The Good Beyond Being in Plato’s Republic
Socrates famously declares in Plato’s Republic that the Good is “beyond Being”, surpassing it in seniority and power. The passage has generated an enormous amount of philosophical interpretation concerning the ontological status of the Good.
But what does it actually mean for the Good to be superior to Being? Goodness and Being are not competitors for rank or power. The language of superiority makes considerably more sense when addressed to an ambitious Glauco, for whom superiority, power and pre-eminence are particularly attractive notions.
Yet even Glauco thinks Socrates has gone too far, but he accepts the preposterous claim anyway.
The following brief extract considers what happens when the language of timocratic ambition is applied to the relationship between the Good and Being.
The Good beyond Being
The glorification of the Good at the expense of Being is as ontologically meaningless as would be the glorification of Being at the expense of the Good. Superiority and power are misapplied from timocratic ambitions to simple concepts, all in an attempt to endear the Good to Glauco. The Good has something to do with good things, as even Socrates pointed out at the beginning of the analogy (p. 185); Being has something to do with things that are.
Extract from Chapter 6, ‘The Digression’, in Ivor Ludlam (2014), Plato’s Republic as a Philosophical Drama on Doing Well, p. 188.
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