The good and political ontology
01
Oct
Although the philosophical discourse on the
good is broad and varied, modernity has lost part of this foundation when it is linked to the question of Being. In the political dialogue, for example, the development of Hannah Arendt and her works: “The Banality of Evil” and “The Human Condition”, or Freud’s “The Evil of Civilization” or Paul Ricoeur’s “The Symbolic of Evil” do not appear.
The latter three can rework, in tragic dimensions, what we claim is the absence of a political ontology, what Hannah Arendt seeks in her texts.
Paul Ricoeur, explaining the symbolism of evil, wrote of individual attitudes that seek to “console” the victims of evil as a causal motive:
“To people who suffer and who are so ready to accuse themselves of some unknown fault, the true pastor of souls will say: God certainly didn’t want this; I don’t know why; I don’t know why…” (Paul RICOEUR, ‘Le scandale du mal’, op. cit., p. 60), looking at the origin of an evil, which the majority cannot explain, although they feel it.
The traditional philosophical discourse on the good revolves around either utilitarianism (the good is what maximizes happiness, in Stuart Mill), deontologism (the good is acting in accordance with moral duty) and eudaimonism (the supreme good is happiness, achieved through virtue).
Kant elaborates that the supreme good is the good will, that is, acting out of duty and not inclination, and so in contemporary philosophy (with an idealist foundation) the good ranges from virtue ethics to care ethics, but the absence of foundational values on evil ends up incorporating relativism and falls into the political discourse of populism and modern sophism.
Although the Greeks touched on the ontological question, the idea of Platonism that the good is the highest form of reality, the cause of what exists and the ultimate goal of knowledge, modernity is paralyzed under the aegis of an evil that is not only structural, but that affects being: Arendt’s banality of evil and Freud’s civilizational malaise.
Arendt shows that there is a fundamentally political gap in current thinking, which falls into the category of the plurality of philosophical thought. Before Hitler’s rise, Arendt’s search went on to other philosophical questions that also went in the direction of the good. In her doctoral thesis, supervised by Karl Jaspers, she discussed “The concept of love in St. Augustine”, but then she revisited the ontological question and went on to analyze the question of totalitarianism.
On the question of Love (agape) in his doctorate, it remains unfinished, according to his own supervisor, but even if evil seems to prevail, it is the good that we must pursue and only it can free us from the historical condition where evil seems to triumph.
