Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

40
Carl Huffman
it to be born into some kinds of animals. Moreover, it could be that the
gods do not allow human souls to enter into animals destined for sacrifice,
as is suggested by the akousma quoted above, which says that
human souls do not enter into sacrificial animals. Fourth, Philolaus appears
to have gone beyond Pythagoras in explaining the physiology of
the soul and how the soul and body work together. It is clear that, despite
Aristotle’s criticism of the Pythagorean stories, in Philolaus not just
any soul can enter into just any body.
The core of the conception with which Philolaus was working
clearly goes back to Pythagoras, who was responsible for a subtler understanding
of the transmigrating soul than has usually been assigned
to him, an understanding that goes contrary to many of the assumptions
scholars have traditionally made about the Pythagorean view of the soul.
First, despite Furley’s claim that the Pythagoreans were hostile to a material
conception of the soul, 53 we have seen that Philolaus appears to
follow most other Presocratics in making the soul material; there is
no evidence that Pythagoras did any differently. 54 Second, it is often assumed
that the transmigrating soul must be a comprehensive soul, yet
the evidence shows that Pythagoras did not think that the transmigrating
psychÞ included all of human psychic capabilities. Finally, a common assumption,
either explicit or implicit, in scholarship on the early Greek
conception of the soul has been that it developed in a linear fashion
from the Homeric view, in which there are a variety of psychic faculties
with no unity, to the comprehensive soul of Socrates and Plato. 55 According
to such an assumption, Pythagoras’ identification of the soul
just with the emotions and his exclusion of intellect from it would be
explained in terms of the general Greek propensity of the time to see
53 Furley 1956, 16 – 17.
54 That the Pythagoreans should have clung to a material account of the soul is not
surprising. Even in the Gorgias, Plato is still presenting the soul as something
very similar to the body, which bears wounds in the next life just like the
body (524e); in the Phaedo, where Plato is clearly arguing against the soul as
a physical harmony, a major part of the argument is based on his newly emerging
theory of forms as purely intelligible objects of knowledge. For the Pythagoreans,
as Aristotle tells us, the physical world always remained the explanandum
(Metaph. 989a33 – 34), so it should not be surprising that the transmigrating
psychÞ remains resolutely physical in nature throughout the Pythagorean tradition.
55 See Kahn (1979, 127, 311, n. 112) who makes Burnet the main culprit. Laks
seems to be working with a version of the developmental model (1999,
250 – 254).