Truth, Beauty, Goodness

John Muir's writings portray total personality engagement leading to the liberating unification of the following components of aesthetic experience: keen perception, scientific understanding, empathy and a sense of the expressiveness of nature, imagination cultivated by the arts, intellectual recognition of the harmony of contrasts, philosophical aesthetic reflection (little developed in Muir), and joyful appreciation of beauty as divine. Muir's theocentric aesthetic contributes to the current variety of cultural and disciplinary aesthetic perspectives. He shows the roles of empathy and imagination in sensitivity to expressiveness in nature. He points the way toward a post-Kantian conception of the relation of the beautiful and the sublime. And the harmonies he finds range from simple to complex, easy to difficult, and small scale to cosmic. The paper is a version of a document used to launch experiential projects in environmental aesthetics for university art students (and there is support for those who choose not to pattern after the religious dimension of Muir's aesthetic experience). The educational assumption is that it helps those who wish to develop their appreciation of the beauties of nature to study an analysis of an example of heroic personality dynamics with its dimensions of body, mind, and soul so magnificently engaged. How shall we expand our appreciation of the beauties of nature? One set of resources for this project are the writings of John Muir (1838-1914). At the age of

The life in the golden rule is seen in its tendency to disclose multiple levels of meaning when seriously applied over time by a culture or an academic discipline. This paper presents a path of reasoning that unfolds a sequence of six levels of meaning in the rule. A sustained footnote notes many, many meanings of the idea of a moral principle that emerge through historical study of the golden rule.

I this article I tackle a series of questions related to beauty and aesthetic perception in Aquinas. Many of these questions orbit what we should make of Aquinas's claim "Pulchra enim dicuntur quae visa placent" (ST I.5.4ad1)

In the first part, I focus on beauty in Aquinas. A surprising amount of literature has been written on Aquinas's relatively scattered remarks about beauty. Drawing upon this erudite literature, I note some important hermeneutical worries about approaching these various remarks and present a summary of Aquinas's view that beauty pertains to what exhibits claritas and proportio. Perhaps the most controversial topic in this literature concerns the transcendental status of beauty in Aquinas. Again, I address some exegetical concerns about the nature of this question, and try to articulate a non-anachronistic version of the question. I then examine Jan Aertsen's well-known criticisms of exponents of the view that beauty is a transcendental for Aquinas. I demonstrate that Aertsen’s objections and arguments are not persuasive, are far from decisive, and were adequately anticipated and resolved by the interpretations of Umberto Eco and others. Indeed, it is Aertsen who has failed to address adequately the cogent interpretations of his predecessors, who rightly defend the thesis that beauty is a transcendental in Aquinas.

Transcendental beauty pertains to beauty as it is in itself (quoad se), but aesthetic beauty pertains to instances of transcendental beauty as it is manifest to us humans (i.e., quoad nos). In the second part of the essay I focus in on a specific kind of aesthetic experience, namely, that of aesthetic perception, and I look to the importance of Aquinas's doctrine of per accidens sensation by the cogitative power and intellect for understanding beauty as a per accidens sensible grasped by aesthetic perception. I then turn to investigate the way in which aesthetic perception, a cognitive operation, involves a form of pleasure, an appetitive operation.

I conclude with some speculative remarks on the importance of aesthetic virtues and cultivating an aesthetics of everyday life.

The book presents a philosophy of living which is organized around the categories of truth, beauty, and goodness. These categories are specified in terms of the truths of science, philosophy, and spiritual experience; beauty in nature and the arts; and morality and character achievement.
    Chapter 1 includes profiles of Charles Darwin and Barbara McClintock, who show virtues in their scientific work that we can apply in daily life.
    In scientific living, we establish important facts with care, explore causes, bring to mind what we know of the relevant science, and learn more--all placed within the context of a broad evolutionary perspective. That perspective includes cosmology, biology, psychology, and history.

Current teleology in Western biology, philosophy, and theology draws on resources from four main Western philosophers. (1) Plato's Timaeus shows how to interpret the universe as the handiwork of a purposive Creator who subordinates secondary, necessary causes to primary, intelligent causes. (2) Aristotle's Physics sets forth purpose as implicit in the nature of things. Purposes of different sorts inhere in different types of being, and everything has a natural function. Living things grow to actualize the potentials of the goal whose principle they bear within themselves. (3) Kant's Critique of Judgment denies that purpose is anything that human beings can know, strictly speaking. Nevertheless, purpose is a concept we must use to make sense of biological systems. (4) Hegel's Philosophy of Nature articulates organic systems as dialectically including and transcending mechanical and chemical systems. Teleological themes persist, in different ways, in contemporary discussions; I consider two lines of criticism of traditional teleology-by Dawkins and Gould-and one line that continues traditional teleology in an updated way-by Holmes Rolston III.

