The Centrality of the Idea of the Good in the Platonic System (2)

Abstract

This chapter investigates the centrality of the Idea of the Good for Plato's ethics. It is certainly a remarkable fact that just as the Idea of the Good has little presence in the bulk of Anglo-American scholarship on Plato's metaphysics, so it has little presence in accounts of Plato's ethics. The chapter demonstrates that any account of Platonic ethics is seriously deficient if the superordinate Idea of the Good is not the main focus and if the Good is not identified as the absolutely simple first principle of all, the One. There may be a number of reasons for the lack of interest in the Idea of the Good among students of Plato. At least one of these is that it is supposed that Aristotle's critique of the Form of the Good in his Nicomachean Ethics is decisive. The chapter then considers the knowledge of the Forms of the Virtues, and looks at goodness as integrative unity. It also studies the connection between eros and the Good, which is made explicitly by Plotinus in one of the most remarkable passages in his Enneads.