Anything is good for anyone, it is said. We are all different, subjective, individual and all situations are distinct within their context of reference and historical, cultural circumstances. The right to prescribe from one culture to another does not exist because all valuations of good and bad are relative, based in opinion or subjectivity. Moral disagreement is best explained by there being no moral facts. This roughly seems to be our current state of affairs. Yet health disagreements are easily resolved and less controversial. In health, we accept having a shared physical nature. If we remove Cartesian or substance dualism, as anti-realists wish to do, and rightly so, then ‘we’ can only be physical. If we accept a physical nature, then whatever we refer to or imply when we awkwardly speak of an ‘inner’ nature, must be either physical in itself, or at least rooted in the physical. If we can accept this starting point, then entertaining the notion of a general human nature becomes a possibility.
If there is a way we are, there will be a what is good for us. Given that our reality, though real, is abstract and, we might say, metaphorical, the notion of ethics as an objective fact can be bracketed for now. Rather, there being a good for us, however we later decide to frame this, and in what terms precisely, is a possibility we must entertain and an assertion that demands to be evaluated.
How far back, not in time, but to what level ontologically must we go in order to glimpse or grasp the situation that will enable us to move forward? To go beyond the distraction and the concealedness of things, to be able to ‘see’, metaphorically speaking, what we are? Presocratic philosophy may be the beginning of the path that leads to an opening in modernity, where wholeness become possible. This is the beginning of a thought that will evolve into a theory of human nature.