Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

394
Tad Brennan
Let it be granted to begin with, that we have an affection for ourselves, and
that the earliest impulse bestowed upon us by nature is a desire for self-preservation.
9 On this we are agreed [sc. Antiochus and the Stoics]; and the implication
is that we must study what we ourselves are, in order to keep ourselves
true to our proper character. We are, then, human beings, consisting
of a soul and body of a certain kind; and these are the things we ought to
esteem, 10 as the first instincts of nature demand, and it is from these that we
must construct our End, our Chief and Ultimate Good. 11
Thus Antiochus argued that, since our nature includes both body and
soul, so too our telos must include goods of the body as well as goods
of the soul; and since he takes it that the Stoics agree with him that
human nature is compounded of body as well as soul, he then asks
them how they can consistently reject goods of the body:
By what means, or at what point did you suddenly discard the body, and all
those things which are in accordance with nature but out of our control,
and lastly duty itself ? 12 My question then is, how comes it that so many
things that Nature strongly recommends have been suddenly abandoned
by Wisdom? Even if we were not seeking the telos of human beings, but
of some living creature that consisted solely of a mind (let us allow ourselves
to imagine such a creature, in order to facilitate our discovery of the truth),
even so that mind would not accept this telos of yours. For such a being
would ask for health, and freedom from pain, and would also desire its
own preservation, and security for the goods just specified; and it would
set up as its telos to live according to nature, which means, as I said, to possess
[sc. not merely pursue] either all or most and the most important of the
things which are in accordance with nature. In fact, you may construct a
9 These are references to the theory of oikeiôsis, which we will examine more
fully below.
10 It’s important to note that esteeming (diligere) my body and soul is not an act of
valuing them, either in the sense of judging them to be ‘good’ or to be ‘promoted’.
Rather, it is a matter of judging them to be the beneficiaries of the
other valued things. It’s not a matter of the summum bonum, as I have put it elsewhere,
but of the cui bono.
11 Cic. Fin. 4.25, tr. Rackham in Loeb edition.
12 This last reference to duty (see below on befitting actions) is extremely compressed.
Of course the Stoics did not ‘discard duty’ in the sense of denying
that certain actions are befitting, but Cicero is claiming that their rejection of
goods of the body will implicitly commit them to that denial. Antiochus is
here attacking the Stoics with one of their own arguments, developed later
at Fin. 4.46 (and cf. Off. 1.6) which says that a theory that makes health and
the like indifferent will be unable to provide a coherent account of befitting actions.
This style of argument was crafted by Chrysippus to combat Aristo’s
more extreme assertion of the indifference of indifferents; see Fin. 3.50 (though
this contains no explicit reference to the befitting).