Values and other

Metaphysical Realities
PREPARED BY:
LESLY P. CARGULLO
SHIELA MAY CAYABYAB
Values

 Values are standards to guide an action, judgement and attitudes.

 Principles that guide one’s life. They are designed to lead us to our ideal world.
 Define what is worth, what is beneficial and what is harmful.
Value and Being

 F. J. Rintelen – believes that value and being should be distinguished, because

there is some characteristics which renders it irreducible to any other aspect,
including that of being.
Stravenhagen
• Whenever we look at something under the
aspect of value, we adopt affirmative or
negative attitude towards it; we go beyond
the factual or sensible.
Louis Lavelle
• Value can never be divorced from being
since value is present wherever there is a
being. Value resides in the very object or act
which the subject comprehends or aims to
accomplish.
 Value can never exist without a support for it, that is,
without being.
 Value inserts and incarnates itself in being,
constituting itself as the soul of all realities, the hidden
principle which makes being estimable and desirable.
 The one constant in both value and valuing is being.
Being is the support of value. Whatever we know as
being or existent, either physically or mentally, has for
us some slight measure in importance and relevance.
 The hierarchy of values, its essential relativity,
discovers for us the intrinsic reference and intimate
relation of value not only to being but also to the
Supreme Being itself, a transcendent Being in
which the perennial synthesis of value and being is
realized.
 the analogy and doctrine of participation of beings
brings us to this Supreme Being.
A. Etheverry

 “thereis no value without being as there is no

being without value.”
Value and Good
 Modern and contemporary philosophers tend to substitute the
term value for good, although no fresh insights into the problem
of good have resulted from this substitution.
 Value is more manageable concept than good, since value covers
the whole field of human desires while good has become obsolete
except when it designates commercial articles.
 Value then represents a wide area of human interest and desire but
it refers to fewer things than good, since value belongs only to
persons capable of appreciating and distinguishing sub-human,
human, and moral values and realities.
Aristotle
• Defined good as that which
everybody desires or that
which is desirable.
St. Thomas
• Something is said to be good in
as much as it is perfection.
• Perfection was absolute integrity.
 Theearly philosophers and medieval Christian
thinkers considered good as identical with value.
 Something is good because it has value and vice-
versa.
 Thenon- scholastic philosophers, especially the
naturalists call good or ethical goodness the value-
proper but they disagree among themselves as to what
constitutes the value- proper.
George E. Moore
• First sought for a real definition of good in
general for he reasoned out that one can not
tell what is ethically good without first
knowing what is good in general
• He came to the conclusion that while “ the
good” is definable, “good” is not.
 From our analysis, we can say that metaphysically speaking, value and good are
identical.
 However, logically speaking, value and good are distinct since if we analyze the
terms, we observe that value is wider, more preferred and more in demand than
good.
 Value is a vagrant term, indefinite, never or seldom narrowed, instead encouraged
to widen out.
 Value is convertible to any term.
Mackenzie

 Valueis closely related to the terms “good” and

“ought”, but these have something yet too precise
about them to be settled.
 “Value is vague enough for anybody, a much more
fluid and adoptable term than good”.
El Jordan

Valuesare determined by one principle,

and good by another.
Hubert W. Schneider

Reasons out that since good sounds

theological, metaphysical and objective,
people substitute values and worth for
good and goods.
Value and Truth

 truth in its broad sense means the conformity

between truth per se and what is asserted.
 it can be logical or metaphysical.
 It is Logical truth when considered from the
viewpoint of the intellect as consciously conformed
to being.
 It is Metaphysical truth when considered from the
viewpoint of being as conformed to intellection.
 the truth of man’s intellection is caused by being. It is
being which found intellection. Being in conformity to
the intellect is being as true. Therefore being as the
metaphysically true is being intelligible. Everything
that possesses the act of being, insofar as it does,
possesses intelligibility; that is every being as being is
metaphysically true. If being is meaningful for us, it is
because there exists a primitive connection between
being and truth, ens and verum.
 Practically speaking, we can deduce from the relationship of
conformity to the intellect that being as true denotes relationship
to man’s intellect to God’s. Being is primarily true by relation to
God’s intellect and secondarily, to man’s intellect. Therefore,
truth is principally the thing itself as it exists, and the idea of it as
conceived by God.
 Having analyzed previously the relation between value and being
and now, the relation between truth and what truth has to do with
value.
 The domains of truth and value are mutually related and
encompass each other, because that which reveals another as
good or as value becomes equally primitive with it and together
make up the synthetic unity of an existent.
 A being in order to be a value must be true, that is, it must be in
accordance with an intellect and that intellect one it perceives the
truth of that being, perceives also value.
 Furthermore, truth whether logical or real, is in itself a value.
Value and Beauty
 Ancient Philosopher Aristotle did not develop a metaphysical
concept of beauty. The beauty that he claims should be a
condition of tragedy is characterized by order and size.
 Beauty is to have order, symmetry and boundary.
 He sometimes mentions beauty in connection with the moral
good.
 Moral beauty is the attractive and splendid order of the good life.
 He distinguishes goodness from beauty since goodness is always
in action while beauty is also in motionless things.
Plato
• Finds beauty a self- subsisting idea
showing through the bodies, law and
knowledge.
• Every beautiful thing partakes of this
eternal oneness of beauty.
• Beauty and goodness are found together
and are measured by the same standard; in
fact, they are identical.
 During the time of Neoplatonism, the theory of beauty
was connected with the metaphysical.
 Plotinus said that the beautiful and the good are to be
looked for together because beauty is being, as good is
also being.
 He affirmed that beauty can not depend wholly on
external ordering even in material things.
Alexander of hales
• Started a new trend in emphasizing the
beautiful among values.
• He claimed that insofar as a form is
conformable to the wisdom of God, it is in
it’s fullness, a fullness that radiates from
the object in its sensible aspect.
 The good and the beautiful, he said, differ
logically because the beautiful is the good
considered as satisfying the apprehension,
whereas the good itself, properly understood,
satisfies desire.
Bonaventure
• Affirmed that beauty presupposes
the other transcendentals such as
unity, truth, and goodness and the
causes associated with each of
them.
Albert the Great
• Alternated between associating beauty with
goodness in a platonic or moral sense and
connecting it with truth as the source of
light and form.
• For him, beauty is the commensuration of
the true and the good or bonum honestum.
 He affirmed hat beauty pertains to the perfection of
being as related to the divine wisdom, whereas good
relates to God’s goodness.
 TheClassical Medieval definition of beauty is “the
splendor of substantial or accidental form shining
upon the well defined and proportioned parts of matter
or upon different faculties and actions.
Ulric of Strassburg
• Affirmed as the Neoplatonism,
the good and the beautiful differ
only logically; the good is form
as perfection, whereas beauty is
form as intelligible light.
M. F. Staltery

 Beauty is not the object organized by a quality of

its organization.
 Beauty is desirable but unlike the values that make
things useful or exchangeable, that of beauty is
value as end and desirable for contemplation. We
call this value aesthetic value.
 Nowadays, beauty is more often considered as a
ground for aesthetic value but it is not necessarily the
sole ground.

Therefore, although beauty is an aesthetic value, it

does not necessarily mean that beauty is a synonym
for all aesthetic values, for more rigorous usage
discriminates between aesthetic qualities.