Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

Antiochus’ next objection then picks up on this very reply to the
first objection, by granting that what would feature in the telos of a
pure soul are not bodily health and painlessness and so on, but, as he
says, “certain attributes analogous to those of the body”, i. e. the psychic
analogues of health, painlessness, and so on. Still, Antiochus insists, these
things really must be included in the telos, and so even the telos of a pure
soul would not be exhausted by virtue alone, i.e. even for a pure soul it
would not be true to say that only virtue is the good; and so a fortiori it
cannot be true for composite humans. Antiochus phrases this argument
in the contrapositive, saying “the only case in which virtue would be
the only good would be if there were an animal that consisted only
of a mind, and a mind, furthermore, that had nothing in it that was according
to nature, analogous to health [sc. in the body]”. And this, he
concludes, is incoherent; it makes no sense to imagine a living creature
that has a determinate nature and yet has nothing even analogous to
health. For health simply is the condition of a living thing’s being in accordance
with its own determinate nature.
But this argument too fails to come to grips with Chrysippus’ position.
It does succeed in showing that even a purely psychic creature
must have some sort of psychic analogue of health. But it does not
show that the Stoics are incoherent when they say that the summum
bonum is virtue. For Antiochus has overlooked the possibility that virtue
might exactly be the same thing as psychic health and tranquility and a
condition according to nature, in which case the telos could include all
of these other things, while nevertheless not containing anything but
virtue. And indeed, as we know, this is exactly how the Stoics will
have viewed the case; they will say that virtue is the health of the
soul, and that it is equivalent to tranquility, that it is the natural condition
of the soul, and so on. So there is nothing incoherent in imagining
a pure soul whose good contains only virtue, provided that virtue is in
fact the same thing as psychic health, psychic painlessness, and so on.
Here I think we can say, on behalf of Antiochus, that if he is confused,
he is at least providing a very good illustration of one of Gisela
Striker’s complaints against the Stoics, that they are far too casual
about making identity-claims inside of intensional contexts. 16 It may
be true that virtue is the same thing as psychic health and ataraxia and
so on, but this does not mean that striving for virtue is the same as striving
for tranquility, or that making virtue one’s end is the same thing as
16 Striker 1996, 298.
Stoic souls in Stoic corpses 397