GOOD. — The good is the “perfection” of being: it therefore indicates the being that has attained its completion (ontological sense), and expresses that by which one being is a principle of attraction for another and the first mover of its development or action (physical-teleological sense): being as the cause or “end” of action.
The Romance languages distinguish between “good” (b.) and “buono” (good), attributing to the latter a predominantly moral meaning, while the former retains the more universal ontological meaning proper to Greek thought. In it, as in all philosophy, the dialectic of the good coincides with or is closely bound up with that of reality.
In Plato the good constitutes the supreme principle and ultimate point of reference for the foundation of the ideas and thus of being: it is therefore the most abstract and transcendent principle among all the formalities of the “intelligible world,” and Greek and Christian Platonism have identified it with God. For Aristotle the good must also be found in the things of this world, as being is: just as the universal good is the “end” of the whole world in relation to the absolute that lies outside the world, so the particular good is the proper and immediate “end” of each being, a good therefore that belongs to this world as the being that seeks II. Hence Aristotle calls the good “what all desire” (τὸ ἀγαθόν, οὗ πάντα ἐφίενται: Eth. Nic., I, 1, 1094 a, 3), a notion accepted by not a few later philosophers (e.g., besides St Thomas and many scholastics, Spinoza, Hobbes, G. E. Schultze, Schopenhauer…), but which must be rightly understood in the light of the fundamental principles of Aristotelianism. This notion does not at all express a mere psychological analogy, drawn from the complacency of whoever attains the good and takes delight in it, but indicates the profound reason that impels being to move and turn toward what is other than itself or to attain a state of itself that is other than its initial or present state. For this reason Aristotle can say: 1) that God, the ultimate end of the universe, moves it “as loved” (οἷς ἐφιεμένων: Met., XII, 7, 1072 b, 1–3); 2) and that the very “form” proper to each being moves the being to its development insofar as it is the immanent end (τέλος) of the being itself, which in its perfected form possesses itself completely and its own reason (λόγος; cf. De Anima, II, 4, 415 b, 15). Then the criticisms of the Neoplatonists against the Aristotelian notion of the good are altogether beside the point: when Plotinus asserts that the good is φεκτόν because it is good and not vice versa (Enn., VI, 7, 25), he says less and not more than Aristotle.
Thus the good is truly the first principle “for the sake of which” (τὸ οὗ ἕνεκα) something comes about, and the moving and, so to speak, coordinating principle of the other principles of being, and particularly of form and agent, with which it often coincides (cf. Met., II, 2, 994 b, 9; see also H. Bonitz, Index arist., 250 b, 13 ff.). Hence the reason of being and that of the good are distinct: being, insofar as it is being, merely says that it “is something”; the good, by contrast, expresses being insofar as it is perfect and is therefore “what is desired”: “Unde manifestum est quod bonum et ens sunt idem secundum rem, sed bonum dicit rationem appetibilis, quam non dicit ens” (Sum. Theol., 1a, q. 5, a. 1). And the good, precisely because it constitutes the “end” of being and is “that for the sake of which” it operates, corresponds to the mode and actualization of this end and comes to being last of all (ibid., ad 1). Thus the relation between being and good is dialectically inverted: “Sic ergo secundum primum esse, quod est substantiale, dicitur aliquid ens simpliciter et bonum secundum quid, id est in quantum est ens. Secundum vero ultimum actum dicitur aliquid ens secundum quid et bonum simpliciter…: et tamen secundum primum actum est quodammodo bonum, et secundum ultimum actum est quodammodo ens” (ibid., and cf. De Verit., q. 21, a. 1, ad 1: the whole discussion of St Thomas takes its cue from the problem posed by Boethius in De Hebdomadibus: whether created beings are to be called “good” by essence or by participation: PL 64, 1311).
