The Metaphysics of Plato’s Moral and Political Philosophy

“Do you think, then, that it is possible to reach a serious understanding of the nature of the soul without understanding the nature of the world as a whole? . . . Proceeding by any other method would be like walking with the blind.” (Phaedrus 270c-e)

“You’ve often heard it said that the form of the Good is the most important thing to learn about and that it’s by their relation to it that just things become useful and beneficial. . . Every soul pursues the Good and does its utmost for its sake. It divines that the Good is something but it is perplexed and cannot adequately grasp what it is. . . [reason] does not consider these hypotheses as first principles but truly as hypotheses—but as stepping stones to take off from, enabling it to reach the unhypothetical first principle of everything. Having grasped this principle, it reverses itself and, keeping hold of what follows from it, comes down to a conclusion without making use of anything visible at all, but only of forms themselves, moving on from forms to forms, and ending in forms.” (Republic 505a-e, 511c)

The “Euthyphro Dilemma” refers to the question posed by Socrates to Euthyphro in the eponymous Platonic dialogue; to wit, is the pious pious because it is first pious or because it is loved by the gods? The dilemma has become a sort of staple objection to a theistic worldview: is what is good such because it is good in itself or is it rendered so merely by a putative supreme being’s decree? As posed from a “naturalist” perspective, the tension that the dilemma drives at is the following: if what is good is such inherently and commanded by the supreme being by virtue of its goodness, then goodness exists as a standard above him to which he refers and defers, in which case the supreme being is not “that which nothing greater can be conceived;” and if the good is such because it is commanded by the being, then morality is, essentially, arbitrary, at its core merely the swaying to and fro of an all-powerful agent’s whimsical dispositions; the so-called “necessary being” would then be subject to randomness, in which case he cannot be absolute.

All this can be seen to rest entirely on a fundamental misunderstanding of classical metaphysics; to wit, the Absolute is not a being amongst beings. Plato’s Socrates, in posing the dilemma as such, was far from gesticulating towards a relativistic or “nihilistic” answer. Goodness, for Plato, is absolute, and to be pursued beyond life, even through death, for as we learn from the Apology, the Crito, and the Phaedo over the course of Socrates’s dwindling days, death can at times really be the just end and true good outcome. Life in the world of sensible reality, then, cannot itself be its own index of goodness or the ultimate terminus of goodness itself but has its goodness only as shone upon it from beyond itself. The true philosopher, the person ruled by reason, is the one who rises out of the darkness of ignorance and presses forth in pursuit of that light, towards that absolute end by and in which all things are, are enfolded, and receive their goodness in being called to exist.

In the end, Plato’s political and moral philosophy reveals itself as always thoroughly metaphysical, indiscerptible from a broader discussion of first principles; immanent political discourse, in other words, is groundless without recourse to the transcendent. As a wide-ranging study of his dialogues reveals, his discussion implicitly points towards a first principle beyond reality, identified as the “Idea of the Good” that grants all things form, content, meaning, and being, without which nothing has any apprehensible content and so is anything at all, not least virtue and justice, as the source of all forms in existence and the ground of all affirmations and rational judgements, upon which all truths rest and without which there is no intelligible moral dictum, political constitutions, or, at base, coherent discourse about reality at all.

Republic: To the Good and Back Again

Though the Republic was known to the ancients under the alternative title On Justice, modern readers know that if an inquiry into the nature of justice is the linchpin of the discussion, it can hardly anchor Plato’s ascent through the realms of philosophia.

In the beginning, both Socrates and Thrasymachus define injustice as corresponding to the unencumbered pursuit of personal gain irrespective of any principle of virtue. All the while, it seeks to maintain a reputation of justice or virtue while practically it pursues nothing but absolute personal pleasure, dominance, and possession. Thus, injustice is evidently the luxury of those who can afford themselves such power – rulers. Thrasymachus goes further and deduces that justice, as its opposite, must then be no more than to do what is advantageous for the strong.

