Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

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Carl Huffman
things that come to be empsycha should be considered to belong to the
same family or kind (homogenÞ). We can now see, however, that this
kinship with animals is not based on a shared rationality 59 but rather
on the idea that humans and animals both have an ability to receive sensations
such as pleasure and pain and to develop desires based on those
sensations. Sorabji thus appears to be mistaken, when he argues that the
pain felt by animals was first used as a basis for just treatment of them
astonishingly late, in Porphyry. 60 The common ability of animals and
humans to feel pain is built into Pythagoras’ theory of transmigration
from the very beginning. 61 The earliest evidence suggests, however,
59 Thus Sorabji, in his splendid book, is mistaken to say that the Pythagoreans accepted
the rationality of animals (1993, 78). He relies in part on Aëtius 5.20
(Dox. Gr. 432a15) where it is asserted that Pythagoras and Plato thought that
the souls of the so called irrational animals were in fact rational (logikas) and
that apes and dogs had intellect (noousi). However, Burkert has shown that,
when Pythagoras is joined to Plato in Aëtius as espousing a given view, Platonic
views are being unhistorically assigned back to Pythagoras (1972, 57–83, see
esp. 75).
60 Sorabji 1993, 208–209. He oddly dismisses Xenophanes’ story about Pythagoras
and the puppy (fr. 7) by saying that “pain is not mentioned” (1993, 208). It
is true that the word pain does not appear, but the pain of the puppy is central
to the story. The cries of the puppy are mentioned and Pythagoras tells the man
to stop beating it, surely because of the pain the puppy is suffering. Sorabji adds
that what matters is not that the puppy is being beaten but that a friend is being
beaten. This is true of Xenophanes’ presentation, but Dicaearchus’ statement
that Pythagoras regarded humans and animals as of the same kind (Porph. VP
19) and the evidence of fragment 13 of Philolaus that humans and animals
share the same faculty of perception indicate that Pythagoras focused on the
shared ability of animals and humans to feel pain.
61 In the later tradition three reasons are given for Pythagoras’ abstaining from animal
food. The argument assigned by Sextus to both Pythagoras and Empedocles
(M. 9.127 – 129), that one breath (6m … pmeOla) pervades the whole cosmos
and thus makes humans one with animals, is not supported by the early evidence
for either Pythagoras or Empedocles and looks to be a later explanation
developed under Stoic influence. Iamblichus reports another argument according
to which animals and humans are akin because they are made from the same
elements (VP 108 and 169). This argument appears to antedate Theophrastus
since he modifies it (Porph. Abst. 3.25), in light of the consideration that plants
too are made of the same elements, so that it is not basic elements that humans
and animals share but the same tissues and fluids (Sorabji 1993, 175–178). It
seems much more likely that the argument from common elements is derived
from Empedocles than from Pythagoras, since Empedocles has a theory of elements
according to which humans and animals would indeed be composed of
the same elements (Inwood 2001, 64), whereas there is no evidence that Pytha-