Metaphysics of Goodness

Harmony and Form, Beauty and Art, Obligation and Personhood, Flourishing and Civilization

Robert Cummings Neville

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781438477428, 9781438477435
• eBook ISBN: 9781438477442
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Develops a theory of culture based on a metaphysics that elaborates on the Platonic and Confucian traditions.

In Metaphysics of Goodness, Robert Cummings Neville extends Alfred North Whitehead's project of cultural studies, which was based on a new metaphysics that Whitehead developed in Adventures of Ideas. Neville's focus is value or goodness in many modes. The metaphysics treated in this book derive from the Platonic and Confucian traditions, with significant modifications of Whitehead, Peirce, Dewey, Confucius, Xunzi, and Zhou Dunyi. Part one develops a theory of form based on a metaphysics of harmony. Part two elaborates a theory of art based on a metaphysics of beauty. Part three sketches a theory of personhood based on a metaphysics of obligation. Part four discusses civilization in a systematic way based on a metaphysics of flourishing. Throughout the book, Neville elaborates a theory of interpretation that is inspired by Peirce, Dewey, and Xunzi but is not limited to their ideas. While the reasoning of the book is concise, it employs methodologies from many kinds of philosophy, art criticism, ethics, and cultural studies, and sees philosophy as needing to learn from all these disciplines.

PART I

Goodness in Harmony and Form

Would it not be helpful if we could be clear at the beginning of our inquiry? Would it not be helpful if we could just define our terms clearly and build on that beginning? Mathematics works this way, clear step by clear step. Philosophy, however, gains clarity only toward the end of inquiry. Even at the end of a philosophical inquiry, clarity is not exactly the end in view. Rather we should hope for an enlarged and highly complicated feel for what connects with what and why certain things are more important than others. Nevertheless, in order to begin I can counterfeit the helpful feeling of clarity by establishing a contrast between what I intend to argue for and what I shall argue against. Let me begin by contrasting two large, thematic, models of goodness.

The one I shall argue for is the aesthetic model according to which goodness is some kind of harmonious togetherness of things with balance, proportion, and measure, things that “just fit together,” as I mentioned earlier. It deserves the label “aesthetic” because it holds that goodness is something grasped or appreciated in a kind of aesthetic vision or judgment, a matter of coherent perception (“aesthetic” derives from the Greek word for perception). The grasp is itself a harmony that connects the goodness in the thing with the goodness in the perception. The large model of goodness against which I shall argue is the realization or fulfillment model according to which goodness is the realization, fulfillment, or completion of a thing’s nature; this model usually supposes that things are substances that can bear unrealized realizations. That something is good means that it is finished in its realization, or on the way to finishing, according to the realization model.

By virtue of thoroughness, clarity might develop in the maturation of inquiry. Thoroughness of inquiry overcomes the dichotomies that provide initial clarity and integrates the truth in both sides. I hope to show along the way that something is true in both the aesthetic and the realization models of goodness. Nevertheless, I will argue that the second is subordinate to and accounted for within the first.

In the West, Plato is associated with the aesthetic model of goodness. His fundamental vision was that the cosmos is a maelstrom of changing processes that have determinateness only insofar as they pass through formal structures. The processes cohere, when they do, because their forms cohere. Because the processes are always passing through forms on the way to other forms, Plato called the concrete world the realm of becoming. Everything is always becoming something else. The stability of the world, for Plato, derives from the stability of the forms through which things pass repeatedly. In the human sphere are forms that are necessary and precious for human life, and these become the ideals that we strive to preserve or achieve. The understanding of goodness then is the understanding of what makes forms cohere. Evil or disaster happen when the forms important to embody in the processes of human life break up by accident, collision, or entropy. Plato’s abstract analysis of goodness appealed to what he called the Form of the Good, that which makes good things good because they have internal coherence. In the Republic where he talked about the Form of the Good, he said that it gives coherence of different sorts to images, concrete processes, theoretical ideas that might apply to those processes, and to what he called the “dialectic” of weighing what theories take in or leave out in their account of processes. He also said the Form of the Good gives aesthetic judgmental faculties to imagination, to common sense for dealing with concrete processes, to theoretical rationality, and to dialectical speculation. The Form of the Good is not itself a determinate form, and hence we cannot know it in a theory or conceptual picture. It gives coherence to the forms of things in process, and in the Philebus Plato characterized “that which gives coherence” as balance, proportion, measure, beauty, and things of this sort, all matters of aesthetic appreciation. In the Statesman Plato said that a good politician has an aesthetic sense of “normative measure” for just how much of this or that to promote and how far to go, this all in contrast with “standard measure” or rules that tell you how much and how many. In the preface, I listed some of the major Platonic contributors to the aesthetic model of goodness, coming down to Charles Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead, my own patrons. Robert S. Brumbaugh is the extraordinary interpreter of Plato on goodness whom I follow in my reading.

