Elements of Theology 4: On the Good

[sdi]

What is "good," anyway? To the philosophers, "good" was simply the object of desire: that is, every thing pursues what seems "good" to it, which in turn pursues what seems "good" to it, and so on. (Moderns might find this odd: maybe one finds sex to be good, but we don't tend to think of sex as a thing that itself has agency; the Greeks did, however.) Obviously, then, some things are more "good" than others, and identifying the greatest "good" one is capable of is, I suppose, what ethics is all about. Here, Proclus skips all that and goes right to the top: if something can be considered "good," there must be some prototype "Good" which acts as the standard and measurement of all that is considered "good." What can we say about that prototype?

On the Good: Every thing that exists desires its own good, lacking it and therefore dependent on it. Good itself transcends existence, lacking nothing and desiring nothing. In between dependent things and the Good, there is a middle rank of independent things which exist but desire only themselves, acting as their own good.

VII. Every productive cause is better than its products.

First, let's suppose a cause to be equal to its products. Then all things would be exactly the same in productive power, but we don't see this in the world around us.

Next, let's suppose a cause to be worse than its products. But if a cause can produce something in others, surely it must be able to produce it in itself? It can't lack the means, since we have supposed that it has them; and it can't lack the motive, since it is the nature of every thing that exists to desire its own good. Therefore a cause must certainly make itself better rather than make products better than itself.

So, since a cause is neither equal to nor worse than its products, it must be better than them.

VIII. Good itself is better than every thing that participates in good.

As we have said, every thing that exists desires its own good: this implies that every thing that exists lacks some good, or it would not desire it. From this we must assume that good itself transcends existence: if it existed, then it would lack some good, but how can good itself lack any good? If it did, it could not be the good of every thing! So, good must be nothing but good: to qualify it, by identifying it with any existing thing, is to remove its universality. [This universality establishes good's uniqueness: so, in order to be explicit, we will henceforth refer to it as "the Good."]

IX. Every independent thing is better than every dependent thing.

Every thing that depends on some external thing for its good participates in the Good through that thing: that which it depends on acts as an intermediary between the thing and the Good. But if some thing depends only on itself, it has no intermediary between it and the Good. Since something is good in proportion to how close it is to the Good, a direct participant must be better than an indirect participant.

X. The Good is better than every independent thing.

For a thing to be independent is for it to have the cause of its own good within it. But to have a good is to participate in the Good, and the Good is better than every thing that participates in it [VIII].

Dodds groups VII through XIII into a single section (which he calls "Of Causes"). I agree with his sectioning, but I have broken it into two halves for the sake of my sanity. Those following along from home might reasonably ask "hey, why did you switch gears from the One to talk about a different principle?" and we'll get there shortly. I should warn you that VII is unrelated to the rest of the propositions here, and it will only be used in the next section: I considered moving it to that post, but no, I think it's better to keep the propositions in order. Just be aware that it isn't used in sequence here!

Our translators all use the term "self-sufficient" for what I am here calling "independent;" I justify the change because "independent" has an obvious contrasting term—"dependent"—while "self-sufficient" has no such contrasting term.

Lofty though he may be, Plotinus is a very intuitive sort of person and I tend to do well when guided by feeling and analogy; Proclus is all cold, hard logic, and I'm finding him very difficult. VIII in particular was this week's great challenge: short as it is, I spent hours and hours on it alone, and I don't think I quite nailed it. Part of what makes it tricky is that we are taking "every thing desires its good" as an axiom: this means the good cannot not exist, but we're here showing that it cannot exist, either. Normally, in logic, one would suppose there's a problem with your axioms rather than needing to posit something above existence! Plotinus made a good case for why this is—the Good exists, but it's "special" somehow because we can't predicate it—but I'm not understanding how Proclus can get there implicitly (since he doesn't seem to say anything about that here). Maybe he returns to the properties of the Good later on.