ABSTRACT
The word "initial", a concept denoting temporality, is advisedly used since the process of loss is indeed timebound. In this view, time itself is not homogeneous, not a mere milieu in which things take place and to which time remains as it was neutral. The anthropological explorer of Central American Indians, Jacques Soustelle, describes the latter's world-view like this. With regard to the Original, the reflection is inferior, literally second-rate, and fragile, in need of care. The soul too is such a reflection, it is created, it mirrors its maker or the One from which it has emanated. No wonder that Jan Patocka, the Prague philosopher, named the care of the soul as the first task of Plato's inheritors, the philosophers of Europe. In a sense, the history of philosophy, in East and West, has been a mighty, at the same time subtle, challenge to the enigmas of original themes, enigmas to be solved.