From a strictly metaphysical point of view it can therefore be said that the good represents the moment of “transcendence” of being. Being is what it is and does not say that it is what it is: it is therefore in itself immobile, pure identity, and closure upon itself. It is only under the aspect of the good that being says movement and communication of itself. From Ps.-Dionysius (see) the medievals took the principle: Bonum est diffusivum sui (cf. St Thomas, De div. nom., 4, § 20: PG 3, 720) to show the fittingness of creation and of the Incarnation itself. To the good belongs the “ek-stasis” of itself—as the Neoplatonists said in their attempt to grasp the original moment of the derivation of beings from the absolute Good—even to the point of non-being that was prime matter. This is something that St Thomas also admitted, with due reserve, thereby acknowledging a certain ontological primacy to the good, itself of unmistakably Dionysian derivation (De div. nom., 5, § 1: PG 3, 816 B) “not by predication but by causality” (De Verit., q. 21, a. 2, ad 2), inasmuch as while being embraces only what is, the good extends also to what is not yet but “can” be, even to prime matter, and in this sense the Platonists, the Angelic Doctor admits, may be right: “Loquendo de bono absolute, bonum habet amplissimam extensionem, etiam ampliorem quam ens, ut Platonici placuit” (De Malo, q. 1, a. 2).
With this transcendent dialectic between being and the good, in which the Angelic Doctor, by reason of his creationist metaphysics, approaches Platonism, there goes a predicamental dialectic of the good within the categorial structure of being, where St Thomas develops Aristotle (Eth. Nic., I, 1096 a, 19 ff.) and shows how the good is found in each of the categories (In I Ethic., lect. VI, ed. Pirotta, n. 81).
From this there already emerges the proper division of the good into the honourable, the useful, and the pleasant (Sum. Theol., 1a, q. 5, a. 6): pleasant insofar as it satisfies the tendency of the subject, useful as a means to an end, honourable as the absolute good of the rational creature with respect to the attainment of its ultimate end. This, of the spiritual being, may be called the second ontological sphere of the good, to which the first serves as foundation and which has as its constitutive element the judgment of human reason as objective norm and the motion of right will as subjective principle in its aspiration to the ultimate end. In this work the good man is, even along the metaphysical line, the man of good will: “Quilibet habens voluntatem dicitur bonus, inquantum habet bonam voluntatem; quia per voluntatem utimur omnibus quae in nobis sunt. Unde non dicitur bonus homo, quia habet bonum intellectum, sed quia habet bonam voluntatem” (Sum. Theol., 1a, q. 5, a. 4, ad 3).
In modern philosophy, however, beginning especially with Kant, the good has been severed from being, and the norm of the good detached from the knowledge of being, so as to make of it an independent and irrational content. Religious thinkers, joined by Christian tradition, have founded the philosophy of values (q.v.), which has as its object what today—with Dilthey’s terminology—are called the “sciences of the spirit” (Geisteswissenschaften), inasmuch as, from a general standpoint, it seeks the consistency of their respective objects: in morals, in law, in the philosophy of history, in aesthetics, in economics, etc. In this research of the philosophy of values, the most disparate trends have taken shape: Nietzsche preached the most absolute irrationalism of the “transvaluation of all values” with the will to power and the master-morality; among the neo-Kantians, while Windelband appeals to the postulate of God as the ultimate foundation of every value, Rickert unfolds the values in the pure immanence of the human, in which N. Hartmann’s Ethics also expressly remains fundamentally atheistic; whereas for Max Scheler the value is bound up with the constitution and dynamism of the entire human person as a capacity for the absolute. Left-wing existentialism, with its ontological nihilism, has suppressed the very problem of the good and of value (cf. J.-P. Sartre: “L’homme est une passion inutile” [L’être et le néant, Paris 1946, p. 708]); right-wing existentialism relies on intuition and faith and upholds the priority and transcendence of the good and of values (q.V. BEING; ETHICS; PHILOSOPHY; MORALITY; VALUES).
CORNELIO FABRO