More Issues in Metaphysics - Beauty as a Transcendental

See my first two posts on beauty as introduction to the question: Is beauty objective? and attempting to define our goal in aesthetics.

Here I shall endeavor a slightly different approach: metaphysics.

Classical ontology (the study of being) can be divided into three branches.*'

1. The study of "being as being," that is, not studying the shape or size or color or function of the keyboard I am typing on, but studying the simple existence of the keyboard itself. This study asks, "What makes it something rather than nothing?"

2. The study of general principles of being, "general features that are true of all things whatsoever. "Medieval philosophers characterize all the different transcendentals to stand for all those features that characterize all the different kinds of entities that exist. The notions of existence, unity, truth and goodness have been taken by some to be examples a transcendental. Everything that is, say a carbon atom, a person, a number or a property of being green, is such that it exists, is a unity (i.e., is one entity in some sense), and is true and good." *''

3. The study of the fundamental categories or 'kinds' of existing things that all other particular existing things fall into. What are the fundamental categories? Persons? Substances? Properties? Physical massive objects? This is different from the study of transcendentals in that an existing thing, say attributes, may or may not be a substance, may or may not be a relation, may not be a physical massive object, but it still must exemplify the transcendentals of unity, existence, goodness etc.

*I here draw from JP Moreland in the Philosophical Foundations...

Why Transcendentals Still Matter

Invoking transcendentals to explain existing things has fallen somewhat out of fashion, but the force of the simple argument remains strong. All things have unity, or are unities. Even to say "a thing is not a unity" linguistically presupposes that we know what we mean by "thing," and we know that it is one, ie it is not "things" nor is it "no-thing." What is unity, then? Is it a property like other properties? If so, how does it come to be so universally predicated? Whether we resort to the classical posit of transcendentals, the empirical observable fact of unity demands an explanation.

Drawing from tradition, there are three major transcendentals that tend to stick together in a group: goodness, truth, and beauty. That is, everything that exists, has some share of all three, by virtue of its existence. Though this schema may sound unfamiliar to the modern mind, it has immense explanatory power and the advocacy of many centuries of intelligent thinkers. Ancient, medieval, and modern thinkers make use of this scheme. Immanuel Kant, to take one modern instance, takes these three transcendentals as his touch-point in three major works of philosophy Critique of Pure Reason, Grounding for Metaphysics of Morals, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, etc.

If Beauty is Real, Why Is It So Hard to Identify?