Proclus on the Good, the Just, and the Beautiful

Proclus, Thomas Taylor (T) · Living the Life Series · 15 pages

Excerpts from the Commentary of Proclus on Plato's First Alcibiades, translated and annotated by Thomas Taylor, fifteen pages, opened by an abstract and train of thoughts cast partly as question and answer. A companion set of excerpts from the same commentary, on the teacher-disciple bond of love, is held in the Higher Ethics and Devotion series.

The discussion begins from a question about self-interest: whether some just actions are advantageous to the man who performs them and some are not. The answer given is that man performs many things for the sake of personal gain, health and riches, and, surveying the good they contain, abandons the love of justice. The correction offered turns on where a man is to be located. Since the Just subsists in the soul, the profitable must also be in the soul — because, as the argument puts it, where our Good resides, there also we have our being, and where the form of man is, there also is the perfection of man; in soul is the man, not in body. From this the three terms of the title are given their places in a hierarchy: the Good lives in the gods, the Beautiful in intellects, the Just in souls. The relations between them are then stated: that the desire of the Good preserves those by whom it is desired; that the Good is bound in souls according to the Just, through the Beautiful, which is their medium and bond; and that what is Just is Good and what is Just is also True, the Beautiful serving in each case as what joins them. A closing metaphysical note ranks the terms of the first triune procession from the ineffable Cause of All — being superior to life, and life to intellect.

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