The throbbing vault. The palpable vault. Socio-anthropo-pedagogical reflections on the family as a loving betweenness

Abstract

Custodian of human frailties, anxieties and weaknesses, according to Borges’ (1980) poetic image, family is that betweenness that realizes the sentimental miracle of the I-You relation (Simmel, 2001) in order to place us in the network of the world. Fontal relationship of mediation for primary socialisation (Donati, 2013), family is «the germinative leaven of individuality» (Acone, 1973, p. 120), a pedagogical existential (Bellingreri, 2014) that, beyond plural forms and sense negotiations, emerges as transcendence that steers the profound education of man.

Cultural universal, intended as repository of a social concept built on exploitation (Engels, 1970), or as cradle of inequalities and totalitarianisms (Horkheimer, 1974), family has never stopped being the original educational space (Fink, 2019; Ricœur, 2005; Pato?ka, 2012).

Starting from a socio-anthropo-pedagogical reflection about the direction of family transformations, this essay aims to recentralize, by dwelling upon its mistery (Marcel, 1967), the pedagogical love that nourishes and vivifies the relational nature of family, that makes it eternal by perpetuating itself in the inheritance.