Proof existence is good

[CrossofChrist]

Is there any “proof” that existence is actually good, other than intuition? St. Thomas’ argument seems to go like something along these lines: goodness is what all people desire. This is found in perfection. But perfection has to be actual in order for it to be “perfect”. Everything actual exists. Therefore existence is good.

I’m going to be honest and say I haven’t read much Aquinas outside of some parts of the Summa in addition to reading his smaller Summa. But why couldn’t perfection exist in potency? IOW how does he know that nonexistence isn’t more perfect than existence? Because the fact that God is pure actuality is also used by Aquinas to show why God is perfect.

From intuition you could say that every action we consider “good”, such as love or joy, brings out the fullness of existence. OTOH, every action considered “bad”, like murder or rape, ultimately takes away existence in its fullest sense. If existence wasn’t actually good, it wouldn’t matter if we murdered others or not. In fact, you could say it would be good to murder or nuke the world because it would end everyone’s existence. But that’s not really a proof, just intuition.

 

[oldcelt]

Is there any “proof” that existence is actually good, other than intuition? St. Thomas’ argument seems to go like something along these lines: goodness is what all people desire. This is found in perfection. But perfection has to be actual in order for it to be “perfect”. Everything actual exists. Therefore existence is good.

I’m going to be honest and say I haven’t read much Aquinas outside of some parts of the Summa in addition to reading his smaller Summa. But why couldn’t perfection exist in potency? IOW how does he know that nonexistence isn’t more perfect than existence? Because the fact that God is pure actuality is also used by Aquinas to show why God is perfect.

From intuition you could say that every action we consider “good”, such as love or joy, brings out the fullness of existence. OTOH, every action considered “bad”, like murder or rape, ultimately takes away existence in its fullest sense. If existence wasn’t actually good, it wouldn’t matter if we murdered others or not. In fact, you could say it would be good to murder or nuke the world because it would end everyone’s existence. But that’s not really a proof, just intuition.

I’m in your boat, but for a different reason. It has been quite a while since I read Aquinas and much in my life has changed. Who knows, It may impact me in many new and positive ways?. Aristotle too, but I’ll be honest…I’d rather take a beating.

 

[balto]

Is there any “proof” that existence is actually good, other than intuition? St. Thomas’ argument seems to go like something along these lines: goodness is what all people desire. This is found in perfection. But perfection has to be actual in order for it to be “perfect”. Everything actual exists. Therefore existence is good.

I think a lot of Aquinas’ understanding of goodness and fullness of being as being interchangeable hinges on his understanding that evil is a privation of good. To me it doesn’t really make much sense to speak of absence of being as being good. I don’t know how it’s logically possible to ascribe a positive qualifier like “good” on something that doesn’t exist. To say that non-existence is perfect or good would be attempting to positively describe something that is indescribable.

From intuition you could say that every action we consider “good”, such as love or joy, brings out the fullness of existence. OTOH, every action considered “bad”, like murder or rape, ultimately takes away existence in its fullest sense. If existence wasn’t actually good, it wouldn’t matter if we murdered others or not. In fact, you could say it would be good to murder or nuke the world because it would end everyone’s existence. But that’s not really a proof, just intuition.

I think your intuition is correct here. Evil, although it is a deprivation of good, still has negative effects that can be felt. In the cases of murder and rape, one is severely depriving another of the fullness of their being. If it really were good for things not to exist, nothing would exist (at least under the classical theistic framework).

 

[Neoplatonist]

Let’s pin things down a little: what does it mean to say that acting out of love somehow makes me more real. How can I exist more than some mean-hearted little person?

 

[godisgood77]

Doesn’t the Bible say that God looked at what he created and saw that it was good? I don’t need anymore proof than that.

 

[Neoplatonist]

Doesn’t the Bible say that God looked at what he created and saw that it was good? I don’t need anymore proof than that.

Yeah, but that was before Adam and Eve broke it.

 

[godisgood77]

Yeah, but that was before Adam and Eve broke it.

Sure… which made it less good, not bad…

 

[Neoplatonist]

Sure… which made is less good, not bad…

Somewhere there’s a line.

Can we say, though, that they also, in the process made it less real? That’s the part that gets me.

 

[balto]

Let’s pin things down a little: what does it mean to say that acting out of love somehow makes me more real. How can I exist more than some mean-hearted little person?

