Chapter III. Family, love and marriage
The ideal wife and the ideal family
The personality is by definition antagonistic to equality. Equality is the lot of the hoi polloi, the grey masses. For a family woman it is much more difficult to become a personality than for a man. So what is it that makes her a personality, and what makes her the ideal wife?
The natural function of the mother is to give birth, rear and bring up the child. When even one of these components is missing, it naturally deprives the woman of full-fledged motherhood status, no matter which words we use on the everyday level for the one who gave birth, and the other who nursed, and the third who educated the child. (By the way, a woman who doesn’t breastfeed – a common phenomenon among the rich parasites – is not a mother.) The family function of the wife is to support the husband’s social status. These are the functions of the normal wife.
Under normal social conditions the woman has no need of displaying any “heroism” in order to conform to a standard that is basically natural. In Japan, for example, based on those criteria of progress and the meaning of life that I outlined earlier, about 90% of all married women are normal. In societies that are historically doomed, or in those that are at a breaking point of historic development, it is much more difficult to be a normal wife, so in order to be one it is indeed necessary to display character and even heroism. The manifestation of these qualities under abnormal conditions turns a normal wife into an ideal one. There certainly have been many such heroic women in history, but one great name jumps immediately to my mind: Jenny Marx. A wealthy baroness, she gave up the life conforming to her status in that time and dedicated herself to her husband and children. I don’t know of any other great people whom as many troubles and misfortunes befell as the Marx family, and they courageously overcame them all. I think it was made possibly primarily by Jenny who not only brought up three outstanding personalities in her daughters, but also served as support for that titan of mankind that was Karl Marx.
It seems to me that, generally speaking, families that from the outset are well-off materially are quite fragile and not strong. They do not have the man and woman growing into the family together and turning it into an inseparable whole where both parts (husband-wife) dissolve into the whole.[1] We know, however, that everything whole consists of parts. In our case this whole, too, has parts, except they became re-structured: on one side is the husband-wife as a united part, on the other – the children as parts of that same whole which is the family. Even if the children live in some other place, it doesn’t matter. For as long as spiritual unity is preserved, realized through all sorts of contacts, the family is preserved.
I would add to the signs of an ideal wife (in the sense of the ideal this time - not just the norm) one more characteristic that was suggested to me by the image of a woman from the era of Soviet socialism: Rita Kopylova of Riga. This woman bore and raised 10 (!) children and became a Professor (and a Doctor as well) of medical science while preserving ideal relations with her husband. I love to hope that this large family is flourishing still. The quality I want to stress here is this: this woman proved to be more than just a wife, more than just a mother of many children – she became herself a personality, which is extremely rare when a woman has this many children. There have been countless women with many children, but very few of them managed to develop the quality of personality.
I specify: the wife’s quality of personality is formed by that area of activity which transcends the boundaries of family relations, i.e. the profession. Practically every woman has a profession, but few rise to the summits of achievement. Rita Kopylova made Doctor of medical science, which fact is of itself an indicator of independent status in science – in this case medical science. This status singles Kopylova out as a personality.
In my opinion, the female brain has relatively more potential in art and poetry – the delicate ether-matters, so to say. Certain women achieved success in these areas while performing successfully their family functions. As an example I can mention that same Marina Tsvetayeva who was certainly a she-poet out of the ordinary (ordinary ones number in the thousands). She was a personality, but not an ideal wife. Therefore the couple Tsvetayeva-Efron was not an ideal family, and not because of Tsvetayeva, but because of her husband Sergei Efron who was much inferior to her in personality qualities.
This leads us on to yet another topic: just what is an ideal family?
The ideal family is a union of two personalities - not just of husband and wife, father and mother. In my formulation personality is a human being whose activity is directed at the realization of common interests, such as the interests of a people, a state or mankind as a whole. The latter involves the work of a human being who brings something new into the world that did not exist before him. There are only two spheres of human activity where something new can be created: science and technology, and the arts.[2] One can also express himself as a personality in politics (the sphere of social relations), but this applies more to men. If the husband and the wife achieved outstanding results in any of the spheres indicated above, they are personalities.
However, in order for the family to deserve the name ideal, one more equally important component is needed: children, or, more exactly, the quality of the children. The children’s life is manifested in their subsequent activity in society, and ultimately defined by that same criterion applicable in appraisal of individual personalities: what did they do for continuation of mankind? It is not only their educational parameters that can serve as their initial appraisal, but also their moral qualities, of which the most important one is the rejection of unfairness in society.
The third factor of the ideal family is the character of relations between husband and wife. If their relations facilitated the process of each becoming a personality while staying in the family bosom, then this family can be considered ideal.
Necessary to achieve such merging are love that binds the family together and knowledge which makes it ideal. Not all that much, really.
[1] I heard one at a wedding someone wish difficulties to the newlyweds. This philosophical turn was not heard, unfortunately.
[2] In that same Symposium by Plato, the wise Diotima had this to say on the subject: ‘…’poetry’ has a very wide range. After all, everything that is responsible for creating something out of nothing is a kind of poetry; and so all creations of every craft and profession are themselves a kind of poetry, and everyone who practices a craft is a poet.” – Plato. Complete Works, 488. Note: “Poetry” translates poiesis, lit. ‘making’ which can be used for any kind of production or creation.
On Love, Family, and the State
(Philosophical-sociological Essay)