THE ESSENCE OF TRUTH

reflections that follow. This concept is nothing artificial but arises from the unprecedented sureness with which the Greeks see those self-evident states of affairs which make up the genuinely questionable.

This is not the only way in which Plato clarifies the 'soul'. A quite different method (albeit one which ultimately agrees with what has just been indicated) is employed in the Laws (Book X, 891 ff.), where the phenomenon of κίνησις (movement), more precisely self-movement, provides the guiding thread for the essential determination of the soul. Here we pursue the essence of the soul only in the sense of the clarified μία τις ἰδέα. We can now say it is that which, ᾧ or ᾗ ..., i.e. what can perceive, what in perception takes up the perceiving relationship to the perceptual object. More exactly, in so far as the soul is the singularity that holds up and maintains, for our own self, the region of a unified perceivability, it has always already and as such, in its very essence, taken up the relationship to the perceivable. Indeed it is here nothing else but precisely this relationship to the perceivable that holds up the region of possible perceivability, the region-opening and holding-open relationship to the perceivable.

Only such a relationship to what is perceivable in general, has the capacity to employ, in its perceiving, anything like sense-organs. For the soul, conceived in this way, is in itself relational, it reaches out to . . . , and as such it is already a possible intermediate, between which eye, ear etc. can now be interpolated. Only on the basis of such a possible interpolation does the soul become something we may characterize as δι᾽ οὗ, as the passage-way through which something is perceived. A passage-way has no meaning at all if a stretch or span did not previously exist within which it is as it were inserted. We do not perceive colour and sound because we see and hear, but the reverse is the case: only because our self is relational in its essence, i.e. maintains a region of perceivability as such and comports itself to this, can the same self have different kinds of perceptions (e.g. seeing or hearing) within one and the same region. What kind of necessity attaches to our possession of sense-organs is an unavoidable question for philosophy, but is beyond the scope of our present inquiry.

'Soul', therefore, must be first of all the relational [das Verhältnishafte]. i.e. that which in itself takes up a relationship to something, such that this, ᾗ ... (that which takes up a relationship), and then the δι᾽ οὗ ... (in passage through which perception occurs), first become possible. Therefore Plato says (184 d 4), grasping this state of affairs more precisely: [ψυχή] ᾗ διὰ τούτων οἷον ὀργάνων αἰσθανόμεθα ὅσα αἰσθητά, the soul is that 'which