The sun analogy: Plato's Good is beyond being

Plato spends nearly the whole class building a world of perfect Forms, the Equal itself, Beauty itself, and avoiding, as long as he can, saying what holds all of it up. When he is finally forced to answer, in Book VI of the Republic, he hesitates. The answer has a name, the Good, and it comes by way of a comparison: just as the sun does not only let us see things but makes them grow, the Good does not only make things knowable, it makes them exist. And then comes the line that left Greek philosophy suspended: the Good is beyond being.

The question left hanging

Think of two white cats, similar enough that you call them equal without a second thought, even knowing that no pair of things in this world is ever perfectly equal. Plato explains that equality you recognize but never see in full by saying the two cats participate in a Form, Equality itself. The same logic holds for the rose and Beauty, for the just act and Justice. Every sensible thing carries a share of what the corresponding Form is in full.

Only the Forms are many, and that leaves a question the whole class had been avoiding: if every thing participates in a Form, and the Forms are many, what do the Forms themselves participate in? What holds up the upper floor?

It's the question that closes Professor Rodrigo Bitencourt's class on the World of Forms, and he himself notices the tone of someone who has arrived at the edge of something. Plato's answer is one, and he offers it almost apologetically, as if embarrassed not to be able to put it properly. After pages spent defining with precision what the Equal itself is and what participation is, the man who had an answer for everything hesitates in front of the Good. That alone says something about the size of the question.

The comparison with the sun

Socrates, in the dialogue, pulls back from defining the Good head on and offers instead what he calls "an offspring of his own, quite like him": the sun. The comparison has two edges, and both matter.

The first: the sun is not sight itself, but it is the cause of things being seen. Without light, even the sharpest eye sees nothing. The second, and this is where the comparison goes beyond easy metaphor: the sun is not only the cause of things being seen, it is also the cause of them being born and growing. No plant thrives without sun, even if no one is watching it.

Plato carries both edges over to the Good. In the intelligible world, the Good is not knowledge or truth, but the cause of things being knowable. And in the same breath, he goes further: the Good is also what gives things their very being. It is not a synonym for truth, it is what sustains truth and what sustains being, at the same time.

In G. M. A. Grube's translation, revised by C. D. C. Reeve, the text of 509b reads that the good "is not the same thing as being, but even beyond being, surpassing it in dignity and power." It is worth noting a translation divergence that is itself content, not detail: the Greek word is ousia, and it can be rendered as either being or essence. The Nous video says "beyond being"; some editions render it "beyond essence." Both point to the same place: the Good is no longer just one more thing that exists alongside the others. It is what makes the others exist.

The word that crossed two thousand years: beyond

Look closely at that word, beyond. It is the hinge of everything. This is transcendence, in the technical sense philosophy would later inherit: something that stands outside and above the very reality it sustains, not merely hidden somewhere within it.

And here it is worth clearing up a common misunderstanding. Plato's Good is not one more god on Olympus, jealous, in love, at war, like Zeus or Aphrodite. It is a principle of a different order: it stands above everything that exists, everything that exists depends on it, and it is, itself, the Good. No Greek philosopher before him had formulated the question with this rigor, placing an absolute principle outside the very chain of things it sustains. It is the first time, in the history of the West, that anyone reaches that edge.

The Good, alongside Truth and Beauty, is one of the transcendentals that philosophy would go on to inherit and argue over for centuries: that which is not defined by anything else, because everything else is defined by it.

Why he hesitates

Notice something before moving on. Plato spent the whole class speaking with confidence: he defined the Equal itself, argued that it is more real than the cats you see and touch, gave participation its name. And right at the highest point, exactly where the answer should have crowned everything, he hesitates and admits he cannot quite put it into words.

That is not a weak argument. It is the mark of someone who has come close enough to a big question to feel its size. You have probably lived that same hesitation yourself, not in front of a philosophical system, but in front of your own life: you know how to point at what is good and what is bad in a choice, but if someone asked what holds up that very judgment of yours, the answer does not come easily. Plato is in the same place, except he had the nerve to say so out loud, in the middle of the most ambitious argument he had ever built.

A Greek who reached that edge alone

It is worth measuring the distance Plato covered to get here. He had no revelation, no scripture to consult. He got there by oar, examining reasonings one by one, after recognizing that looking straight at things was not enough. A Greek of the fourth century before Christ, alone, reached the edge of a principle that is beyond being itself.

If you want to follow this argument at the source, it is in the Republic, Plato's masterpiece. There he does not speak only of politics: he speaks of the Good and of justice, in the very same Book VI where the sun analogy appears.

And that distance covered alone is exactly what leaves open the most interesting question of this whole class: if a man got this close with no help at all, what was still missing? It was another man, many centuries later, also alone at first, who answered that better than anyone, and the article on what he found, and what he didn't find, in the books of the Platonists picks up that question exactly where Plato left it.

If you want to hear this passage in the voice of the one who teaches it, with the sun rising on screen and the quote laid over it, it is in the source class, just below.

Continue: Plato and the World of Forms: the measure no one gave you · Plato's second sailing: the method of the Forms · What Augustine didn't find in the books of the Platonists · Without God, Is Everything Permitted? Camus's Answer
Source class: F&T 2.4, Platão I: o Mundo das Ideias e a busca pela transcendência