Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

402
Tad Brennan
e.g. the principles that make it a parliamentary system, give it a bicameral
legislation, and so on.)
I already mentioned the passage from Chrysippus On Ends, in which
he said that self-preservation is the first appropriate thing for every living
thing. 22 But what he said more precisely is that the first appropriate or
oikeion thing for each animal is its systasis.
They say that the first impulse an animal has is towards preserving itself
(hauto), since nature made it appropriate/familiar to itself from the very beginning,
as Chrysippus says in the first book of the treatise On Ends, where
he says that the first thing that is appropriate/familiar to each animal is its
own systasis and its awareness of this.
Notice how this passage says both that the first appropriated thing is the
systasis, and also that nature from the very beginning makes the animal
appropriate or familiar to itself, heauto. It is not impossible that this describes
two, simultaneous acts of oikeiôsis of two distinct things, but it
looks to me more likely that it is describing one act of oikeiôsis,
whose object can be described indifferently as the systasis, orheauto.
This reading is supported by a passage of Alexander of Aphrodisias 23
in which he says:
Now the Stoics (though not all of them) say that the first thing that is oikeion
to an animal is itself (hautôi) (for each animal, as soon as it is born, is
made oikeion to itself – and hence the human being, too). But the Stoics
who seem a bit more sophisticated and careful about the matter say that
as soon as we are born what is made appropriate to us is our systasis and
its preservation.
Here too, the systasis is put in parallel with the ‘animal itself’, or made to
be a more accurate characterization of the animal’s self. What we mean
by referring to ‘itself’, if we consider the matter carefully, is the animal’s
systasis.
Seneca 24 tells us that the constitutio (a natural Latin rendering of systasis)
is the commanding-faculty in a certain state relative to the body
(principale animi quodammodo se habens erga corpus). 25 He then tells us
22 D.L. 7.85.
23 De An. Mant. 150.25 = SVF 3.183.
24 Sen. Ep. 121.
25 This verbal formulation seems to fit the pattern for an item in the fourth Stoic
genus, i. e. the “pros ti pôs echon”. Fourth-genus predications are “those whose
nature it is to become and cease to be a property of something without any internal
change or qualitative alteration … For ‘son’ and ‘man on the right’, in
order to be there, need certain external things. Hence without any internal