I don’t think that a mean-hearted person is less real than a loving person (meaning that somehow the mean person fades out of existence more so than a loving person). It means that the final end of a human being is to love God and love neighbor. A mean-spirited person is not fulfilling that end as well as a loving person and hence does not fulfill the end of humanness as well as the loving person.

An analogy would be this: the purpose of a heart is to pump blood. If someone’s heart has a defect that makes it difficult to pump blood effectively, you would say that their heart is less of a heart than a normal person’s heart. It doesn’t fulfill its being as well as the normal heart.

 

[godisgood77]

Somewhere there’s a line.

Can we say, though, that they also, in the process made it less real? That’s the part that gets me.

I could follow that thought through…, but the idea would breakdown when we get to the question of God’s omnipotence and all knowing nature… the “all in God’s plan” idea.

 

[Neoplatonist]

I don’t think that a mean-hearted person is less real than a loving person (meaning that somehow the mean person fades out of existence more so than a loving person). It means that the final end of a human being is to love God and love neighbor. A mean-spirited person is not fulfilling that end as well as a loving person and hence does not fulfill the end of humanness as well as the loving person.

An analogy would be this: the purpose of a heart is to pump blood. If someone’s heart has a defect that makes it difficult to pump blood effectively, you would say that their heart is less of a heart than a normal person’s heart. It doesn’t fulfill its being as well as the normal heart.

But fulfillling its telos is not “being.” To be able to say being is good, under that conception, it would have to be the case that ‘being’ is the thing’s very nature, but that is only true of God, not of creation; therefore the ‘being’ of creation cannot be ‘good.’

 

[balto]

But fulfillling its telos is not “being.” To be able to say being is good, under that conception, it would have to be the case that ‘being’ is the thing’s very nature, but that is only true of God, not of creation; therefore the ‘being’ of creation cannot be ‘good.’

Its final cause is part of its nature, along with material, formal, and efficient causes. It doesn’t necessarily follow that in order for something to be good it has to have being as part of its nature as God does. I think you’ll need to clarify because I’m not sure how you’re making that jump. Its being is granted to it by God and this act of being entails a final cause along with the other three causes as part of its essence. Sure it’s not unlimited goodness because it has a finite nature and is only finitely good, but I don’t know why that would be a problem for calling it good.

 

[Neoplatonist]

Its final cause is part of its nature, along with material, formal, and efficient causes. It doesn’t necessarily follow that in order for something to be good it has to have being as part of its nature as God does. I think you’ll need to clarify because I’m not sure how you’re making that jump. Its being is granted to it by God and this act of being entails a final cause along with the other three causes as part of its essence. Sure it’s not unlimited goodness because it has a finite nature and is only finitely good, but I don’t know why that would be a problem for calling it good.

I’m getting at the claim that being and goodness are identical.

Saying something is “good” is a function of its end, and is not the same as saying it “exists”. The one exception to the distinction is the case where existence IS its end - but there is only one of those. Other things can be good, but the goodness is not identical to being.

 

[CrossofChrist]

Let’s pin things down a little: what does it mean to say that acting out of love somehow makes me more real. How can I exist more than some mean-hearted little person?

Part of what prompted me to start this thread was this part of the Summa, which asks if being and goodness are identical. Which is why I brought up Thomas.

I think you could prove that existence is good using an argument such as Newman’s argument from conscience, but that argument is based off of intuitive reasoning which is a whole different animal than St. Thomas’ reasoning.

 

[Neoplatonist]

Part of what prompted me to start this thread was this part of the Summa, which asks if being and goodness are identical. Which is why I brought up Thomas.

I think you could prove that existence is good using an argument such as Newman’s argument from conscience, but that argument is based off of intuitive reasoning which is a whole different animal than St. Thomas’ reasoning.

My Bonaventure and Augustine are rusty, but I did some work on Aquinas’s doctrine of the transcendentals, coming out of his underappreciated debt to the neoplatonic tradition through Plotinus and the Arabic thinkers. In this view, the highest ideals or concepts, among which were being and goodness, could be reasoned to be possessed in their completeness by God alone, but could not be reconciled in our minds as commensurable.

 

[CrossofChrist]

My Bonaventure and Augustine are rusty, but I did some work on Aquinas’s doctrine of the transcendentals, coming out of his underappreciated debt to the neoplatonic tradition through Plotinus and the Arabic thinkers. In this view, the highest ideals or concepts, among which were being and goodness, could be reasoned to be possessed in their completeness by God alone, but could not be reconciled in our minds as commensurable.

