Our Spaceship Earth and the Inevitable Apocalypticism of the Anthropocene

 The term “Anthropocene,” as Sloterdijk states, carries an urgent moral-political message under the guise of scientific neutrality, as it points at humanity as the responsible agent for the habitation and management of the planet. It tells us that humanity is no longer seamlessly integrated with the planet. As the Anthropocene has a responsible agent, it bears the content of an accusation. Sloterdijk contemplates on it via an imagery of a judicial setting: as “When we speak of an ‘Anthropocene,’ … we are taking part in a court case –in a preliminary hearing before the main trial, to be more precise– in which, as a first step, the accused’s culpability is supposed to be settled … This preliminary hearing is concerned with the question of whether it makes any sense at all to try the offender in question, given that the latter is not of age.”[1] The accused is not of age, and in some respects, it is insignificant, even weightless. Referencing Stanislaw Lem on the ineffectiveness and insignificance of humanity in terms of biomass, Sloterdijk questions “the point of putting on trial a species that pales in comparison to the material dimensions of the Gaia-system, the hydrosphere.”[2] Of course, the answer is that humanity’s biomass is not the sole determinant of its impact, and a weightless humanity can impact its environment in significant ways. “If humanity is supposed to be put on trial, this is mainly because it epitomizes a meta-biological agency that is able to exert quite a bit more influence on the environment, by virtue of its capacity for action, than we would assume on the basis of its relative physical weightlessness.”[3]

The agent “humanity” implies all human beings as the collective that is responsible for the destructive consequences of the Anthropocene. However, within the context of the radical technological advancements of the modern age, “humanity” refers to the European civilization and the technocratic elite.[4] Sloterdijk writes that starting from the 17^th and 18^th centuries, the European technocratic elite, with the use of coal and petroleum in machinery, transformed the global scene, and the discovery and technical mastery of electricity led to “a new universal” in terms of energy. As such, “The collective that is characterized these days by expressions such as ‘humanity’ mainly consists of agents who within less than a century have acquired technologies developed in Europe. When Crutzen speaks of an ‘Anthropocene,’ this is a gesture of Dutch courtesy – or avoidance of conflict. In fact, talk of a ‘Eurocene’ or a technocene initiated by Europeans would be more fitting.”[5] (Thus, Sloterdijk adds another suggestion to the list of alternative names for the Anthropocene, such as Plantationocene, Capitalocene, Anthrobscene, Misanthropocene, and Chthulucene).

For Sloterdijk, the concept of “Anthropocene” reflects the 19th-century epistemological obsession of contemporary geology of historicizing and organizing historical fields into eons, ages, or epochs.[6] The emergence and proliferation of the concept of the Anthropocene is linked with the triumph of historicism, which itself is linked to the idea of evolution. Behind the triumph of historicism, Sloterdijk particularly elaborates on Marx and Engels, who viewed human history as a special case of natural history as humans must secure their own existence through production –the history of relations of production is a continuation of natural history in a different form. The Marxist image of the world (the operation of relations of production shaping and determining the stages of society’s evolution from hunter-gatherers to slave-holding societies, feudalism, capitalism, and finally to communism) has replaced older doctrines in terms of the segmentation of the ages of the world. In this context, with the Anthropocene, which belongs to another pragmatic theory on the ages of the world, the responsibility of “weightless” humanity is revealed as an ethico-political project in which humanity must go through a test of transforming “emission” into a “mission”:

The concept of ‘emission’ helps us to recognize that the kind of influence we are concerned with here has until now taken place in the mode of a ‘side effect’ – otherwise, we would be talking about a ‘mission’ or a ‘project.’ The ‘e’ in ‘emission’ reveals the involuntary character of the anthropogenic impact on the exo-human dimension. Thus, the concept of the ‘Anthropocene’ includes nothing less than the task of testing out whether the agency of ‘humanity’ is capable of transforming something ejected into a project or of transforming an emission into a mission.[7]

A central component of Sloterdijk’s account is concerned with the temporal/historical character of the anthropocenic standpoint, which he links with the apocalyptic logic: since “effective histories can only be organized from their end points backwards, the anthropocenic standpoint amounts to a narrative with a stark moral choice.”[8] In the past, this narrative was dominantly in the form of apocalyptic literature in the West, as the apocalyptic approach evaluates the world from its end and is a cosmic moral procedure of sorting good (worthy of survival) from evil (not worthy of survival).[9] Sloterdijk writes,

