The empirical is a symbolic representation of the spiritual. The aporias arise when questions about the existence of universals are asked. Questions about the existence of anything are coherent only in the context of the empirical.

So the universal (the spirit) is prior to the particular (empirical nature), but it does not follow that the universal exists prior to the particular.

The empirical is a symbolic representation of the spiritual. — John

I don't know what this means.

So the universal (the spirit) is prior to the particular (empirical nature), but it does not follow that the universal exists prior to the particular. — John

If the universal is prior to the particular, then the universal is prior to the particular.

It means that talk about the existence of universals is incoherent. Universals do not exist, they inhere in existents. The existence of an existent, in other words, is a symbolic expression of universals.

Universals do not exist, they inhere in existents. — John

What is the difference between existing and sort-of existing?

The existence of an existent, in other words, is a symbolic expression of universals. — John

Does this mean that whatever exists depends upon an expression of universals?

Thus universality is ultimately prior and foundational to particularity. Particularity emerges from universality as various combinations and configurations of universals. — darthbarracuda

But universality or generality is the product of induction or generalisation from particulars. So really it is a two-way relation - a symmetry-breaking or dichotomy - that is being described.

It is true that the particular derives from the general (via downward constraint - a limitation). And it is true that generality derives from the accumulation of the particular (thus via upward construction). So in being mutually derived in this fashion, both the general and the particular, the universal and the instance, must arise from something further - a third thing - beyond themselves.

That is where vagueness, apeiron or firstness enters the metaphysical picture. The general and the particular are themselves the complementary limits on being which result from breaking the symmetry of a vaguer "everythingness" that is neither the one, nor the other, just the potential for the logical division that develops.

So as usual, the instinct is to reduce two choices to just one - either it is the case that the general or the particular is the primary.

But metaphysical two-ness has to be a dichotomy to be logically possible. To definitely have one thing, that can only be the case if it brings along the concrete possibility of the exact thing which it is not.

And from there, the only way out is to see the whole thing as a triadic development - a transition out of vagueness where it is possibility itself which is being metaphysically divided towards its logical limits.

The general and the particular can only exist in relation to each other. And then that definite relation can only exist in relation to yet a third thing which is the same relation at its other limit - a state of maximal vagueness, a state where it can't meaningfully be said whether there is the general or the particular.

The general and the particular can only exist in relation to each other. And then that definite relation can only exist in relation to yet a third thing which is the same relation at its other limit - a state of maximal vagueness, a state where it can't meaningfully be said whether there is the general or the particular. — apokrisis

Yet if I remember correctly Peirce included second-ness and third-ness. So first-ness would be vagueness (which is a vague term itself - a placeholder for what is impossible to predicate?), second-ness would be universality and third-ness would be the "crisp" particularity. A crude image would be gas-liquid-solid.

Universality comes before particularity simply because we particulars cannot exist without universals, i.e. constraints and repetition. The very class of particulars is a universal. So indeed you are correct that we never come across universals "by themselves", but this is well-accepted as the instantiation relation objects have with their properties.

My view of universals is that this term encompasses a number of things including grammatical laws, aspects of mathematics, and many concepts that are basic to scientific reasoning, among other things. But I think to get a perspective on why the debate is important, takes a lot of reading.

There's an online essay called What's Wrong with Ockham: Reassessing the Role of Nominalism in the Dissolution of the West. This essay analyses the issue in terms of Aquinas' view of universals, and of William of Ockham's criticism of that.

One of the definitions:

What does Aquinas say is a universal, then? While a nature does not exist as a universal, the nature can be considered as a universal insofar as the individual act of a mind relates that mind to many things. As Aquinas puts it, universality is an accident of an intelligible nature which accrues to it insofar as it exists in the intellect and thus relates the intellect to many things existing in reality.

Aquinas’s view is perhaps best framed in terms of what historians of philosophy call the “inherence theory of predication.” A proposition is true, on this account, if the predicate term signifies a nature or form which inheres in what is named by the subject term. “Socrates is white” is true if and only if the form of whiteness inheres in Socrates. “Socrates is a man” is true if and only if Socrates is characterized by the nature humanity. Obviously this view is linked to a metaphysical account of things as caused to be what they are by virtue of their forms; and it is linked, as well, to an account of cognition according to which I understand things insofar as they are characterized by these intelligible forms. Indeed, this is why it leads to the semantic account, as my words are only meaningful insofar as they signify the concepts in my mind, which concepts are caused by, and so represent by means of their formal similarity to, the forms of things.

