The Philosopher's Newsletter

            In Unit IV, Chapter 6 of my philosophy book (Philosophy for Highschoolers), we encounter a system of acting whereby higher ends are always valued in the spiritual realm, while simultaneously one acts toward what is lower in the physical realm.  In order to act, one must do both at once:  One must value the higher (speculatively) and act toward the lower (practically and tangibly).  Thus acting has two components: One spiritual and one physical, and the physical is here as-it-were the manifestation of the spiritual, manifesting it into the physical realm, where the action is clearly seen. 

            We often think of money as a physical thing—a coin, a dollar bill, or a piece of gold—but this is really only the symbol or token of what money itself as a financial entity really is.  We can study these physical coins and bills, to see how they flow throughout an economy, in order to get an idea of what money is, and how it functions, but we should always remember that money itself is not these physical things, but rather a spiritual dynamic, or principle, or force, representing the fact of people valuing things.  In this discussion, we will study the spiritual principle of money[Comment 1] , and what it is of its nature to do, in itself (i.e. in spiritual terms).  We will show that money is fundamentally an expression of value.:  It is an artificial quantity representing how much people value things.  

We will now study a characteristic set of transactions, in order to discover how money functions. When a person mines some natural resource out of the ground, and then presents it to a buyer, the buyer offers him, in exchange for his good, some money.  The purchaser doesn’t have to accept this money, but usually does, and this is because he trusts that he himself will be able to re-use the money again in the future to buy something else, instead (Of course, if he doesn’t trust that he’ll be able to use it again in the future, then the money is essentially worthless, and he won’t accept it at all).  What has happened here is that the producer has traded his good for something that he values more—money—an artificial medium of exchange; and the buyer has traded his money for something he values more—the good.  Thus both of them consider themselves to have grown in value; one really, and the other virtually (inasmuch as coins themselves have no value, except perhaps as art).   

As the good travels throughout society, various people perform more and more work on it, perfecting and refining it, and selling it for more and more money as it grows in value[Comment 2] .  For instance the farmer produces the grain and sells it to the beef-herder, who feeds it to his cattle, and thereby converts it into beef.  The beef-herder then sells this cow-meat to a fast-food chain for a slightly higher price; the fast-food chain provides the service of packaging it into a combo-meal (to make you value it even more for its handiness and convenience), and sells it for an even higher price, yet.  We see then that at each step of the way, people perform actions (mining, refining, etc.) that are rewarded with money, the pledge of future service.  

However, there is something else that we might glean from this example, and it is in this that we discover the real nature of money.  Suppose the beef herder, instead of selling to the fast-food chain, sells part of it back to the farmer, for his dinner.  What then has happened in real terms?  This time, the good hasn’t really changed hands:  It started in the farmer’s possession (as feed), and is back in his possession (as a sirloin steak).  But what has happened is that the farmer, for his service, has gotten paid, and through this pay, has obtained the right, or entitlement, to  expect a similar but different service on the part of the beef-herder (of converting it into steak).  This then, is fundamentally what money is and represents:  It represents the right to expect approximately equal service in return[Comment 3] , sometime in the future.  We see then that once you work and produce something, money then entitles you to expect something else—some other work, or labor, or service—from others.  Indeed, money is just that!  It is an expectation of future service.  This is why it can also be given, not after service has been performed, but even before service has been performed (as a loan, i.e. as credit).  Indeed, many people finance and live their lives not in the black (of what they’ve already earned), but in the red (of what they owe, and promise to earn in the future).  

We can now study some larger trends of how money flows throughout a society.  In any given transaction there are two parts, a real part, and an artificial part.  The real part occurs when work is really done or a valued good is really obtained.  The artificial part occurs when one is credited with money, or when one then ‘puts that money to work’ and spends that money to buy something else.  Thus money is really just an artificial means of exchange between two real parts of a transaction.    

Since goods continually grow in value (as they are mined and refined more and more), and since money is given for these goods or services every time they are sold, it is common for someone to perform a service so great (i.e. so necessary and essential), that they receive more money than they know what to do with, that is, more than they can responsibly spend.  Then money just accumulates within their bank account, as a reservoir of wealth.  It is standard practice at this point to try to reinvest the money and put it back into the economy, but this is not necessarily a good thing, as we shall discuss later.  

