(Part A)

Philosopher Stelios Ramfos, in an interview with capital.gr about same-sex marriage, says:

-Mr. Ramfos, what are marriage and family for you?

This is indeed the basic and critical question, I would say, and the starting point if we want to speak in more demanding terms. If we accept that marriage is the culmination of love, as the prime minister said, between two people and at the same time a legal contract defining the rights and obligations of its members, we must ask why for so many millennia, starting from the patriarchal form of society and the primal clan, people who were strangers to one another and everywhere on earth felt and still feel the need to unite and form this strange structure that is the basis of society and is called family.

-And is marriage not the culmination of love?

Love, which certainly exists, was not the rule for millennia. This is an issue that arose, to put it jokingly, after Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. It is a matter of the last three centuries, and in fact love in marriage as the sole condition is an idea of only a few decades. If we accept the modern and rather simplistic view that marriage is the culmination of love, then if I could legislate, I would table a bill against marriage, because if love were enough, marriage would not be needed.

-So for you marriage is something much more.

Of course. It is the institutional culmination that forms the family. After the primal clan, people recognized the need to organize their lives in a way that could guarantee humanity a different way of life from that of animals. What we called family, and in the form we know it, exists only in human beings. If we accept love alone as the condition, then nothing prevents us from speaking tomorrow about love between a human being and an animal, or between a human being and a robot, and who knows what else one might imagine.

-And what is this "more"?

In marriage there was always a deeper demand, one that was not superficial. Through marriage, family is created, and its role is extremely important because through it human desire is redirected in a qualitative and value-based way. Instead of animal drives and pressures, we develop value-based desires that can humanize us. Through the institution of marriage and through family, we achieve a differentiation of desire, which ceases to be an instinctive desire without limits and direction, as in animals that are indifferent to everything. This redirection of desire, regardless of what happens in life, regardless of whether we have miserable and bad families, is the ideal type of the family. Freud described this with the Oedipus complex and the prohibition of incest, within the framework of marriage and family. That is the purpose of the family: the humanization of the human being, speaking anthropologically, psychoanalytically, and sociologically. And not on the basis of what we hear about miserable parents who abuse their children or anything similar, which of course does exist.

-That is also an argument, however, against the "normal" family, which is heard often...

But it is like saying that if we have the ideal type of number for doing arithmetic, and we make mistakes in addition or subtraction, then the number itself is to blame. The issue is not a particular family, whether it is good or bad, but that ideal type, that "ought," the constitutive condition if you like, which will shape a society without wild instincts, but will develop it with feelings of love, companionship, mutual help, and the like. That is why we say the core of society is the family. I repeat, as an ideal type and not as a good or bad practice. And it is very important to understand that the whole discussion is about this ideal type (to be continued).

Pavlos Marantos

marantosp@gmail.com