By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
Convertible transcendentals apply to reality as such, and thus to any and all realities, divine or nondivine, concrete or abstract. But they apply to divine things in one sense, to nondivine things in another, and so also with concrete things and abstract things.
Significantly, in the Franciscan schools, pulchrum (= the beautiful, beauty) was included among the traditional convertible transcendentals. If one proposes to follow in this tradition, then one can hardly fail to be struck by the distinction Hartshorne makes between two different kinds of beauty. On the one hand, there is "a pure, unsullied, never failing but empty beauty" that is "the beauty of fact as such, neutral to factual alternatives." On the other hand, there is "the supreme beauty" that is "the harmony of all things, both necessary and contingent, a harmony which is itself . . . contingent—a superior fact which is only vaguely accessible to us in our factual experience" (LP: 297).
1 February 1998
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