At any given moment, this reservoir of wealth will be partially liquid assets (i.e. money), and partially non-liquid assets (i.e. real, tangible goods).  They can convert the liquid part back into non-liquid assets, simply by spending it in some way.  Consequently, it is natural for wealth to grow, both as money, and as goods.  

Rather, there is a natural end for money: It should either ‘evaporate’ into nothingness, or it should ‘condense’ back down into a gratuitous gift to those who gave it in payment, in the first place.  Let’s examine why.  Insofar as goods grow in value, it is natural for money to parallel, and also grow in quantity.  This means that it is standard practice for a country to print more and more money to match—as closely as possible—the real increase in value or wealth of that nation; and this printing of more and more money is known as inflation.  A small amount of truthful inflation, that is, inflation equal to the true growth in standard-of-living/value/wealth within that society, is a good thing.  If it is done correctly, any individual price will remain constant, but there will just be more things available to buy (and more money to buy it with).  As money grows in quantity, it is also common for any individual piece of money to eventually end up in the possession or reservoir of one who has performed an absolutely necessary/essential service and has a lot of wealth stored up (i.e. the orange reservoir at the top of the diagram above).  Thus those people who are necessary to society naturally accumulate large stashes of money, and this large bank account bespeaks how much we value them for the services they have performed.  

The problem is, that many times people get greedy, and wish to capitalize on all of this money they’ve obtained, and USE IT.  They wish to spend ALL or at least A LOT of their money, simply because they can.  People wrongly think to themselves “I have all this money, and I could be using it to have a better life, so I’ll find somebody who can do something for me . . . anything that will make me happier!  They may find a few things, a few novelties, or trifles, or knick-knacks that negligibly make them happier, but often not finding anything BIG or obviously HIGHER to buy—because they themselves already possess the highest purchasable things in life—they then turn to spend or reinvest their money in other unnatural ways:  Perhaps they seek to buy political power (through campaign contributions, or even outright bribes).  Perhaps they seek to make more money with the money they already have, by loaning it out at a premium (i.e. for interest) to those who are lower down and just scrounging to ‘get by.’  Perhaps they seek to reinvest their money and loan it to companies which are developing new technologies.  

The problem in each of these cases—some worse than others—is that one is seeking to 

exert one’s money from a distance, and so one doesn’t have very good oversight and control of how it is being used.  In the first case, one is seeking to sway or control political policy decisions, but one may not in fact be the objectively best person to decide such matters.  After all, having gained money from business doesn’t necessarily give you the wisdom needed to rule and lead a country.  Indeed, through one’s money, one may in fact be pushing out of power those who alone know how to truly lead, and who therefore rightfully should rule.   In the second case, one may unknowingly be enslaving the poor because one falsely thinks that one is rightfully entitled to the extra interest, since it was “part of the contract.”  Even if the poor agree to pay extra interest (because of situational necessity), this is not really just.  The better outcome would be for the money to just sit in the bank account of the one who has it, and never get used, than that the poor should not be enticed and enslaved to work harder[Comment 4] .  Rather if the money is to return to the poor, it should freely be given to them so that they might obtain leisure, goods, and opportunities, not so that they might enslave themselves harder to the system.  The standard and perhaps fairest way to freely give money back to the poor is by voluntarily reducing one’s fees and prices, as far as possible, until one is no longer accruing cash, but rather has a net equilibrium of cash-flow.  In this way a private good (lots of money being accumulated in one institution’s bank account) becomes a public good (an inexpensive and widely available service).  In the last case, the danger of reinvesting in other technological companies is, again, that one often gives too much incentive[Comment 5] , and so instead of spending it wisely, the company foolishly blows it all, in a few glitzy but ill-fated business ventures, with the result that you, quite rightly, lose most of your investment.  In each of these cases, the rightful end of money to simply rise (as wealth rises), is distorted, and twisted back to some other end.  Money is a tool to seek higher ends; if no higher end can be found, then it shouldn’t turn back upon itself to meddle in the normal functioning of lower matters.  If it does, it will simply cause waves, upheaval, and eventually a new equilibrium.  Rather, money is itself something vain and empty, and so once it has accomplished its purpose it should simply sit, with no further consequence.  The problem is that because of greed, many bend their accumulated money back into the system, and try to reinvest it to gain more.  However, the love of money is the root of all evil, and just as anger feeds itself by a positive-feedback mechanism, reinvested money does the same thing and increases the general energy of society to such a point that things—people, institutions, laws—are stretched to the limit, and even are broken.  Rather, we should recognize that money is a tool for us, as humans, not we the tool for it; consequently, we should keep our end and priorities in order.  Happiness, truth, and salvation are all ends to be sought; money is not. 

