«Das Entstehen von allem» Zum Seelenbegriff des späten Plato

Abstract

«The emergence of everything». On the concept of the soul in the late Plato.

The analysis of the complex phenomenon of movement in the tenth book of the Laws for the purpose of developing a new, predominantly cosmologically determined concept of soul has always been known as one of the most difficult texts in Plato’s entire work and also as a text that cannot be interpreted unambiguously and finally. The paper would – partly in reliance on the achievements of the so-called Tuebingen interpretation of Plato – try to prove the essential significance of Plato’s late doctrine of principles for the understanding of this movement analysis. In the first place the ontological meaning of the difference between linear and circular movement would be shown, and this with a help of the interpretation of both movements with regard to the mutual influence of the basic principles of the «one» and a «indefinite dual» therein. Only against this foreground can the main principle of late Platonic ethics as set out decisively in Timaeus be understood, namely that the highest virtue of the human life in nothing else consists as to bring the chaotic disorder of the soul movement, caused by the birth, in harmony with regulated circular motion of the universe. With late Plato the soul – the original soul of the universe as well as each individual soul – is not to be understood as one and simple substance, but rather as the differentiated and controversial structure consisting ultimately of two equally original primal forces of all becoming, namely the one and the indefinite duality. From this perspective, the care for the soul is not primarily directed to one’s own self and his own soul, but a lot more and especially to the soul of the whole.