Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

Empedocles and metempsychôsis: The critique of Diogenes of Oenoanda 83
tire scenario of transmigration might turn out to be of relatively little
significance for the moral prospects of ordinary humans. The gods
who walk among us face their own challenges in the moral realm,
their own fate and their own opportunities. But on this understanding
of what Empedoclean transmigration theory is about, it does not
touch on the fate of every man. The issue, then, would be symbolic theology
rather than human ethics and eschatology. Yet to treat the transmigrator
as a soul is just to assert that this is a theory that touches us all,
that this is a general, human issue being preached with general moral/
pedagogical intent. Thus the assimilation, for which Diogenes is not,
of course, personally responsible, would make quite a difference to
our understanding of the philosophical situation. If Empedocles’ transmigrating
bearer of identity is not a feature of human lives in general,
then the assimilation of Empedocles to the Platonic and post-Platonic
amalgam does a fundamental disservice to history.
The other aspect of this difference concerns the nature of the soul. A
psychÞ for Epicureans, as for Aristotle and for Stoics too, for that matter,
is intimately interdependent with the body – I am referring to what I
called above the ‘essential interaction’ model. Whether the soul is a special
kind of matter (atomic or pneumatic) or a special kind of formal/
functional structure, soul and body are reciprocally dependent and correlative
entities. It is this foundation that is taken for granted by Aristotle
in his attack on the Pythagoreans in book I of De anima (407b) and on
which Lucretius bases many of his arguments in book III and that Diogenes
uses repeatedly in our fragmentary text. But if (as on the contingent
visitor model) the transmigrating entity is so radically different from
the body it enters as the Platonic transmigrating psychÞ sometimes seems
to be and as the Empedoclean daimôn properly interpreted must have
been, then arguments based on the unargued assumption of a deep
and intimate causal interaction of soul and body will fail on the grounds
of ignoratio elenchi. If the naked souls of Plato’s Gorgias are even imaginable
(as they would not be for Aristotle, the Epicureans or any Stoic
except possibly Seneca (as far as I can see), if the ‘I’ of Empedoclean
transmigration is a radically different kind of entity (whether a daimôn
or not) who puts on a body like an alien robe of flesh (fr. 126 DK)
or like the cloak of the weaver in Plato’s Phaedo, then all those arguments
based on the assumption that the soul which does the wandering
is somehow an essential part of a body/soul compound rather than a
contingent inhabitant of something alien to it must fail. If that is what