  

Questions: 

1.  What is the only necessary criterion for something to function as money?  In other words, what has to happen in order for you to be willing to accept money as a payment?  Ans: You have to value it as a trustworthy sign of someone’s willingness to perform some service for you sometime in the future (i.e. you have to trust that you will indeed be able to ‘get something done’ with that money.) 

2. What is something that could function instead of money?  Ans: Work-hour credits; local money/scrip. 

3. In an economy of values, does money characteristically rise (toward more-untimate highly-valued ends), or sink (toward lower, less-valued ends)?  Ans: Value rises toward what you value more, but money sinks, and when it is spent, it is a representative of what you valued less (i.e. past performed labor).  In the see-saw model, you give away and spend your money (as part of the downward impetus on the artificial end of the see-saw), in order to make the other real endof the see-saw (value/wealth/standard-of-living) to rise.   

4. What is the natural outcome or end of money in a dynamic economy?  Ans: To rise through the economy, first representing one future valued thing, and then another future valued thing, until it finally comes into the possession of one who is content, and who doesn’t have anything more that they want to buy with it.  Thus the natural end of money is to accumulate in large quantities in the possession of those who have need of nothing.  *Note:  These people should not seek to spend it, just because they can (which would create extra unnecessary busywork for others); rather, it is better to simply give it back in small amounts to those who are low and impoverished in the economy, or let it sit or evaporate.  That way, those who are impoverished can seek what they want, without having to perform extra busywork to acquire it.  If anything is done with the money, the money should be given back to the impoverished, in the form of lower prices.  When this happens, those lower, impoverished ones have in a certain sense inherited the higher’s success, and a private good has become a public good. 

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 [Comment 1]When we understand the idea of money in itself, how it is to function, and what are the limits of its applicability, then we will also understand by negation how it is abused and misused in society when people become overly obsessed with the love and accumulation of money. 

 [Comment 2]Thus money is always flowing downward, but represents an upward growth in value.  It is as-it-were the counter-weight or lever that by repeatedly being pushed down, invested, and ‘put to work’ over and over in varying circumstances and transactions, enables the other end of the see-saw (the real one—value, wealth, and our standard-of-living) to progressively rise.  

 [Comment 3]Thus money is always flowing down, but representing a growth in value.  It is as-it-were the counter-weight that by pushing down enables the other end of the see-saw (value, wealth, or standard-of-living) to rise.  

 [Comment 4]The danger of reinvesting the money and getting the poor to have extra incentive to work really hard (in order to get the higher pay that one is now offering, rather than the standard pay that they were receiving before), is that the poor themselves are lured into over-valuing their own work.  Perhaps the best thing right now would be for them to focus on their family, but because artificially large overtime bonuses are being offered at work, they neglect what should really be more important in their life.  Some will say to me that you can’t argue with what they choose to do—that the proof is ‘in the pudding,’ so to say, and if they freely chose the work rather than the family time, then they are truly better off.  However to this I respond that money is a representative of value, but not a perfect one.  Many times goods and services are priced for more or less money than they ought to be; and in this way money is “unjust” (Lk. 16:11).  If you over-pay for service, though you feel really generous, you are in fact being unjust; you are devaluing the money.  And the result will often be, not that their standard of living will increase, but that all will all be expected to pay higher prices for something else by bad people, i.e. by those who desire to exploit and milk society for all they can get.  Admittedly, this doesn’t always happen if the higher wage is paid locally to just a few laborers, but it invariably happens if the higher wage is paid to all of them.  Thus higher minimum wages are not a good thing. 

 [Comment 5]Of course, if you can control how much you give to them, and not make it available all at once, but only as they can effectively use it, then you can avoid this danger.

St. Thomas Aquinas famously offered “5 Ways” (Summa Theologiae, I, q. 2, a. 3) to prove God’s existence.  Of these five ways, one is essential, and four are existential.

