Nice analysis. It is true that the notion of good, for having unceasingly been weighed down by new determinations, has not ceased to weaken in its original unity. We could even renew the semantic trail you have proposed by taking a more dramatic route, because if we consider it more closely, the evolution of good is the classic example of a longstanding metaphysical agony. First, at a time when logos was still young and vigorous, there was the platonic good, the Idea as a principle of all other Values, this light that “gives to visible objects the faculty of being seenâ€. Good was both the genesis of knowledge and revelatory of Being (for sure, not with Aristotle). The first hard knock dealt to this signification was the more or less successful integration of good in religion, then its progressive dissolution in the “moraline†of action. It was no longer a question of knowing ones’ good in a disinterested fashion, but to MAKE good for a specific motive. The contemplation of the ideal good is supplanted by the good act. It was therefore necessary to find new foundations for this more exiguous and demanding good, having become a practical end. Precepts, principles and maxims followed in succession to culminate in formalism with the moral law and the categorical imperative. The “ideality†of good was nonetheless preserved… At least for a while. But things took a radical turn with the emergence of Utility, as a new serious candidate to the foundation of ethics. In the already reduced space in which it has been confined, Good must henceforth compose with this intrusive and voracious tenant, to which Hume and consorts granted a permanent right of residence. Excluded form ontology, then partially banned form morality, good turns consequently away from the ideal to slowly slide towards categories of quality (“he plays goodâ€) then of quantity (“acquisition of goodsâ€). Stripped of its rights, good is nothing more than an all-purpose adjective, with blurred contours, used in direct relation with ethics or the ideal, an offshoot separated from its roots! Fortunately, the law of sense has its reasons which reason has much difficulty in elucidating, and it could be that the notion of good has not yet drawn its last breath. 
“And now --for something completely different–”–Monty Python.
What of mystics who claim that the good is within us, that heaven is within, that we can find peace within–and only then can we act and react for the good of others?
Humm, I recognize an incisive thought process…:) Plato puts Good above Being, and this is why he does not apprehend Being, leaving reality to the wayside and returning to the idea per se… Plato does not go past Form. It is an attitude full of nobility, and I understand how one can be Platonic if one stops at the Aristolian ousianism, without having seen that Aristotle, in the Theta book of metaphysics, discovers the Act, i.e. the finality of being qua being. There is thus something that goes beyond the Form, something which finalizes it and which is not the form! We can see this in friendship, what finalizes the friend is not him, but another, there is well and truly a beyond the Form. We already see this in art work, reason for which Aristotle was so interested in the artistic process, in as much as this enabled him to understand the manner in which intelligence plays out. IMO, the Theta book of metaphysics is the place where Aristotle contemplates the snow capped mountain tops. In effect, he shows how good is an acolyte of being, in other words a transcendental identifiable to Being. I wonder if the definitive linchpin of metaphysics is not there, like a Himalaya. Now then, I am under the distinct impression that very few understand this book, Aristotle being considered solely as the one who discovered Substance, which is untrue historically since Parmenides had already discovered substance. However, he is the first to have caught the Being in Act, and this was forgotten after him, even someone like Avicenna did not understand it. Only Thomas Aquinas apprehended Being in Act (notably in differentiating Dynamis and Actus), but he used it exclusively in view of his theology, and did therefore not redevelop Actus on its own, i.e. from the strict viewpoint of a First philosophy. It seems to me that the summit of metaphysics is there: the Act, or the final causality… On this note, the topics part is a desert, not even a cactus in sight…
I Kant remember where I read this, even if it was here, but I think I understood that someone thinks that substance is what is “placed underâ€. This is wrong. Substance is the translation of the Greek word Ousia. Now then, the “Romansâ€, who always seem to get things wrong, that is to say if we deem “things†to be first philosophy, for in matters legal that is not the case, having translated “Ousia†by substance, we, and more notably decadent scholastics, have managed to understand “Ousia†as what holds under. And what holds under? By Jove, it is the subject, and we have hence identified substance with first substance, that is to say substance with the subject. Needless to describe the sort of mess this type of blunder entails… for let’s be clear, we haven’t gotten over it yet, and it is not clear at all that we will ever get over it someday. 
Humm, I don’t know much bout mystics. All I can think of is that mystics who have a metaphysical (first philosophy) touch can “do good” unto others, for truth is the good of intelligence… 
For creatures immersed in flux truth is an approximation, a striving toward unrealized potentials, a journey without end. If you, H., have found the ultimate end-all, be-all stopping place of final answers to all of our growing pains questions, please tell me where and what it is and I’ll respond with a map to Eldorado or Shangrala, whichever you prefer.
