The Good · beyond being

What the whole climb was for: the sun stands to the visible world as the Good stands to the intelligible — cause of the seasons, of the light, of the eye's power, of the very being of what is seen — and then the sentence that made Glaukon laugh out loud: the Good is not being but epekeina tes ousias, beyond being, exceeding it in dignity and power (509b). Plotinus took the phrase with total seriousness and built the One on it; the Arabic Theology of Aristotle carried the One into Jewish philosophy; and the Tree's name for what stands past the last thing that can be named is Ein Sof — "without end," a description of the failure of names. One laughed-at sentence about a sun outside a cave, arriving in Hebrew a millennium and a half later.