Abstract

In ethics, the good is the final cause of every action. All other causes are what they are relatively to the final cause, but the final cause is not relative to something else, except as means and efficient cause of an ulterior motive, whereby the supreme end, whose possession brings happiness, is the absolute in ethics. In physics, the same thing: the living being tends to the fullness of its eidos and all matter is moved towards that end. But the notion of happiness is a kind of empty truism and the correspondent good will also remain empty until determined by relation to some substantive content, and in that determination we will fatally see the polyphony and the antilogy break out. In the realm of nature, as long as the good is thought from a philosophy of form and as what is useful and advantageous, that strengthens, brings health and preserves life, we will then have a total relativization of its absolute sense, because one form needs to snatch the matter from the other to survive, and the good of one, therefore, will be the evil of another. How to determine the good from the point of view of a philosophy of matter?