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The Idea of the Good and Unconcealment [198199]

Just as the eye must obviously be ἡλιοειδής, so must the comprehension of the idea (νοεῖν) have a character that corresponds to what determines and enables this yoke as yoke (the ἀγαθόν). It must be ἀγαθοειδής [like the good]. As the eye is sun-like, so must the comprehension of the idea be ἀγαθοειδές.


b) The good as the higher empowering power for Being and truth in their linked essence


This is only a preliminary explication of sensory seeing and the non-sensory comprehension of the idea. We perceive that what extends the span of the yoke, so to speak—light and Being and truth—is determined by something higher. “And so this, what grants unconcealment to the knowable beings and lends to the knower the capacity to know, is the idea of the good” (book VI, 508e1ff).

It should be noted that one and the same ground enables knowledge of the idea and the openness of the idea: the good—that although Being and unconcealment or truth do essentially co-participate in enabling essential knowledge, something still higher is given. “There is still something higher to esteem, beyond Being and truth, something that surpasses the power of these, and only by virtue of this, which surpasses truth, is knowledge really possible” (book VI, 509a3–4). Final passage (509a9–10): “But fix your eye once more, as we have been doing, on the image for the highest idea, namely, the sun! The sun may be plumbed still more deeply and more thoroughly to draw forth yet more correlations.”

A further characteristic of the sun as sensory image of the good is developed:


Socrates: In my opinion, you might say that the sun bestows upon the visible things not just the quality of being seen, but also their emergence, growth, and nourishment, while the sun itself is not becoming.

Glaucon: How could it be!

Socrates: And so we must now also say that not only does being known {ἀλήθεια} belong to the knowable things on the basis of the good, but even this {namely, that these things are always something composed in this and that way; in short, Being}, and that therefore Being, too, belongs to them only on the basis of the good, while the good itself is not a type of Being, but is beyond Being and towers over it in power and worth. (Book VI, 509b2ff)


This, in the whole of the Platonic corpus, is surely where Plato expresses his decisive thought about the good.

The good is beyond Being, ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας (book IV, 509b9), and therefore = nothing (to put it formally). This means that if we ask


Being and Truth (GA 36/37) by Martin Heidegger

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