Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

The Pythagorean conception of the soul from Pythagoras to Philolaus 31
parts of the body, so that perception must be located in the heart only in
the sense that the principle (archÞ) of perception, which controls perception
throughout the body, is located there. Similarly, Sedley speculates
that the psychÞ is not located solely in the heart but that the principle of
the psychÞ is located there, which serves as a command center for animal
functions, while the psychÞ as a whole is the harmony of the material elements
of the body such as the hot and cold. 30
At first sight it is hard to see how this conception of soul as a harmony
of hot and cold would allow the psychÞ to be what transmigrates
for Philolaus, since the whole point of the argument in the Phaedo is that
the harmony which is the soul must perish, when the physical elements
of which it is the harmony fall apart. Several ways of dealing with this
apparent contradiction between the harmony theory of soul and a belief
in transmigration have been proposed, none very satisfactory. 31 I have a
new suggestion. For a body to become ensouled it is necessary for the
proper harmony of limiters and unlimiteds, such as hot and cold, to
30 Sedley 1995, 25.
31 First, it might be that Philolaus did not in fact believe in transmigration (Burnet
1914, 92 – 93; Wilamowitz 1920, II, 90). Second, he might not have recognized
the conflict between his belief in transmigration and the harmony theory
of soul; it might be that one of the purposes of the Phaedo is to point out precisely
this unrecognized conflict (Huffman 1993, 331 –332). Third, he might
have explained the psychÞ as a harmony of bodily parts but followed Empedocles
in arguing that it is not the psychÞ that transmigrates but rather the daimôn (Guthrie
1962, 319), which is an occult soul, or in anthropological terms, a free
soul, which plays no role in the living body but whose function is precisely
to preserve the personality of the individual in sleep or death (Bremmer
1983, 14 – 53). Kahn (1993, 435–436) also argues that what transmigrates is
not the same as the soul that controls us in life. He doubts that “Empedocles
or any other Greek philosopher before Christian times” envisaged “the survival
of the whole person in his full individuality … The survival they contemplate is
never that of the whole human being, but of one single element of our empirical
self, one whose isolated existence after death involves a complete break
with the conditions of human life … What lives on is not the individual
human personality … but the godlike element which was lodged within his
breast”. In Xenophanes fr. 7, what Pythagoras recognizes in the puppy, however,
is something distinctive of his friend so that it is the individual human personality
that has transmigrated and the same thing is implied by Pythagoras’
ability to remember the details of his past lives (D.L. 8.4). In Empedocles
fr. 137, the image of the father slaying his son in an animal sacrifice gains its
power from the presupposition that his son’s individuality is preserved in the
animal. These texts thus clearly suggest an intimate connection between the
soul that transmigrates and the soul that constitutes our individuality in life.