Yet already Socrates notices a number of internal contradictions in Thrasymachus’s posit. If to do injustice is to seek to outdo everyone, just and unjust alike, in serving one’s own desires, while to do justice is to conform to the manner in which other just persons behave, and since ruling is like any other craft – for instance medicine or sailing or horse-breeding – then to rule is to seek the advantage of those over whom one rules, since crafts like medicine and sailing seek not a further gain of their own but rather attain for perfection in order to serve the good of those over whom and for whom they are set. Thus, justice must correspond to acting in the benefit of those over whom one rules rather than oneself. More crucially, since the one who is knowledgeable in her craft does not seek irrationally to diverge from other knowledgeable people but rather imitate them while the unjust person seeks to surpass everyone around herself regardless of the soundness of their judgement, it follows that injustice is inimical to reason while its opposite, justice, must correspond to that which has kinship with rationality.

From there does Socrates’s exposition of the ideal city-state begin, when Thrasymachus irascibly compels him to demonstrate whether justice is truly good in itself apart from the societal advantages and honours it confers. The Athenian philosopher reasons that if both an individual and a city can be called “just,” then both justice in an individual and justice in a city must partake of the same form of justice instantiated differently. The ability to reason analogically with respect to both in virtue of this single form is what carries the narrative of the Republic into its famed discussion of the ideal city-state, a dialectic that will extend even unto the relation of world to mind and mind to world, and so, in short, the full scope of what is given to experience.

Justice, as said above, will result in conformity to others who are just while seeking to be unlike the unjust. The unjust, necessarily, will seek to outdo both the just and the unjust, for he seeks nothing but absolute personal gain and lives in accordance with no one and no principle beside private whim. And yet here the Athenian notices an internal tension that renders injustice itself untenable, for if the unjust seeks to accomplish what is proper only to himself, he will inevitably clash with others who are unjust and have similar personal pursuits, and the only way to fulfill such pursuits will be a retreat towards deference and living in harmony, either of the two submitting to be ruled by the other in some measure to bring about a common good, so that a degree of justice is inevitable even to achieve the aims of injustice:

Is there any greater evil we can mention for a city than that which tears it apart and makes it many instead of one? Or any greater good than that which binds it together and makes it one? (Republic 462a-d)

If justice in a person, Socrates states, corresponds to the harmonious binding-together of the human soul’s whole out of its parts – the rational, the spirited, and the appetitive – so too, justice in a city would correspond to the binding-together of its guardians, auxiliaries, and workers. In both a man and a city, justice is striving towards being one rather than being many. For in the case that a man is many because some parts within him coerce to rule illegitimately rather than submitting to be ruled so that unity may be present, the man is in a state of disarray and war against himself, which corresponds to injustice; for “wickedness is discord and sickness of the soul” (Sophist 228b.) In the case that a city is many because some parts within do not fulfill their own function while simultaneously striving for unity with the whole by consenting to be ruled by those who legitimately wield power in pursuit of what is universally good, then the city will be at war with itself.

Thus, crucially, justice is good because goodness is that which is the binding-together of the parts as one, transcending both the whole and each of the parts, allotting each’s own function for itself – its identity, which is simultaneously its differentiation with respect to the other – as well as their integrative oneness with each other.

In other words, in considering the nature of justice and what justice does, Socrates must do so with reference to principles beyond justice itself, by which justice may enact its being as that which it is. For in what way can we assume justice just is what it is yet refuse to ask by what has anything its character as that which it is? Socrates’s quest for the nature of justice is inextricable from questions concerning reality itself, and so it must primordially rest on metaphysical principles. And only in considering the very event of all things as owing to an unnegatable and ineffable principle of unity as existence does one grasp the stress on oneness in Plato’s understanding of the nature of justice and virtue.