In the West, Aristotle is associated with the realization model of goodness. Goodness lies in the achievement of a final cause, “that for the sake of which” a thing acts. The ultimate final cause for Aristotle is self-sufficiency, that which needs nothing else and cannot change because any change would be for the worse. For him, the ultimate Good is “thought thinking itself,” which is pure act with no potency; Thomas Aquinas developed this into his idea of God. Next most perfect in itself to thought thinking itself, for Aristotle, is a fixed star spinning in place; next best is a spinning star moving in orbit; next best is the rotation of the seasons; next best is the reproductive cycle in plants and animals. Human beings need to find the balance between extremes, the Golden Mean, in moral life; but the highest good for human beings, according to Aristotle in book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics, is contemplation of eternal truths in imitation of thought thinking itself.1

Chapter 1 of this part introduces many of the important concepts concerning goodness that I will develop throughout this volume. The claim basic to this whole project is that anything with form has goodness by virtue of that form. The first argument for this is experiential, namely, that we experience everything as having some good or other. To make out this argument I need to introduce the notion of form as such, which I will articulate theoretically in the first and second chapters. Crucial to the notion of form is that of harmony, which I shall develop abstractly in the second and third sections of the first chapter. In order to experience goodness appreciatively, the form of that which is good needs to relate to the appreciators. I shall elaborate a conception of a “situation” in which the intentions and attentions of experiencers relate through harmonies to that which is appreciated. Throughout the volume, I will embroider the example of appreciating a sunset.

The most revolutionary contribution of this book, I dare to think, is its systematic development of the hypothesis that anything that is determinate is a harmony, including as components within itself relations with all other things with respect to which the thing is determinate. We cannot fully define things by “properties” they possess, but by how they compose in their forms all the other things to which they relate without making those things lose their own external integrity. In my language, things have components rather than properties, and many of these components are relations to other things. Relations themselves are harmonies. This is an extreme relational metaphysics undergirding a relational axiology.

Chapter 2 extends the argument by asking, in a preliminary way prior to the full-blown discussion in chapter 4, why we should identify goodness with form. The first answer is that goodness is a kind of “density of being,” as in the philosophy of Leibniz. The denser the being of something, the better it is. The chapter elaborates the theory of harmony to explain density of being. This elaboration requires the further elucidation of the notion of an existential field in which harmonies are related. A situation as defined in chapter 1 is one kind of existential field and is “situated” within a larger environing existential field. I justify the goodness of density of being in two stages. First, I explain how the elegant optimization of complexity and simplicity constitutes goodness. Second, I explain how the composition of the form of a harmony arranges its components so that they function in one or several of four ways: as having narrowness, width, vagueness, or triviality. Though borrowed from Whitehead, I nevertheless develop these notions here according to my view of harmony, not his. Finally, chapter 2 articulates the experiential terms of intensity and immediacy for the situational grasp of the goodness in density of being.

Chapter 3 deepens the discussion of the previous two chapters by developing a more formal but concrete cosmology to show the grounds for their claims. The metaphysical theory of determinateness as harmony applies to any possible cosmos. Our particular cosmos is temporal, and so a temporal cosmology needs articulation. It includes a theory of the future as a structured field of possibilities, often including alternative possibilities. I introduce and complicate Aristotle’s famous example (in De Interpretatione 19a30, chapter 9) of admirals contemplating a sea battle on the morrow to illustrate alternatives in the future that have different values. The chapter discusses a theory of actuality and actualization with an analysis of becoming. Acts of becoming take place in the overlap of a field of actualized things and a field of possibilities. Goodness is present wherever there is form, in possibility or actuality. The perspectives in which things are good include their own harmonies and their functions in all the harmonies in which they become components. The cosmology articulates some of the complex ways in which things are good in themselves and good for or in other things.