That doesn’t seem very far off from the truth.

(BTW, sorry for editing my post on you. My bad.)

 

[polytropos]

Is there any “proof” that existence is actually good, other than intuition? St. Thomas’ argument seems to go like something along these lines: goodness is what all people desire. This is found in perfection. But perfection has to be actual in order for it to be “perfect”. Everything actual exists. Therefore existence is good.

This is an area where it is hard to get a handle on Aquinas’s terminology. Actuality is not merely existence. When Aquinas uses the term being (especially as a transcendental, ie. “philosophy of being” or characterizing God as “Being Itself”), he usually does not just mean that a thing exists. Actuality refers to existence in a certain way. Particularly it has to do with the lack of potentialities relative to a substance’s natural ends (which are inherent in its form).

Take two trees. One is bigger than the other, but is missing a branch. Aquinas would probably say that the one that is not missing a branch has more “being.”

God is taken to be Being Itself because he lacks any potentialities. (This must needs be analogical, as well, since God does not have ends like we do; He has a nature, but it is not a nature which He, or anyone/anything, can do anything to improve.)

This is an interesting basis for metaethics and aesthetics. Good is a transcendental; it is the aspect of being as desirable. In other words, it is being (actuality) viewed by an intellect as desirable, ie. it is the recognition (say) that it is better for a tree to have a branch than to be broken. Now, someone might perversely believe that it is better for trees not to have branches, and so he regards branch-less trees as more good. But since the both being and good are rooted in the natures of things (even if good is a conceptual distinction, an aspect, of being), he is wrong, and he has misapprehended the good.

Truth is also a transcendental notion and fits roughly into a correspondence theory. The correspondence of intellected forms with actual forms is what truth is. As such, it too is rooted in the real natures of things, and is an aspect of being.

I think this is a powerful account, augmented by a good theory of analogy. Does it make sense to say that being or truth are analogical? The analysts may not think so; they might feel that being is captured in the existential quantifier over an arbitrary domain, that truth is rooted in the attribution of a boolean value to a proposition. I don’t think we have to give such tools up, though. It makes sense to say that being is analogical. To say that there are separate modes of being is a fruitful analysis: there are substances, which are ontologically primary; there are accidents, which exist only as inhered in substances; there are universal forms, which exist only in the intellect; there are entia rationis, beings of reason (like the rules of logic, subjects and predicates, complex mathematical apparatuses like matrix algebra and group theory), which exist in the mind but are not real forms that have instances in the world.

Truth is analogical because it is what corresponds to these different varieties of being; I have true knowledge of my cat in a different way than I have true knowledge of multivariable calculus. The idea also allows us to accommodate what probably constitutes the vast majority of human knowledge. If I have never seen a cat before, and I sit down to play with a cat, I learn quite a bit of knowledge. It is propositional in the sense that it consists in subjects and predicates, but it is not sentential or verbal, and I likely could not express everything I would come to know. Moreover, if I went on to study cats formally in the specialized science of biology, I would learn quite a bit more. As the intellected, universal form of cat in my understanding better approximates what actual cats are, I am approaching the truth.

And good is of course an analogical notion. Compare the uses of: It’s a good tree. It’s a good cat. It’s a good knife. The emotivists took the difficulty in defining and analyzing good to be reason to cast doubt upon it and demote it to subjectivity. But that is an impoverished account.

 

[CrossofChrist]

This is an area where it is hard to get a handle on Aquinas’s terminology. Actuality is not merely existence. When Aquinas uses the term being (especially as a transcendental, ie. “philosophy of being” or characterizing God as “Being Itself”), he usually does not just mean that a thing exists. Actuality refers to existence in a certain way. Particularly it has to do with the lack of potentialities relative to a substance’s natural ends (which are inherent in its form).

Take two trees. One is bigger than the other, but is missing a branch. Aquinas would probably say that the one that is not missing a branch has more “being.”

God is taken to be Being Itself because he lacks any potentialities. (This must needs be analogical, as well, since God does not have ends like we do; He has a nature, but it is not a nature which He, or anyone/anything, can do anything to improve.)

This is an interesting basis for metaethics and aesthetics. Good is a transcendental; it is the aspect of being as desirable. In other words, it is being (actuality) viewed by an intellect as desirable, ie. it is the recognition (say) that it is better for a tree to have a branch than to be broken. Now, someone might perversely believe that it is better for trees not to have branches, and so he regards branch-less trees as more good. But since the both being and good are rooted in the natures of things (even if good is a conceptual distinction, an aspect, of being), he is wrong, and he has misapprehended the good.

