HoP 228 - It's All Good - The Transcendentals

[Music] Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast. Brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyofilosophy.net. Today's episode, it's all good, the transcendentals. Normally, I make an effort to spare you the technical jargon that typically festoons philosophical prose. I assume that people listening to podcasts while they are jogging or washing the dishes don't really want to fight their way through the sort of phrases I use all the time in my day job, like internalistic epistemic theory of justification, jointly necessary and sufficient conditions, or full-bodied medium roast. A lot of the best philosophy is done during coffee breaks. But with the medievals, it's often tempting to make an exception. This isn't just because they were such lovers of technical terminology, it's also because their conceptual breakthroughs often went together with the development of fine distinctions. In some cases, what may seem a case of mere scholastic hair splitting has survived to become a standard instrument in the toolkit of today's philosophers. An excellent example is the contrast between extensional and intentional. We're going to find this distinction useful for today's episode, so I hope it won't ruin your morning run or evening wash-up if I take a moment to explain it. The basic idea is that you can think of or talk about one in the same thing, or group of things, in more than one way. George Clinton, for instance, was the leader of the soul-drenched jazz organ infused 1970s band Funkadelic and also the leader of the more disco-leaning group called Parliament. Hence, if you are thinking about the leader of Funkadelic, and I am thinking about the leader of Parliament, what we are thinking about, is extensionally identical; we are, in other words, thinking of the same man out there in the world, namely George Clinton. But our thoughts are intentionally distinct. Thinking about the leader of Funkadelic is not the same as thinking of the leader of Parliament, even if it turns out that you and I are thinking about the same man. They must be different, since someone could realize that George Clinton led Funkadelic without realizing that he led Parliament. Another frequently used example, which, as it happens, also involves organs, is that the extension of the phrase "animals with hearts" is the same as the extension of the phrase "animals with kidneys", because all animals with hearts have kidneys and vice versa. But these phrases obviously mean different things, so they are intentionally distinct. The Medieval's achieved unprecedented clarity on this point and deployed it in innovative ways. But it was suggested much earlier by an ancient philosopher who was better at providing distinctions than the committee who decides on the Queen's Honours list each year, Aristotle. In his metaphysics, Aristotle mentions that unity is convertible with being, even though unity and being are somehow different. Anything that is is one thing and vice versa, so being and unity are extensionally identical. Now, the metaphysics was one of the many texts that came to be read by scholastic philosophers in the 13th century after being unknown during the early medieval period. Once the Medieval's began to study the work, this passage really caught their attention. Aristotle did have a point after all. How could anything exist without having some kind of unity? Even something that is nothing more than a scattered bunch of other things, like a crowd, is still one crowd. It must have some degree of unity, or we wouldn't be entitled to refer to it as something that is. Which brings us to the transcendentals. To forestall any confusion straight away, no, the transcendentals are not a group of medieval superheroes. But they're pretty super nonetheless, because they are nothing less than the properties or features that apply to all existing things. Being and unity are both transcendentals, because everything that is is, even Bill Clinton would agree to that, and as we've just said, everything that is, is one. There are other examples, notably true and good. Aquinas also includes thing and something, which sound less redundant than Latin than they do in English, race and aliquid. As we'll see in a bit, beauty was also considered as a possible transcendental. But Medieval's thought of more besides these, and in fact, you can quite easily make your own transcendentals at home. To take a rather trivial example, nothing can be both round and square, so all existing things have the property of not being a round square. The transcendental that first attracted serious attention in the 13th century was goodness. We can see this in William of Oksere, a master of theology at Paris in the decades following the founding of the university. He's not to be confused with William of Ovan, whose views of the soul we discussed last time. William of Oksere took up a question that had been raised by Boethius in one of his theological treatises. Why, as Boethius, are all things that exist good? William accepted Boethius' answer, namely that God is a purely good cause, so everything God creates winds up being good too. For this reason, William claims to be and to be good are one and the same thing. Reading Boethius or William of Oksere on this