Everything thus suggests conceiving of the ‘Anthropocene’ as a term that is only meaningful within the framework of apocalyptic logic. Apocalypticism signifies evidence from the end. Since, as a collective, we cannot be all the way to the end yet but always have to somehow carry on for a while longer, and human intelligence cannot definitively review its own history. It can only try different versions out in diverse forms of anticipation – a fact testified to by an illustrious series of simulations, sacred and profane, from the Egyptian Book of the Dead to the first report of the Club of Rome.[10]

The indispensable apocalyptic logic highlights the mythological character of the narratives we form on the Anthropocene, as the specific temporality of human beings drops its shadow over the stories we produce. In terms of humanity’s relation to nature, Sloterdijk views the Heideggerian insight of conceiving being as time as essentially correct but missing a significant aspect: We notice time when its flow is disrupted.[11] For Sloterdijk, we see this disruption as a delay in the basic form of tragedy, and in current times, humanity must deal with constant delays with regard to our environmental policies. But modern humans, as Sloterdijk emphasizes, notice time as time mostly through accelerations: “Accelerating as fast as possible on one’s trajectory is what drives apocalypse as a temporo-logical form.”[12] The “logic of self-reinforcing sphere of activity that feeds back upon itself” determines the modern era: Humanity has witnessed the emergence of devastating circuli virtuosi, but certain important events led to the circulus virtuous emerge in the modern era, their effects leading to a new perception of time.[13] Sloterdijk specifies six self-reinforcing circular and interwoven processes that have emerged until now: fine arts, banking, engineering, the state, scientific research, and law.[14] The formulation of the concept of Anthropocene inevitably follows the apocalyptic logic because it indicates that the cosmic insouciance that was the basis for historical forms of human being-in-the-world has come to an end. In conventional terms, we could describe ‘the human place in the cosmos’ – to recall Scheler’s treatise – as a kind of scenery-ontology: on this view, the human being, as a dramatic animal, performs before the massif of nature that can never be anything other than a placid background for human operations. Such scenic ontological thought remained predominant for quite a while, even after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, although nature-as-background is nowadays construed as an integral storehouse of resources and as a universal landfill.[15]

The apocalyptic framework reveals the binary of foreground-background or stage-play ontology of the old ecology. As Sloterdijk states, in the 19^th century, the traditional scenery-ontology was starting to be supplanted by an ecological logic, and the scenery-ontology, the old divide of foreground and background, the old ecology of stage and play have lost their ground.

What currently creates epochs is the revenge of the former background on the depicted figures and frameworks: the background has emerged from its inconspicuousness and quit its assigned position as the supplier of self-evident things. The old ecology of stage and play is out of joint. It is now no longer possible to place ruthlessly risky cultural figures on endlessly resilient natural slides. The slide itself demands that its previously overlooked improbability be entered into the figures it carries and considered in them. It might even seem that nature took revenge on history by having its own fragility suddenly surpass the riskiness of the historical structure. Thus, the due de-dramatization of history gives a prelude to the rediscovery of a dramatic nature. If humanity were to awaken from its historical narcissism, it would discover that it no longer has a mission other than to make the concern of an overly finite nature its own.[16]

Nature as the “supplier of self-evident things” belongs to the Cartesian/modernist anthropocentric imaginary. Sloterdijk views historicity as a fragility, as it means mortality for civilizations.[17] The Anthropocene reveals how the old stage/background Nature discarded its assumed role and demonstrated its excess fragility, calling for the recognition of its limits. This view resonates with the feminist new materialist maxim, “There is no outside Nature.” Or, following Donna Haraway, we are always already within nature cultures (within what has been viewed as “stage” (nature) and “play” (history/culture).  There is no exit from the stage or play, no absolute exteriority. For Karen Barad, “There are only ‘acts of nature.’” For Vicki Kirby, who revised Derrida’s “No outside of text” as “No outside nature”, this is not privileging nature because “there is no outside, no remainder that is not already involved and evolving as text.”[18] As there is no outside, we as humans are viewed as ethical modalities. The idea of being inside forever reveals our responsibility to take care of the “inside,” highlighting the dimension of our accountability: “Taking account entails being accountable, for all ac/countings are from within, not without. There is no pure external position, only agential separability, differences within, différance.”[19]

