Plato: Is the Good More Fundamental than Truth?

Recently, someone asked why the Greek philosopher Plato considered the idea of the Good more fundamental than the idea of Truth. I think the reason is that the idea of the Good tells us that something is better than something else. Without the idea of the Good, we would not even feel compelled to distinguish between truth and falsehood because everything would be of equal value.

Now, this does not mean that the idea of the Good tells us what is true. It tells us rather that we should value truth—that truth is better than falsehood. Before we decide what is true, we first have to decide that the search for truth is a worthwhile endeavor.

In other words, we don’t arrive at the idea of the Good by pursuing truth; we pursue truth because we consider it good. The Good is the sun that cannot be seen directly, but by its light we see everything else. We do not know everything simply through the Good, but we see that there is a path called Truth at all and that it is worthwhile to tread upon.

To put it in modern technical terms, I don’t think that Plato thought that the Good provided us with an epistemology so much as with an axiology, that is, with value judgments rather than truth judgments. Axiology is more fundamental than epistemology; the Good is more fundamental than Truth.