Abstract
In this essay I am concerned to allow families and “thick” communities to be better appreciated as foundational to our human lives and not be perceived as merely derivative. To set about accomplishing this, what I offer is less an argument to this effect than a highlighting of historical and philosophical impediments to seeing matters in this way. I construe these impediments to be deep, influential and not often well-comprehended biases. They grow primarily out of a commitment to individualism that is poorly thought through. I enumerate and comment on a number of these individualist undercurrents, from Newton’s atomism to recent secular existentialism. Later, I suggest that Enlightenment notions of universality and autonomy not only contribute to these “anti-family” biases, but also paradoxically engender a vacuous sort of “commonality” that plays into equally empty notions of the common good. In the interim, however, I draw from both Sellars and Hegel to forward a richer notion of the “individual” that enables us better to appreciate the spiritual life and the central role that families and thick communities play in its constitution and in the constitution of all human life. I conclude with some brief reflections on the importance of empathy and of spiritual families in our contemporary world.
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Notes
- 1.
Once the normative notion of the “good,” as in “common good,” is introduced into our reflections, even more issues arise. These vexing issues include regarding relations between the rights some say that individuals have as individuals, the foundational and intermediary positions occupied by families in fostering and transmitting human values, and those shared, thus allegedly “common” moral aspirations we are so often enjoined to pursue.
- 2.
It is a spiritual notion of the person that I wish to adumbrate. I believe that some deep failure of understanding has prevented spiritual conceptions of human life from flourishing and the unavoidably central and sustaining role of the family from being sufficiently appreciated. This has allowed secular conceptions of the person to proliferate. If we more fully comprehend our spiritual nature, by no means an easy task, we will contribute to a more insightful understanding of the vital importance of families and communities. We will also achieve a better understanding of the various ways in which the notion of a common good can serve us well or serve us poorly.
- 3.
Sellars distinguishes between a manifest and a scientific image of human life in the world (Sellars 1971, p. 6). It is in terms of the manifest image that humans become aware of themselves and thus become human in the first place. Sellars asserts that having a conception of itself is an essential feature of humanity. Were human beings to have a significantly different image of themselves, they would be human beings of a significantly different sort. On this Sellarsian view, the claim that human beings are special creations is most fundamentally supported by the fact that to be human one must have encountered oneself, but to encounter oneself one must already be human. This suggests an extraordinary difference between the pre-human and the human. Although he ultimately rejects the claim, Sellars believes that one is driven towards a holistic account in which the arrival of the human is much like an extraordinary event, virtually inexplicable.
- 4.
This is perhaps most clearly seen in Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals (Kant 1949).
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Erickson, S.A. (2014). Attacks on the Family East and West: Evidence for the Erosion of a Common Good. In: Solomon, D., Lo, P. (eds) The Common Good: Chinese and American Perspectives. Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture, vol 23. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7272-4_3
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