ABSTRACT
This passage, which comes almost at the end of the ‘simile o f the sun’, is very often understood as maintaining that the Idea o f the Good transcends every kind of being, that is to say, that it is itself no longer being at all. As one example among many, I quote Jens Halfwassen, Aufstieg zum Einen 221f.1: ‘The simile of the sun culmi nates in the “most sublime paradox” that the absolute principle, the One and Good itself, “is not being but even beyond being”, ov>x ouai'ag
1J. Halfwassen, Der Aufstieg zum Einen. Untersuchungen zu Platon und Plotin (.Beitrage zur Altertumskunde 9) (Stuttgart 1992); cf. also 222 n. 6; 223ff., 244, 245 n. 73; 257ff., 261ff.; id., ‘Speusipp und die Unendlichkeit des Einen", AGPh 74 (1992) 46, 50, 71; id., ‘Das Eine als Einheit und Dreiheit", RhM 139 (1996) 55.
