Reflections on the sense of justice in modern society. Returning to the origins, to Hesiod, the first poet and first thinker of justice. Wondering about the concept of good and evil, on questions that have never changed and without the possibility of exhaustive answers. With the awareness that, in an increasingly complex world, the answer is in the same need to look, with sensitivity, at the limits of judgment.
In an event organized, in Rome, by the Paci association (Business professionals, business crisis) with the contribution of the Child Movement Foundation and the Observatory on crime in agriculture and on the agri-food system, the latest work was discussed “Gift-devouring judges. Hesiod, at the origins of law “, ed. Mondadori, by Fabrizio Di Marzio, formerly an ordinary magistrate, professor of private law, together with Margherita Cassano , first female assistant president of the Court of Cassation, Maria Rita Parsi, psychotherapist and president of the Children’s Movement Foundation. Simona D’Alessio, Ansa journalist , coordinated the work .
A book of cultural interest and of great topicality between philosophy, classics and law, as highlighted, introducing the meeting, the president of Paci Giuseppina Ivone , who in its title starts from the accusations of Hesiod of having corrupted the judges to his brother Perse, with whom he was in contention for the division of his father’s inheritance.
In the debate, held at the Auditorium Parco della Musica, focus is on women. Eve and Pandora personification of sin and evil
Pandora created to punish men
And what is the female role in history, society and justice, reading Hesiod
“A deception hatched by the god (Zeus) with no remedy for men” to impose the evil in compensation for Prometheus’s theft of fire, the creation of woman
Di Marzio offers a reinterpretation of the “feminine” myth of Hesiod. The figure of the woman in justice, personified by two goddesses, not by two gods. Themis, second wife of Zeus (goddess of order and justice) and Dike (procedural justice to be made comprehensible to men to administer it). “The woman enters the world as the guardian of justice and law. Without that entrance, the fire would have burned human justice, fomenting a development of action regardless of any idea of limit. The woman protects the man from violence; she consolidates the community in reflection ”, writes the author.
And, quoting the ancient Greek poet, “a house and above all a wife, an ox, a plow”. The woman protagonist of existence. Whoever chooses a good wife, “solicits and fixes the mind”. “A good wife and a valid ally for life”, “ally in the confrontation with nature” and in “family solidarity made of help and comfort” in old age.
The poet often defined as misogynist, De Marzio still writes, does not condemn women. As in Genesis, the woman is assisted by the man and, above all, in the woman “the contradictory destiny of the human soul is symbolically fulfilled, irremediably split into the incompatible reasons and conflicting feelings of which everyone’s thought is made”.
“Pandora” is the one who gives. Like the earth, and producer of gifts and life. And the power of her is such as to be exchanged for the power of fire.
“With the introduction of the woman, the time of myth ends and the time of history begins”, writes the author, with the detachment of the figure of men “eternal children who unconsciously live next to the gods or play perpetually in the bloody war”.
And again, the creation of woman shows the limit of the use of fire and the limit of her “power”. The woman and the unexpected, “disrupts the straight and simplistic expectation of the world, in which men used to delude themselves”.
In the footsteps of Hesiod, the high magistrate Cassano, as a jurist and a woman, explored the reasons underlying the request for justice, what are the “rights” that justice can guarantee, in a complex society that is advancing with ever greater ” expectations “, with respect to the time required by the legislation. With the awareness of the limit and imperfection of justice. Nourished, today, by the expansion of the category of “rights” which concern, above all, the ethical, individual and existential sphere to be found in everyday life and in relationships, rather than in a written and crystallized justice. Sometimes, to overcome stereotypes transformed into rights, as for the right to motherhood required by virtue of an alleged “imperfection” of the woman.
In a community in search of shared values, the dialectic between justice and society, on the basis of the insurmountable boundaries set by the principles, must therefore be nourished by the ability to listen, doubt, humility, dialogue with the parties and with the defenders, he stressed. the Cassano. Values not for women only. “A constant ideal tension towards knowledge”, for men and women together, to understand the complexity of reality with the awareness of the limit.
The psychotherapist Parsi, intervening in the debate, underlined how, in the curiosity of Pandora, the creativity of women is manifested, the winning way to go further. She is the ancestor of all women and, in fact, the one who opens the way to other perspectives through the transition from dependence to autonomy.
Parsi also warned against frailty often due to unreasonable behavior, deceit, arrogance, prevarication and violence. Highlighting, in the actuality of a dramatic situation, the fundamental importance of cultural reflections for a community in crisis, to recover the sense of the complexity of living and the demands of individual experience by grasping the sense of the limit.
