Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

396
Tad Brennan
pursue what is appropriate to them, and human beings differ by having
received logos as a further addition on top of impulse. I suspect that the
treatise Antiochus refers to here in the de Finibus was exactly Chrysippus’
On Ends, where the plural in the title indicates this sort of broad
survey of a variety of species and their corresponding ends.
Antiochus makes no objection to the principle that a thing’s end is
determined by its nature. Indeed, he accepts this principle, and uses it to
argue that Chrysippus gave human beings an end that would be too impoverished
even for a hypothetical creature composed only of a soul,
much less for the actual composite creatures that human beings are.
Even if we were to imagine a purely psychic creature, the argument
goes, one that had no body, then it still would not follow that its telos
excluded the things that the Stoics exclude from the human telos, e.g.
health and freedom from pain. So, since even the telos of a purely psychic
creature would still include health, freedom from pain, self-preservation,
and the possession of the things according to nature, it is all the
more ridiculous for the Stoics to claim that the telos of a composite creature
like a human being will exclude health and painlessness, and exclude
the possession of things according to nature. If even a disembodied
soul needs health, then a fortiori an embodied human being will.
Now it seems to me that this objection is clearly confused. Grant to
Antiochus that the telos of a purely psychic thing will include the health
of that purely psychic thing – it surely does not follow that the telos of a
purely psychic thing includes the health that the Stoics claim to be indifferent,
namely the health of a body. The kind of health that might
feature in the telos of a disembodied soul would be psychic health,
not physical health; and so too for its painlessness (which might be,
e.g., mental tranquility), its self-preservation, and the possession of
things according to its psychic nature. 15 Antiochus is surely right to
say that each of these could feature quite legitimately in the telos of a
pure soul; but he is wrong to think that Chrysippus has said anything
inconsistent with this. Chrysippus only excludes the health of the
body from the human end, not the health of the soul. So Antiochus’
first a fortiori argument falls prey to confusion between the psychic
and bodily senses of ‘health’, ‘painlessness’, and so on.
15 D.L. 7.96 = SVF 3.107, and Stobaeus 2.74 = SVF 3.112 mention “painlessness”
(alypia) as one of the good psychic states that supervene on the possession
of virtue, where this clearly cannot mean the lack of physical pain.