The essential way to prove God’s existence relies on a consideration of Absolutely Simple Perfections.  Absolutely simple perfections are those that imply no admixture of imperfection.  The perfection of Celtic-ness, for example, has imperfection because it is a mixture of multiple, disparate considerations.  If one person is the strongest caber-tosser then, because of their massive body structure, they can’t also be the best Celtic dancer.  Thus Celtic-ness is a mixture of things, and there can be no ultimate perfection of Celtic-ness.  However, there can indeed be simple perfections of truthfulness, or holiness, or justness, etc.  None of these imply any imperfection mixed in with them.  Since these simple perfections involve no imperfection, they each go to an extreme, and thus we can conclude that they must be found in the divine nature:  God is infinitely truthful, infinitely holy, and infinitely just.  This is the essential proof for God’s existence.

Although the above essential argument proves that there is an ultimate to each simple perfection (and thus that divinity exists), yet it doesn’t necessarily prove that all those perfections are united in the same individual being.  Although it can be reasoned that they must be united in the same Being – after all He who is maximally holy wouldn’t be unjust or untruthful (Boethius offered the most famous argument for this in his Consolation of Philosophy, 524 A.D.) – yet historically, many people assumed that they were not united in the same being, and thus polytheism occurred.  Consequently, the essential argument doesn’t really prove that God exists, as the God that we know, but only that divinity must somehow exist.  Man has a natural ‘religious sense’ about him (Rom. 1:18), because he is aware of the necessity for this perfection, in contrast to his own imperfections.  Since the essential argument doesn’t get to a personal, individual God, but only to some divine force, we move on instead to the existential arguments for God’s existence.

The four existential arguments for God’s existence are existential, because instead of inferring what theoretically should and probably does lie at the end of some pattern or hierarchy of beings, they instead depend upon direct causality from God, that is, they find direct, tangible evidence of God’s existence.   This evidence can be found in creatures that we study (which is why these proofs are real, tangible, and existential) but—even though it is in creatures—the evidence is still a sign or vestige of divine causality (final, efficient, material, or formal in proofs I, II, III and V, respectively).

The four existential arguments are divided up among the four kinds of possible arguments (AND, OR, NOT, IF-THEN—compare their shapes in the last picture below to the shapes in diagrams 3.56-3.58, and 2.43 in text), and among the four quadrants of existence/human nature (intellectual and spiritual, intellectual and physical, willful and spiritual, willful and physical).

The first proof for God’s existence is the proof from motivation.  Motivation is the pull exercised by some end that attracts you.  Many wrongly think that this proof is a proof from movement, but it only indirectly having-to-do with movement, inasmuch as movement is also initiated by motivation (e.g. gravity motivating you, causes you to move downward).  Fundamentally, however, the proof begins from a consideration of motivation.  Aquinas argues that “nothing is mo[ti]v[at]ed . . . if there is not a being in act.”  Then by modus tollens, since things are moved, we can conclude that there must somewhere be a being in act, motivating us.  Now the thing in act, motivating us, must itself be motivated, and since you can’t keep going on forever, finding higher and higher sources of motivation, there must be an ultimate being, motivating all things.  This being is God (the Holy Spirit).

The second argument for God’s existence is the proof from efficient causality.  We see in nature that certain things are effected (or caused) by others, whose being is present simultaneously with it.  The brain directly effects the hand’s action, the ideas in a  blueprint directly effect the construction of a highway, a government directly effect laws, and a light directly effects images on a screen.  This direct causality, such that there is no becoming in between the cause and the effect, is known as a per se series.  A per se series doesn’t have to have just one link; it can have many links (e.g. a CEO’s ideas percolate down through the whole company structure and influence the way business is done), but a per se series must always have a first, because nothing is able to simultaneously cause itself (This is affectionately known as “pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps.”).  Thus Aquinas’ argument is that if a thing exists, and yet doesn’t have the source of its existence within itself, then it must be caused by another, who in turn must be caused by another, and so on, until we come to the first efficient cause, who is God (the Father).

The third argument for God’s existence is the proof from possibility and necessity.  Aquinas’ argument is that if all things are possible, and if nothing is necessary, then sooner or later everything would cease to be; in which case, nothing would exist ever after that (nor now).  Thus the fact that things exist here and now, is proof that at least some being necessarily has to be, and this is the being of God (the Divine Nature).