I will quote Aquinus on this one: we are mired in error more often than not. 
H.,
???
Did error ever stop anyone from moving beyond it?
…it would probably take a few lives to get to the bottom of truth. As long as we agree that error presupposes truth. :D/
In the footsteps of the Good, the Bad and the Ugly… please give a warm hand to the Good, the Being and the True.
Actually, I just wanted to relate something quite exquisite which I saw this morning, whilst asking myself if the Good is analogous to the True, and I’m speaking here in the order of Being in Act, not in the ethical order. Hang on a sec.
There are two modalities to the True, there is the ontological truth and the formal truth, and that is not the case with the Good.
You don’t say this is “my†truth, you say it is “the†truth, whereas you say it is “my†good… Thus it is evident that “the†good doesn’t exist, there is no formal good, at least for me, for some like the ideal good. As the real good is never perfectly good, they fall back on the ideal good, which it is not good at all, yet they conclude that it is absolutely good, for it is never absolutely bad either!
Metaphysics tries to isolate this “good†in the expression “my goodâ€. Aristotle doesn’t define good, he recognizes it. He says: Good is what all desire… That’s not a definition! Note with such a “definition†he puts good in a maximum security zone, for no one can suppress desire!! Hi hi! Way to go Aristotle! I find this assertion each time more masterful. He couldn’t have done any better to definitively save the Good!
Well then what is quite curious is that the only way to know a good, is to “love” it! No, but it’s true, lest we ignore our good. Thus love is the measure of love, which signifies that, in the order of affect, love is ultimate.
So now I’ll show you what I saw this morning: if good is Being in act, and love is the measure of love, then one must conclude that Being in Act is the measure of Being in Act! Not bad, eh? Because this means that we can neither critique Good nor the Being in Act! Well yes, we knew it, one cannot critique the end!! And that is why, IMO, those who put criticism above all else suppress finality, precisely so as to critique it!!
I am under the impression that the turning point of all of philosophy is there, there are those who put Good over Being, and those who see that Good is Being in Act. Yet Plato and all neoplatonicians put Good above Being. From there, metaphysics of the being becomes a first philosophy of the intelligibility of Being, an “ousiologyâ€, at the end of the day a critique, and then they develop a philosophy of Good, at the level of the One, separated from Being… Yet if someone as intelligent as Plato does this, that means there is necessarily a snag there, a big bone…
IMO one must ponder long and hard over this, I intuit that everything hinges on that precise spot.
oups, trying to edit…
The more I ponder over it, the more the answer to the question “Why do so few people attain substance?†becomes clearer. Just a sec, I’ll explain rapidly what I mean…
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To start with, one must let go of “I am†to get to “This isâ€. That’s the first stage, and obviously it eliminates all those who haven’t sharpened their pencil; that is to say about 80%.
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Then, face to face with “This isâ€, one must abstract “isâ€. There you have another 15% who get sidetracked.
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There are only 5% left who, in front of the abstraction of “isâ€, must now set down the interrogation: “What is being as beingâ€? Among those who have surmounted the first two obstacles, more than half drop off, only 2% stay in the race.
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Then, in front of this interrogation, one must let go of the abstraction of step 2, in other words the universal being, the being of reason, go beyond logic, that is beyond the “thinking the beingâ€, further than the artistic or poetic or mathematical approach, and practically all of the contemporary elite, turn here indefinitely in circles, Heiddegger, Levinas, Husserl, Jacques Maritain… they are subjugated by being in their thought, and they never come back to the concrete and reality. That’s where the big divide plays out amongst intelligent people, in front of the following choice: either it is intelligence that dominates the being, or it is the being that dominates intelligence. In Antiquity, single-handedly and foremost, Aristotle accepts to revert to experience and to be dominated by being. There are only 000,1% left, 1 in 100.000…
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Those people come back to reality with “I amâ€, the “I†being the most perfect modality of the “This(es)†that each of us experiment. There, finally, they discover the soul, then substance. Yet there are still a whole lot who don’t go past the soul, to substance, like Saint Augustine… There are 0000,1% left, 1 in 1.000.000…
This is curious, for the contemporary figures which I admire the most, notably artists, all fall at stage 4.
