The "transcendentals"
These discussions of truth and goodness bring up the question of the "transcendental properties of being," which are things that can be said of any object simply because it exists (or is an object), irrespective of what kind of object it is (and so these "properties" "transcend" any one category of being).
Traditionally, it has been held that any being is one, true, good, and beautiful.
First of all, by "one" is meant "undivided in itself and divided from any other." Now I'll grant that a society, say, is a kind of pseudo-unit that can't really be called a being; but it is sort of a being; it can certainly be considered as a unit. I suppose that what this "property" means is that if you're going to know anything, then you know it in one act of understanding, which obviously (as a relation) connects it together somehow. But in this case a given "many" would have to be considered as a "many," which would make it a unit. It seems to me that "unit" here is just defined in such a way that it includes its opposite within it, and so I don't see much point in taking it in this sense.
Similarly, "ontological truth" in the sense that "being is true" would simply be "truth" in the sense of "the facts," irrespective of their relation to any mind; because the being as defined in this way couldn't be "false." Certainly the being is what it is; and if known correctly, judgments about it will be true. But beings can mislead; iron pyrite would make the unwary observer think that it is gold; and so isn't it false gold?
But if truth really is a characteristic of the judgment, why define the being as "true"? You can do it, in the sense in which you can define a fire as "comfortable" because it makes you comfortable; but why bother?
Also, "ontological goodness" by which "any being is good insofar as it exists" can have a sort of a meaning, in that any being that agrees with your preconceived idea is good, and by changing your idea, any being can agree with it. But that's a little silly, don't you think?
Further, the notion of "ontological truth" and "ontological goodness" imply that a greater being is "truer" and "better" than a less limited one; and in our discussion of the problem of evil, I tried to show that that view gets you into all kinds of difficulty.
Finally, since an object is beautiful if it conforms to my preconceived esthetic (emotion-based) ideal of what it "ought" to be, then this is just a special case of "goodness"; and like goodness, it does not follow that a less limited object is "objectively more beautiful" than a more limited one.
The case is perhaps strongest here. Some pieces of music are, by many people's standards, just incredibly beautiful; but what they are, objectively, are just a succession of vibrations of the air, and as such are at a much lower level of existence than a drunken disorderly human being--which means that he is objectively more beautiful than a Beethoven symphony.
Why don't we just forget about these senses of the terms? I don't see any point to stretching things to such lengths.
This, then, finishes our discussion of what you might call "being as such," at least when you admit that some of the beings of our experience are limited. That is, we have treated the fact of limitation, which all beings except God are "infected" with. Given that, what has been said in this Part applies to all beings. In the next Part, dealing mainly with energy, we will get into different modes of the finite, possessed by some beings but not others.
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