Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

Stoic souls in Stoic corpses 401
clare the intellect (dianoia) to be, since the pointing-gesture is carried there
naturally and appropriately. And even without a pointing-gesture of this
sort using our hands, we incline towards ourselves (heautous) when we
say ‘egô’, both because that is the immediate effect of the sound ‘egô’,
and because of the accompanying pointing-gesture that I’m about to describe.
For we utter the first syllable of ‘egô’ by drawing down the lower
lip, gesturing at ourselves (heautous). And following on the motion of the
chin and the inclination towards the chest and that kind of pointing-gesture,
the next syllable remains adjacent and does not suggest something
at a distance, as happens with ‘ekeinos’ [i.e. ‘that man’].’
Chrysippus wants to prove that the rational soul is in the heart, while
Galen holds that it is in the brain. Let us not dwell, as Galen does, on
the spectacle of lunatic phonology in the service of crackpot anatomy.
We should focus only on the repeated insistence that three things are
collocated in the chest: the commanding faculty, i. e. rational soul or dianoia,
the referent of ‘ego’, and the self or ‘heautous’. Three times we are
told that pointing towards the chest means pointing towards ourselves,
and that this is evidence that our soul must be in our chest. Consider the
inference; would the collocation of our self and our chest tell us anything
about where our soul is, if the body were part of the self? If
my body were part of me, then of course I would be pointing at myself
when I point at my chest – and this would remain true no matter where
my soul might reside. This seems to me pretty good evidence that
Chrysippus agrees with Epictetus on the central point: myself, what I
refer to when I say ‘I’, is the same as my soul, in particular my dianoia
or hÞgemonikon.
Well – what are we to make of all of this? I think that we can get a
clear picture of the Stoic doctrine, and also explain the source of Antiochus’
confusion, if we look at the word ‘systasis’. This is a noun derived
from the verb we have seen above, synestanai, and it means something
like ‘constitution’ or ‘composition’. As usual, nominalizations like this
manifest a process/product ambiguity: is a systasis the process of putting
some components together, or is it the compound that results from this
process? In the case of Stoicism, I think it is actually a third thing, something
like a principle of composition, a cause of the compounding, or a
rationale for the structure of the compound. (The word ‘constitution’
itself, as used in political philosophy, works exactly this way; the constitution
of a government is neither the act of constituting the government,
nor the government itself that is the product of that process, but
rather the principle and rationale for the structure of the government,