STEPWISE UNFOLDING OF PERCEIVING IN ALL ITS CONNECTIONS

(and solitary) attempt to demonstrate the essential connection between soul (animus) and time. But having theological purposes in mind he was a long way from treating the specific relationship of the soul to being, and was still farther from seeing the connection between being and time (although objectively speaking this connection cannot be evaded).

Plato's treatment of the relation between being and time is too brief and indefinite for us to force a great deal out of it. It is enough that the passage we have interpreted (under the four points) indicates how much Plato was concerned to more precisely delineate the relation of the soul to being (striving for being), and to elucidate this from various sides, without, however, expressly posing the question of the essence of being.

To what degree an explicit and autonomous insight into the relation of being to time is already present in Plato cannot be objectively established. It is enough that these connections of the present and past, and indeed with a predominant connection to the future, here already come into view.

Before we summarize and illuminate the character of striving for being in a more systematic form, we must follow the discussion of the third step to its conclusion, especially since we encounter here yet another new and important determination.

§ 33. The 'Excess': Not an Addition to What Is Sensed, but the Conceptual Highlighting of Distinct Characters of Being in the Sphere of Striving for Being

The following (186 b 2-10) is self-contained:

[Socrates] Ἔχε δή: ἄλλο τι τοῦ μὲν σκληροῦ τὴν σκληρότητα διὰ τῆς ἐπαφῆς αἰσθήσεται, καὶ τοῦ μαλακοῦ τὴν μαλακότητα ὡσαύτως;

[Theaetetus] Ναί.

Τὴν δέ γε οὐσίαν καὶ ὅτι ἐστὸν καὶ τὴν ἐναντιότητα πρὸς ἀλλήλω καὶ τὴν οὐσίαν αὖ τῆς ἐναντιότητος αὐτὴ ἡ ψυχὴ ἐπανιοῦσα καὶ συμβάλλουσα πρὸς ἄλληλα κρίνειν πειρᾶται ἡμῖν.

Πάνυ μὲν οὖν.

'Stop there! Does it [the soul] not perceive the hardness of the hard through the medium of touch, and likewise the softness of the soft?'

'Yes.'

'But being, the what-being and that-being and so-being, and the being-opposed-to-one-another, and again the what-being of this opposition, the soul