Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

366
Keimpe Algra
school. Yet as soon as we try to zoom in on the details various questions
arise.
A first question is how exactly the inner demon relates to what we
might call the ‘self’. Two at first sight different answers to this question
can be found in our Stoic sources. Although the evidence is scanty, the
early Stoic standard view appears to have been that the inner demon
simply is the self: it is the soul, which is given a divine status in virtue
of its potential rationality, whether this soul is de facto rational or not.
Marcus Aurelius remains close to this standard view by using the hendiadys
“mind and god” (moOr ja·da_lym). 22 Seneca and Epictetus, however,
tend to present things differently. In their texts the notion of the
‘divine in us’ seems to have developed, at least at times, into the notion
of what we might call a ‘normative self’: that purely rational being
which we should be or which we strive to be, but are not yet in fact.
A kind of superego, in other words, part of an apparently pluralized
‘us’, but at the same time presented as separate insofar as it guides and
admonishes ‘us’. In this latter quality it is in a way ‘hypostasized’, as
the following passage in Epictetus makes clear:
[Zeus] has stationed by each man’s side as a guardian his daimôn, and has
committed the man to its care, a guardian who does not sleep and is not
to be deceived. For to what other guardian, better or more careful,
could he have committed each of us? So when you close your doors and
make darkness within, remember never to say that you are alone. For
you are not: god is within, your own daimon is within. What need do
they have of light to see what you are doing? 23
Seneca makes the same point in his famous 41st letter:
We do not need to uplift our hands towards heaven, or to beg the keeper
of a temple to let us approach the idol’s ear, as if in this way our prayers
were more likely to be heard. God is near you, he is with you, he is within
you. This is what I mean, Lucilius: a holy spirit indwells within us, one
who marks our good and bad deeds, and is our guardian. 24
With respect to Epictetus Anthony Long has suggested that talk of an
independent internal demon, which appears to ‘pluralize’ the person,
should be seen as a metaphor or, better, “as a way of articulating the
idea that in listening to and obeying one’s normative self one is at the
same time in accordance with the divinity who administers the
22 M.Ant. III, 3; see also XII, 26 (2j\stou moOr he|r).
23 Arr., Epict. I, 14, 12 – 14.
24 Seneca, Ep. XLI, 1.