Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

420
Christopher Gill
case of the heart and liver constitute an index of the mismatch between
the findings of anatomy and Galen’s Platonic-style paradigm.
But these problems could all have been resolved if Galen had adopted
a view more like the Stoic one – or, more precisely, if he had adopted
the combination of the brain-centred account and the Stoic unified
psychology outlined earlier. In fact, outside the polemical context of
PHP (and sometimes even within it) Galen does adopt views that are
more like the one I am recommending and that differ from his official
Platonising view. Von Staden points out, for instance, that in some
works we find a contrast between psychological and ‘natural’ functions
that is much closer to the distinction we find both in the Ptolemaic doctors
and in Stoicism. For instance, in Differences of Symptoms (Symp.
Diff.), the natural activities of a living being are said to include “appetite
or ‘striving’, digestion, the distribution of nutriment, the generation of
blood, the pulse, and the excretion of residues … whereas the ‘psychic’
activities are restricted … to cognitive and voluntary motor activity” 41 .
“Natural” activities are explained by reference to four “natural faculties”
or capacities, namely those for attraction, retention, alternation, and secretion.
These are, usually, seen as operative in each part of the body –
by contrast with PHP where the stress falls on the idea of the liver as the
primary source of these capacities. 42 As in Herophilus, Erasistratus and
Stoicism, psychic activities tend, outside PHP, to be grouped under
the headings of perception (aisthÞsis) and movement (kinÞsis), sometimes
with the addition of “activities that belong to the ruling part (hÞgemonikon)
of the psyche”, which are based on the workings of the brain and
nervous system. 43
A related point is that – again outside PHP – Galen is more inclined
to present the body as a single, interconnected psychophysical system,
rather than as three independent systems. For instance, in some other
works, Galen spells out ways in which the nerves operate as a communication
system between all the organs. In a fragmentary commentary
on Plato’s Timaeus, for example, we are told “that all the nerves in
41 See von Staden 2000, 107, referring to Symp. Diff. VII.55.
42 Von Staden 2000: 107, referring to Prop. Plac. IV.759, Symp. Diff. VII.63. For
the contrast with the account of the liver in PHP see De Lacy 1988, 61 – 62
(also 56 – 57).
43 Von Staden 108 – 109, referring to Symp. Diff. VII.55, and outlining the cognitive,
sensory and voluntary motor functions allocated to the ruling part of
the psyche (and categorised as “psychic”). On Galen’s use of the psyche-nature
distinction, see also De Lacy 1988, 53 –56.