Words signify forms—this is the heart of Aquinas’s “realism.” It is not that these signified forms are universals or have any universal existence; they exist only as the individual acts of being characterizing individual things. (And, as we will see, even the sense in which they “exist” in individuals can admit of great qualification.) But as the individual forms of individual things, they have a potential intelligibility which can be abstracted by the mind; abstracting this potential intelligibility—making it actually understood by the mind—is the formation of the concept.

The 'concept' is central, although the essay distinguishes the classical idea of concept from 'conceptualism' which tends to 'psychologize' concepts, i.e. try and explain them as merely or only 'mental constructions'.

In any case, the essay depicts Ockham's rejection of this notion of universals as follows:

Notice, however, that even if it does not entail that universals exist, the inherence theory of predication does seem to entail a rather highly populated universe of discourse, if not perhaps a highly populated ontology. For this view requires, in addition to all the beings about which I can form true propositions, a whole new set of beings, namely, the natures or forms, which verify any true proposition about those beings. For Ockham, this proliferation of objects was the ground for grave objection. In Ockham’s judgment, it is at best a meaningless play of language, and at worst an irresponsible complication of our theorizing, to insist that “the column is to the right by to-the-rightness, God is creating by creation, is good by goodness, just by justice, mighty by might, an accident inheres by inherence, a subject is subjected by subjection, the apt is apt by aptitude, a chimaera is nothing by nothingness, a blind person is blind by blindness, a body is mobile by mobility, and so on for other, innumerable cases.” Why should we “multiply beings according to the multiplicity of terms”? This is, for Ockham, “the root of many errors in philosophy: to want it to be such that, to a distinct word there always correspond a distinct significate, so that there is as much distinction between the things signified as between the nouns or words that signify.”

If Ockham’s primary motivation was to articulate an alternative to this proliferation of beings, he saw that he could do this very efficiently with some incisive logical or semantic innovation. Instead of having common terms signifying forms or natures of things, Ockham insisted that they signify the things themselves. “Man” does not signify the humanity of individual human beings; it signifies the individual human beings themselves. In other words, “man” is not predicated of men on account of their having humanity; rather, it is predicated of men just because “man” is a name for men. Ockham thus replaced the inherence theory of predication with an alternative version, sometimes called the two-name theory, or the identity theory. “Socrates is a man” is true if “Socrates” and “man” can name the same thing, if Socrates is among the things—individual human beings—that “man” can signify.

In effecting this revision of the semantics of terms, Ockham eliminated the need for even talking about natures or forms. This is the crux of Ockham’s nominalism, which while it cannot be adequately described as a denial of the existence of universals, can be described as a denial of the existence of forms or natures.

Later on, the author notes that

Thomists and other critics of Ockham have tended to present traditional realism, with its forms or natures, as the solution to the modern problem of knowledge. It seems to me that it does not quite get to the heart of the matter. A genuine realist should see “forms” not merely as a solution to a distinctly modern problem of knowledge, but as part of an alternative conception of knowledge, a conception that is not so much desired and awaiting defense, as forgotten and so no longer desired. Characterized by forms, reality had an intrinsic intelligibility, not just in each of its parts but as a whole. With forms as causes, there are interconnections between different parts of an intelligible world, indeed there are overlapping matrices of intelligibility in the world, making possible an ascent from the more particular, posterior, and mundane to the more universal, primary, and noble.

In short, the appeal to forms or natures does not just help account for the possibility of trustworthy access to facts, it makes possible a notion of wisdom, traditionally conceived as an ordering grasp of reality.

Notice it is precisly this question which is at stake in the interminable debates about the meanings of physics.

I think that essay is important. It also mentions another important source, which is Richard Weaver's 1948 Ideas Have Consequences. This has, perhaps unfortunately, become strongly associated with the American conservative movement, but it also attributes nominalism with 'the fall of the West', i.e. the abandonment of a meaningful metaphysic. Similar themes are also explored in M A Gillespie's The Theological Origins of Modernity and E A Burtt's Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science.

