STEPWISE UNFOLDING OF PERCEIVING IN ALL ITS CONNECTIONS
Let us once again bring the whole into view. The perceiving comportment to the perceived involves a relationship of the perceiver to the perceivable. The clarification of the essence of perception (perceivedness) must establish what this relationship consists in. For this it was first necessary to investigate the content of the perceived. Besides colour, sound, smell etc. there was something more - the being of these, otherness, sameness and so forth - and corresponding to this 'double' content something twofold in the relationship to the perceived, a relationship that is taken up first of all through the soul itself and that simultaneously occurs through the bodily organs.
However, something is still missing in the foregoing discussion of this perceptual relationship. We saw merely that the content of the perceived contains an excess, and that this must be related in its perceivability and perceivedness to the soul itself. But nothing has so far been said concerning the character of the soul's relationship to being, non-being etc. This is now clarified in the third step.
Why is this necessary? Since no organ comes into play here, it is puzzling how the soul through itself has a relationship to being. If it is capable of clarification, the nature of this 'through itself will at the same time characterize the essence of the soul more clearly; to be sure, 'soul' in the indicated sense. But the third step also contains the complementary counter- inquiry to the first step: there the excess as such, here the nature of its relationship to the soul. The discussion of the question of αἴσθησις leads to the goal, for ψυχή becomes visible in such a way that it is now possible to determine its essence, thus to confer on the word a fulfilled and grounded meaning and legitimate its name.
However, the soul is not any kind of thing, to which a relationship can now be attached; instead, it is itself the relationship to ... To be such a relationship is to be soul. Therefore the inquiry into the more precise nature of the soul's relationship to being, non-being etc. will have to ask about how the soul relates, as relationship, to the indicated excess. After the foregoing discussion, this excess is now what is more familiar to us; what now occurs is a retrospective inquiry concerning the relationship which belongs to this excess, namely that of the soul. In exhibiting the excess the first thing encountered was εἶναι (185 a 9: ἐστόν), being. This is