helo

Found randomly in a google for “Agathon” — talking about Heidegger’s take on Plato’s Republic, and the part that the sun plays in the allegory of the cave:

The sun represents the agathon idea — or what has most commonly been translated as ‘the form of the good’. Heidegger claims that this is a misleading translation since agathon (the good) did not mean moral value to the Greeks, but rather, that which made something else possible.

And here:

The Greeks, he says, thought of the Good in essentially utilitarian terms, i.e., as something useful or efficacious — “tauglich.” Agathon is therefore that “which is useful to something and which makes something useful.”

Agathon is not “virtuous”, but effective. Hmmm. Then there’s this unintelligible bit by our friend Jean-Luc Nancy, in The Sense of the World, about the offering of sense… beyond essence:

The excellence of the agathon is without content: it concerns merely the position beyond essence, in this (non)region where it is no longer a matter of presenting being (to oneself), but of being toward being-as-act… of touching on the emergence — or being touched by the coming — of being-as-act. The agathon is neither any specific “good” nor a “good” in the sense of a “posession”. After all, its name is not attached to a semantics of “goodness”, but to a semantics of greatness (cf. mega, great, agan, much, too much), intensity, and excess. Being touched by and touching the excess of excellence.

Eh?

[ tags: battlestar-galactica, science-fiction, tv, television, agathon, helo, heidegger, plato, republic ]