I contend that the maxim “No outside” is closely connected to Sloterdijk’s reworking of the imagery of the Spaceship Earth, as “Spaceship Earth does not have any exits, neither for emergencies nor for normal situations.”[20] Sloterdijk, referring to Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1968), writes that Fuller’s imagery “consisted in the truly prodigious redefinition of our home planet: from this critical moment on, the good old-fashioned Earth may no longer be envisaged in terms of natural dimensions, but is rather to be conceived of as a colossal work of art. It was no longer a foundation but instead a construct; it was no longer a basis but instead a vessel.”[21] The fundamental implication of living in a spaceship Earth is that “its crew must in fact have a vital interest in the maintenance of livable relations within the interior of the vessel.”[22] For Fuller, the most important condition for humans to stay in spaceship Earth was that there was no operating manual, so the passengers were supposed to learn and understand how things were by themselves. In the past, humans made some ignorant mistakes, which the system was designed to bear for a remarkable amount of time. However, as the passengers start to understand their situation and seize control over their environment, the system does not indulge in ignorance as it did before.

Human being-in-the-world, of which twentieth-century philosophy spoke, is thus revealed as being on board a cosmic vessel that is susceptible to failure. Some time ago, I suggested the concept of ‘monogeism’ to characterize the human being’s appropriate cognitive relation to this vessel – a term that designates the minimum, as it were, of a non-ignorant contemporary relation to the paramount importance of the Earth. It likewise forms the axiom for a political ontology of nature.[23]

Thus, “No outside nature” means “No outside Spaceship Earth.” As such, Sloterdijk sees “the true conception of the conditio humana” as “life-and-death autodidacticism.”[24] As the passengers of the spaceship, we must use our own minds, make our own decisions, and essentially learn how to travel in space all on our own. In terms of our eco-political issues, Sloterdijk questions the timing of our “knowing” as it seems to always come too late. However, there is also “a prognostic intelligence that proves itself precisely in the gap between ‘late’ and ‘too late.’”[25] For Sloterdijk, until now, humanity has accepted the principle of learning from mistakes, but prognostic intelligence tells us that we must learn before making mistakes. In order to figure things out, the kinetic expressionism of the last century must be disposed of or radically modified. Sloterdijk defines kinetic expressionism as “modernity’s mode of existence, which was primarily made possible by the ready availability of fossil fuel.”[26] The availability of such materials led to the specific economic, political, and cultural climate and impacted our sense of identity, as well as our understanding of personal freedoms: “We can no longer imagine a freedom that does not always also include the freedom to rev our engines and accelerate, the freedom to move to the most distant destinations, the freedom to exaggerate, the freedom to waste, indeed, lastly, even the freedom to detonate explosives and destroy ourselves.”[27] Sloterdijk believes that we must fundamentally change our thinking as the expressionistic character of current lifestyles in affluent societies demonstrates that nature has not been and is not indifferent to human activities and that there are indeed limits to expression, emission, and the indulgence of ignorance. The 21^st century will go down in history as a carnival of redemptive vanities, at the end of which human beings will long for redemption from redemption and salvation from saviors. At the same time, it heralds an era of hypocrisy and the double standard. Nevertheless, beyond vanity, panic, and hypocritical rhetoric, this age will continually confront the question of whether to set up something like a stabilizing regime on board the spaceship Earth. It should be borne in mind that, from the outset, we must have modest expectations regarding the concept of stabilization. Cultural evolution knows no stable equilibrium. At best, it can segue from one livable state of disequilibrium to the next.[28]

Sloterdijk points out that the current struggle is essentially between expansionism and minimalism. There is a “gigantomachy” in which the idealistic party as a side argues for a new modesty and for reducing all kinetic expressionism to an eco-political minimum:  reduction instead of increase, minimization instead of maximization, and self-circumspection instead of self-liberation. For Sloterdijk, “it seems as though ecological puritanism might be the only reasonable morality on board the spaceship Earth … We realize that we are obligated to cultivate a modus vivendi that corresponds to the ecological-cosmopolitan insights of our civilization.”[29] However, he thinks that a global ethics of moderation is not realistic, due to the link between self-preservation and self-advancement. In affluent societies, people view their wealth as “the irrevocable spoils of conquest”[30] and they will not accept parameters of moderation or negative growth. The argument of modesty maintains these rich societies will ultimately have to accept the ecological facts that their consumption habits are not sustainable in the long run and that there is only one Earth. Sloterdijk finds this argument of the Earth as “an irreplaceable singularity” undeniable at first but questions the monadological interpretation of the Earth. There is the aspect of the technosphere, as such, we do not yet know what will happen “if the geosphere and biosphere are further developed by an intelligent technosphere and noosphere. It is not impossible a priori that such further developments will lead to effects that amount to a multiplication of the Earth … technology has not yet spoken its final word.”[31]

