| Just as the present moment finds the institution of marriage hotly debated, the advocates of its "traditional" meaning and those of its "redefinition" each proposing new and different links between sexuality and sociality, so the late 18th century saw marriage and the sexual relationship become debatable and definable in ways hitherto unimagined. This had less to do with actual marital practice, and more with new attempts at grounding that practice: The Enlightenment had demanded a justification of all social institutions, turning marriage from a sacrament into a component of civil society or civic religion, and the more highly integrated constitutional monarchies that sprang up in Germany in the late 18th century had subsumed the power to consecrate marriage under its aegis (Preussisches Landrecht). But even if it was de facto the king who now had the power to marry couples, the bases of this power were still very much in contention: Was he acting as an agent of social stability or utility? Was he acting as a quasi-religious authority? Or was he the representative of human reason, wholly divested of any arbitrary power that may otherwise accrue to his person?;The early German Romantics turned to love and marriage to anchor their social utopian aspirations, and they sought in turn to transform the institutionalization of marriage as well. This dissertation argues that they did so by decisively emancipating marriage from concerns of morality or religion in any but the widest sense, relying instead on a metaphysical justification of the marital union. For a German philosopher writing in the wake of Kant, a metaphysics of marriage, as opposed to any other theory of marriage, had to provide a justification for the institution from the resources furnished by reason alone. And for those followers of Kant who criticized a number of "dualisms" within the critical philosophy, and who subsequently began experimenting with monistic reinterpretations of Kant's project, this "reason" could not be either theoretical or practical, but had to be rather one single unifying principle. In other words, these thinkers were forced to justify matters both of theoretical and practical philosophy from a single monolithic principle derived primarily from their respective theories of consciousness. |
