Tuesday - Truthday

Every day is a truth day - omne ens est bonum - every day is a good day, a beautiful day!

As I walked across and along the river, over the expressway (what a word!), up the hill that is Sandyford Street, by the fire-station and the wonderful (now empty) school building (built 1897), I pass west through the small copse of tangled trees between the hospital and the railway line towards Yorkhill Park. As I do, the last of the sun's light glinting through the trees is being gradually enveloped by a great shelf-cloud which occupies the whole of the visible horizon. The golden light fizzles through the trees before the cloud eventually swallows it up. Further down at the base of Yorkhill Park the spare ground here has already itself been swallowed up by the property developers. Slowly, perhaps too slowly for people to see, all these nooks and crannies, these little invaluable spaces, are being devoured by the constructivist ones, until one day, we might look back and ask, where has all the space gone? 

Up at the university library, Level 10, Philosophy and Theology ('philosophy without theology is irrelevant, and a theology without philosophy is more or less superstitious credulity' writes Raimon Panikkar somewhere in there), I fall upon Kitaro Nishida's An Enquiry into the Good. 

Goodness is a gathering together (a necessary tautology) of (the spirit of) all things (of their actuality). If we look at the etymology (the truth of the origin of the word) of 'good' we can trace it as far back (in time and space) as the pre-Indo-European root ghedh- meaning to unite and to associate. This corresponds with the proto-Germanic gothaz and the Old Norse goor to the Old English gaedrian meaning to gather, to put together ('together' deriving from the same source). The result of this 'gathering together' is the gradual arising of 'God' which according to Kitaro is 'the unity of the universe' ('infinite love, infinite joy, and peace'), and the awakening of the great Self (what the Hindus refer to as Brahman). Goodness and Godness are as similar as their orthography would imply. With this awakening of the Self (the dissolution of the small self into the immeasurable Self) comes pure being (actuality) and what Aristotle called 'perfect action'. Goodness spills forth - one does not 'try' to be good, rather good is being, or simply, good is. It irradiates forth like the sun's rays. Thus, Aristotle can say that the good is happiness (eudaimonia) [but a happiness that is not pleasure, see "State of Grace - From Kinning Park to Glasgow Green", but liberation from it into the realm of well-being and 'infinite joy'].

'The satisfaction of... the realization of ideals always constitutes happiness,' writes Nishida. Which is why the Teutonic theosopher Jakob Boehme wrote, 'The infinite freedom of the human heart proves God directly'. 'The highest good, in other words,' Nishida continues, 'is for our spirit to develop its various abilities and to achieve a perfect development. In this way Aristotle's entelechie is the good (the completed reality of an entity and the power of the entity to reach completion). For a human to display his or her innate nature - just as a bamboo plant or a pine tree fully displays its nature - is our good. Spinoza said that virtue is to function in accordance with the self's own nature'.

'[...] In this regard the good is beauty... Beauty is felt when things are realized'. 

"And God said, 'Let there be light, and there was light. And God saw that the light was good".

One could also say that this is the true, that the light was true, or indeed beautiful. Thus, I can say, Tuesday - truth day.... omne ens est bonum (all reality is good)... every day is a good day, a beautiful day.

The sun's rays leap across the horizon of being and understanding.