Unity as Goodness: the First Principle of All Things

To be is to be one; to be is to be delimited, as this-rather-than-that. If something were not one, it would be indistinguishable from anything that is and therefore would not exist:

if in fact it is, it must always, as long as it is, be some one thing; it cannot be nothing. (Parmenides 144c.)

Indeed, if all things were only parts, and each part endlessly made up of further parts, but no substantive, undivided unity could be identified, then in considering existence downward from wholes to parts, we would obtain an infinite regress amounting to nonexistence. For existence to become manifest, whatever exists must be a unity. Thus, the most primal character of all things, of any thing at all that is intelligible, is being one.

The lover of wisdom attains to what lies behind all forms, the true realities of the shadows, Socrates says, in coming to behold the Idea of the Good, pursued by all as the source of reality itself and the inward actuality of all things, the condition by which anything that is is, is one. The Good beyond being, as the grounding principle of all things, orders all discussions and holds together Socrates’s theories on civic and personal justice for it first upholds the coherence of discourse itself as the cause of all intelligibility:

what gives truth to the things known and the power to know to the knower is the form of the Good. And though it is the cause of knowledge and truth, it is also an object of knowledge. Both knowledge and truth are beautiful things, but the good is other and more beautiful than they. In the visible realm, light and sight are rightly considered sunlike, but it is wrong to think that they are the sun, so here it is right to think of knowledge and truth as Good-like but wrong to think that either of them is the Good—for the Good is yet more prized. (Republic 508e-509a)

As Socrates has said, “what is is knowable” (Republic 478b). Nothing can escape the purview of intelligibility because to render a judgement on anything is for it to be intelligible. And intelligibility is identical to being (what corresponds to the Latin esse, existence, rather than the Greek οὐσία, essence), for whatever is is that which can “show itself” as the subject of predication, whatever can be knowable, as having something true of it. In all judgement and all thought then, there is always a prior framework that is logically presupposed within which anything is that which it is and thus has knowable truth, the unity and ground at once linking both the objectivity of anything (“truth”) and objectivity’s inherent apprehensibility – subjectivity itself, objectivity’s being “taken in” by thought (“knowledge”). Just as absolute non-being is impossible because it is incoherent that there could be nothing – it would be the reality that there is no reality, i.e., always a prior framework within which any judgement can be rendered about what is or isn’t, that there is nothing as opposed to something – so also is the extinguishing of truth impossible, since it would always logically first be true that there is no truth. Thus, even “nothing” and falsehood presuppose existence and truth. Being as truth is the framework within which any thing is anything at all, what it is over against what it is not (e.g. nothing as opposed to this or that). Therefore, being is truth, being is knowability. The instant one has made a judgement about anything (even, say, “there is nothing”) is to presuppose that absolute precondition in and by which any thing is anything and is therefore capable of “standing forth” as the subject of a predicate. Therefore, the sheer fact of intelligibility, of knowledge alone, which corresponds to subsistence, leads thought to the Absolute that is logically prior to and underlies all reality and corresponding apprehension of reality, the first principle and source of all things which Plato calls “the Good.” That any thing at all is knowable – and being must be knowable, since the claim that being isn’t knowable is fundamentally a claim about being, about the nature of reality (that it cannot be known), and is therefore self-refuting – leads the mind from its experience of being to the truth of the Absolute Good.

Since truth is being as apprehensible, and knowledge is apprehension, for Socrates to say that the Good is the cause of the truth in all things is to say that the Good is what grants intelligible content to anything; in other words, it is that which grants reality to all things, for to be is necessarily to be knowable, and only that which has anything knowable of it has being. The Good, then, is the precondition assumed by any posit of existence, beyond anything in reality and the totality of reality as that by which it is enabled both to be and to be known, by which it has its inherent intelligibility, its referentiality as an object of judgement, and also its conceptual content – its form – downstream of which is its sense-perceptibility. When the philosopher is first unfettered, he discovers that the shadows which had been cast before him his entire life were perceptible only because of the glare of the fire; awakening yet more, he discovers that the fire itself is only a distant echo of the sun’s light which casts itself upon all things. Light is the precondition for sight; so also, nothing could be, could have knowable reality, be “correct” or “true” as having identity without, in that very act of self-positing, point through itself to the absolute Good enabling it to be that which it is.