issue, one may feel like someone who's turned up late to a play and missed the first act. Whoever said that everything that is is good. What about natural disasters, burnt coffee, and the repeated success of soccer teams coached by José Moreno? The world seems to be chock full of terrible things, so how can anyone say that all things are good? The answer lies with a late ancient Platonist doctrine about goodness, which found a welcome reception in Augustine and Boethius and was then widely accepted by the medievals. According to this doctrine, nothing can be at all without having some share in goodness. This is not to say that everything is perfect, to the contrary only God is perfect, but even evil things must be good in some ways, or they could not be at all. By now this understanding of evil as relative non-being is familiar to us, so I won't linger over the point now. Suffice to say that it forms a background assumption for the whole discussion of transcendentals, and explains why goodness is always included alongside unity and truth as co-extensive with being. Instead, let's consider a more subtle question, which William of Oksere leaves unanswered. How can it be true to say that being and being good are one and the same? William himself admits that this is problematic. After all, one thing can be more good than another, but it seems that one thing cannot be more than another. A solution would be provided by Philip the Chancellor, another theologian of Paris, and a contemporary of William of Oksere, both died in the 1230s. Philip was a significant figure in the life of the university in the first third of the century, because he served as Chancellor at the Cathedral of Notre Dame for about 20 years. Philip's decisive contribution to the theory of transcendentals came in a treatise called "Day Bono", meaning on the good, and not as you may have been hoping that the work is a prophetic tribute to the lead singer of you too. Like William of Oksere, Philip the Chancellor was strongly influenced by Boethius, and he accepted their conviction that being and good are convertible. But unlike William, he also made use of the materials from Aristotle and the Islamic world that had recently become available in Latin. In fact, Philip nicely illustrates the dynamic we've been seeing throughout early 13th century of philosophy, with newly translated texts being used to make progress on difficulties that had already been faced by earlier generations. Thanks to his exposure to Aristotle and the resources of terminus logic, Philip was able to explain more precisely the relationship between being goodness, unity, and truth. We can formulate the puzzle facing him a bit more precisely by framing it as a dilemma. If being is the same as unity, truth, and goodness, then aren't these further notions pointless, or as the medieval's put it "negatory"? Unity, truth, and goodness would be mere synonyms of being. Saying that all things that are are good would no longer be an ambitious claim about metaphysics and God's creation, but a mere totology, on a par with such empty observations as it is what it is, or as 1970's soul singers like to say, everything is everything. On the other hand, is saying that a thing is, does have a different meaning from saying that a thing is good, then goodness must somehow differ from being. And this suggests that Boethius was wrong. It isn't necessary that whatever is is good. Philip the Chancellor's solution is that being, unity, goodness, and truth are indeed the same, but only extensionally. They are, however, different in intention. He makes this point using the vocabulary of 13th century logic, writing that, "Though they are convertible with respect to the extension and scope of their supposites, the good goes beyond being conceptually." We see here how important supposition theory could be in context beyond logic. To say that two different terms "supposite" for the same thing means that the two terms refer to the same object or objects out in the world. But this doesn't mean that the two terms have the same signification. To go back to our former example, the terms "leader of parliament" and "leader of Funkadelic" both "supposite" for drunkenness. George Clinton, while meaning something entirely different. Supposition theory provided the tools clearly to express this fact, and a recitalian theory of language could offer a deeper explanation of what is going on. For Aristotle, words signify concepts in the mind, and concepts signify things in the world. So, we use different words to lead the mind to different concepts, which may turn out to apply to one and the same thing, in our example, George Clinton. Likewise, being and unity are distinct concepts, but both apply universally to everything that there is. Unfortunately, like children in a fairy tale scattering breadcrumbs, Philip the Chancellor is not out of the woods yet. This is because the terms being, unity, and so on clearly have a much closer, more intimate connection than other words that are intentionally different while being extensionally the same. It seems that whatever falls under being must also fall under unity, goodness, and truth. This isn't always the case. George Clinton may be the leader of both Parliament and Funkadelic, but he could retire and pass leadership of the bands