soul
The Self-Moving Soul
τὸ αὑτὸ κινοῦν
What never stops being moved is what moves itself — and so the soul, the wellspring of all motion, can never cease to be.
In the Phaedrus, Plato defines the soul as the one thing that moves itself rather than waiting to be pushed by something else. Because every chain of motion must begin somewhere, he reasons, there must be an original self-mover that nothing else set going — and what was never set going can never be stopped or destroyed. This self-moving soul is therefore the ungenerated, deathless source from which all other motion in the cosmos flows. In Laws X he extends the same idea to argue that soul is older than body and prior to all physical change.
Where this idea shows up
5 Greek sources·1 Jewish-canon citationWhere to read it
- Platonicae quaestiones120 CEPlutarch· Chaeronea
- Plutarch· Chaeronea
- Ohr Hashem1399 CE