CHAPLAIN
THE TRANSCENDENTALS – ENNOBLING THE AFFECTIONS
REV DAVID ASSENDER SCHOOL CHAPLAIN
Since before the turn of the first century , the study of ultimate things , ultimate purpose and the ultimate flourishing of human beings has occupied the thoughts of many philosophers and educators . The big question always set before the big thinkers is , what are we educating for or towards ?
Plato and Aristotle believed that for society to reach all that it can be , the dispositional component of education must take place before formal training , meaning that a child ’ s character and temperament are the proper first objects of society ’ s educational orientation . Millennia later , John Stuart Mill famously stated it this way :
‘ Men are men before they are lawyers , or physicians , or merchants , or manufacturers ; and if you make them capable and sensible men , they will make themselves capable and sensible lawyers or physicians ’. 1
What ’ s fascinating is that educational policymakers , in essence , have been systematically reversing the principles of this idea since the 1970s . Many have remarked how in our institutions , education for economy and industry has eclipsed education for humanity . The moral partnership between home and school has been severed in the development of children ’ s noble affections for inclining them towards the good .
Pedagogies for explicit dispositional development have been lost and are no longer the remit of schoolteachers . Decades of reducing the measure of
school communities to their published Year 12 results , shaping the language , culture and identity of those institutions , have neglected to produce principles worth living by . At least , not explicitly . As Joe Winston articulated in 2006 ( of a contemporary education in the arts , no less ):
‘ Impact , benchmarks , mechanisms , measurement . The language , typical as it is of the economic , positivist and managerial jargon that reflects the dominant assumptions of our age , is more than a technical means of communication ; it constructs the moral boundaries within which the arts are today being discussed , conceptualised and evaluated . And the moral language that characterises our era , as MacIntyre informs us , produces , in turn , human characters who typify it in the way that they “ morally legitimate a mode of social existence ”’. 2
Measures of knowledge acquisition and skill attainment do not amount to a sufficient construct for a functional mode of social existence . Thankfully , in many places , the tide has begun to turn . As institutions slowly begin to emerge from the cave of instrumental efficacy in education , tools for reconstructing the development and elevation of the human spirit , as the foundation of all learning , are being rediscovered . What are these tools ? In philosophy , they are called the transcendentals , of which beauty , goodness , and truth are referenced most often .
Transcendentals are properties of being . They are understood , from a cognitive and first principles horizon , to be the ‘ first ’ concepts , since they cannot be logically or deductively predicated ( except in theology , to God ). Neither can they be appreciated by any other creature but humankind , so they are uniquely for us . Thomas Aquinas ( 1225-1274 ) explained them this way :
‘ Every being , in so far as it is conceivable as a positive reality , is true ; in so far as its perfection is a matter of approval or desire to a rational will , it is good ; and in so far as its perfection involves an excellence which the intellect cannot contemplate without the will , if duly disposed , being moved to a certain complacency and delight , it is beautiful .’ 3
1Mill , J . S . ( 1867 ) Inaugural address delivered to the University of St . Andrews , London : Savill , Edwards and Co . https :// en . wikisource . org / wiki / Inaugural _ address _ delivered _ to _ the _ University _ of _ St ._ Andrews ,_ Feb ._ 1st _ 1867 2Joe Winston ( 2006 ) Beauty , goodness and education : the
Arts beyond utility , Journal of Moral Education , 35:3 , 285-300 , referencing MacIntyre , A . ( 1981 ) After virtue ( London , Duckworth ).
10 Great Scot Issue 171 – Edition 1 2024