to two different people, perhaps Fred Wesley and Bootsie Collins. Then the titles would become extensionally as well as intentionally distinct. Or as the Medievals would say, the terms "leader of Funkadelic" and "leader of Parliament" would come to supposit for different things. With the transcendental terms, this cannot happen. Why not? Again, Philip is ready with an answer here, which is that although the other terms do indeed introduce a conceptual change from the basic idea of being, they do not add much. Being the leader of Funkadelic is a positive feature that brings with it certain legal and financial rights, as George Clinton has often been eager to point out. By contrast, unity adds only something "negative" to being, namely the absence of division. This idea that the other transcendentals add negative characterizations was also used in a text written jointly by yet another Parisian theologian, Alexander of Heils, and some of his collaborators, especially John de la Rochelle. However, Alexander and John added that the transcendentals could also allude to the way that being relates to other things. For instance, the reason that being is convertible with truth, something that may have been puzzling youth throughout this episode, is that any case of being can be understood, that is, can be related to the intellect. Likewise, the good is being in so far as it relates to our will or faculty of choice. These ideas will be taken up by the most famous exponent of transcendental theory, Thomas Aquinas. These states explicitly that when two things differ only conceptually, this is because they are distinguished only by virtue of negations or relations. So, that's how the transcendentals differ from one another. But what is it that they all have in common? Well they are, extensionally, the same, of course, because they apply to all things. But the medievals had a more rigorous way of putting this point. To be worthy of the name, the transcendentals are going to need something to transcend. Their parliament, Funkadelic, transcended the boundaries of musical genre and often of good taste, the medievals transcendentals transcended the categories. These, of course, were another inheritance from the Aristotelian tradition. Substance, quantity, quality, relation, and the rest were taken by the scholastics to constitute ten classes of being. On this understanding of Aristotle's categories, being human really is what it sounds like, a way of being, in this case, a kind of being that is appropriate to substances. By contrast, the being that belongs to blue is a qualitative sort of being. What's special about the transcendentals is that they cut across the division between categories, applying just as much to a substance like human as to a quality like blue. For instance, just as each human that is is one human, so each instance of blue that is is one instance of blue. Though this cross-categorial status gives the transcendentals both their name and their philosophical importance, it also raises some problems. Within the Aristotelian logical framework used by the scholastics, we understand concepts by finding definitions, and we define things by dividing a large class into a smaller subclass, as when we say that human is the sort of animal that is rational. But obviously, with the transcendentals, that won't be possible. You can't understand being as a certain specific kind of something or other, because everything that there is has being. We grasp the categories as divisions within being, but we can't grasp being itself in a similar way since it isn't a division of any more general class. That applies, of course, to the other transcendentals, too — unity, truth, and goodness all apply to everything. How then should we try to define them? The answer is, basically, that we can't. The best we can do is somehow to characterize them, for instance by explaining that unity means being in so far as it lacks division. This isn't a proper definition, but it does convey what we might mean when we talk about unity and also why it is different from being, intentionally different, of course, not extensively different. If you press the point by asking how we would learn about such general concepts, the scholastics will suggest that you go read one of the texts that has been made available in the recent Latin translation movement. This time, they will point you not to Aristotle, but to Avacena. He argued that concepts like being are, as he put it, primary intelligibles. They are immediately available to the mind, and we do not learn about them on the basis of anything else. Just like Thomas Aquinas are happy to accept this and even cite Avacena by name when explaining the idea. As a result, the transcendentals are not just important notions in 13th century metaphysics. They actually define what metaphysics is, since it can be understood as the science of the first and most general concepts that we have. Which of course is going to raise even more problems. A rival conception of metaphysics would make it the science of the most fundamental causes of being, rather than the most general concepts, which brings metaphysics very close to theology. Aristotle's metaphysics muddied the waters rather than clearing them up, since some parts of it seemed to undertake a general study of being, and