It certainly is interesting how metaphysics affects things outside of its own domain. I remember reading a while back on SEP how ancient Buddhist philosophers tried to distance themselves from the Hindu caste system by developing a thoroughly nominalist ontology of radical particularity. According to some Hindu philosophers, people belonged to their caste by having certain universals - they metaphysically belonged to that caste. And of course Buddhism rejected the caste system and some adherents ended up sacrificing what I see to be a reasonable position in order to try to distance themselves from an otherwise unreasonable view of nature (castes).

See this thread on Dharmawheel for a recent discussion of Buddhism and nominalism.

I came to this conclusion about it:

I think the nub of the issue is this: Buddhists are always saying, don't try and conceive of 'the ultimate'. As soon as you try and conceive of it, say what it is or isn't, then you're entangling yourself in the domain of relative/verbal/conventional descriptions, 'mistaking the finger for the moon'. The point of Buddhist praxis is always practical: you have to realise the nature of the ultimate, which is indeed ineffable from the viewpoint of conventional philosophy. (cf Wittgenstein 'that of which we cannot speak...'.) So I think that this resistance to the consideration of metaphysical propositions such as universals is consistent with that. Dharmakirti's attidude is: 'so you say there are "universals"? Where is one? Show it to me! What difference does it make!' That is the characteristic pragmatist attitude of Buddhism to not reifying abstracta.

So I think I understand why Buddhism doesn't deal with universals and the like - they're all part of what amounts to speculative metaphysics.

But my interest in universals actually came out of my debates on Philosophy forums, about Western philosophy in particular. In that context the question has a different meaning. There, the eclipse of Platonism and the rise of nominalism is one of the principle factors underlying the origins of scientific materialism. So there's no grasp of an ineffable light at the end of the tunnel - neither any moon nor finger pointing to it - but simply the endless accumulation of empirical facts against the background of an intrinsically meaningless physicalism. In this context, the question has a different import.

Yet if I remember correctly Peirce included second-ness and third-ness. So first-ness would be vagueness (which is a vague term itself - a placeholder for what is impossible to predicate?), second-ness would be universality and third-ness would be the "crisp" particularity. A crude image would be gas-liquid-solid. — darthbarracuda

Firstness is logical vagueness. But secondness is particularity - the particularity of some fleeting relation or event. And thirdness is then generality - the regularity of some habit in which the said relation or event is reliably produced (due to the development of some system of constraints).

But phase transitions certainly illustrate the point.

A gas is vague possibility. Particles are not in interaction. A liquid is a collection of events. Some kind of organisation arises as every particle has some individual interaction with other passing particles. Then a solid is the emergence of a global rigid order that puts every particle into a final entropy-minimising state of organisation.

Universality comes before particularity simply because we particulars cannot exist without universals, i.e. constraints and repetition. The very class of particulars is a universal. So indeed you are correct that we never come across universals "by themselves", but this is well-accepted as the instantiation relation objects have with their properties. — darthbarracuda

Talking about before and after runs into big difficulties if your notion of "time passing" is already based on a notion of time as a dimension, or a constructable string of particular instants.

So in the systems view, time is both global and local, general and particular. Universality is identified with final cause, while particularity is about efficient cause.

Thus one can say that universals are structural attractors. They exist in the future of a pattern of development. They are the goals towards which events tend (with retrospective necessity).

So you can say the universal exists even before it exists. It is there already waiting when things first start as the future outcome. But by this point it should be clear that the whole conventional notion of temporality is becoming more confusing than useful.

Again, trying to say one thing is definitely in existence, or definitely more primary, than its other, is where the monadic or reductionist approach to metaphysics quickly goes wrong.

Holism depends on getting past those 101 stage paradoxes.

What is the difference between existing and sort-of existing? — darthbarracuda

What do you mean by "sort of existing"? I am saying that it makes no sense to say that universals exist independently of the particulars that instantiate them. Can you give an account of some other kind of existence you think they might have?

Does this mean that whatever exists depends upon an expression of universals? — darthbarracuda

No, it means that whatever exists is an expression, or instantiation, of universals.

Peirce confined existence to Secondness/particularity/Brute Actuality. Therefore, strictly speaking, Firstness/possibility/Ideas and Thirdness/generality/Mind indeed only exist in their instantiations. However, they nevertheless have Being--they are real--apart from those instantiations. Within our existing universe, all three Categories are involved in anything and everything to varying degrees; but in the cosmological sense, Thirdness is primordial because actualities are determinate individuals in a continuum of indeterminate potentiality.

