Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

Empedocles and metempsychôsis: The critique of Diogenes of Oenoanda 77
Diogenes repeats the Stoic doctrine that fools’ souls are destroyed immediately
when the soul/body compound is dissolved, whereas wise men’s
souls last for a long time before they too are ultimately destroyed. There is
another expostulation addressed to the readers:
Do you see their manifest implausibility? They make this claim as though
sages and non-sages didn’t possess the same kind of mortality, despite their
intellectual differences. I wonder even more at their self-control: once the
soul has the capability of existing without the body, even if we say it is
for a split second, how …
Exactly what sort of intellectual self-control is envisaged in this snide
comment is not completely clear, but probably the idea is that once
you allow the soul to survive death it takes heroic self-control to deny
it true and complete immortality.
Fragment 40, as reconstructed, brings in the Orphics and Pythagoras.
“Let us not say that the soul hasn’t perished when it moves on [metabainousa],
as the Orphics (and not just Pythagoras) seem to say in their madness.”
Fr. 41 should probably be placed in this context too, since it connects
Pythagoras and Empedocles (“not as the Empedocleans and Pythagoreans
say, for …”). Fragment 42, unmistakably attacking Empedocles
on this doctrine, follows.
Three observations about Diogenes’ exposition here. First, it is in his
usual vivid and exclamatory style. Second, Plato is not firmly associated
with metempsychôsis or transmigration, at least not in the bits we have.
He is attacked for his views on the survival of the soul after death, indeed,
for his views on immortality, while the Stoics are criticized for their intellectual
sloppiness as well (needless innovations on Plato, inconsistent
views about survivial of sages and fools). Of course, other themes of criticism
could have been present in the full original text. Third, the ordering
of the critiques is not chronological or school-based, since it seems to
have gone from Plato to the Stoics, then back to Orphics and Pythagoreans
and on to Empedocles. Most likely, then, the organizational principle
was the doctrine under attack: survival, immortality, and transmigration
were treated as distinct headings for the purposes of his polemic; indeed,
we should imagine an ascending order of apparent absurdity as his
organizing principle.
Fragment 42 goes as follows (I reproduce and translate the text in
Smith 1993, with an eye to the minor changes in Smith 2003 as well). 5
5 Quite rightly, Smith 2003, 100 complains that I failed to update my translation
in Inwood 2001 in light of Smith 1993.