The Translation of the Good

In 2000 Marcel Detienne published Comparer l’incomparable supporting the thesis that, when cultures and tradition are very different «pour construire de bons comparables, il faut […] monnayer une “catégorie-entrée” avec l’aide des gens du terrain (historiens et anthropologues) pour analyser les agencements lisibles dans les configurations culturelles». This “catégorie-entrée” should be necessary to compare cultures totally different. In fact, in different cultures and traditions, the same words not intend to say the same thing. An example is “goodness”. The aim of this paper is to examine the translation in its etymological sense of “transport in front of”. If translating means to facilitate passages, and if a possible nucleus of goodness is in its generating relations, what does this imply about the translation of goodness in cultures and traditions? It will mean not to look for the most appropriate meaning but to look for experiences of relations and ties in different cultures living together nowadays, without renouncing their specificity. So, with the help of some research developed in the field of cultural anthropology, it will emerge that the capacity to create ties is the way in which goodness can nowadays translate itself in social ties, improving them.