In the end, for Sloterdijk, the Anthropocene implies care for the cohabitation of all human and nonhuman agents and is a call to build “a network of simple and more advanced settings in which the agents of the current world will create their existence in the mode of co-immunity.”[32] Addressing the challenges posed by the Anthropocene requires a radical rethinking of human cultures, lifestyles, and economic systems, and the processes of moving away from kinetic expressionism and unlimited growth towards greater moderation and sustainability must be evaluated in unconventional perspectives for plausible change. Additionally, Sloterdijk underlines the need for a new politics for the Earth that can address the challenges posed by climate change and environmental degradation. This will require a fundamental transformation of human civilization and its relationship with the planet.

The Subject-Object Myth and the Metamorphic Zone

Latour echoes Sloterdijk’s engagement with the modern subject’s ontological and temporal constraints when he contemplates the cold scientific statement: “The maximum permissible CO2 limit was crossed just before 1990,” and questioning how we can “swallow the news that our very recent development has modified a state of affairs that is vastly older that the very existence of the human race … but we also have to absorb the disturbing fact that the drama has been completed and that the main revolutionary event is behind us since we have already crossed a few of the nine ‘planetary boundaries’ considered by some scientists as the ultimate barrier not to overstep!”[33] This predicament resonates with the inevitable apocalyptic logic conveyed in Sloterdijk’s account. We are not able to deal with the vast scale of events mentally or emotionally while simultaneously taking on agential responsibility for everything: “How can we simultaneously be part of such a long history, have such an important influence, and yet be so late in realizing what has happened and so utterly impotent in our attempts to fix it?”[34] For Latour, we are unable to simply read such scientific statements as objective facts and maintain our distance, as “There is no distant place anymore. And along with distance, objectivity is gone as well; or at least, an older notion of objectivity that was unable to take into account the active subject of history.”[35] The current issue concerns understanding the role of human agent “not only in the construction of facts but also in the very existence of the phenomena those facts are trying to document.”[36]

The problem of rethinking agency is deeply connected to Latour’s conception on the Earth as a full-fledged actor of what he calls “our common geostory.”[37] He emphasizes that the ways of telling our common geostory is the problem of philosophy, science and literature. Viewing the Earth or all nonhuman or more-than-human agents as full-fledged actors imply abandoning the view of human agency within the framework of the active subject-passive object binary. From a new materialist lens, human agency can be viewed as another mode of agency “receiving, storing, processing and emitting information.”[38] Humans and nonhumans engaging in these operations isomorphically reveal the non-exclusivity of human agency. In a similar vein, for Latour, “One of the main puzzles of Western history is not that ‘there are people who still believe in animism’, but the rather naive belief that many still have in a de-animated world of mere stuff; just at the moment when they themselves multiply the agencies with which they are more deeply entangled every day. The more we move in geostory, the more this belief seems difficult to understand.”[39] Latour does not understand the accusation of “anthropomorphism” (or attributing agency) often directed at novelists or scientists as well. He believes that every entity they deal with “are all born out of the same witches’ caldron because, literally, that is where all of the shape-changers reside.”[40]

This resonates with the agential realist account of Karen Barad, for whom agency is simply a “‘doing’ or ‘being’ in its intra-activity”[41] and “the ongoing reconfigurings of the world.”[42] All agencies, human and nonhuman, participate and intra-act within the material-discursive continuum, the spacetimemattering. In this framework, human or human agency is viewed as an ethical modality, as being accountable means acknowledging how and through which acts we leave “marks on bodies.”[43] A nonhierarchic understanding of agency is a matter of engaging with responsible “cutting practices” –“an ethico-onto-epistemological commitment to understand how different cuts matter.”[44] It is about engaging with responsible material-discursive practices that acknowledge and take into account the materiality of all beings.

Thus, Latour’s view of agency can be understood within the framework of the new materialist framework to which he belongs and which problematizes the constituent subject-object divide of the modernist tradition. Being a ‘subject’ is not to act in front of a background but “to share agency with other subjects that have also lost their autonomy. It is because we are now confronted with those subjects –or rather quasi-subjects– that we have to shift away from dreams of mastery as well as from the threat of being fully naturalized.”[45] Thus, in the Latourian relational framework, “Gaia is another subject altogether –maybe also a different sovereign.”[46] Latour’s account echoes Sloterdijk’s, particularly in terms of the problematization of nature as passive and human as active (the old ecology of stage and play), as he observes an ironic twist in the subject-object poles of our traditional understanding: Human societies ironically have become “the dumb object” whereas nature has taken the role of the active subject.

