Chapter III. Family, love and marriage
It requires two noble hearts
For Love to bless humanity,
But to be a thing apart
They must make a precious three.
Goethe (Faust)
To remain unmarried despite one’s will is a great
misfortune; to do so by one’s own will is a great fault.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
The history of mankind spans about three million years, yet its leap-like development only falls into the latest five thousand years. The formation of the family, which became one of the most important landmarks in mankind’s development, went through different stages. Frederick Engels described and systemized these stages better than anyone in his famous work The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. In non-systemized form, though, all family forms indicated by Engels (blood-relative, punalual, monogamous) are mentioned, albeit in a different terminology, in the pages of the Bible, which book can serve as the original reference for tracing the development of human history in the ages B.C. and in the early years A.D. Through many centuries the Biblical commandments served as the foundation for family relations in Christendom, representing a code of rules and regulations for the monogamous family. These rules, including those in the form of commandments, are constantly reminded by contemporary theologians, philosopher-ethicists and also sociologists who are extremely worried by the modern crisis of family relations in capitalist societies. Their actuality is determined by the fact that the writers of the Bible managed even in those ancient times to grasp the essence and importance precisely of the monogamous family for mankind’s development, and the popular faith in these rules played a substantial role in regulating the family.
This is even more evident in Chinese history, where detailed rules for specifically the family life (Chen Yimen) were adopted during the Tang dynasty era (6th-9th centuries), and complemented and re-worked in the later epochs. For example, during the Ming dynasty (late 14th – late 17th centuries) family relations were regulated by Zheng's Family Rules, as well as the Summing of Family Rules.[1] I draw your attention to the Chinese experience just in order to stress that in China for thousands of years the forms of, and conduct of the family were governed by the state. In Europe, on the other hand, prior to the start of capitalist development family relations were regulated mainly by the church, which leaned not so much on a precise code of rules as on the general principles and recommendations contained in the Old and the New Testaments. However, even in the bourgeois era, when legislative acts of the state started including family affairs, they dealt ordinarily with the property aspect of marriage, not with the moral obligations of the married couple. This would appear to be a minor nuance in the sphere of family life in the Orient and in the West, yet it produced cardinally different consequences which are now experienced by societies in the West and in the Orient.
So, we return to the questions raised in the Introduction: what is the essence of family? What is it about? Why is it that precisely monogamy, and not any other form of the family, has been and still is the promising one in the historical perspective? In order to answer these questions, we need to immerse ourselves once again in philosophy.
[1] See: Fang Xiaofen. History and Characteristic of Family and Clan Regulations.
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On Love, Family, and the State
(Philosophical-sociological Essay)