The problem of evil didn’t use by Hume (and also not by three speakers, Demea, Cleanthes and Philo in Dialogues) as an argument against the existence of God. He only tries to reconcile the existence of God and the existence of the evil in the world. And he also insist to refute the inference of perfect attributes of God from the world. Can the prevalence of evil and suffering be reconciled with the claim that an omnipotent, omniscient and wholly good God governs the universe? We can find three affirmative answers for this question from the speakers who practice the Dialogues: Demea, applies to reconcile this contradiction (if it is) by ‘the best possible world’ theory. Cleanthes, wants to solve this problem by supposing the ‘Author of nature to be finitely perfect; though for exceeding mankind’. And the other speaker Philo, thinks that the problem of evil is not a problem for theism. Because when God create the world he ‘has no  more regard to good above ill then to heat above cold, or to drought above moisture, or to light above heavy.’

This fifth chapter of The Golden Rule (Oxford University Press, 1996) begins with the following paragraph.
  Jesus is a controversial figure partly because the records of his teachings juxtapose intuitively appealing statements with controversial ones. The golden rule, for example, is associated with more problematic teachings. Therefore, whoever would take the initial, obvious sense of Jesus' golden rule as its final sense faces a challenge when interpreting the rule in context. Matthew's Sermon on the Mount (chaps. 5-7) and Luke's comparable Sermon on the Plain (6.20-49) may appear to associate the rule with inferior standards: Give to others, or face the punishment of God (Matthew), and Give generously in order that you may receive abundantly (Luke). But these contexts also associate the rule with a high standard, including the commands to be perfect and to love your enemies. Thus, two main questions arise about the New Testament golden rule: How does the rule relate to notions of reciprocity? And how does the rule relate to the high standard of the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain, a standard that some have called unreasonably high? It is necessary to sort things out in some detail to show that a progressive, reasonable, and high standard emerges from the rule in Matthew and Luke.

Confucius used the golden rule as a social-ethical rule in a path that leads from self-examination and self-control to the virtue of ren (love, co-humanity--the person-to-person virtue par excellence). The rule of living is anchored in the virtues of basic relationships--loyalty in doing one's best for superiors and consideration in not demanding too much of subordinates. A section follows on 10 meanings of golden-rule relating (the word that Confucius uses is pi--comparing). Then the way of spontaneity is set forth using Mencius, Chu Hsi, and Ch'en Ch'un; the virtue of loyalty becomes cosmic centeredness, and consideration becomes spontaneous doing for others. The conclusion compares the rule of living in Confucianism and the West.

Realm of Beauty and Truth is my latest collection of poems that can be enjoyed travelling through the world of beauty, truth, love, spirituality, patriotism, peace and universal brotherhood, and sometimes halting for having some glimpses of growing diversity of the modern age.

My father taught me to value the good guy and in Oliver Twist Dickens does this beautifully and boldly, allowing the orphan several special chances to stay safe and protect his goodness.  Though novelistic tastes now usually run to more edgy, risk-tasking, bad behaviors, Dickens has lasted as a champion of the almost unbelievable ideal of being decent.

The practice of theurgy in Late antiquity and Middle Ages can be understood correctly and comprehensively only if we take into account the basic principles of Neoplatonist philosophy and theology as the basis of medieval mysticism. In order to understand the basic purpose and goal of the theurgical ritual of making stone tombstones with appropriate symbols in medieval Bosnia (Stećak) it is necessary for us to know the basic postulates of Neoplatonist philosophy (creation of the world, emanation and reversion of the Good, the Virtue) and Neoplatonist theology within the religious discourse of the Middle Ages (allegorical reading of the Scripture, the mystical theology of affirmation and negation). Theurgy as an expression of ritual mysticism puts an emphasis on experience and "living religion ". Every aspect of the imbalance in the soul can be purified through a theurgical ritual where the appropriate "theurgical token" (sunthemata) balances the soul and prepares it for the ascent. Philosophy is purifying, religion illuminating, but theurgy is uplifting.