The co-existence of agents is obfuscated by the scientific worldview, which led to the material world in which the agency of all the entities has been made to vanish: Latour calls this “a zombie atmosphere” in which “nothing happens anymore since the agent is supposed to be ‘simply caused’ by its predecessor. All the action has been put in the antecedent … The consequent could just as well not be there at all … their eventfulness has disappeared.”[47] But storytelling is common for human and nonhuman, rather than being a property of human language –it is a result of being thrown in a “fully articulated and active”[48] world. Latour believes that we must form a common geo-story with the Gaia. The idea is not succession or causality but rather relationality and (a Harawayian) making-with or sympoiesis.

Latour proposes an approach that embraces a common source of agency: a metamorphic zone “where we are able to detect actants before they become actors; where ‘metaphors’ precede the two sets of connotations that will be connected; where ‘metamorphosis’ is taken as a phenomenon that is antecedent to all the shapes that will be given to agents.”[49] Detecting this metamorphic zone is crucial politically as well, as what is needed in politics is “a common world that has to be progressively composed.”[50] What we should compose cannot be divided into animate (having agency) and inanimate (not having agency) or else, such a process of composition is made impossible. The old divide of nature and culture is problematic, as well as the efforts to combine or reconcile the two as distinct domains. As with other new materialist thinkers, Latour rather maintains the idea of a nature-culture or material-semiotic continuum.

The point of living in the epoch of the Anthropocene is that all agents share the same shape-changing destiny. A destiny that cannot be followed, documented, told, and represented by using any of the older traits associated with subjectivity or objectivity. Far from trying to “reconcile” or “combine” nature and society, the task, the crucial political task, is, on the contrary, to distribute agency as far and in as differentiated a way as possible — until that is, we have thoroughly lost any relation between those two concepts of object and subject that are of no interest any more except patrimonial.[51]

With the return to the metamorphic zone, the Earthbound will “articulate their speech in a way that will be compatible with the articulation of Gaia.”[52] According to Latour, there should be a new way of creating global geopolitics that does not involve expanding politics towards nature or naturalizing the human sphere. Thus, we need to distribute agency more radically, widely, and far away and traverse the worn-out binaries of subject-object and nature-culture. What he means is our political theory, and ecological thought must be open to addressing the intricate interactions of human and nonhuman actants, of people and things, of animate and inanimate entities alike, by recognizing their mutual dependence and relationality.

In both Sloterdijk’s and Latour’s accounts, the Anthropocene is viewed as a shift from a view of nature as an objective backdrop to human activities to the recognition that human actions are now profoundly shaping the Earth’s systems. Anthropocene implies a new moral and political responsibility for humanity to relate with the Earth. In Sloterdijk’s account, the Anthropocene is understood within an apocalyptic framework, evaluating the world from the end, bringing both the potential for catastrophic outcomes and for redemptive possibilities. Addressing the challenges of the Anthropocene requires a radical rethinking of our traditional onto-epistemological frameworks as well as our cultural and economic systems -like the issue and implications of breaking from the modus operandi of kinetic expressionism and unlimited growth towards greater moderation and sustainability. Latour focuses on agency in the context of the Anthropocene, arguing that traditional binaries and dichotomies of subject-object, nature-society, and animate-inanimate are no longer sustainable or tenable in this new era. Like Sloterdijk, he maintains that the Earth must be viewed as an active agent that is being transformed by human actions rather than an objective backdrop. The more we engage with the geostory of the Earth and with the interconnected agents that compose it, the more we see the dysfunction of our old views and systems. Latour proposes a different ontological approach, a common source of agency which he calls a “metamorphic zone,” arguing that we must distribute agency as far and in as differentiated ways as possible. This shift in perspective is necessary to understand and re-evaluate the complex challenges posed by the Anthropocene.

Bibliography

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.

Barad, Karen. “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, (1–2), 2012, https://doi.org/10.7146/kkf.v0i1–2.28067

Latour, Bruno. “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene,” New Literary History, Vol. 45, No. 1, (Winter 2014). DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2014.0003

Kirby, Vicki. “Matter out of Place: ‘New Materialism’ in Review,” What if Culture was Nature all Along?, edited by Vicki Kirby, Edinburgh University Press, 2017.

