The Comparison Of Marriage And Family View Between Marx, Engels And Hegel

The constantly progresses of human beings’ civilization have been pushing allaspects of their life forward, while marriage issues are the everlasting topics. love,marriage and family are the necessary parts of the society; meanwhile they are closelyconnected with each other all the time. At present, China is at its crucial transitionalperiod both in the economic and culture. Also Chinese views about marriage havebeen struck by the western economic and culture. The sense of marriage and familyare fading out and being twisted, the instability of the structure of the family is raisingas well, the coming up series of society issues bring up extremely negative influenceto the current construction of harmonious socialism.Before Marx and Engels, Hegel, the representative of the German classicalphilosopher, plays a crucial important role in the history of ethics thought about love,marriage and family. Hegel observed the "family ethics" among country, civil societyand family, then he came up with a set of abstract theories which involves love,marriage and family. Standing on the historical materialism, Marx and Engelsinherited the reasonable core of Hegelianism, they criticized and surpassed the valuesof marriage and family which belong to Hegelian idealism, and also they restated theessence of love, marriage and family as well as the development history behind them.Besides, they showed people the real unity of love, marriage and family in the futurecommunistic society. Marxist philosophy aims at researching the reality in the dailylife with the help of any available philosophy resources and philosophic thinkingmethods. Therefore it has a practical significance to lead the construction of the newtype of family under the socialism with Chinese characteristics with Marx and Engels’thoughts of marriage and family.Based on these aspects, lots of researching methods are used in this article, likelateral comparative assessment, vertical comparative assessment, method of induction,etc. It will show a systematic comparison on the similarities and breakthroughs ofthoughts about marriage and family. The whole article is made up with four partsexcept introduction and acknowledgements.Part one is mainly about the comparisons of the foundation to the ideal marriagebetween the two kinds of theories----the similarities and differences about love. Both of them regard "love" as the foundation of the real marriage and family, while theyhave different understanding about love. Hegel regards "love" as the love of "absolutespirit" from the point of his ethics thought, it’s the "narcissism" of self-awareness;Based on criticizing Hegel’s opinions, Marx and Engels revealed that love should bethe "love of human beings", and people can feel it in the practical family life.Part two made series of comparisons about marriage between them. Hegelregarded marriage as one external link of the family concept, i.e. a kind of "directethical relation"; However, Marx and Engels, viewing from the real-life, deemed thatmarriage is a kind of special social relationships combining sexes. Both of themmentioned monogamous marriage, but their definitions for its reason and nature aretotally different. Marx criticized that Hegel reversed relationships between thoughtand being, reality and concept. He pointed out that the consciousness of marriage wasjust the reflection of realistic marital life.We should analyse the form anddevelopment of marriage in terms of reality rather than concept.Part three made a further comparison about their different ideas of family. In theview of self-development of ethics, Hegel reckoned family as the performance ofabsolute idealism progressing to the phase of ethics. Marx and Engels unveiled theinternal motivation driving family’s development and predicted the realization ofcommunistic family in the future from point of productive labour. Starting from theend of Hegel’s ideological development, Marx and Engels developed their theory in acomplete opposite way.Part four summarized the instructively important significance of Marx andEngels’s theory about love, marriage and family in the future society to buildingsocialistic marriage and family in our country.