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it is the rebirth of a new existence, a new world, and a new spiritual
being from that knowledge. Based on these, two interconnected
moves can be observed in parallel, one of which is a production, a
creation, with which a perceived world on a phenomenal level is
created; while the second movement is getting to know, to learn,
this world, that is, reproduction. God created the world and then
made it real to himself through Christ. This is presumably what was
said in the Tübinger Stift when Hegel and Hölderlin were students
there. We also find in the logical example previously discussed a
process of creation and cognition side by side. Being created is not
sufficient in itself for cognition. Creation is fulfilled in cognition
and claiming, which, at the same time is also a re-production, in
every sense of the word. In this way that which would merely lie
before us as dead material comes to life and lives.
The dialectic of remembering and forgetting plays a prominent
role in the question of identity, and it also demonstrates well how
the Greeks thought about memory. The Greek goddess of remem¬
brance is Mnemosyne. After nine nights of lovemaking with the
lustful king of the gods, she gave birth to nine girls of the same
nature. These became the muses. Of this Hesiod writes, Mnemo¬
syne “who rules Eleutherai’s hills. She bore them to be a forgetting
of troubles.” (Hesiod: Theogony. 54-55.) But Mnemosyne was also
the name of one of the rivers of remembrance in the underworld,
which was the pair of the Amelés potamos (river of unmindfulness).
The dead souls had to drink from the water of the river of Lethe,
which is called the Amelés, to forget at birth what had happened in
on the plain of Lethe, so that they would not remember what fate
they chose, as Plato describes in the last book of the Republic. (Rep.
614.a, 621.b.)’" Only the initiated had the privilege of drinking not
from the River Lethe but the River Mnemosyne after their death.
21 This is referenced in the Myth of Er in the last book of Plato’s Republic. He
describes that souls reincarnating from Hades first choose a fate, and then
they must drink from the river Amelés, which separates the fields of Lethe
from the earthly world, upon which the souls forget everything.