Sloterdijk, Peter. Infinite Mobilization, Towards a Critique of Political Kinetics, translated by Sandra Berjan, Polity Press, 2020.

Sloterdijk, Peter. What Happened in the Twentieth Century?, translated by Christopher Turner, Polity Press, 2018.

Watkin, Christopher. Michel Serres, Figures of Thought, Edinburgh University Press, 2020.

[1] Peter Sloterdijk, What Happened in the Twentieth Century?, trans. Christopher Turner (Polity Press, 2018), 8.

[2] Ibid., 9.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., 10.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 12.

[7] Ibid, 14.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid., 15.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid., 16.

[15] Ibid., 21.

[16] Sloterdijk, Infinite Mobilization, Towards a Critique of Political Kinetics, trans. Sandra Berjan (Polity Press, 2020), 143-144.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Vicki Kirby, “Matter out of Place: ‘New Materialism’ in Review,” What if Culture was Nature all Along?, ed. Vicki Kirby (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), p. ix.

[19] Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity”, Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, (1-2), 2012, 47, https://doi.org/10.7146/kkf.v0i1-2.28067

[20] Sloterdijk, What Happened in the 20th Century?, 25.

[21] Ibid., 24.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid., 25.

[24] Ibid., 26.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Ibid., 27.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Ibid., 32.

[29] Ibid., 35.

[30] Ibid., 36.

[31] Ibid., 38.

[32] Ibid., 43.

[33] Bruno Latour, “Agency in the Anthropocene,” New Literary History, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Winter 2014), Johns Hopkins University Press, https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2014.0003, 1.

[34] Ibid., 2.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Ibid.

[37] Ibid., 3.

[38] Christopher Watkin, Michel Serres, Figures of Thought (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 314.

[39] Latour, Agency, 8.

[40] Ibid., 13.

[41] Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007), 178.

[42] Ibid., 141.

[43] Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” 47.

[44] Ibid., 46.

[45] Latour, Agency, 5.

[46] Ibid., 6.

[47] Ibid., 14.

[48] Ibid.

[49] Ibid., 15.

[50] Ibid., 16.

[51] Ibid., 17.

[52] Ibid.

The post From being in the world to being onboard: Sloterdijk and Latour on the Anthropocene appeared first on The Miskatonian.

Historical Appropriation

In Neoplatonic thought, the ultimate source of reality, the Good or the One, transcends the realm of being and thus lies outside the scope of things which are because it is the ground or source for that realm. Plotinus provides a typical expression of this thought:

In order that Being may be brought about, the source must be no Being but Being’s generator (V.2.1).¹

This yields an ontological picture stratified into three levels: (i) the realm of becoming (i.e., spatiotemporal reality), (ii) the realm of being (i.e., the realm of the forms), and (iii) that which is beyond being (i.e., the Good or the One).

The observation that the Good does not belong to the realm of being puts it beyond the possibility of predication and thus beyond knowledge. The Good, therefore, also transcends intelligibility because the proper object of intellect is that which is. This strongly negative stance comes out clearly in writers like Pseudo-Dionysius:

Just as corporal form cannot lay hold of the intangible and incorporeal, by the same standard of truth beings are surpassed by the infinity beyond being, intelligences by that oneness which is beyond intelligence. Indeed the inscrutable One is out of the reach of every rational process. Nor can any words come up to the inexpressible Good, this One, this Source of all unity, this supra-existent Being (588B).²

The Good, therefore, is something that can never be properly known or understood by intellect because it is prior to the very conditions of intelligibility. This understanding of the Good has strong affinities with the apophatic traditions of many religions, and because of this, Platonic texts are often appropriated in this context to forward the view that the Good (or God, or the One) is altogether beyond being and knowledge.

Central to the history of this appropriation, Republic VI contains the famous image of the Good as the sun. Ostensibly, we find the direct claim at 509b that the Good is “beyond being,” yet from the immediate context, it is not altogether clear what this involves. It may mean, as Plotinus and Pseudo-Dionysius would have it, that the Good is not something which is because it is altogether beyond the realm of being as its ground and cause. It may, however, simply mean that the Good surpasses the form of Being in worth and value, but this does not preclude it from belonging, like the other forms, to the realm of things that really are. If this second deflationary reading is correct, then the Good should also appear as a legitimate object of knowledge. Several of Socrates’s claims in this passage support this reading, yet his claims are often qualified in curious ways. I propose that we look closely at the passage and determine just what we can and cannot infer about the Good from this text alone.

