[Inquiry] Re: Inquiry Oriented Systems -- Revisatory Notes

[Jon Awbrey]

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IOS.  Revisatory Note 5

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3.2.10.  The Pragmatic Cosmos (cont.)

Why do things have to be this way?  Why should it be necessary
to suppose an ordering, much less a pragmatic ordering, on the
commonly understood array of goods and quests?  If everyone who
reflects on the question for a sufficient spell of time tends to
agree that the Beautiful, the Just, and the True are one and the
same in the End, then why is it necessary to postulate a meantime
cosmos, and why should the pragmatic cosmos have a special appeal?

The practical necessity of some order or other and the potential of
a pragmatic order are apparently relative to a certain contigency
that affects the typical agent that we have in mind, namely, the
contingency of being a fallible and a finite creature.  Perhaps
from a "God's Eye View" (GEV), Beauty, Justice, and Truth all
amount to a single Good, the only Good that there is.  Still,
the imperfect creature is not given this outlook on the good
as its realized actuality and it cannot contain its vision
within the point of view that is proper to it.  And even
if it sees the possibility of this unity, it has no way
to actualize what it sees at once, at best being driven
to work toward its realization measure by measure, and
that is only if our limited agent is capable of reason
and reflection at all.

The imperfect agent lives in a world of seeming beauty, seeming justice,
and seeming truth.  Fortunately, the symmetry of this seeming insipidity
can break up in relation to itself, and with the loss of the objective
world's equipoise and indifference goes all of the equanimity and most
of the insouciance of the agent in question.  It happens like this:

Among the number of apparent goods and amid the manifold of good appearances,
one soon discovers that not all seeming goods are alike.  Seeming beauty is
the most seemly and the least deceptive, since it does not vitiate its own
intention in merely seeming to achieve it, and does not destroy what it
reaches for in merely seeming to grasp it.

Jon Awbrey

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