Since then “what is is knowable,” Plato’s Socrates draws the inevitable conclusion to the principle of being and knowing:

not only do the objects of knowledge owe their being known to the Good, but their being is also due to it, although the Good is not being [οὐσία], but superior to it in rank and power. (Republic 509b)

“Being,” in the narrower sense that Plato uses the term here, corresponds to the essence (οὐσία), the “what-ness” of units that is instantiated either immaterially or sensibly in diverse particulars. It is the realm of multiplicity and complexity; here, any object of knowledge must have intelligible confines, and what something is is always secondary to the fact that it is. For anything that is must be one before it is or belongs to any form or essence; any “this” is defined and confined as this one thing that it is rather than that other one which it is not, and “this” as not “that” precisely presupposes the existence of “that” in not being that; identity is always simultaneously difference, otherness. As the Eleatic stranger of the Sophist recognizes, every limit of something is a part for something, the latter depending on the former for it being that which it is. But oneness itself, that which is “truly one, properly speaking, has to be completely without parts” and anything “which consists of many parts,” such as a whole, “won’t fit that account” (Sophist 244e-245b).

If the Good is beyond the complexity of οὐσία, then it cannot fail to be identified with the simplicity of the One in the first Parmenidean hypothesis that transcends all duality of rest and motion, change and stability, difference and identity, and so is the cause of all being (the intelligible realm) and coming-to-be (the sensible realm). It is beyond all bounds – indeed, does not even have non-being as its opposite, for it transcends that too (cf. Sophist 258b-259d) – and so cannot have parts or be just another being among all the beings that are. Rather, it is that simplicity undergirding all things, “itself. . . different from nothing,” and so “neither is nor is [a] one” (Parmenides, 139c, 141e). As beyond all complexity and compositeness, it is the very act of unity and being for all things as the “unhypothetical first principle of everything” (Republic 511b), the absolute oneness by which anything is one, the ever-immanent ground of anything that exists (Parmenides 137c-142a).

Such is precisely the role of justice in the city and in the soul, so that it can be said to mirror the Good in both instances. It is, with respect to politeia and person, a fainter echo or image of the One’s power to grant unity to all things. The Good accords that oneness which is the pursuit of the just city and person, and in them justice is a diffusion at scale of the Good’s binding-together power as unity-itself. Thus one comes to discover that the Good beyond all things was all along the true and ultimate object of justice, the end implicit in all pursuits and determinations, and the supremely loveable that is the object of all desire, the most exalted character of which is knowledge itself. Understood so, the pursuit of unjust ends can only ever ultimately be a pursuit of the Good itself, if only distorted by ignorance.

This understanding of all things as unfailingly longing for the Good as the source and end of all rational desire is perhaps the most representative characteristic and uniting thread of the entire Platonist tradition. And, already, it is ubiquitous in its founder’s works.

The Natural Desire for the Good and the Beautiful

“People love the good” (Symposium 206a), and “every soul pursues the Good and does its utmost for its sake” (Republic 505e), wanting “the good to be theirs forever” (Symposium 206a). “Love is wanting to possess the Good forever,” Diotima explains to Socrates in the Symposium before revealing the way about. Knowledge is never not desire, never not erōs; the mind does not passively register what appears to it in all of being but is teleologically restless in every instant after the possession of forms or ideas as incarnate in the sensible world, an inexhaustible and reflexive movement towards every greater abstracting, categorizing, and understanding of all that appears in being. This simply is the nature of conscious experience, and the mind can never exhaust the wellspring of its desire, such that its seeking is always being renewed in every moment of existence. Precisely for this reason the sensible world cannot be taken as self-sufficient for Plato, but merely the impress of a higher realm of ideas that the mind is concerned with grasping. The sense-perceptible has no “objective being” apart from reference to the conceptual and the abstract, and so these, as informing the sense-perceptible, correspond to a level of being above it, with which the mind is concerned, to which it is intentioned, when it apprehends anything in being.

