Blog Marcos L. Mucheroni Filosofia, Noosfera e cibercultura

When Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD) broke with Manichaeism (the division between good and evil), he became a Christian and, in order to solve his main problem, he saw that evil is the absence of good and therefore the absence of Truth.

Based on Augustine’s model, evil for Leibniz established the foundations by which a world with evil brings more good and therefore a world without evil is better, in his Monadology he established: “an imperfection in the part may be necessary for a perfection in the whole” and therefore the parts depend on the whole for the (rational) truth as he conceived it.

Leibniz (1646-1716) was influenced by Augustine, and theorized that truth is related to reason: “I understand by reason, not the faculty of reasoning, which can be used well or badly, but the chain of truths which can only produce truths, and one truth cannot be contrary to another”, so from a half-truth a truth cannot emerge, this is the problem of contemporary narratives.

This is the key to establishing the virtues, which are capable of exercising the moral good, and from this stems the public good. The current social problem is not just due to the search for the common good, it is necessary for it to be growing and sustainable for there to be moral virtues.

Thus, there is no justification for theft or small deviations, as biblical wisdom says: “he who is not faithful in little is not faithful in much” (Luke 17:10-11), and a permissive society cannot bear fruit for the construction of the common good and the public good.

The problem of truth, is established by the method in the Phenomenology, the German philosopher Husserl (1859-1938) will say that truth occurs through phenomena that are observable, perceptible and sensitive: “we call this phenomenology”, so truth has a method that can be observed in everything that happens around us.

Moral relativism makes truth something linked to the morals of that group. In the previous post, we recalled that it was first dealt with in Plato’s book Theaetetus, whose central concern was to combat the Sophists and create a true citizenry; in general, the book is a rejection of theses that manifest some form of mixture between reason and sensation.

We need to defend and take a strong stand on the side of the moral good and for this we need fraternal love, but it cannot be separated from the cardinal virtues.