Truth is also a transcendental notion and fits roughly into a correspondence theory. The correspondence of intellected forms with actual forms is what truth is. As such, it too is rooted in the real natures of things, and is an aspect of being.

I think this is a powerful account, augmented by a good theory of analogy. Does it make sense to say that being or truth are analogical? The analysts may not think so; they might feel that being is captured in the existential quantifier over an arbitrary domain, that truth is rooted in the attribution of a boolean value to a proposition. I don’t think we have to give such tools up, though. It makes sense to say that being is analogical. To say that there are separate modes of being is a fruitful analysis: there are substances, which are ontologically primary; there are accidents, which exist only as inhered in substances; there are universal forms, which exist only in the intellect; there are entia rationis, beings of reason (like the rules of logic, subjects and predicates, complex mathematical apparatuses like matrix algebra and group theory), which exist in the mind but are not real forms that have instances in the world.

Truth is analogical because it is what corresponds to these different varieties of being; I have true knowledge of my cat in a different way than I have true knowledge of multivariable calculus. The idea also allows us to accommodate what probably constitutes the vast majority of human knowledge. If I have never seen a cat before, and I sit down to play with a cat, I learn quite a bit of knowledge. It is propositional in the sense that it consists in subjects and predicates, but it is not sentential or verbal, and I likely could not express everything I would come to know. Moreover, if I went on to study cats formally in the specialized science of biology, I would learn quite a bit more. As the intellected, universal form of cat in my understanding better approximates what actual cats are, I am approaching the truth.

And good is of course an analogical notion. Compare the uses of: It’s a good tree. It’s a good cat. It’s a good knife. The emotivists took the difficulty in defining and analyzing good to be reason to cast doubt upon it and demote it to subjectivity. But that is an impoverished account.

That was a really good post. :tiphat:

So let’s see if I’ve got this right.

Aquinas means that perfection consists in something achieving the purpose its designed for. Using the tree example, a tree in its very nature is designed to have branches. It reaches “perfection” or is completely actualized when its branches have leaves on a warm summer day.

If this gets extended to existence, we can see that only things in existence can be perfected upon by attaining their ultimate goals. Nonexistent things can’t attain any perfections because they can’t have any goals or any purpose. And something without *any *perfections at all lacks any good that there is, because good is what makes up perfections; without perfections there isn’t any good to be achieved. On the flip side, existence is good because anything that exists can attain some sort of perfection to which it is directed.

 

[jonathan_hili]

Well, I’d approach the question: Is existence good? from this way -

(I) Goodness is a property of some action, thing or state of being;
(II) Since goodness is a property, it cannot inhere to non-existence, since non-existence is the absence of all properties;
(III) Consequently, non-existence cannot be good.

Now, this obviously doesn’t prove that existence is good, but seems to show that its contrary cannot be good.

The reason I bring this up is because oftentimes people say something like, “It would be better not to exist”, which is nonsensical.

To actually ask if existence is good, I think you need to define “good” more specifically or else it could be used ambiguously, which is not very helpful.

Is “good” used in the sense of an action (that is, living well or creation of things), a thing (good in itself), or state of being (living or being as good).

 

[balto]

I’m getting at the claim that being and goodness are identical.

Saying something is “good” is a function of its end, and is not the same as saying it “exists”. The one exception to the distinction is the case where existence IS its end - but there is only one of those. Other things can be good, but the goodness is not identical to being.

I don’t know that “exists” and “being” are quite the same thing. Something may exist but yet still lack being. This is what I mean:

polytropos:

This is an area where it is hard to get a handle on Aquinas’s terminology. Actuality is not merely existence. When Aquinas uses the term being (especially as a transcendental, ie. “philosophy of being” or characterizing God as “Being Itself”), he usually does not just mean that a thing exists. Actuality refers to existence in a certain way. Particularly it has to do with the lack of potentialities relative to a substance’s natural ends (which are inherent in its form).

Take two trees. One is bigger than the other, but is missing a branch. Aquinas would probably say that the one that is not missing a branch has more “being.”

I think that polytropos does a better job explaining things than myself . So if something lacks being it doesn’t mean that it is more “ethereal” than another thing if you know what I mean. They both exist, but the one that fulfills its final cause better has more fullness of being.