Teaching and Learning About Truth, Beauty, and Goodness

• In Event: Peaceful Solutions to Challenges of Pandemic: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives From the East to the West

Abstract

In philosophy, the one, true, good and beautiful are called transcendental values - ultimate ideals of human interest and desire, and hence of education. We find them inscribed on school and college buildings, but in our secular, relativist, anti-metaphysical age they are now just empty words
This paper asks: Where do these ideals come from? And can they be reclaimed? This proposal concentrates on their origins, drawing on key philosophical texts.
The word transcendental derived from Latin, means “that which surpasses something.” To transcend is just a transitive verb - something transcends something else; the verb needs a complement. So what is the complement when we talk about them as transcendental?
To discover this, we must turn to Aristotle's Categories. There Aristotle explains the kinds of things we can say about something. For example, we can ask of a thing ‘what is it’s color’ or other qualities. We can ask how many there are, or its quantities. Or where it is, or how long it takes, or in what direction it moves - its place, time, or motion. Aristotle mentions ten categories in all. Aristotle noted that the One is all-encompassing and indivisible. So it can't be any place or take any or have any color or other quality, and it cannot take time, and so cannot move, and it cannot have quantity because while it is one it can’t be two, so it doesn’t have quantity -in the way a family with one dog might have two. So the One surpasses or transcends the categories.
Neoplatonist philosophers, strongly influenced by Plato, Aristotle, and Indian Vedanta, then identified the One, the True, the Beautiful and the Good as transcendentals in this Aristotelian sense. These ideas have since exerted an almost unimaginable force on Jewish, Christian and Muslim thought. It was a natural step to identify the One with God and the true, beautiful and good as His attributes or names.
The love of God, and hence of truth, beauty, and goodness, became the guiding principle of medieval philosophy, art, and education and later, the ideal of Renaissance humanism which shaped modern universities and liberal arts colleges.
Today, however, we live in a relativistic age. Skeptics ask: Whose truth beauty or goodness? Scientific positivists devalue aesthetic, moral and religious values as arbitrary; critical theorists attack them as instruments of hegemonic oppression; postmodernists deconstruct even empirical science as - like poetry - just an arena for free play of language.
Transcendental Reconstruction. Can these ideals be reclaimed? The paper concludes that transcendental ideals - truth, beauty and goodness cannot be conveyed through classroom lessons, but only through direct experiences in school communities of science, arts, and moral value running parallel to and connecting with adult communities of practice. Young people, facing the challenges of climate change and state violence, are surrounded by a vibrant culture of artistic and social activism responding to these challenges, engagement with which can bring them face to face with the truth, beauty and goodness of their time.

Author

• Leonard J. Waks, Hongzhou Normal University