I would agree that they are real apart from their instantiations, but I would not agree that they "have Being", because I think 'to be' is coterminous with 'to exist'. Any alternative to this seems incoherent to me. Consider this; a thought, an imagining, or a feeling is real but it does not exist and is not a be-ing.

but there are many things that are real that you can't 'have an enounter with'- like the Gross National Product, the inflation rate, and the probability of the Mets winning the World Series. Some are abstract but have real consequences, others are 'real possibilities'. But that domain includes many more things than things that exist. Which actually conforms with Pierce's usage above.

The first task is to understand just what it is that nominalists are claiming.

Very few if any nominalists deny that we think about things in terms of universals. That's the whole gist of what concepts are, after all, and who is going to deny, especially in a philosophical context, that we formulate concepts?

What nominalists are denying is the reality of universals, where "real" in this usage amounts to "extramental." (And hence why this debate was framed simply as realism vs. nominalism in scholastic philosophy. It's realism vs. nomalism with respect to universals. Universals were an important enough topic in scholastic philosophy that there was no need to specify realism vs. nominalism about what--it was understood that it was about universals.)

At any rate, we're denying that there's somehow literally one (real) thing that is identically, multiply instantiated in two different entites.

Nominalism also often amounts to a denial of real abstracts in general (even though that's broader than the issue you brought up).

I'm a nominalist in both senses.

here are many things that are real that you can't 'have an enounter with'- like the Gross National Product, the inflation rate, and the probability of the Mets winning the World Series. — Wayfarer

In my view, insofar as those things are real (again, read "extramental"), you can have an encounter with them.

We could give examples of real things that one can't have an encounter with, though--or at least where it's virtually impossible to discern that one is having an encounter with them; we have to rely on theoretical models and indirect evidence from others gained via difficult-to-set-up experiments. For example, neutrinos.

In my view, insofar as those things are real (again, read "extramental"), you can have an encounter with them. — Terrapin Station

Yes, in practice our talk about the reality of things is talk about them being causal entities. They are "things" if they can make things happen. So the weather can be a type of causal thing. Even a reductionist still talks of things with emergent properties.

but there are many things that are real that you can't 'have an enounter with'- like the Gross National Product, the inflation rate, and the probability of the Mets winning the World Series. Some are abstract but have real consequences, others are 'real possibilities'. — Wayfarer

This is also sort of right in that all these things are real in a sign or symbolic causal sense, more than a material causal sense. They are things that are meaningful at a semiotic level and so cause us to react in appropriate ways.

Ultimately symbolic entities and material entities are causally connected. Entropy ends up being created as we jump up and down in joy, cheering when our team wins. Forests get mown down if someone is concerned over GDP.

So claims about things being real seem best understood as claims about entities with causal potency. And the world is complicated enough that there are both material and symbolic entities to take seriously.

Although we can then also tighten the definition of real when it comes to the symbolic or semiotic as it is not just about something as detached or dualistic as "an idea". A sign must be related to the material world for it to be actually a causal entity. Symbols must be grounded. Entropy must be expended, in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics, the mother of all causality.

So people conventionally want to draw a strict line between physics and information, matter and mind, when it come to talking about reality. And clearly they are quite different classes of thing.

But if reality is defined in terms of being causal, and symbols are understood as being causal in this parasitic or pragmatic fashion, then - invoking the overall reality of the second law, the most universal of constraints - we can see how minds or ideas are also fully real as part of the world's complex causal being.

The error here is to suppose that uniqueness is an inherent property of every particular. It's not. There's nothing in 'grass-green' that says anything about uniqueness. The uniqueness-as-a-universal that you are thinking of is simply a consequent, and the uniqueness of this consequent is a further different consequent from the original consequent.

Although we can then also tighten the definition of real when it comes to the symbolic or semiotic as it is not just about something as detached or dualistic as "an idea". A sign must be related to the material world for it to be actually a causal entity. Symbols must be grounded. Entropy must be expended, in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics, the mother of all causality. — apokrisis

You're imbuing thermodynamics with the status of divine will, as always.

