Note 43 — Chapter XIII · PLATO

This much may be conceded to Teichmüller’s observations. “The individual, and the individual soul, is not an independent principle but only a resultant of the compounding of the Idea and the principle of Becoming”—though this is not how Plato regards the matter; hence in Plato—“the individual is not eternal (i.e. not necessarily), and the eternal Principles are not individual”, Stud. z. Ges. d. Begr., p. 115, 142 (1874). But all that Teichmüller has to say under this head is in reality only a criticism of the Platonic doctrine of the soul and does not help us to determine what exactly that doctrine was. Plato speaks always of the immortality, i.e. the eternity, of the individual soul; nowhere does he confine indestructibility to the “common nature” of the soul; and this fact is not even remotely explained by appealing as Teichmüller does to an alleged “orthodoxy” to which Plato is supposed to be accommodating his words. If from no other passage we should be obliged to conclude definitely from Rp. 611 A that Plato believed in the existence of a plurality of souls and in their indestructibility: ἀεὶ ἂν εἶεν αἱ αὐταί (ψυχαί). οὔτε γὰρ ἄν που ἐλάττους γένοιντο μηδεμιᾶς ἀπολλυμένης, οὔτε αὗ πλείους. Here the predicate of the first sentence is indubitably εἶεν only; it is affirmed that always the same souls will exist, not that αἱ αὐταὶ εἶεν (“the souls are always the same ones”) as Teichmüller supposes, Platon. Frage, 7 ff., and it is asserted with all possible plainness that the plurality of individual souls, of which a definite number exist, is indestructible.