is necessary for the moral construction of common life. The family thus has a necessary function in the realization of such a community. So we must read the texts about the family from our own perspective that hates, that of the realization of freedom.

According to Hegel, man is more than just a legal person or a moral subject. Man is involved in social relationships in a substantial way. The spirit of a community is the condition of morality, and without morality law cannot stand. The social community is able to give a concrete determination to the good, that is to say the unity of law and welfare. The family is the first and immediate form in which the unity of right and welfare is realized. In the family, man is no longer an abstraction. Only within the community do people really exist. The primary situation of communal life is the family.

Love is the element that guarantees the unity of the general and the particular. In the family I do not exist as a separate individual, but I am part of a living community. That community is held together by trust and love. And such unity is not primarily understood, but felt. Family members faithfully care for each other and are emotionally connected. In the family it is not about laws and not about a rational structure of living together. Hence, dislike says that this is about the "individual in his natural generality."

Natural sexual differentiation and forms of spontaneous affectivity is not just a natural given. It is about the natural generality, but it exists as a spiritual reality. The physical duality of the sexes is being transformed into a spiritual unity. Love is reason in% of the feeling. It is unity in the multiplicity. If we take sexuality as purely physical, it remains characterized by a mutual outward goat.

The mind is unable to think of this union in marriage and the multiplicity in the physical distinct union in unity with each other. However, human reason is capable of this.

Love is a paradox according to Hegel. I give up my own independence and now exist in unity with others. That loss is experienced by me as the answer to a desire. It is satisfying that as an individual I can nevertheless give up my independence in order to derive the value and meaning of my existence from my involvement with others.