Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

Stoic souls in Stoic corpses 1
Tad Brennan
What did the Stoics think about the relation between soul and body?
What did they think about the relation between any particular individual,
e.g. you or I or Socrates, and the souls and bodies that in some sense
belong to us? Did they think that you and I and Socrates are simply
bodies? Simply souls? Did they think that we are a combination of
body and soul? Or did they have some more complicated view?
The texts that would have directly answered these questions are unfortunately
lost. Few relevant scraps remain, and those are not obviously
consistent. So in this paper, I try to employ an indirect strategy: I try to
infer the answers to our questions about anthropology and metaphysics
from Stoic views about ethics and the final end.
Here’s the thought: when the Stoics (or any other ancient school)
instruct you to pursue some telos or end, they do so as part of an account
of what is good for you. But an account of what is good for you – for
you, rather than the cosmos or a community or a cow – must involve an
account of what you, in fact, are. To put it somewhat awkwardly, you
are the thing for which the things-that-are-good-for-you, are good. If
we can figure out how to characterize the beneficiary of these benefits
– what is the ‘you’ for whom these things are good – then we can figure
out what you are. And then the nature of the goods, and the way in
which they are good for you, may give us further detail about what exactly
you are. So by starting from ethical evidence, we may be able to
1 This is a revised version of a talk that I gave at the Zweiter Kongress der Gesellschaft
für antike Philosophie in Hamburg, Germany in 2007. I am grateful to
Dorothea Frede for her organization of the event and for the invitation to speak
there. This paper incorporates and extends a line of thought I began in my book
The Stoic Life (2005), particularly chapter 8, and arrives at a determinate conclusion
concerning some issues I left unresolved there. I received useful comments
from members of the Hamburg audience, particularly Tony Long, Brad Inwood,
Keimpe Algra, Brad Inwood, Chris Gill, and Jula Wildberg. My revisions
benefited from the advice of Charles Brittain and Jacob Klein. And as always,
my deepest thanks go to Liz Karns.