The Good of Life
Essays in Metaphysics
by
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According to the common sense, ordinary people usually talk of good as something valuable. Everyone aims at a good life, wants to feel good, looks for good opportunities of jobs and good friends with whom to have good time. If we ask different people what good means, we’ll probably be given a wide number of definitions. With no doubt someone will say that good is the opposite of evil. One of the most tangled term in the history of thought, good is the ordinary purpose of everyday life because of the positive implications that it entails. The inadequacy of the concept to express the idea of good – to which I’ll come back in the discussion of the so called natural good – depends on the fact that it is not an abstract idea: good is first of all experimented as something enjoyable. At a first level, the of emotional-cognitive involvement, the notion of good refers to something positive, for being posed and given as a component of the world of life. The aim of the present essay is to focus on this pre-moral and pre-willed aspect of good which is, nevertheless, the transcendental condition of morality and the main ingredient of ethics. As a philosopher I began my investigations on this topic in parallel with the effort to come across the origin of the pre-moral aspects of the evildoing. The phenomenon of global terrorism – to which I’ve been working since 2001 – introduced me to the problem of good. The reason is simple. I’ve noticed that, in the deliberate closure to the world of life, for being part of a subversive group, terrorists suffer from an intimate impoverishment: some phenomenological evidences and the metaphysical investigation concerning human agency (Fisogni, 2009) allowed me to argue that the spiritual dryness strictly relies on the loss of sense and value of the outer world. I could realize that the taste of good was the crucial component of personal flourishing and a main ingredient to incline ethical conduct to virtue. Moving from this intuition I’ve explored some phenomena of the personal life through the lens of phenomenology. In order to understand this theoretical frame, let me briefly introduce to what I consider a method as well as the very heart of any philosophical investigation.
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About the Book
Good” is a term to handle with care, especially at our times, so dark, so deeply involved with wars, financial crisis, humanitarian emergencies, and terrorism. So why an investigation concerning such a topic? Moving from the early infancy, I’ve explored how the inclination to the world of life structures the Self, in dialogue with some eminent scholars of the twentieth century (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philippa Foot, Robert Nozick, Hannah Arendt) and the classical metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas, in order to throw light on the origin of the moral sense. As a main ingredient of the ethical conduct, the good-as-positive grounds a respectful ecology of life, according to Pope Francis’s encyclical letter “Laudato sì” and invites all of us to increase humanity.
About the Author
Primavera Fisogni (1963), Italian philosopher and journalist, is currently editor at La Provincia daily newspaper in Como (Italy). She was educated at the Catholic University of Milan, where she graduated in classics and in theoretical philosophy. She took the PhD in metaphysics at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome, directed by Spanish scholar Lluìs Clavell. Her essays are mainly aimed at exploring the premoral origins of evildoing (Terroristi. La persona nell’agire eversivo, 2004; L’inaridimento dei terroristi, 2009; Dehumanization and Human Fragility, 2013) and are focused on the phenomenology of dialogue (Incontro al dialogo, 2006). As a feminist thinker, she explores theoretical arguments for the female priesthood in the Catholic Church (A Love Life in a Sexless Condition, 2011). She was awarded as a reporter in 2002 and 2009. As a philosopher, she won the Prize Leggere Donna for her investigation about terrorism.