And after he has given birth “to many gloriously beautiful ideas and theories, in unstinting love of wisdom,” the philosopher finally attains to that which is the end of reason as the source that has called it on in all rationality. Indeed, we learn in the Symposium from Diotima’s exposition of the “scala amoris” that knowledge’s loving pursuit seeks to grasp the forms, which are the true natures of what is in the sensible world (Republic 490a-b). But just as the Good transcends all forms (ἰδέαι), and just as the One is not an object differentiated among others, so also do we discover that the Beautiful is not merely “one idea [ἰδέα] or one kind of knowledge” among others (Symposium 211a-d). It is instead, as we learn in the Republic, the very power undergirding knowledge itself and for that reason can itself only be the end that yields truth. Knowledge is not merely a path to the Good; the very experience of knowledge is nothing short of a direct participation in the Good’s inexhaustible gift of itself. The desirable is, by definition, the beautiful, and for this reason Beauty-itself alone can be the end pursued by knowledge, the Good “the last thing to be seen” as the “cause of all that is correct and beautiful in anything” (Republic 517b-c). Every experience of the beautiful in all of being and every occasion of longing for it that is rational experience is nothing other than one’s longing to draw nearer to one’s source of being, the unity that holds all things together and pours itself out fully and inexhaustibly in all things.

The Teleology of Reason and Justice: Desiring the Good Beyond Being

Precisely because the Good is wholly beyond being, beyond the realm of the forms and cannot be wholly equated with either pleasure-seeking alone or knowledge-seeking alone, that it is in its very transcendence immanent to and manifest in both [correct] pleasure and knowledge. Nonetheless, the latter rather than the former will bring one closer to the Good. The first principle is the cause of all being and becoming, and all being and becoming requires measure (proportion), truth, and beauty (Philebus 65a). As concerns the first, all things are a mixture of unlimitedness and limit: all things are comprehensive of (1) overarching form in its indefiniteness, and (2) particularity, as a definite instantiation of a supervening form. And all things necessarily possess truth (see above), and beauty, for the beautiful is the desirable, and what has either being or becoming is necessarily capable of being an object of knowledge and judgement, being therefore endowed with telos as constituting the end of a pursuit, of a desire – intellection’s gaze. The Good which is the cause of all “beauty, proportion, and truth” (Philebus 65a), is, then, primarily attained through the pursuit of knowledge rather than that of pleasure, for knowledge’s very character is constituted by its aim to grasp for that trifecta Socrates names in the Philebus. Truth is of the Good, and knowledge aims at truth, and truth is that which is. Since justice is the opposite of injustice as Thrasymachus defined it, justice must be aligned with truth because it is rational, and so ordered towards the Good as its telos.

But the unjust soul, given over entirely to irrational whim and mere sensible benefit, enslaved to the indulgence of sex, food, luxury, wealth, or might whenever they rear their heads, is in a state of civil war, like the city fallen captive to the tyranny of one man over the many; injustice cannot achieve for the soul its truest desire. It, inherently, does not appropriately participate in the right conduit to the Good. Reason alone can effectively subdue the appetitive and the honour-seeking, capable of providing each its due portion while keeping the soul in alignment with its proper ascent. In contrast, the appetitive and the honour-seeking, if respectively made to rule over reason, cannot provide for it since their rule is antithetical to the unencumbered pursuit of truth, and, being savage in nature, are like fools on a ship who oust its rightful owner as a babbler and proceed blindly, without a whit of experience in navigation, to nominate another fool amongst themselves as captain (Republic 488a-489b). The appetitive and the honour-seeking are concerned with the proximate and the sensible, mutable and deficient as they are, while reason of its nature dwells in what is higher and beyond becoming, that higher realm of intelligibility, of eternal ideas that in-form the becoming of the ever-motive sensible, thereby constituting its existing and being that which the visible depends on and presupposes by its very intelligibility. The opposite of the just man, the “one who condemns [justice],” then, “has nothing sound to say and condemns without knowing what he is condemning” (Republic 589c).

