Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

404
Tad Brennan
heauto of the animal. It is not the same as the animal, which is a compound,
but it is the same as the animal’s self.
And here you can see why Antiochus will have been confused. For
Chrysippus is quite happy to say that every animal is a compound of soul
and body, and that human beings, too, are a compound of soul and
body. He never denies that human beings are composed of body and
soul. But if we ask who I am, or who Chrysippus is, then the answer
is that I am not a soul-body compound. Rather, we, ourselves, are
the principle of composition, the systasis, which is only a name for
the hÞgemonikon playing a particular role.
This explains why Chrysippus was not inconsistent in giving us an
end that is suitable for a purely psychic creature. Although as an animal,
human beings are composed of soul and body, when we ask who we
are, what our selves are, then the answer is that we are a purely psychic
thing, the systasis or hÞgemonikon.
In one way, my proposal that the systasis is a principle of composition
rather than the composite makes it like an Aristotelian form, especially
an Aristotelian soul. I don’t mind that comparison, but I think in
fact that the Stoic soul is even more loosely bound to the body than the
Aristotelian soul is. Unlike the Aristotelians, the Stoics seem to have argued
that at least in certain cases, the souls of certain individuals can survive
the separation of soul and body, and persist as unified portions of
pneuma without bodies, in which case they are called ‘daimones’ or sometimes
‘hÞrôes’. 26 I think this makes all the more sense when we think of
the Stoic soul’s relation to the body as just one of the jobs it can do.
True, while the soul is incorporated, it plays the role of organizing
the soul-body compound that is the animal, and that is when we call
it a ‘systasis’. But that is to describe it as relatively disposed towards
something else, not to say what it is in its essence.
After all, Socrates in the Phaedo also thinks that, during life, his soul
is involved in some sort of compound with a body. That is why he defines
death as the separation of the soul from the body; they must be
somehow combined if they need to be separated. But even though
he concedes that there is a soul-body compound during life, he does
not think of that compound as himself; the real Socrates, the one
who is talking and arranging all of his words, is only a soul, not a compound.
The relation to the body is not essential to Socrates in any way;
it is just an accidental episode in his biography.
26 S.E. M. 9.71 = SVF 2.812; D.L. 7.151 = SVF 2.1102.