Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

Stoic souls in Stoic corpses 391
wash it. Aristotle is even more brutal in a passage from the Protrepticus,in
which he compares our soul’s attachment to our body to the fate of captives
who are tortured by being tied face-to-face and point-to-point
with corpses. 2 On this picture we are the captives: that is, we are the
soul alone, and our bodies are loathsome and repellent corpses, things
we are unnaturally and inorganically bound to, things whose very proximity
to us is a form of torture.
This picture of the body as something alien, extraneous, burdensome
and noxious to the real human being, the soul, fits well with Socrates’
views in the Phaedo about both anthropology and ethics. A human
being is simply a soul, not a combination of soul and body, and the body
is a sort of prison (62b). Given that this is the sort of thing a human
being is, there’s no mystery why the goods of the body should be no
part of our human good. It also fits with Socrates’ metaphysics. Soul
and body are of completely different types: the soul is an incorporeal,
partless, and immortal being, whereas the body is a corporeal, divisible,
and perishable being.
The ethical view of the body and its goods that we find in the Phaedo
is very close to the view that we find in Stoic ethics, both in Epictetus
and elsewhere. The Stoics, too, thought that the body and the goods of
the body such as food, health, and wealth are indifferent to our own
happiness.
Of course, the official Stoic position is that there is no such thing as
a ‘good of the body’. Things that other philosophers and non-philosophers
might call ‘goods of the body’ really are not goods at all: they refuse
to use the word ‘good’ (agathon) of such things, or ‘bad’ (kakon) of
their absences and opposites, reserving those appellations for virtue and
vice alone. This stance runs counter to ordinary usage (as the Stoics
were aware) 3 ; it also runs counter to a very natural argument, parts of
which they should be reluctant to reject. In outline, this argument – familiar
from, e.g., Socrates’ argument in Republic I 4 – would say that anything
that has a function has a virtue, and anything that advances and
increases a thing’s virtue is good for it. If sharpness is the virtue of knives,
then being sharpened is good for them, and sharpening stones are
among the goods for knives. Thus it is very natural to say that food
is, at least in this sense, a good for the body; it helps the body to perform
2 Arist. Protrepticus, fr. 107 Düring = fr. 1.6.60 Rose.
3 Plutarch, St. rep. 1048a = SVF 3.137 = LS 58H.
4 R. 352 – 354.