Only the one who lives according to reason, then, can be ruler, for the philosopher alone is wholly unfettered, having ascended out of the cave of ignorance in pursuit of that knowledge beyond the senses to attain the ultimate source of all existence by which all things are known. And so we see in the Republic’s chiasmic structure, which has for its center the form of the Good, moving from person to polity to forms to the Absolute and back again, that one ascends to the Good as the end of reason in apprehension of it as the cause of all knowledge, being, beauty, unity, and truth, and from it one reasons one’s way back below to adduce the function of justice for governance of both the politeia and the individual soul:

[Reason] does not consider these hypotheses as first principles but truly as hypotheses. . . as stepping stones to take off from, enabling it to reach the unhypothetical first principle of everything. Having grasped this principle, it reverses itself and, keeping hold of what follows from it, comes down to a conclusion (Republic 511c)

Justice’s inherent goodness hinges entirely on the absoluteness of the Good as the first principle and transcendent ground of all things. To seek after anything, specifically a certain political constitution or a moral precept in this case, the object of desire must first be taken as good to be sought for oneself, which is to say, again, that nothing can be desired in and of itself, only in light of a more ultimate end, to wit, attaining what is good. The desire for anything determinate – finite – in which some good is perceived, must always be enfolded within a more primordial motion towards goodness itself – that which is unlimited – by which that proximate object of desire can then be willed for the goodness perceived to it: “we want, not those things that we do for the sake of something, but that thing for the sake of which we do them” (Gorgias 468c).

To desire what is “good for me” is always necessarily to desire what is good itself, what is truly good, and this is only possible if what one first and absolutely desires is goodness itself. Goodness, then, cannot be exhausted by anything among the things that are; the good sought in all things must be the true end sought in all seeking and therefore beyond all being. One cannot but look for good when desiring anything rationally, as aimed towards an apprehensible purpose, even if one is ignorant about true goodness in doing as one (erroneously) sees fit. A man who, for instance, tragically commits suicide cannot do so except in seeing greater benefit to dying than to living, such that what he really would be after is the good:

it’s because we pursue what’s good that we walk wherever we walk; we suppose that it’s better to walk. And conversely, whenever we stand still, we stand still for the sake of the same thing, what’s good. . . Hence, it’s for the sake of what’s good that those who do all these things do them. . . we don’t simply want to slaughter people, or exile them from their cities and confiscate their property as such; we want to do these things if they are beneficial, but if they’re harmful we don’t. For we want the things that are good (Gorgias 468b-c)

Thus, to seek one’s good is to seek the source of existence itself and goodness itself, what itself grants me unity as the very inward source of my being. And inasmuch as it is inescapable that all things look out for the good through what is good for them, then one can only desire justice if one’s desire is rational, that is, teleological, for through justice rather than injustice do the many become one and in so doing mirror their source and attain closer to it. And this alone, of course, is the noblest pursuit there can be for Plato, for “reason belongs to that kind which is the cause of everything,” that cause “present in everything.” And as the cause of the mixture of knowledge and pleasure, Plato can therefore name the Good νοῦς and “all-encompassing Wisdom” (Philebus 30b-e; Phaedo 97c).

To be clear, his system does not merely end at some base notion of “objective norms,” for any such “moral fact” would still, as a determinate, rational unit of thought, be conditioned by the Good from beyond itself, presupposing Reason itself as its foundation, such that every finite good is only an inherent instance of the Good itself. Thus, in light of the Good’s universality as the unbounded source and end of all, that which is truly good for anyone is ultimately just the Good itself.

