This essay aims to reconcile the perceived conflict between common and singular goods by resituating them within the context of the human family, since it is here, at the bridge between person and polis, that the singular good is first ordered to a common good as to its natural perfection. The essay begins with an inductive overview of the Aristotelian conception of the singular good as activity, which reveals the fundamental outward orientation of being. This ontological “givenness” finds expression in the human person as love in the fullest sense, that is, as radical being-for-another. Taking such radical human love as its starting point, the second part of this essay draws upon the phenomenological tradition of the person to examine the natural outpouring of human love between husband and wife, since this is the form of love with which political society, as guardian of the common good, is primarily concerned. Such an examination reveals that the natural desire of husband and wife for total knowledge, love, and union cannot be fulfilled within that relationship alone, since the spouses cannot fully understand each other as givers when they alone are the receivers of the gift. The individual goods of husband and wife can only be attained by their mutual gift to some third good which is held in common, since only here can their ends and highest activities be one. In the order of nature, it is primarily in the child as the common good of the husband and wife that the singular goods of the man and woman are fulfilled. Therefore the common good of a political society is found in its most basic form in the family as the fundamental unit of society, where it exists as the natural perfection of the singular good.
