Metaphysics of the Family

[In_Spiration]

I’m mentally toying with this, so outside opinions are welcome. Keep in mind, I’m basing this on Aristotelian-Thomistic terminology.

The family is the primary human being of the human person. The father is its form; the mother, its matter; the child, its substance. The essence of this individual unit of being is family, which provides the substance of mankind.

In terms of metaphysics, substance is the most fundamental category of being, and any individual substance can be abstractly divided into form and matter. The former, substantial form, provides specificity, while the latter individuates that specificity with material particularity. The marriage of these two culminates in the individuated reproduction of the species itself. That is, consummation of marriage reflects the form of a man and thus reproduces a material image of the species. (Marriage, represented by individual offspring, is indissoluble. The similarity of root meanings between ‘indissoluble’ and ‘individual’ is perhaps telling.)

The father begets his own image by entering into union with the mother and providing his form (what she doesn’t alone have to give) within her matter (what he doesn’t alone have to give). This culminates in the transcendent and immanent being of Man through a son or daughter. (Side note: Interestingly, though it’s an evolutionary adaptation to assure paternity, fathers typically care a lot about having children who resemble them.)

The Holy Trinity is a sort of family of divine Persons sharing one and the same substance; hence, I find this stuff metaphysically intriguing. (The Father begets the Son, Who becomes a species with the image and likeness of God.) I would expand on all of this, but I’ll let brevity leave extra room for wider discussion. I haven’t read Theology of the Body yet, and I understand it’s relevant, so I’ll have to get on that some time.

 

[Katholish]

The family is the primary human being of the human person. The father is its form; the mother, its matter; the child, its substance. The essence of this individual unit of being is family, which provides the substance of mankind.

The notions of matter and form cannot be applied as you have done. First of all, “The family is the primary human being of the human person.” is a non-sensical sentence. It literally doesn’t make sense.

Secondly, if we did try to apply the notion of substance analogously to the family, form would have to apply equally to all of the constituent parts (i.e. all members of the family). Form cannot be one literal part. The form would have to be what makes the family be a family. In that case, it would probably have to be the marraige bond itself. The matter would be those elements which physically make up the family, and that would be the individual persons who are members of the family.

If the father were the form, than you could not call a single mother with children a family. We can grant that such a situation is an imperfect family, but it is still a family nevertheless.

Thirdly, it makes no sense to say a child is the substance of the family. If that were true, the child would contain the form and matter within itself and there would be no need for the mother and father in the picture.

In terms of metaphysics, substance is the most fundamental category of being, and any individual substance can be abstractly divided into form and matter. The former, substantial form, provides specificity, while the latter individuates that specificity with material particularity.

That is partially correct. Not every substance has matter and form. Angels are substances without matter.

The marriage of these two culminates in the individuated reproduction of the species itself.

Reproduction is not a correct term that can be applied here. It implies some perfect form of which the substance is just a copy. This would correspond with Plato’s incorrect notion of the world of forms, but would be inconistent with an Aristotelean framework.

 

[HisIsTheCrown]

I’m mentally toying with this, so outside opinions are welcome. Keep in mind, I’m basing this on Aristotelian-Thomistic terminology.

The family is the primary human being of the human person. The father is its form; the mother, its matter; the child, its substance. The essence of this individual unit of being is family, which provides the substance of mankind.

In terms of metaphysics, substance is the most fundamental category of being, and any individual substance can be abstractly divided into form and matter. The former, substantial form, provides specificity, while the latter individuates that specificity with material particularity. The marriage of these two culminates in the individuated reproduction of the species itself. That is, consummation of marriage reflects the form of a man and thus reproduces a material image of the species. (Marriage, represented by individual offspring, is indissoluble. The similarity of root meanings between ‘indissoluble’ and ‘individual’ is perhaps telling.)

The father begets his own image by entering into union with the mother and providing his form (what she doesn’t alone have to give) within her matter (what he doesn’t alone have to give). This culminates in the transcendent and immanent being of Man through a son or daughter. (Side note: Interestingly, though it’s an evolutionary adaptation to assure paternity, fathers typically care a lot about having children who resemble them.)

The Holy Trinity is a sort of family of divine Persons sharing one and the same substance; hence, I find this stuff metaphysically intriguing. (The Father begets the Son, Who becomes a species with the image and likeness of God.) I would expand on all of this, but I’ll let brevity leave extra room for wider discussion. I haven’t read Theology of the Body yet, and I understand it’s relevant, so I’ll have to get on that some time.

St Thomas is the great.
But he is not the only one.
To tell you frankly, you must be very, very good in Thomistic Theology.
But, frankly I got tired of reading your small and tiny text for I am bad at analysis.
The problem is the structure, says Derrida. When you try to structure everything, the structure wont help anymore but becomes an obsatcle.
An egg layed in Toronto is Canadian and in New york is american. But an egg layed excatly on the american-canadian border, which passport is entitled to the hatched chick?

 

[Sair]

I’m mentally toying with this, so outside opinions are welcome. Keep in mind, I’m basing this on Aristotelian-Thomistic terminology.

The family is the primary human being of the human person. The father is its form; the mother, its matter; the child, its substance. The essence of this individual unit of being is family, which provides the substance of mankind.

In terms of metaphysics, substance is the most fundamental category of being, and any individual substance can be abstractly divided into form and matter. The former, substantial form, provides specificity, while the latter individuates that specificity with material particularity. The marriage of these two culminates in the individuated reproduction of the species itself. That is, consummation of marriage reflects the form of a man and thus reproduces a material image of the species. (Marriage, represented by individual offspring, is indissoluble. The similarity of root meanings between ‘indissoluble’ and ‘individual’ is perhaps telling.)

The father begets his own image by entering into union with the mother and providing his form (what she doesn’t alone have to give) within her matter (what he doesn’t alone have to give). This culminates in the transcendent and immanent being of Man through a son or daughter. (Side note: Interestingly, though it’s an evolutionary adaptation to assure paternity, fathers typically care a lot about having children who resemble them.)

The Holy Trinity is a sort of family of divine Persons sharing one and the same substance; hence, I find this stuff metaphysically intriguing. (The Father begets the Son, Who becomes a species with the image and likeness of God.) I would expand on all of this, but I’ll let brevity leave extra room for wider discussion. I haven’t read Theology of the Body yet, and I understand it’s relevant, so I’ll have to get on that some time.

To be perfectly honest, I think this analysis represents everything that is wrong about metaphysics, in that it represents a wholly contrived, arbitrary, human-made cultural imposition upon the ways in which nature actually behaves.

“Man is the form”, “woman is the matter” and “child is the substance and most fundamental category of being”? Any elementary understanding of natural sexual reproduction would tell you that both a male and a female are biologically necessary, to an equal degree, for the conception of any offspring, and are therefore more fundamental than the offspring itself. Indeed, any examination of nonhuman animal reproduction indicates that the preservation of the parents usually comes before the preservation of offspring, since the former will have the opportunity to produce more of the latter in favourable circumstances, thus benefiting the species as a whole through their own survival.

The metaphysical tapestry to which you refer, woven around the basic facts of human reproductive relations with the thread of culturally shaped gender roles, can only reflect human thinking from a very particular historical, sociocultural perspective, rather than being any indication of the “true” nature of sexuality and social organisation. In a very limited sense, it is ‘natural’, given than humans have a tendency towards the desire to control the world, but in all other ways, it represents the contrivance that arises from this desire.