The Entanglement of Family and State, and the Bleak Prospects of Jia Philosophy

Abstract

Western political philosophy has historically employed political ideas to shape the imagination of the family, rather than envisioning politics as an extension of the family. The modern political theory of individualism, however, grounded in an instrumentalist conception of the state, renders the family entirely absent from political philosophy, at the cost of evading the problem of the continuous reproduction of political society. The originary experience of existing through the generations, as implied by the family, can open an ontological space for addressing this problem, though doing so gives rise to a tension between ontology and ethics. The modern state’s requirement that the family perform a function of moral cultivation is premised on a shift in the family’s center of gravity from the vertical dimension of intergenerational relations to the horizontal dimension of the conjugal relationship. At this point, the family as artifact furnishes us with an ethical paradigm for understanding the state as a constructive political community. Yet a conception of the family centered on this horizontal relation is precisely what signals the ontological rootlessness of modern politics. The complex entanglement between family and state across the functional, ontological, and ethical dimensions portends the bleak prospects of jia philosophy in modern society.