The relations between forms, ideas, laws, and particulars are analogous to the relationships between formal and material causes. The material cause of a statue is the marble and the hammer-blows of the sculptor, but the formal cause is the idea that the artists is attempting to realise*. Likewise laws and principles are causal in the sense that the provide the matrices of possibility along which things tend to unfold, but they are not causal in the sense that efficient or material causes are. So your description of what is real being 'entities with causal potency' is still physicalist.

The point about scholastic realism (i.e. acceptance of universals) is that it provides a connective principle, a telos, which has on the whole been lost to modern thought:

Characterized by forms, reality had an intrinsic intelligibility, not just in each of its parts but as a whole. With forms as causes, there are interconnections between different parts of an intelligible world, indeed there are overlapping matrices of intelligibility in the world, making possible an ascent from the more particular, posterior, and mundane to the more universal, primary, and noble.

It is precisely the absence of that which has given rise to the notion of life being the fortuitous combination of elements which just happens to take the forms it does, in service of the only measurable outcome, which is proliferation (and ultimately 'heat death', right?) But the idea that this happens for any reason is scornfully dismissed on the grounds of it being 'antiquated thinking', in the same category as the Aristotelean physics which Galileo so successfully demolished. Reason in the sense of telos is itself treated as a kind of superstitious relic - the only real reasons are 'antecedent factors', the chain of material causation grounded in physical laws.

----------------------------------

*That's not to say that I believe Aristotelean metaphysics are the final word but the categories of thought and of causes are indispensable, and the loss of them disastrous.

You're imbuing thermodynamics with the status of divine will, as always. — Wayfarer

And better yet, it is not theistic mumbo-jumbo but testable hypothesis!

Divine will is capricious. God can forgive you or smite you. And either will be claimed as good evidence of His causal reality.

But thermodynamics is counterfactual. You can prove it wrong by filing your patent for a perpetual motion machine.

Likewise laws and principles are causal in the sense that the provide the matrices of possibility along which things tend to unfold, but they are not causal in the sense that efficient or material causes are. So your description of what is real being 'entities with causal potency' is still physicalist. — Wayfarer

I've already said often enough I take a "constraints and freedoms" approach to causality. So that combines top-down and bottom-up causes in the one whole - the formal and material causes of being.

The point about scholastic realism (i.e. acceptance of universals) is that it provides a connective principle, a telos, which has on the whole been lost to modern thought: — Wayfarer

Yep.

So I take it that you are just agreeing with me then? But for some reason, you don't want to accept the telos that science has discovered - entropification?

If your divine will could show itself more clearly, more consistently, then we might believe in it with more confidence. Until then, let's stick to what we are finding written into the fabric of nature everywhere.

But thermodynamics is counterfactual. You can prove it wrong by filing your patent for a perpetual motion machine. — apokrisis

If, however, the Universe expands and contracts through an endlless cycle of big-bang-and-bust, then there's your machine.

I agree with what you say; I would not claim such things are not real. I just want to say that they do not "have being" or exist, in line with what I said in the post your were responding to.

Such fine distinctions are always going to be, at least to some degree, terminological issues. You may have a different conception of what 'being' means than I do. :)

A gas is vague possibility. Particles are not in interaction. A liquid is a collection of events. Some kind of organisation arises as every particle has some individual interaction with other passing particles. Then a solid is the emergence of a global rigid order that puts every particle into a final entropy-minimising state of organisation. — apokrisis

I would then put universals prior to particulars. Universals are more vague than particulars. They are what particulars are made up through the instantiation relation or what have you.

No, it means that whatever exists is an expression, or instantiation, of universals. — John

Yet is this not what universalists believe? That particulars instantiate universals? Properties are just ways things are, and these ways are universals. Repetitive patterns.

I would agree that they are real apart from their instantiations, but I would not agree that they "have Being", because I think 'to be' is coterminous with 'to exist'. Any alternative to this seems incoherent to me. Consider this; a thought, an imagining, or a feeling is real but it does not exist and is not a be-ing. — John

I would have said that thoughts exist but are not real, as realism typically is about an external reality beyond the mind.

At any rate, we're denying that there's somehow literally one (real) thing that is identically, multiply instantiated in two different entites. — Terrapin Station

Right, so all the processing power of similarity gets re-located to the mind. The external world is just some amorphous deserted blob and it's cut up and structured by the power of the mind.

The problem with this that I see is that it is difficult to understand how and why the mind "separated" itself from the rest of reality.