The fourth chapter steps back to ask why we should identify what I have described in the complex theory of form with what we mean by goodness or value. The preliminary discussion treats and rejects several arguments to the effect that goodness is not really in things but is just in the projections of valuations onto things. Then I argue that we distinguish between greater and lesser goods, and different kinds of goods, by contemplating imagined possibilities, as when an artist contemplates how to compose a work. The chapter begins the sketch of a theory of aesthetic judgment so that we can see how aesthetic valuation, on the one hand, is immediate, and, on the other hand, is mediated to be critical. All of this immediate appreciation and critical judgment takes place within the processes of engaging things in the world that have goodness in one perspective or another.

The argument plot of this part is like successive waves washing over the beach, each bringing in new material, adding layers of sediment. It is like climbing a hill from many different approaches, each with its special tracks. It is like the five parts of Whitehead’s Process and Reality that are radically different ways of approaching the same general topic. Although some sections here have the form of a sequential argument, like a mathematical argument, with steps building upon what has been suggested earlier, the overall plot of this part is a deepening of the hypothesis about harmony, form, and goodness by adding new dimensions to what was articulated earlier.

CHAPTER 1

Goodness in Experience

Ubiquity, Evolution, and Aesthetic Perception

Anything with form has goodness. At least, this is the hypothesis of which I hope to persuade you in this book. We shall begin with the most abstract considerations in the first part and then treat more concrete kinds of goodness in the parts on beauty and art, obligation and personhood, and flourishing and civilization. Art is an example of goodness as beauty, which is goodness ready for appreciation through special humanly constructed symbolic artifacts. Persons under obligation illustrate goodness as appreciable and ready to be acted upon, defining the actor in relation to goodness. Civilization is the bearer of goodness in relation to human flourishing, and it exemplifies a larger reach of goodness across the cosmos. I shall articulate these abstract declarations from many angles as a complex hypothesis made vulnerable to correction and justified to some extent throughout this book.

You might think that to account for goodness by reference to form is to explain the obscure by the more obscure. What is form? That is an ancient question in the West, beginning with Parmenides, Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle. In China, it is even more ancient, with speculations on the hexagrams of the Yijing. In South Asia, concern for form is at least as early as the Samkhya philosophy that tried to distinguish the content of consciousness from consciousness itself. A central project of this book is to understand form as one of four transcendental traits of any harmony; I mean “transcendental” in the Western medieval sense of a trait found in everything, not the Kantian sense of “transcendental philosophy” as the study of the conditions for the possibility of knowledge.

The claim that anything with form has goodness is by no means new, as I affirmed earlier. Plato claimed it in his theory that the Form of the Good gives goodness to anything with form. Augustine maintained that all beings are good because of their formed nature, although their goodness might be misplaced or misdirected. The Confucians said that what Heaven imparts to each person is an inner “heart-mind” that includes a capacity to grasp the worth of each thing in its forms or coherences and to respond appropriately; the Confucians debated how to cultivate this heart-mind and what might distort it. The South Asian traditions have a paradoxical history. On the one hand, form as the content of consciousness exhibits goodness that attracts or repels, either way putting a consciousness in bondage; freedom is to detach oneself from the attractions and repulsions of what passes through consciousness. On the other hand, parts of those traditions consider the movement of the universe to be like delightful play, Shiva dancing, Krishna flirting and playing the flute: human fulfillment is to couple with the dance.

Nevertheless, the thesis of this book, that anything with form bears goodness because of its form, is not popular today, as I already confessed. Many reasons exist for this unpopularity. One is the cultural trickle-down of the modern scientific distinction between fact and value. What is knowable, according to that distinction, are only facts, and value or goodness is what we subjectively project onto facts. Another reason, possibly related to the first, is the democratic impulse to say that anyone’s value judgments are as good as anyone else’s and should be limited only when they cause harm. The thesis that goodness is the result of form runs against the common sense of much of the late modern world.