The Sun and Sight

At 508a, Socrates lays the groundwork for the allegory of the sun by pointing out the way that the faculty of sight involves three elements:

1. Objects of sight
2. Power of sight
3. Source of sight

Socrates especially calls attention to the addition of this third element by contrasting the faculty of sight with the other faculties. In the case of hearing, for instance, there is no mediating element between a sound and the faculty of hearing. Provided that the faculty of hearing is present and the object of hearing is present, the activity of hearing happens spontaneously. In the case of sight, however, we need both the light, which makes the objects visible and the sun, “whose light makes our sight see in the finest way and the seen things seen” (508a).³ The sun surpasses light because it is the ultimate “divine source” of sight and being seen. The identification of the sun with the ultimate cause of sight, however, brings about a curious feature of the metaphor as it stands: “though the sun is not itself sight, it is the cause of sight and is seen by the sight it causes” (508b). The sun is now fulfilling not just one but two of the three roles involved with sight. It alone satisfies (iii) in an ultimate sense, but in terms of (ii), the sun is merely one among the infinite variety of visible objects. The sun may clearly stand out as the brightest of all visible objects, but it does belong to the sphere of visible things.

At first, it may appear that this involves the sun in a viscous form of self-causation. After all, how can the sun be both the cause of all visible things and be itself visible? We do not need, however, to say that the sun is the cause of its own existence, merely that it is the cause of itself qua visible thing. Suppose, for instance, that Solon of Athens creates all the laws of Athens and thereby establishes what it means to be a citizen of Athens. In doing so, he does not set himself up as a tyrant, however, but places himself under the laws which he makes. In this sense, Solon is the cause of himself not simpliciter but merely as a citizen. Similarly, the sun is not the source of itself simpliciter, but merely as a visible object.

Socrates goes on to explain at 508c that the sun is that “child of the Good,” an account of which he promises to Glaucon at 506e. The sun is its child and is in its “likeness” because it stands in an analogous relationship to three things—and here Socrates makes explicit a fourth element of sight that was only implicit in his earlier description, namely the whole visible realm:

1. The sun is to sight as the Good is to intellect
2. The sun is to visible objects as the Good is to intelligible objects
3. The sun is to the visible realm as the Good is to the intelligible realm.

Socrates places his primary emphasis on this first respect in which the sun and the Good are similar. Just as the sun is the ultimate origin of sight, that in virtue of which all sight is possible, so too the Good is the ultimate origin of all intellect. Further, just as the sun is not identical with sight itself, neither is the Good identical with intellect or any act of intellect, contra those who would claim that the Good is prudence (505b). From what Socrates says, however, it seems that we are also meant to consider the second and third ways in which the sun is related to visibility in the metaphor. In these terms, the sun is just one among many objects that are visible and is, therefore, within the visible realm like all other visible objects while also being the source of visibility. From this passage so far, it appears that the Good should be taken as merely one among all those things which are intelligible and, therefore, within the realm of being.

This interpretation of the metaphor is supported by the description of the Good that Socrates gives at 508e:

Therefore, say that what provides the truth to the things known and gives the power to the one who knows, is the idea of the Good. And, as the cause of the knowledge and truth, you can understand it to be a thing known; but, as fair as these two are —knowledge and truth—if you believe that it is something different from them and still fairer than they, your belief will be right.

The Good, then, is something known and merely surpasses knowledge and truth in fairness rather than ontologically. Socrates, however, inserts cautionary phrases throughout the passage as a whole, and this last description is no exception. What should we make of the phrase “you can understand it to be”? This seems as though Socrates wishes to back off somewhat from the straightforward assertion that the form of the Good is itself known. Perhaps this description is merely intended as a pedagogical step for Glaucon. In this reading, he would not be wholly wrong to “think of” the Good “as being” something intelligible, but eventually, he will need to leave this partial, metaphorical way of thinking behind as he comes to an adequate understanding. Authors like Plotinus and Pseudo-Dionysius frequently maintain that there are ways of thinking about the Good that are more appropriate than others because they lead the mind toward the recognition that the Good is something ultimately beyond its grasp. Then again, this phrase could be a stronger prescription, and Socrates could be asserting that this is the most appropriate way to think about the Good because this is the way the Good really is. In any case, interpretive caution is called for.

