(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"?
The book I'm reading on Plotinus has some good overlap with what Thomas says about transcendentals.
I'd been puzzled by the fact that Plotinus says that Being -- the Real -- is Beauty. Now it looks as though he agrees that they are different words for the same thing.
Quote:Contemplatives, precisely, do not attend to the mere matter of the thing but
rather to its unity, its grace. They are freed from enchantment not because
they see all things as indifferent or ugly (as though they were “cynics” in a
more modern sense) but because every real thing is beautiful, and such as to
awaken joy in those who really see it. “They exist and appear to us and he
who sees them cannot possibly say anything else except that they are what
really exists. What does ‘really exist’ mean? That they exist as beauties” (I.6
[1].5, 18– 9). “Or rather, beautifulness is reality.”9