The fifth argument for God’s existence is the proof from the governance of things.  Many things in the world are inanimate, and lack thinking powers, yet act in regular, dependable ways that prove not just random or average, but good (good for the whole universe, and for man).  If things tend toward doing what is good—and not just once, or several times, but regularly—then it must be intended by a higher, conscious power.  This higher power, by whose nature all things—even inanimate ones—tend toward what is good, is God (the Son), in whom the universe was created (Col. 1:16-17).

Bringing the 4 arguments together, we can arrange them in the following manner.  Notice the green path/line of deduction in each case.  

Here we see that each argument separately concludes to one or another of the 3 divine persons–Father, Son, or Holy Spirit–or to the united, divine nature.  Knowing how these arguments separately prove the existence of a different person in the Trinity (or the divine nature as a whole) can help us better understand how each of these Divine Persons directly influences our lives.  Since there are only 3 persons and 1 nature in God, it is likely that Aquinas’ four existential arguments for God’s existence are exhaustive; that is, they are probably the only four existential arguments that there can be for God’s existence.

Question to address: How many transcendentals are there?

–From Fr. Augustine Tran, Roswell GA

Dear Fr. Tran,

First a little history. The way I understand it, Aristotle’s 10 categories (See section 1.5.5 in my textbook) were the highest, most universal ideas in each class of being. However Transcendentals went beyond this, because transcendentals would “ascended beyond” (Lat. scendere “climb” + trans “beyond”) these headings and would infuse indiscriminately into everything, no matter what category it was in.

Truthfully, there is dispute about how many transcendentals there are. St. Thomas Aquinas listed 5: res (thing), unum (one), aliquid (something), bonum (good), and verum (true). Another source I read lists 7: being, one, thing, something, true, good, and beautiful. I myself, following another tradition, consider there to be only four–being, truth, goodness, and oneness–for reasons that become clearer later in the text (i.e. that reality has 4 directions or coordinates: up and down vertically, and side to side horizontally, and the transcendentals occupy unique locations within those 4 possible directions: Being is always primary and at the top, oneness is where it all unites together at the bottom, truth is the relation of the lower back up to the higher, and goodness is the relation of the higher back down to the lower). Next I will give some reasons below for why I don’t consider certain other qualities to be transcendentals.

To me, ‘thing,’ and ’something’ are essential terms (having to do with essences), not existential terms (having to do with beings/existants). In other words, things’ and ’somethings’ existed from all eternity as the eternal possible essences from which God could create things/creatures and make them to be real. Consequently, there was an idea of the “thing” of a chair, as a “something,” long before any chairs actually existed. However transcendentals are inherantly existential, and therefore they are founded for all eternity in being itself, that is, in the eternal being, who is God. From there, they pass into creatures (inasmuch as creatures are created and modelled after God), and transcend down through the hierarchy of creatures, but they are originally divine qualities, not created ones.

To me, ‘beauty’ is not a transcendental because not everything is beautiful. Everything is ‘one’ in some way, everything is a being in some way, everything is ‘true’ in some way, and everything is ‘good’ in some way, but not everything appears beautiful; on the contrary, some things just appear plain ugly. Why? Because beauty is subjective (not objective). You have to be at the right place and the right time and see it in the right way in order for it to appear to you as ‘beautiful.’ Beauty is the knowability of the good (see glossary, or Section 4.3.4). If truth is the relation of the lower to the higher, and goodness the relation of the higher to the lower(as stated in many places in the text), then beauty is also (like truth) the relation of the lower to the higher, but within a context of goodness. In other words, beauty is true goodness, i.e. goodness conforming to our expectation of what it should be, so that we can enjoy and experience its goodness, as it happens to us. Since beauty requires two elements lining up in coordination (i.e. truth and goodness), it doesn’t always occur. Indeed, it can fail to occur when something is indeed good, but good in a hidden or unrecognized way and so not truly known; or when something is truly and clearly known, but doesn’t appear as good. Beauty is also not a transcendental because the 4 transcendentals correspond to the 3 persons and one nature of the blessed Trinity (Father=Being, Son=Truth, Holy Spirit=Goodness, Divine Nature=Oneness).

Thank you for your excellent question,
-David Rudmin