Justice is beneficial in se, apart from any putative utilitarian value, only because the goodness inherent to it is primordially a ray of the Good beyond all, only because the desire for justice is first and last a desire for “the unhypothetical first principle of everything” that is inevitably pursued by every soul. And so, Socrates concludes that it is “by their relation to [the Good] that just things become useful and beneficial.” Through justice the Good shines, unfolds, and manifests itself; to love justice is always first to love the Good.

A so-called “objective” moral fact, however, cannot yield universality, since any one “fact” is, again, by its nature determinate, exclusive. In fact, relativism itself is compatible with “objective moral facts.” Inevitably, in the realm of finitude it should happen that the fulfillment of two moral objectives is not possible simultaneously; the goods will be hierarchized according to the situation, and yet what is inevitable and universal through all this is that the Good itself remains absolute, the criterion as the end sought through and in that hierarchization. One seeks to know “moral facts” – or better, the forms – only because one is first drawn to know what is good. Only when one does not falter from the remembrance that what is ultimately and primordially desired in all event is the Good itself, not because the Good is some extrinsic agent who imposes himself upon beings, but rather because one inevitably seeks one’s very inner source of being, unity, and mind, can one be impelled to order oneself according to and in pursuit of the knowledge of what is truly good and right. Only the Good as the actuality of all, immanent to all as unlimited by οὐσία, ensures that what is in truth good for myself is an instance of the Good itself. In the Crito, Socrates is immovably resolute in the face of his friend’s protest and appeals that it is better for him to die than to act unjustly: it is both good for him and for the city precisely because it is the Idea of the Good manifested for each’s “good for me.” In refusing to act unjustly, Socrates does not violate the city’s inherent integrity in its disposition towards the Good, a longing instantiated in its constitutionality, and neither is Socrates’s soul tainted by betraying what it knows to be intrinsically good, the form of Justice alighted by the Good, falling thus into disharmony and away from the image of its source. And, as is reported by Phaedo, there is for Socrates the pragmatic benefit that if a philosopher has kept his eyes on the eternal things that are unseen, his death will be a welcome liberation to fly tither where he has long sought to be.

Naturalism’s Impotence: The Absoluteness of Intelligibility

As the very source of the being and knowability of anything that is, the Idea of the Good, for Plato, must remain the absolute cornerstone upon which any intelligible posit of reality ultimately rests and thus the precondition and starting point for any rational account of anything at all. Indeed, the Good simply is the immanent character of all things and the manifestation of any one object of existence in which it is apprehended as the existent it is.

By its sheer knowability, the world presupposes a power beyond itself by which it can be intelligible, just as any object seen by the eyes always first presupposes light as the enabling precondition by which it and anything at all can be seen. The very fact of intelligibility renders the notion of a purely physical reality that is entirely self-referential as a self-enclosed system of material quanta in blind motion impossible, incoherent, and explanatorily deficient, since the latter’s very existence beckons for that beyond itself which can provide it with its explanans. No metaphysics can ever logically be “naturalist” or “physicalist.” Nothing that merely stands forth as an apprehensible object of cognition or subject of any judgement whatsoever can be self-referential; merely to think anything is to think true reality, and merely to have known the world is always already to have surpassed its limits.

The physical realm’s sheer “standing forth” as apprehensible reality would presuppose a higher realm of abstract ideas “descending” to inform it and enable its givenness to thought. It is the very nature of reality to be the content of experience, such that subjective awareness is already presupposed by the very possibility of objective being. What is true is that which exists, and that which exists is that which can be apprehensible, and if that is so, then any determinate existent, simply by virtue of being, must inherently presuppose the capacity of being known, of which its own is only a finite instantiation. And thus it follows not only that mind is inherent to being rather than an illogically unanticipated accident to it, but that beyond the totality of what is, there must be that simplicity which is the absolute actuality of being and knowing as the basis of all that is, all metaphysics, even all form reasoning, and upon which all finite acts of being and knowing are ever contingent. From and through and to this indivisible ground of reality goes the power of both that which is to be and be known, and that which knows to know what is.

