What did Plato and Plotinus mean by "beyond being?"

Question

The question is exactly what the title says. Plato, in the Republic, famously referred to the Good as "beyond being in power and dignity," and Plotinus later expounded this assertion in his elaborations of the One as something that transcends Being (Which he links with Nous, the secondary principle emanating from the One). I'm really at a loss in figuring out what exactly this means.

At prima facie, the concept itself doesn't make much sense, but reading Plotinus' Enneads (Lloyd P. Gerson's translation of them, in specific), it seems that, by "Being," Plotinus did not refer to simple existence and self-identity in the everyday sense but a much more specific and concrete dimension of those. For example, here, he seems to say that the self-identity of anything whatsoever comes from participation in the One, who then is self-identical on account of itself and not by similitude to any external thing (V.3.15)

For everything that is not one is preserved by the One and is whatever it is due to this. For if it has not become one, even if it is composed out of many parts, it is not yet that which someone could speak of as ‘itself’. And even if someone were able to say what each part is, they would be saying this due to the fact that each is one, that is, due to its being itself. But that which, not having many parts in itself, is thereby not one by participation in the One, but is itself the One, and it is not one due to something else but because it is the One, that from which other things somehow also come, some by being near and some by being far.

And Gerson, in one of his footnotes for VI.8.21, says the following:

The Good or One, which has hitherto repeatedly been said to be ‘beyond οὐσία’, is here said to be nothing other than its οὐσία. Plotinus is emphasizing the paradox arising from the fact that the Good exists and so, in some sense, οὐσία, the abstract noun formed from the verb for being, may be used of it. But its οὐσία, as is argued throughout this and previous chapters, is nothing other than its existence, its willing, or its activity.

So this brings a further development to this question (Although the initial form of it is something I'd like an answer to, as well): If Plotinus, by "Being," doesn't mean simply existing, what exactly does he mean by it, then?

Answer 1

Plato, particularly in Plotinus' "neo-Platonic" interpretation, believes--or at least talks about--multiple levels of reality. Our ordinary, everyday life is an illusion, it's several levels removed from True Reality. You can travel away from the "center," into even more unreal things like stories, myths and painted images. You can also travel towards the center, into the realm of forms, ideas, and increasingly important ideals such as Truth, Beauty and Love. You can imagine them as planets orbiting close to the single, unified center, which Plato calls "The Ideal of the Good" and Plotinus calls "the One."

"Being" is an attribute of the world we live in. It emanates from the One, but the One is beyond it. You can view it as taking shape somewhere at a deeper level of reality than our own, but not the deepest level. In the same way that photosynthesis is caused by the sun, but doesn't define the sun, "being" exists as an emanation of the "One" but doesn't define the "One."

It's a counterintuitive concept, one that doesn't make literal sense, but that's standard for neo-Platonic topics. It's a general principle that the objects of True Reality cannot be described accurately in ordinary language.

Answer 2

There is a similitude here:

(508-509) "it is right to deem light and vision sunlike, but never to think that they are the sun, [in the same way] the idea of good [...] you must conceive it as being the cause of knowledge, and of truth [...] but to think that either of them is the good is not right."

And:

(509b) "The sun [...] not only furnishes to visibles the power of visibility but it also provides for their generation and growth and nurture though it is not itself generation. [...] In like manner, then, you are to say that the objects of knowledge not only receive from the presence of the good their being known, but their very existence and essence is derived to them from it, though the good itself is not essence but still transcends essence in dignity and surpassing power.”

In the previous passages (507) there is a restatement of the theory of ideas: “We predicate ‘to be’ of many beautiful things and many good things, saying of them severally that they are, and so define them in our speech.- [...] And again, we speak of a self-beautiful and of a good that is only and merely good, and so, in the case of all the things that we then posited as many, we turn about and posit each as a single idea or aspect, assuming it to be a unity and call it that which each really is. [...] And the one class of things we say can be seen but not thought, while the ideas can be thought but not seen.”

Thus, we have the ideas (also essences) that "can be thought but not seen" and that are the cause of being (like sun is the cause of vision) and they (the objects of knowledge) "receive from the presence of the good their being known, but their very existence and essence is derived to them from it."

Ousia is a very "loaded" term, and too often we read it through Aristotle's eyes: it may mean, depending on the context, i) "being", in the sense "to be something", ii) "being" as the eternal, changeless and perfect: the Forms, and iii) "essence".

Thus, agreeing with @Jo Wehler's answer, the proposed translation has: "the Good itself is not an essence but transcends the essences" (see Aristotle's Met., 988a8-988a17: "for the Forms are the cause of the essence of all other things, and the One is the cause of the essence of the Forms").

We may say that if essence=Form, then the Good (the One) is a sort of super-Form (see Aristotle again: "the Forms are predicated in the case of sensible things, and the One in the case of Forms").

Regarding "beyond being", see Shorey's note to (509b) where "transcends essence" translates "ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας":

It is an error to oppose Plato here to the Alexandrians who sometimes said ἐπέκεινα τοῦ ὄντος. Plato's sentence would have made ὄντος very inconvenient here. But εἶναι shows that οὐσίας is not distinguished from τοῦ ὄντος here. ἐπέκεινα became technical and a symbol for the transcendental in Neoplatonism and all similar philosophies. cf. Plotinus xvii.1.