Philosophy as metanoetics is dialectic inaugurated and informed and sustained by religious experience. Tanabe Hajime's book lays the groundwork for a philosophy of living for scholars and non-scholars alike. From this complex book one may reconstruct a sequence of stages. (1) In the first stage, complacent confidence in reason and in the independent self abounds. (2) Then reason exhausts itself in the effort to resolve insuperable theoretical and/or practical problems, "antinomies." (3) Then comes the religious breakthrough: one confesses one's weakness and repents of one's sins and pride and receives "resurrection" through the saving grace of Other-power (tariki). (4) Thinking, newly revived, expounds the contradictions of life and thought using the dialectics of absolute mu, nothingness. In particular, philosophy reflects upon Other-power and criticizes a naive concept of the otherness of Other-power. (5) Then a reconstructive way of thought is found which affirms a mediated unity of the absolute and the relative. (6) Finally, all activities of truth and goodness and beauty (199.2) are transformed. People are "restored to life as coworkers of God or the Buddha" (190.3). In fairness, it must be emphasized that Tanabe does not offer such a sequence of stages but at times presents the essential process as a ceaseless, circular, two-stage movement of consciousness oriented now toward relative (finite, intuitable) being, now toward absolute nothingness; and some expositions would condense some of my stages. Two problems motivate the separation of these stages. First, how can we sustain three moments which all find a place in PM: the religious orientation to Other-power; the dialectical critique of the otherness of the Other; and the Hegelian identity of the absolute and the relative? And second, how can religious philosophy produce a philosophy of living for the broad category in which Tanabe includes himself-"ordinary, ignorant people" (lx; 16.3; 85.2; 187)? Stage 1: naive self-confidence. The evil tendency intrinsic to finite beings is to take their relative independence (both as individuals and as a group) to be absolute. This evil is reflected in pride, in the materialism of the present age, and in the inability of existing political arrangements to achieve both liberty and equality. Stage 2: reason crashes on the rocks of antinomy. Tanabe adapts the pattern of Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind and insists that everyone must go through the breakdown of practical, scientific, and philosophic reason. Tanabe insists that the critique of reason must go beyond Kant to criticize the reasoning subject as well as the objective discourses of reason (38.2). The model of Tanabe's own experience suggests to him that without radically acknowledging the impotence of reason to reconcile its contradictions, one will never perform thoroughgoing zange, repentance, which opens the way fully for the invasion of grace. Tanabe explains that scientific theory has often been misleading, and philosophy cannot accept science as an unquestioned starting point. Science needs to be understood not only in terms of its announced results but also historically and in terms of its philosophical components and their difficulties (34; 97.3; 226.3). The most basic problem in the scientific method (noted more than a decade before Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) is this: one cannot be too optimistic about the heuristic value of the experimental method, since any scientific hypothesis projects an interpretation that hinders revolutionary discoveries (62.1; 108.2). Indeed, scientific theory may "fall into absolute disruption in its opposition to and estrangement from the irrationality of actuality" (97.1).

The struggle between good and evil is one of the main subjects of the Epistle
of Pseudo-Barnabas, which originated between 70 and 130, thus, in the period
when apocalyptic literature was flourishing. The latter’s impact on the Epistle is
undeniable, and is expressed in the characteristic approach of the present time as
the „last days” marked by intense activity of evil forces. Even though the outcome of God’s struggle with Satan has already been decided by the victory of
Jesus Christ on the cross, still it is ongoing, and at different levels. For Pseudo-
Barnabas, two areas of this confrontation are of utmost importance: the orthodoxy
of faith and morality of life. The first issue is treated very broadly (chapters
I-XVII), and its essence is to convince the readers of the Letter of the saving
exclusivism of Christianity. The author radically opposes Judaism, considering all
its laws and institutions in their historical implementation (e.g. sacrifices, fasting,
Sabbath, temple, ritual ordinances) as the result of both the incorrect (physical)
interpretation of the inspired Scriptures and submission to Satan’s insidious work.
The only people of the Covenant are those who have believed in Jesus Christ and
were immersed in the water of baptism. The other area of the still ongoing struggle
is the heart of a Christian who, at any time, has to choose between the way of
life and the way of death (chapters XVIII-XX). The final manifestation of Christ’s
victory over evil will happen at His second coming, when He will put an end to the
„times of the Wicked” and will bring into His Kingdom all the Christians faithful
to His teaching.

A discussion, on the basis of waking realism, of the real existence of goodness and of a supreme eternal being that would fittingly be identified as and called God. Goodness is not reducible to an attitude or a projection or a prescription (or a 'value' that is in no way a 'fact') but reducible rather to very being itself. The idea is an old one and is presented here not as new but as presented anew (as many old ideas need presenting). Accompanying and completing it, and completing the project of waking realism, is a defense of the existence of God -- a theistic God, not a deistic or a pantheistic God. This idea too is old but again is presented and argued here anew. Such a God would be Waking Realism writ large.