Upon this ground of form and meaning alone does the politeia therefore also stand. For if only reason can save the city, then the philosopher must rule, and the philosopher is she or he that strives after the Idea of the Good as the end calling forth all knowledge in virtue of being its origin, as the source of all things knowable. As the origination of all things, it must also be the end to which they are oriented. No notion of true and false, justice and injustice, ought and ought not, or whatever else that is relevant to political constitution and moral practice – even “notion” itself – is ever coherently separable from the Idea of the Good.

For either the city or the soul, then, injustice is in principle a faltering from the pursuit of the absolute Good, irrationality devoid of its own essentiality since it is merely the absence or distortion of the form of justice that takes the soul away from its source by failing to achieve unity. And in praxis, it appears as a state of civil war, of corruption, and of abject servitude (Republic 583a-587e). The rule of reason in pursuit of truth, of justice, is for Plato founded upon the absolute first principle beyond being, the Good immanent in all goods, the highest of which is truth. When the discussion comes full circle in Book X, then, it is only natural that we find Socrates can reclaim from Glaucon what he has conceded for the sake of the argument: not only is justice inherently good as transcendently evocative, apart from whether it carries utilitarian societal purchase, but by its intrinsic goodness it will not fail to be beneficial in a more immediate way as well.

The End of Philosophy

All philosophy, whether moral, political, epistemological, or metaphysical begins, as the Athenian tells us, in a moment of wonder at the state of existence that elicits in due course principles both about the world, its state of affairs, and how one is to live (Theaetetus 155c-d). This indeed is the possibility that is the very promise one can rest upon merely from the world’s givenness to thought, of its sheer intelligibility that compels the very project of philosophy.

From this most elementary insight, the dialogues of Plato establish an inevitable corollary, the recognition of which is why no coherent philosophy can fail to be “Platonic,” transcendental: to think anything at all is to think what is, and what is must be amenable to thought, so to that in thinking the totality of being one is necessarily thinking of principles undergirding principles. And in thinking principles, one ultimately arrives beyond each and all of them to that which is the very pre-condition for the possibility of any principle at all – not another being in all of being, not the sum of being itself, and still not, insensibly, a being outside being, but the at once transcendent and immanent simplicity that is the precondition of all truth and all knowledge of truth, conferring to all things their manifest character and thus their givenness to experience both as that which they are in themselves and in relation to others. Indeed, there simply is no alternative. Nominalism falls flat under the weight of its internal contradictions for in asserting that all philosophy is merely human language that cannot step outside its own context to ascertain the true nature of reality, in severing knowing from being, that is, it itself makes a fundamental claim about the nature of reality, since our language is apart of it, and thereby steps outside its own context to make a determinative, absolute claim that one cannot step outside one’s own context.

This Absolute that is mystery beyond all being and cognition is that which all mode of thought is inevitably on a trajectory to attain once philosophy begins, by turning towards the world and considering the wonder that is being, given as gratuitous event to be known and beheld in experience. And in contemplating reality, the mind discovers it has attained to the very end and rest from which it began its life, the inward power by which it cogitated, cognized, induced, deduced, speculated, and contemplated the depths of what is made manifest.

To reason politically, morally, or epistemologically while maintaining that such evidently intelligible discourse can be empirically self-referential, failing to consider the precondition for why such is possible at all, is nothing other than an arbitrary limitation of scope that prevents one from following principles through to their inevitable end. Any idea and all words taken hold of by the mind are the breath of the Absolute, alone through and in which anything appears; the very possibility of reason is the self-givenness of the One.

Plato’s enduring contribution to the history of philosophy, above which he stands as a text to its footnotes, is that there can be no such thing as a “naturalist” philosophical project, for to reason at all is always already to be drawn on by an end beyond the world’s ends.

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