(October 29, 2019 at 6:52 am)Grandizer Wrote: So I just got done reading Feser's section on the transcendentals. A lot of it was clear, but perhaps I should go back and reread it because I didn't exactly get how "truth" or "good" is convertible with "being". Clearly we are not fully "good" or "true", but does this mean we are not fully "being"?
I see the next section is specifically on final causality. Hoping to get more clarity on final causality as I read this next section.
You inspired me just now to go and look at that section again. It's a key tenet of several different philosophies, I think, that the Good the True and the Beautiful are just different words for the same thing, and that Being is all of these things. But I have been pretty fuzzy on why anybody should say that.
Obviously the easy objection is that bad or ugly things have being as well as good or beautiful ones. And I'm sure any number of people will say "Oh yeah, cancer has being -- is that good?" With the implication of "check mate, theist."
But as always the definitions he's using are not the ones we use.
As I understand it, "good" here is, as always, related to the actualization of a thing's potential. In this case, a thing is good insofar as it becomes what it is meant to be. The opposite wouldn't necessarily be bad -- certainly not in a moral sense -- but something like unfulfilled or deviated from the goal. Beauty I think is the same -- a thing is beautiful not because of some ideal proportion but because it has achieved that which it was pointing to. True, also, doesn't mean "a statement in accord with the way the world is," but something more like "to thine own self be true." What you really are.
So let's say I had a strange ugly animal show up on my veranda (as I did a few years ago). It was clearly sick. Much later I realized that the badgers in my neighborhood had some kind of skin disease or mange and had lost their hair. A naked badger is unpleasant. And I think Feser would say it's "bad" and "not beautiful" because it diverges from the complete healthy badger that its DNA points to.
I also made a mistake for a long time, because the critters tend to come at night. I thought there were two raccoon-dog families, and one was more beautiful than the other. But I was thinking that the badgers were really raccoon-dogs who just weren't as good-looking. Once I realize that they (the healthy ones) looked exactly as badgers are supposed to look, I found them more beautiful.
"Being" in this case means the extent to which a thing has actualized its potential. So it doesn't mean just that something exists. A hairless sick badger does in fact exist. But it has less being -- in Thomas's meaning of the term -- than a badger which is in accord with the outcome its DNA was aiming for.
So the terms are transcendental because they really mean the same thing -- different words for the same condition of achieving the fulfillment of potential.
As in so many other cases, this just makes a lot of the arguments against Thomas's metaphysics go away. Because it means that objections like the one I suggested above -- that sickness also exists -- are objections to different meanings of the words. There may be a hundred reasons NOT to accept any of this, but the arguments I have seen in the past are misdirected, because they are using different definitions than Thomas.
