The one, the true, the good, and the beautiful

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I was taught classical philosophy at Gonzaga University, a Jesuit institution. This means that I was taught Aristotelian philosophy, by way of Thomas Aquinas.

I learned, in my Metaphysics class taught by Father Carney back in 1977, that there are four transcendental properties: the One, the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. Everything in the world partakes of these four properties. Take a tree, for example. It’s one tree: it’s a unity, a thing in the world that can be pointed at and identified. It’s a true tree: it’s identifiable, it’s a unique tree, it’s that tree there in the front yard, and it definitely conforms to every definition of a tree you ever heard of. It’s a good tree, in that it conforms to the definition of trees, and in its nature it has never consciously committed any evil deed. And it is a beautiful tree, because it, in its present state of being, is admirable and beautiful, whether or not it’s perfectly symmetrical or delightful.

Then, recently, I ran across this old dialogue between Albert Einstein and Rabindranath Tagore:

TAGORE: . . .  Science is concerned with that which is not confined to individuals; it is the impersonal human world of Truths. Religion realizes these Truths and links them up with our deeper needs; our individual consciousness of Truth gains universal significance. Religion applies values to Truth, and we know this Truth as good through our own harmony with it.

EINSTEIN: Truth, then, or Beauty is not independent of Man?

TAGORE: No.

EINSTEIN: If there would be no human beings any more, the Apollo of Belvedere would no longer be beautiful.

TAGORE: No.

This hurts me.  It strikes at the True, and at the Beautiful.  (Well, the Beautiful was little shaky to begin with, in case you didn’t notice.)

Basically, Tagore is saying that, if there were no people in the world, the transcendental properties would not apply.

Uh-oh.

Beauty becomes a fashion show of stuff that doesn’t matter, and Truth becomes just a set of things that equal other things.

And it goes without saying that the Good goes right out the window.

And – given what we know about the subatomic universe – who can say what’s a unity? What’s the One?

The Universe is a scary place, kids, when you take away the transcendental properties.

Somebody please hold my hand.

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Goldendale, Washington

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 Goldendale is a town in Washington state, in Klickitat County not far north of the Columbia River. The sign at the city limits used to read like this (maybe it still does):

 

 

 

WELCOME TO GOLDENDALE

THE GOLDEN GATE

TO THE EVERGREEN STATE

 

 

When we made our yearly visits to my my paternal grandmother, back in the 1960s and 1970s, Goldendale was the last real town we passed through before we arrived at her house. We usually stopped for a burger. I wish I could remember the name of the burger place, because it was excellent.

 

 

Partner and I have passed through Goldendale a few times over the past fifteen years. It’s bigger than I remember, but I see from Wikipedia that it has less than four thousand residents, so it’s still pretty small.

 

 

In June 1918, astronomers William Campbell and Heber Curtis came to Goldendale to view a solar eclipse. This was an especially important eclipse, because Einstein’s theories predicted that the light of stars close to the sun would be deflected slightly, and everyone wanted to see whether or not it was true.

 

 

The Goldendale data (which wasn’t terrific) did not confirm Einstein’s theories. Luckily, other viewings over the next few years confirmed that Einstein was correct.

 

 

But Goldendale turns out to be a great place to have an observatory. The air is clear, and the weather is mostly cloudless. There’s a permanent observatory there now, in its own state park.

 

 

And here’s the thing: my father (who was six years old at the time) was only a few miles away from Campbell and Curtis, on his parents’ ranch, as Campbell and Curtis performed their observations.

 

 

The world is a very small place after all.

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