What I don’t understand is why should metaphysics absolutely be art? The big obstacle is in effect that of stage 4, that identifies metaphysics and logic (or art, but it’s basically the same…). When one adopts an artistic viewpoint, one does not do metaphysics, and vice versa, when one does metaphysics, one does not do art… I admit I do not understand how we have managed to make a rivalry out of these two touches… as if we absolutely wanted not to differentiate two vital activities, like to sleep and to eat for example… I don’t quite understand the thing about absolutely wanting to mix the two, possibly to the point where they become mortal enemies. Gee, that’s really curious…
The majority don’t get past stage 1, they stop at “I amâ€, most often in a very infantile way, for if the Cartesian spirit has found its way into the bloodstream of western civilization, not everyone is Descartes either, who was a cretin but certainly not an idiot…
‘good’ can not only refer to something other than us…
good can also refer to US, to our innermost core.
we can feel that our personality and ourselves are ‘good’ …even better than anything outside of ourselves… don’t you think?
or did I missunderstand u?
You seem to me to be refferring to virtue. That said, being convertible with the being, good has as many significations as being.
Please bear with me, while I share the fruits of my cogitations.
There is something in our acts and our life which remains irreducible to finality: that something is the how of our body proceeding from matter. Now then, it is because matter is irreducible to finality that we can study it per se, from there the fact that psychology likes so much to look at the person separated from finality, without realizing that matter separated from form is unintelligible. We are then in chance, but on the other hand for there to be science there must be a law, i.e. something necessary… There we have it! Finality is thus not pure matter but matter transformed by form!
So on a psychological level, the how can only be understood in the light of finality. And what can a psychology separated from finality be up to? By Jove, it idealizes the how, precisely because it is separated from finality. And this is how the how becomes all pervasive and considers itself as being determinant, thus self-sufficient! For example, is psychology, which never attains substance and unbeknownst to finality, not entirely taken by relation? To ask this question boils down to underlying the importance of relation on a psychological level and its fragility on a metaphysical level: the more we live on a psychological level, the more relation becomes important, the more we live on a metaphysical level, thus in view of the end, the more relation is tenuous…
IMO, this point has much bearing on the physiognomy of a person… Psychology hardly differentiates quantity and quality, I assure you it does not! For example, it considers that intelligence can be measured, and thus does not really proceed form quality, since it confines intelligence to logic and the capacity to deduce. Yet education should be much more centred on quality than on quantity. This is in fact the most radical confusion one can make and which is quite common: we do not differentiate conditioning and finality.
Yet if the life of intelligence is linked to a conditioning which is language, it only truly breathes when it goes beyond it. Not to see this comes down to equating finality and conditioning, which concretely leads to replacing philosophy by psychology, and it then becomes impossible to attain reality as it is. At the end of the day, one only enters into metaphysics by looking at finality, in other words by looking at the good of intelligence: at being.
Interesting discussion! A few quick points:
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The Good is often described as having the highest value, or rather, that essence from which all value is ultimately derived. As regards Harvey’s critique of the modern usage of the word “good” as most aptly descriptive of commodity or fetish, let me just add that the first five definitions of the word “value” in most dictionaries (I’m using Oxford-English, and I’ve checked Merriam-Webster too) are in terms of, precisely, exchange-value! That is to say, in the capitalistic weltanschuung, the good is always extrinsic, always an attributte, mode or feature rather than an intrinsic form or reality-principled value judgment-- a quantity rather than a quality-- which really creates some bizarre juxtapositions when you try to relate the “good life” and the “happy life”.
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Deleuze mentions in his book on Nietzsche that the internalization of pain is the formula for resentment. The good as opposed to the bad, in Nietzsche’s polemic formulation, is a value-creating judgment of the active, ‘master’ type; whereas the description of the good as opposed to the evil is a reactive designation to which ‘slave’ morality is inclined. Anyway, Nietzsche’s point in general is that, in reality, there are no properly moral phenomena (hence his advice to move “beyond good and evil” and back to the ‘true’ world); what exists instead, are moral interpretations of phenomena. My take on this is that everyday occurrences of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are so common, the judgments made about them so formalized, that rational discussion of these values tends to get muddled precisely when we try to universalize these notions, to think them proper for everyone at all times. The absolute movement of an inchoate ethics is its self-destruction; our action is mired, not simply in error and failure, but in profound ambiguity without any sort of legislative rule for acting in the particular situation. In this case, specific moral imperatives tend to take away from concrete questions of good character: responsibility, courtesy, honesty, etc. Elevating these to moral absolutes involves contradictions not occasionally but necessarily; and such a universalizing movement is unfortunately not a transcendence but an egoistic, thematizing, reductive moral absolutism. --Transcendence, imo, is to be found in structuring our ethics (and perhaps our philosophy) from the first in the relation to the Other and not in ethical monism.