Polytropy

Index to this series

Executive summary (added September 11, 2018):

1.

The society at the nucleus of the family is temporary, ending with the death of one of the two members.

2.

The family has a life-cycle, with three phases: (1) before children; (2) after children, but before they have free will; (3) after the children have free will.

3.

The community consisting of husband and wife is now a society. It was not a society when a marriage was arranged by the groom or the groom’s father and the father of the bride. The non-social aspect of a marriage survives in the custom of formally “giving away” the bride.

4.

If today a bride and groom do not quite recognize themselves as forming a society, they may come to do so in time.

5.

Contraception helps clarify that a marriage is normally for the sake of having children.

6.

In order to grow up and leave the nursery, the child must be educated. The work of this is both the child’s and its teachers’. Parents must also allow the child to leave the nursery and join their society.

7.

There are three possible needs, and they are distinct: (1) to have a baby, (2) to have a child, (3) to have a grown-up child.

8.

Any of those three needs is fulfilled by an act of will; there is no parental “instinct”—not a scientific term anyway, though it is used popularly for an appetite or desire.

9.

Born without free will, we are not born in chains either, since this would mean suppression of a will that didn’t exist.

The last chapter was called “The Family As a Mixed Community,” because the family consists of both a society and a non-social part, called the nursery. Now we are looking at “The Family As a Society.” We are not in contradiction, but are in the flux that Heraclitus observed in all existence (24. 62). The inmates of the nursery normally grow and join the society of their parents: the family as a whole is a society in this sense.

Altınova bazaar, Wednesday, September 13, 2017