It is also impossible for me to understand why we have different concepts to begin with, if universals do not exist. The mind presumably originated from the rest of the world in some sense. It is causally connected to the world. What makes us recognize round from triangular is not the going-ons in our heads but the actual structure of the two objects in the world that we interact with.

So instead of the mind molding reality, it is the rest of reality that molds the mind. In fact this is basically the Aristotelian conception of the soul.

And better yet, it is not theistic mumbo-jumbo but testable hypothesis! — apokrisis

Theology doesn't try to be a science, because it's subject matter isn't scientific.

If your divine will could show itself more clearly, more consistently, then we might believe in it with more confidence. Until then, let's stick to what we are finding written into the fabric of nature everywhere. — apokrisis

Natural theology is all about attempting to show the necessity or probability of theism by general observations of the world at large.

If, however, the Universe expands and contracts through an endlless cycle of big-bang-and-bust, then there's your machine — Wayfarer

Exactly. There is the counterfactual hypothesis. And where does the evidence currently stand?

"Dark energy" is telling us that there is only a one way ticket to the heat death, no eternal recurrence. And even most cyclic models require the second law to be obeyed somehow. There are theorems that even a spawning multiverse can't be past eternal.

So science must conceive of other possibilities. Then reality tells us its answer.

Such fine distinctions are always going to be, at least to some degree, terminological issues. — John

Would you agree that talk of existence, being, or reality, is talk about causal potency? It is "stuff" that has an effect?

So the problem is that most want to confine the notion of causal being to material being. But it also seems reasonable to allow for formal being, or ideational being, or symbolic being - the other kinds of causal being that really do appear to act in the world?

... I would not claim such things are not real. I just want to say that they do not "have being" or exist ... — John

Late in his life (1908), Peirce wrote about "three Universes of Experience." The first "comprises all mere Ideas," everything "whose Being consists in its mere capacity for getting fully represented, regardless of any person's faculty or impotence to represent it," such that "their Being consists in mere capability of getting thought, not in anybody's Actually thinking them." The second "is that of the Brute Actuality of things and facts," whose "Being consists in reactions against Brute forces." The third "comprises everything whose being consists in active power to establish connections between different objects ... its power of serving as intermediary between its Object and a Mind." Elsewhere he also characterized them as (1) ideal possibilities, (2) Matter and physical facts, and (3) Mind and minds, along with habits, laws, and (especially) continua.

For Peirce, the constituents of all three Universes are Real--"having Properties, i.e. characters sufficing to identify their subject, and possessing these whether they be anywise attributed to it by any single man or group of men, or not"--but only those in the second Universe exist. This is why the particular article that I am quoting here described an argument for the Reality of God--Ens necessarium, creator of all three Universes--rather than the existence of God. I continue to find this terminological distinction helpful in these kinds of discussions.

Universals are more vague than particulars. — darthbarracuda

Says who exactly?

If you are thinking that universals are ghostly forms or epiphenomenal ideas, then your claim is that they definitely don't exist. So they are not vaguely existent. They are sharply inexistent.

But if you are taking my approach, then universals and particulars are as real (or ideational) as each other.

Theology doesn't try to be a science, because it's subject matter isn't scientific. — darthbarracuda

So they don't both talk about the world and our place in it? What are you on about?

Says who exactly?

If you are thinking that universals are ghostly forms or epiphenomenal ideas, then your claim is that they definitely don't exist. So they are not vaguely existent. They are sharply inexistent.

But if you are taking my approach, then universals and particulars are as real (or ideational) as each other. — apokrisis

I am saying that without universals, particulars wouldn't exist. Particulars are made of universals. In the same way you might boot up MS Paint and use a few geometric templates to make a design.

So they don't both talk about the world and our place in it? What are you on about? — apokrisis

Science talks about the world. Theology talks about the divine and how it relates to the world and its residents.

I certainly acknowledge the causal efficacy of thoughts, feelings, institutions and so on, and their reality on account of that. But I do tend to think of being or existence in terms of tangible beings or existents that can exert tangible forces that work as efficient or material causes..

I continue to find this terminological distinction helpful in these kinds of discussions. — aletheist

I agree and I probably only diverge in that I equate being with existence and that I do not think being exhausts reality. I would say there is also spirit, and that it is on account of spirit that there can be final and formal causation, and beauty, goodness and truth as well.