Maybe useful: Paul Shorey, The Idea of good in Plato's Republic, pp. 223-225, but I cannot see it.

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And see also Plato's unwritten doctrines: "[According to] the advocates of [scholars that] have intensively examined the scattered evidence and testimony in the sources in order to reconstruct the principles of Plato's unwritten doctrines [...] the existence of the Forms as well as the objects we sense are derived from two fundamental principles. The two fundamental 'ur-principles' that are thought to constitute the basis of Plato's unwritten doctrines are The One: the principle of unity that makes things definite and determinate, and The Indefinite Dyad: the principle of 'indeterminacy' and 'unlimitedness'. [...] In logic, the One supplies identity and equality, while the Indefinite Dyad supplies difference and inequality. In ethics, the One signifies Goodness (or virtue), while the Indefinite Dyad signifies Badness." See also Konrad Gaiser, Plato's Enigmatic Lecture 'On the Good' (Phronesis, 1980).

If so, the reading of "the Good" as "the One" is much earlier than Plotinus: "Plotinus found [the One] in Plato’s Republic where it is named ‘the Idea of the Good’ and in his Parmenides where it is the subject of a series of deductions."

See: Eyjólfur Kjalar Emilsson, Plotinus (Routledge,2017), Ch.3.2 The One is beyond being and beyond thought, page 75: "Plotinus frequently describes the One as 'beyond being' (epekeina ousias) clearly echoing Plato’s Republic (509b9) [...] even if Plato speaks just of 'the Good,' this is clearly the same thing as he elsewhere in the Republic calls 'the Idea of the Good.' Plotinus, however, takes the One (the Good) to be beyond the Platonic Ideas. So Plotinus thought Plato identified Ideas and being, and that since he claims the Good to be beyond being, it must be beyond Ideas too, which, of course, flies in the face of Plato’s calling the Good the Idea of the Good.

Answer 3

Here is the passage (Greek, English) quoted from Plato’s Republic (Emphasis J.W.) referring to "beyond being":

καὶ τοῖς γιγνωσκομένοις τοίνυν μὴ μόνον τὸ γιγνώσκεσθαι φάναι ὑπὸ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ παρεῖναι, ἀλλὰ καὶ τὸ εἶναί τε καὶ τὴν οὐσίαν ὑπ᾽ ἐκείνου αὐτοῖς προσεῖναι, οὐκ οὐσίας ὄντος τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ, ἀλλ᾽ ἔτι ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας πρεσβείᾳ καὶ δυνάμει ὑπερέχοντος.

In like manner, then, you are to say that the objects of knowledge not only receive from the presence of the good their being known, but their very existence and essence is derived to them from it, though the good itself is not essence but still transcends essence in dignity and surpassing power. (Republic, book VI, 509b)

The passage is taken from Plato’s simile of the sun. Plato compares the idea of the Good with the sun:

The sun by its light provides existence and growth to the living beings and the sun light makes them visible for our eyes. Similarly also in the domain of ideas the idea of the Good creates by its force the ideas as stable and enduring entities and lets us recognize the ideas by our mind.

Apparently Plato does not express his main concept “The idea of the Good” by a clear concept. Instead Plato takes refuge to a simile.

It is no wonder that Plotinus, about six centuries later than Plato, does link his main concept “The One” to Plato’s concept “The idea of the Good” not on the basis of clear concepts. For Plotin’s interpretation and link to Plato I recommend Plotinus, Chapter 2.

Answer 4

The SEP entry on Plato's middle-period metaphysics/epistemology uses the phrase "first among equals" to describe the status of the Form of the Good vis-à-vis the other Forms. By analogy, ω is the first countable ordinal, but it is equal in cardinality to e.g. ω + 1, ω^ω, etc., all before ω₁. So the Form of the Good is not greater in the order of the quantity of its existence as a Form, for all Forms are equally ultimate existents.

But somehow, auto to agathon is yet prior to even the Form of Existence in the other order. Perhaps this is what was mysterious for Plato such that he seems as if he never conclusively tried to describe the greatest Form. But one might think that, "among other things," auto to agathon must itself be the Form of Order, which Form would be the foundation of all the orders (including that of existential quantization) holding of the other Forms.

Consider, for example, that Plato, via the Timaeus, seems to have a Form of the World, which is also a Form of Life, an anima mundi later compared among the esoteric alchemists to a (pseudo-)Aristotelian prime matter or bare substance. And the Forms are said to dwell in their own world. If everything in their world is a Form, it follows that the Form of Forms (another characterization of the ultimate Form) is the Form of Worlds. Since existence, here, is just being an element of some world (that of being or that of becoming), then the Form of the Good ends up being quintessential to the Form of Existence, even as it is a Form that does exist. For the Form of Existence would itself not exist but for the Form of the Good in reciprocal turn; the relationship between the living Forms is not one of hierarchical dominance alone, but is, as the SEP says, one involving a first-among-equals. If there be a Form of the City, we might think of its skyline as symbolic of music, which music is a symbol of auto to agathon again, in the way of the Form of the Good determining the heights of the other Forms so as to shape that skyline.