FAMILY STRUCTURE AND THE HEGELIAN INTERPRETATION

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyse family in its trans-cultural pattern using Hegelian interpretation. Using the method of exposition and analysis, this paper shows how the human family is not mere human convention but a determined natural design through which natural safeguards for offsprings are guaranteed and human societies are founded. This paper studies Hegel’s interpretation to family and family love as it expresses the structure of Geist (Spirit). Thus the family is the externalisation of the inner structure of man. The family’s status is well known as a moral imperative, where man learns language which distinguishes him from the rest of animals and constitutes the essence of man as a species. In other words, it is in the family setting that man is humanised. According to Hegel, the symbolic transcendence of death is obvious through rituals of burial when the family takes upon itself the final duties of consigning the dead individual to the sphere of abstract negativity, thus preventing him from falling prey to the unconscious forces of mere nature. Unfortunately, Plato tried to abolish the family in favour of his political revolution. On appraisal, this study shows that Plato failed to realise that such structures as the family which has existed trans-culturally cannot be conventional but deep rooted in human nature and thus cannot easily be obliterated. Hegel maintains that just as the individual is shown to be immanently contradictory in terms of being, as both self-sufficient and dependent upon others, so too is the family. Not only is the family both a self-sufficient unity and a dependent part of a greater whole, but also, the aim of its unity which is the cultivation of self-sufficient individuals, is achieved only by its dissolution into larger body of family, the civil society.