Note 85 — Chapter XXV · PHÆDON.

Zeller, Philosophie der Griech. Part ii. p. 267.

“Die Seele ist ihrem Begriffe nach dasjenige, zu dessen Wesen es gehört zu leben — sie kann also in keinem Augenblicke als nicht lebend gedacht werden: In diesem ontologischen Beweis für die Unsterblichkeit, laufen nicht bloss alle die einzelnen Beweise des Phædon zusammen, sondern derselbe wird auch schon im Phaedrus vorgetragen,” &c. Compare Phædrus, p. 245.

Hegel, in his Geschichte der Philosophie (Part ii. pp. 186-187-189, ed. 2), maintains that Plato did not conceive the soul as a separate thing or reality — that he did not mean to affirm, in the literal sense of the words, its separate existence either before or after the present life — that he did not descend to so crude a conception (zu dieser Rohheit herabzusinken) as to represent to himself the soul as a thing, or to enquire into its duration or continuance after the manner of a thing — that Plato understood the soul to exist essentially as the Universal Notion or Idea, the comprehensive aggregate of all other Ideas, in which sense he affirmed it to be immortal — that the descriptions which Plato gives of its condition, either before life or after death, are to be treated only as poetical metaphors. There is ingenuity in this view of Hegel, and many separate expressions of Plato receive light from it: but it appears to me to refine away too much. Plato had in his own mind and belief both the soul as a particular thing — and the soul as an universal. His language implies sometimes the one sometimes the other.