Transcendentals

Parmenides first inquired of the properties co-extensive with being.^[3] Socrates, spoken through Plato, then followed (see Form of the Good).

Aristotle's substance theory (being a substance belongs to being qua being) has been interpreted as a theory of transcendentals.^[4] Aristotle discusses only unity ("One") explicitly because it is the only transcendental intrinsically related to being, whereas truth and goodness relate to rational creatures.^[5]

In the Middle Ages, Catholic philosophers elaborated the thought that there exist transcendentals (transcendentalia) and that they transcended each of the ten Aristotelian categories.^[6] A doctrine of the transcendentality of the good was formulated by Albert the Great.^[7] His pupil, Saint Thomas Aquinas, posited six transcendentals: ens, res, unum, aliquid, bonum, verum; or “being,” "thing", "one", "something", "good", and "true".^[8] Saint Thomas derives the six explicitly as transcendentals,^[9] though in some cases he follows the typical list of the transcendentals consisting of the One, the Good, and the True. The transcendentals are ontologically one and thus they are convertible: e.g., where there is truth, there is being and goodness also.

In Christian theology the transcendentals are treated in relation to theology proper, the doctrine of God. The transcendentals, according to Christian doctrine, can be described as the ultimate desires of man. Man ultimately strives for perfection, which takes form through the desire for perfect attainment of the transcendentals. The Catholic Church teaches that God is Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, as indicated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.^[10] Each transcends the limitations of place and time, and is rooted in being. The transcendentals are not contingent upon cultural diversity, religious doctrine, or personal ideologies, but are the objective properties of all that exists.^{[citation needed]}

Modern “integral” or holistic philosophy within the Wilberian lineage, as well as Steve McIntosh, author of Evolution’s Purpose, seek to integrate Beauty, Truth, and Goodness as necessary requisites of all evolution in the Kosmos (body, mind, soul, spirit) within the individual at the microcosmic developmental level, as well as sociologically.

The three terms, Beauty, Goodness, Truth, form a subgroup within the family of transcendentals and their development can be considered separately.^[11] In Plato's dialogues the individual concepts are mentioned frequently but nowhere in his works are beauty, goodness and truth put forward as a specific group. The more common formulations in the dialogues are justice, goodness and beauty, and justice, goodness and wisdom.^[12] Aristotle similarly does not refer to the three concepts as a group, but in the Metaphysics he states that, "each thing relates to being and truth in the same way", and in the Ethics, that "good is said in as many ways as being". ^[13]

In the second century CE there was, in Alexandria, a group of early Christian Neoplatonists, who were beginning to link the ideas of Plotinus, in particular the idea of, the One, the Soul, and the Intellect, to, "the three persons of the Trinity (Lilla 1997)".^[14] St. Augustine, a little later, developed an early notion of the transcendentals, namely, Being, Goodness and Truth,^[15] and a connection began to be made between these and the three human faculties of Being, Willing and Knowing. ^[16] Pseudo-Dionysius in the sixth century compiled a list of divine names which attributed to God the concepts of the One, the Good, Light, Love, Beauty, Truth and many other terms.^[17]

These notions were carried forward into the medieval period where Thomas Aquinas, took from his mentor, Albert the Great, the idea that the transcendentals were a set of three, namely, Unum, Bonum, Verum, the One, the Good and the True, referring to them as the Ens Realissimum, or the most real Being. ^[18] It has been suggested that Bonaventure, while agreeing that, the One, the Good and the True, could be seen as three aspects of Being,^[19] proposed adding a fifth concept to the list of transcendentals, that of, Pulchrum or Beauty, but this has been disputed.^[20]

In the fifteenth century, in Florence, the philosopher, Marsilio Ficino was instrumental in reviving an interest in Plato, and it is to Ficino that the first definitive formulation of Beauty, Goodness and Truth, has been attributed. The specific passage is to be found in the Commentaries (1496):

"So the action of the intelligence is directed to some end. For in so far as it understands, its end is the truth; in so far as it wills, its end is the good; in so far as it acts its end is the beautiful"^[21]

The idea seems to have been taken up by the Humanist writers who followed Ficino, for example Baldassare Castiglione,^[22] and we can assume that it was one of these, perhaps Gian Giorgio Trissino, the patron of the architect Palladio who was influential in the latter's referring, in his book, I Quattro Libri, (1570) to the "true, good and beautiful method of building", the first known use of the terms used consecutively.^[23]

Although there are references to the threefold group in Italian thought (e.g. Muratori 1706) and German thought (König 1727) it was in France (Diderot from 1747 onwards) that the triad began to appear with any great significance.^[24] In 1762 in a letter to Voltaire, Diderot referred to, " the true, the good and the beautiful [as] a kind of trinity", and Victor Cousin's book, Du vrai, du beau et du bien, Of the True, the Beautiful and the Good, appeared (in its final form) in 1853.^[25]

Towards the end of the Eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant put the concepts to use in his three great works, Critique of Pure Reason (1781) Critique of Practical Reason (1781) and Critique of Judgment (1790) in which the subjects of truth, goodness and beauty were dealt with in turn.^[26] Nowhere did he refer specifically to the set of three but he did say of another set taken from medieval logic, namely, "the One, the Good and the True", that although seemingly empty, may have had, "some rules of understanding... wrongly interpreted".^[27]

Seventy years later, Charles Sanders Peirce, influenced by Kant, began to develop an idea of three larger categories under which the three concepts might fall. To these categories he gave the names, Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness, and used them to give an order to, among other things, "the three normative sciences: aesthetics, ethics and logic" - terms which may be compared with Beauty, Goodness and Truth. Although the order in which the terms appear has varied throughout history, Peirce's own conclusion was that, "Logic follows Ethics and both follow Aesthetics".^[28]

The specific grouping together of Beauty, Goodness and Truth was not, it seems, of particular importance to Kant or Peirce and was not mentioned by them. Nietzsche, too, rejected consideration of the group saying that it was, "unworthy of a philosopher".^[29] There was a shift, however, among philosophers around this time from seeing the group, not in terms of metaphysical concepts, but as three important human values. Franz Brentano was one of the first proponents of this way of thinking and his list of values (1889) included, among others, those of Beauty, Virtue and Knowledge^[30]: G.E.Moore included similar values in his Principia Ethica of 1908 ^[31]; and A.N. Whitehead, another philosopher of the early twentieth century, referred in his book, Process and Reality (1929), to the, "vision of truth, beauty and goodness" which continues to lead us on.^[32]

• Transcendence (philosophy)