At Home in the Cosmos

Abstract

This dissertation is a Thomistic personalist account of the human family. It seeks to shed light on the nature of the family by way of a metaphysical and phenomenological analysis. Or better, I hope to contribute to a conscious awareness of the presence of the family. Such a project is necessary because personalists have said much about the individual person but less about the person-in-the-family. Moreover, Thomistic personalism will benefit from a synthesis of late 20th and early 21st century insights regarding philosophical anthropology; such a synthesis I offer here. I pose the philosophical question thus: what is the nature of the family? And the central claim of the dissertation: the family is beautiful. Now, there is a distinction between ontological and aesthetic beauty. Ontological beauty belongs to beings as such. It is the kind of beauty that is contained in the classical meaning of the term cosmos—"the beauty resulting from order.” For its part, aesthetic beauty deals with the artifacts of man. It is a derivative kind of beauty. So, my dissertation will be an examination of the family as ontologically beautiful, or said differently, the family as a microcosm. Such a claim contends with two prominent, contemporary philosophies of the family. First, feminist philosophy following Foucault imagines the family as an artificial structure of sexual oppression. For these, the family is not a microcosm, but is instead a prison—artificial and controlling. Second, reforming philosophers such as Henry Rosemont Jr., reject any metaphysical account of the family and argue that the value of the family is strictly utilitarian in nature—it is a community of merely cooperating human beings towards the end of the greatest, communal happiness. To respond to these objections, I draw on the 20th century Catholic personalists to articulate a portrait of the family as beautiful according to the three Thomistic attributes of the beautiful: integritas, consonantia, and claritas. The dissertation unfolds in this way. After examining the objections, in Thomistic fashion I provide a sed contra by considering three world wisdom authorities on the question. I show that the Islamic Quran, the Bhagavad Gita and the philosophy of Confucius all take the family to be of cosmic import and beautiful. I next lay Thomistic personalist foundations for a study of the family. This includes the anthropology of Karol Wojtyla and the metaphysics of W. Norris Clarke. Wojtyla describes the human person as a rational being, free and related to the eternal. Clarke explains that the person is a substance-in-relation and proposes system as a category of being to account for the unity of relating substances. With these key notions in hand, I turn to St. Thomas’s cosmology to articulate the attributes of the cosmos that will in turn describe any microcosm; specifically: esse, diversity, metaphysical inequality, and teleology. Following the articulation of foundational notions in Thomistic personalism, I begin the examination of the family according to the attributes of beauty. Under integritas, I consider the person-in-the-family beginning with Clarke’s metaphysical account of the person as ontologically relational. Next, I turn to Dietrich Von Hildebrand to provide an account of the role of the heart in human persons, given the heart’s crucial role in the experience of relationships in the family. Finally, I consider three Thomistic positions on the gender of persons: each attributing gender to either matter, form, or esse respectively. In the final move, I argue that a home is crucial to the integrity of the family too. Consonantia has to do with harmony and therefore I attempt a phenomenology of the familial relationships, arguing that each person of the family has a vocation to contribute to family unity. Drawing on Marcel’s study of fatherhood, I propose an existential order in the family wherein the father is found at some existential distance from the family. This distance is a condition that calls a father to provide a unity of direction for the family—to lead. To explain this leadership, I consider the Aristotelian distinction between a king and a tyrant to say that the father’s vocation is kingly: to order the family to virtue through giving himself. For her part, the mother is at the existential center of the family. She actualizes the unity of the family with her ineinanderblick (loving gaze). To understand this, I turn to Dietrich Von Hildebrand’s phenomenology of love as a value response. Finally, I consider the relationship of children as those who receive love in the family and so complete the perfection of being as both acting and receiving according to Clarke’s notion of receiving as an ontological perfection. Moreover, I consider Marcel’s insight that children are both incarnations of the parent’s love and also a judgement. In my final move, I take up the claritas of the family. I account for the intelligible unity of the family as a metaphysical system characterized by the central qualities of freedom and virtue. Regarding freedom, I examine Marcel’s notion of founding a family as a free act. With respect to virtue, I consider the traditional notion of the family as a school of virtue, not only for the children but for the parents. Finally, I propose that the family has a sacred character because, of all the unities or systems in the cosmos, the family most clearly reflects the splendor of God.