The Sun and Growth

At 509b Socrates asks Glaucon to “pursue our analogy further” and adds another dimension to the metaphor:

I suppose you’ll say the sun not only provides what is seen with the power of being seen, but also with generation, growth, and nourishment although it itself isn’t generation.

This addition is so brief that it is easy to let it slip by unnoticed, but it is striking just how complex the metaphor has become. The sun already stands in relation to three things (sight, visible things, and the visible realm), and Socrates is now adding generation, growth, and nourishment. In parallel, the Good is the source, not only of the intelligibility in things but also of their “existence” (τὸ εἶναί) and “being” (τὴν οὐσίαν). While he does not state it as explicitly as the other parallels, it seems clear enough that Socrates means to add a fourth parallel between the sun and the Good to the three we have already:

4. The sun is to generation as the Good is to being.

In the metaphor, the sun is the cause of generation wherever it occurs. He is sure to point out that the sun is not identical to generation, just as it is not identical to sight, but we may still ask whether the sun is one of those things subject to the process of generation. In terms of the metaphor, there did not seem to be any internal difficulty in claiming that the sun is both the source of sight and also something that is seen. The sun, in this case, is a causa sui in a weak, non-viscious sense because it is only the cause of itself qua visible object. In the case of generation, however, a stronger self-causation threatens. If the sun is the ultimate source of the process of generation, then it will be a necessary precondition for every instance of it. The sun would need to be already in order to cause its own process of coming to be. Although Socrates remains silent on this point, the logic of the metaphor seems to indicate that the sun lies outside the realm of coming to be in a way that it did not lie outside the realm of sight.

It is at this point that we find the famous claim that the Good is “beyond being,” but we must be sure to read to the end of the sentence:

Therefore, say that not only being known is present in the things known as a consequence of the Good, but also existence [τὸ εἶναί] and being [τὴν οὐσίαν] are in them besides as a result of it, although the Good isn’t being [οὐκ οὐσίας ὄντος τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ] but is still beyond being [ἔτι ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας], exceeding it in dignity and power. (509b)

According to the traditional reading, this passage claims that the generation of visible objects is analogous to the “being and reality” of the objects of intellect, i.e., the Forms so that the Good is somehow beyond this being and reality because it is the source of it. In the metaphor, the sun is neither something that comes to be nor the process of generation, but the source of both. Given this analogy, we may think that the Good is not itself a being because it is the source of being. The Good, then is beyond being in the sense that it is outside of its scope, transcending the realm of being altogether as its antecedent ground and source.

According to the deflationary reading, when he claims that the Good is not being, Socrates may be making the much less radical claim that the Good is merely non-identical with the form of Being itself. That is to say, he is merely calling attention to the way that they are two distinct forms. This reading is somewhat supported if we understand the phrase “surpassing it in dignity and power” to be a qualification of the claim that the Good is “beyond being” rather than a separate claim in its own right. If this reading is right, the Good is not beyond being simpliciter but merely beyond it in dignity and power.

The observations that the Good is non-identical with being and greater than being in dignity and power are, on their own, compatible with the conclusion that the Good is nevertheless one of those things which are, and therefore is subject to the form of Being in that sense. This passage about the relationship between the Good and being is highly parallel to the earlier passage about its relationship to knowledge. Just as the Good is something distinct from knowledge and “more splendid” than it, the Good is distinct from being and “surpasses it in dignity and power.” Nevertheless, just as the Good is something known, there is no reason to suspect that it is not something that is. We should remember, however, our earlier caution that this may be merely the “right way to think about” the Good rather than the plain truth. If we are to overturn this deflationary reading, we must bring into consideration the logic of what it means for something to be the “source” of being, a logic that is never drawn out explicitly in the text.

Conclusion

The famous description of the Good as “beyond being” at 509b in the analogy of the sun does not immediately or obviously imply a strong ontological transcendence of the Good. It is tempting to cite this passage in discussions of Neoplatonism as though it were a clear statement of Plato’s position, yet there are several indications in the surrounding text that the Good is something that can be known and therefore belongs to the realm of things which are. Nevertheless, the fact that this account is merely an allegory and only proposes to tell the tale of the “child of the Good” taken together with the curious qualifications Socrates attaches to his claims that the Good can be known gives us some interpretive leeway. Ultimately, the logic of viscous ontological self-causation justifies the appropriation of this text within Neoplatonism, but we must be sure to understand that Socrates never brings this logic into the discussion here. When we add this logic, the passage appears in a Neoplatonic light, but if we remove it, the claims of this passage appear much less radical.

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