other parts, and inquiry into the first causes of all things. Any attempt to bring the two projects together would inevitably lead to a further question, is it really true that the transcendentals apply to everything in the same way? And we apply the notions of being, unity, and goodness to God in the same way as we apply them to created things? These concerns are going to lead to intense debate in the later 13th century, most notably between Aquinas and Dundes' scotus. The transcendentals also play a role in another area of philosophy entirely, aesthetics. The medievals did not recognize aesthetics as a sub-discipline of philosophy along with physics, ethics, or metaphysics, but they did talk about beauty, which some authors, including Alexander of Hells and his colleagues, wanted to include in the list of transcendentals. Some scholars have thought to find the same idea in Thomas Aquinas, but in passages where Aquinas enumerates the transcendentals, beauty is not included, and with good reason. Elsewhere, Aquinas tells us that to be beautiful is to be good in a certain way. Beauty is the tendency of goodness to be pleasing. So, beauty would relate to goodness, much as goodness relates to being. In a sense then it counts as a transcendental, because its extension is just as wide as that of goodness, which in turn is just as wide as the scope of being. But beauty is unlike the other transcendentals in that it involves a relational feature of goodness rather than of being. Aquinas' remarks on beauty stand in a long tradition, which, like the conception of evil as non-being, can be traced back to Augustin and ultimately to pagan Platonism. In this tradition, beauty is defined in terms of symmetry and order, which are in turn seen as manifestations of divine reality in the physical realm. God, in other words, is ultimately and perfectly beautiful, something expressed in a famous line of Augustin's confessions, late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new. If you consider a work of art such as the shocked cathedral, you can see how this spiritual, dare I say, transcendent, understanding of beauty might be put into practice. But what about a work of art like, say, the classic Funkadelic album "Let's Take It to the Stage"? Part of what makes it enjoyable is its ridiculousness, its irreverence, its roughness around the edges. You might suppose that in the Middle Ages, aesthetic tastes ran exclusively towards the cathedral end of that spectrum. But as it turns out, the medieval artistic sensibility could be pretty funky. When commenting on the appeal of poetry or visual art works, medieval authors often emphasize the play of contradictory features, like sweetness and bitterness in food. Audiences enjoyed incongruity and parody, and did not insist that beauty should somehow convey a transcendental goodness present in all created things. To the contrary, they were comfortable with the idea that beauty was merely skin deep. In fact, is it or of Seville related the Latin word for beauty, Pulcretudo, to the word for skin, Pellis? It is tempting to think that in this case, the philosophers were like a medieval peasant whose land has been confiscated by the local lord; they simply lost the plot. But Aquinas does emphasize the relational nature of beauty. Just as truth is being as related to the mind, so beauty is goodness as related to our capacity to feel delight. This fits with the dynamic nature of aesthetic experience, which always depends on an interaction between artwork and audience. Philosophers were also open to the idea that beauty is, if not superficial or skin deep, then at least, characteristically bodily in nature. They belonged, after all, to a religion based on the incarnation of the divine in a human body. For this reason, somewhat less intellectualist thinkers, including Aquinas' contemporary Bonaventure, gave great weight to sensation, and used vividly physical metaphors as they described our journey to know God. For the most powerful of examples, we need only think back to the visions of Hildegarde of Bingen. For authors with this frame of mind, the beauty of nature or of a work of art could have a role in spiritual life precisely because these things appeal to the senses. As I've said, the case of beauty shows that the theory of transcendentals was not only about metaphysics. If I may indulge in one more technical expression, the transcendentals have what philosophers would nowadays call a "normative dimension". It is not only being or unity that has universal scope, but also goodness, and according to at least some authors' beauty. For the 13th century's scholastics, then, existing things do not just call us to know about them, but also to value them. As they would put it, things make a claim on our will as well as our intellect. But how should we respond to and understand the goodness of these things? And what is our place within the world of goods? These are the questions we'll be tackling next week, as we turn to a final major philosophical discipline in this survey of developments in the earlier 13th century. Our topic will be ethics, especially theories of moral conscience. That's next time on every podcast listener's not-so-guilty pleasure, the history of philosophy without any gaps. [ Silence ] [ Silence ] [BLANK_AUDIO]