My thesis here is strongly realistic in the philosophic sense. Its claim is that goodness is resident in things and that we need to discern what it is. The human capacities to discern goodness in things are among the most important results of evolutionary processes and they need constant enhancement through education. Also, among the most important elements of culture are signs for discerning and interpreting what is good. What we notice as good is what we have experiential signs to recognize. What we notice is also a function of our interests and purposes. Nevertheless, the heart of goodness lies in the characters that the forms of things have, my hypothesis says, not in our judgment. Is it not common to think we know what is valuable about something, positive or negative, and then learn that we are mistaken? You cannot be mistaken without there being something about which to be mistaken.

If this goodness-realism thesis is correct, then perceptions of goodness approximately appropriate to the things experienced must pervade the entirety of human experience. The ubiquity of goodness in experience was a hallmark of John Dewey’s philosophy. And was he not correct? Before thinking of all the reasons why human interests might be the sole source of goodness, do you not admit that appreciations, negative, positive, and of different kinds, fill your experience? They do mine. I want to insist on this as a naïve, precritical reading of experience and then give a critical justification for the reading.

The main point of this part is the explication and justification of the thesis that having form makes things valuable in ways borne by their forms. In order to make this case, we have to deal with the human recognition of goodness in formed things. My characterization of goodness in things cannot justify itself without appealing to your appreciation of them as something like what I characterize. Therefore, another and intrinsically related project is the investigation of human valuation on the many levels in which valuation takes place. The present project relates systematically to an earlier project, my Axiology of Thinking trilogy.1 That project studied valuation in four families of thinking: imagination, interpretation, theorizing, and the pursuit of responsibility or practical reason. The present book involves some rethinking of those claims.

It is useful to look at some of the diverse ways in which the experiential side focuses on the goodness experienced. The experience of something good is itself a relational harmony brought to focus essentially by the intentionality of the experiencer. As a harmony, the experiencing of something as good is itself something good. At perhaps the most basic level, elementary animal life-forms have mechanisms of moving toward edibles they discriminate as nourishing and away from what they recognize as toxic. Within the limits of mobility, things move away from environments that are too hot or cold and toward those environments that are just right in temperature. “Just right” means what supports the harmony of the various components of the organism. Higher animals perceive greater varieties of things as to nourishment and poison, greater ranges of environmental adaptation; and they possess other instincts for defense against predators and hostile conditions, for the protection of young and other group members, for winning the protection of potential helpers, and so forth. Higher animals move from sheer instinct to the employment of signaling systems for warning their fellows of predators, indicating sources of food and water, and other tools of group life. With the development of signs, semiotic systems come into play that lead into rudimentary cultures. Signaling behavior is somewhat instinctual in a purely biological sense, but also cultural in the sense that young need to see the signals at work to master behavior according to them.

Evolutionary biologists are quick to point out that instincts for what is good and bad for animal life in various contexts develop according to biological adaptability. Those animals that are good at distinguishing nourishing food from toxins are more likely to pass on their genes for doing that instinctively. Evolutionary arguments such as this explain a great deal. Nevertheless, we should be careful to remember that what is being explained is the capacity to discriminate what is good and bad for the animal. The biological behavior being explained is not reproductive success or failure but the instincts to judge and respond appropriately to what is good and bad food, good and bad environmental temperatures, what beasts and conditions to fear, and the rest. These pragmatic considerations of what is good or harmful are relative to the needs of the organisms and animals themselves; different animals need different foods, different temperatures. The goodness, relative to the discerning animal, lies in the chemical composition of the potential food and the degree of warmth or coolness. Valuation of these factors is not a subjective projection of emotional opinion onto pure facts that have no goodness. The fact is the foods and environing conditions are really good or bad for the organism that might be mistaken in its assessments.

As animals develop more complicated kinds of semiotic systems of signals, cultures come to play important roles in the discernment of what is good. Social groups develop complex interactions of instinct and lore about what is valuable. Ants, bees, wolves, herds of antelopes, and primates have complex social behaviors that involve sharing a semiotic system and making sure that the relevant members le...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Goodness in Harmony and Form
• Part II Goodness in Beauty and Art
• Part III Goodness in Obligation and Personhood
• Part IV Goodness in Flourishing and Civilization
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover