Not infrequently I will post articles from friends that I find particularly noteworhty. In this post I introduce Dr. Adi Schlebush to the friends of Iron Ink . Dr. Schlebush is a South African who gets Worldview thinking. In this paper Dr. Schlebush explains a different anthropology than is currently in ascendancy in the West. This anthropological model stands in contrast to what most of the West has known but has a long and storied (and we would say “Biblical”) history.
I have divided this paper up into several posts knowing that people won’t typically labor through a long reading.
The role of familialism in Counter-Enlightenment social ontology
Adie Schlebusch
Department Systematic and Historical Theology
University of Pretoria
jaschlebusch@tukampen.nl
Abstract
In countering what they identified as the individualizing implications of the social contract theory as proposed by the likes of Locke and Rousseau, the
leading figures in the Counter-Enlightenment in the nineteenth century
advocated a distinctly familialist understanding of the nature and structure
of human society. Central to the Counter-Enlightenment’s social ontology
was the idea that the family—both nuclear and extended—is the most
basic and vital constitutive unit of human society. In contradistinction to
what these traditionalist conservatives saw as Enlightenment liberalism’s
atomising of the individual, leaving him vulnerable to the rising power
of the centralized state, nineteenth-century Counter-Revolutionaries
such as Johan Gottfried Herder, Louis de Bonald, Robert Lewis Dabney
and Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer proposed a relationship-based
social positioning of the individual as ontologically situated within the
context of familial blood relationships—relationships which provide the
necessary framework for social prosperity. In this regard, the nineteenth-century Counter-Enlightenment’s social ontology amounts a particularly
interesting and noteworthy historical phenomenon as a distinctly modern
movement characterized by strong theoretical resistance against the
prevailing liberal social ontology which has largely shaped modern
Western democracies.
1. Introduction
During the eighteenth century, Enlightenment thinkers brought about an
unprecedented change in the Western world’s understanding of human
society, most notably by virtue of their assertion of the sovereignty and
absolute independence of the individual human being by means of the social contract theory associated with the likes of Locke, Hobbes and Rousseau
(Wokler, 2012:90). This marked a distinct philosophical shift in terms of the
concept of sovereignty—away from traditional notions of sovereignty which had previously been regarded as being of a distinctly divine nature, in which humanity was regarded as the subject under the rule of divine providence— towards an anthropocentric concept of sovereignty as fundamentally belonging to humanity itself (Morgan, 2001:121). This in turn brought about a revolutionary change in terms of the prevalent social ontology, that is, that branch of philosophy which studies the nature, structure and properties of the social world of human interaction and existence (Seele, 2006:51-52).
Milan Zafirovsky (2011:34) from the Sociology Department at the University of North Texas points out how the epistemic shift that marked Enlightenment played a central role in bringing about this revolutionary change in terms of the social ontology which has shaped modern Western society: it marked a transition from the traditional understanding of society as status- and relationship-oriented, to an ever-growing emphasis on individual equality and individual autonomy. Whereas the role and legal status of a person in society had traditionally been understood in terms of the place that person occupied in a given society, modern social ontology turned that relationship between individual and society upside down according to the new individualistic framework. It is this framework, Zafirovsky (2011:24, 85) notes, which largely provided the basis of the modern democratic societies in terms of its conceptualization of individual and civil rights, as well as political and individual liberty and progress.
Despite the socio-political successes of Enlightenment social ontology in shaping modern society and in particular modern Western democracies, its historical progression has not remained unopposed, however. In the history of ideas, several philosophical movements can be identified which were characterized by its resistance against this liberal or individualist social
ontology. One of the most well-known ideologies developed in resistance to
it was the fascism on the early and middle twentieth century, for example
(Antliff, 2007:20-21). Nonetheless, it was the Counter-Enlightenment of the nineteenth-century which provided the most notable movement of resistance to the idea of the social contract and its socio-political implications itself (Zafirovsky ,2011:279).1
2. Research methodology
The central research question of this article is how, in terms of the historical development of ideas regarding social ontology, Counter-Enlightenment thinkers resisted the ontological individualization brought about by the social contract theory. The focus is, therefore, in other words, on the core element of the social ontology historically proposed by Counter-Enlightenment theorists in opposition to the revolutionary ideas about human society which characterized eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophy. Utilizing the Ideengeschichte2 as research method, the history of the ideas of this historically-significant traditionalist school relating to social ontology in the nineteenth-century will be amplified in a novel manner. Firstly, the emphasis of this article will be on the profound implications of the Enlightenment upon social ontology, whereafter the focus will shift to how leading thinkers associated with the nineteenth-century CounterEnlightenment, such as Johan Gottfried Herder, Louis de Bonald, Robert Lewis Dabney and Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer, purposefully and consciously opposed the Enlightenment’s social ontology, with a special emphasis on the central idea that shaped their distinct social ontology in their historical context.
1 The term “Counter-Enlightenment”, derived from the German “Gegen-Aufklärung” coined by Friedrich Nietzsche, was originally popularized in the English-speaking world via the work of Isaiah Berlin in the middle of the twentieth century as a description of the traditionalist conservative reaction to the rationalist philosophy of the Enlightenment (Summerfield, 2008:9).
2 The Ideengeschichte or History of Ideas methodologically aims at elucidating the historical development ideas, in particular, the historical understanding and rhetorical application of those ideas within a given historical context (Hongtu 2020:136—137)—in the case of this article, late eighteenth and nineteenth-century Counter-Enlightenment ideas related to social ontology.
