Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

84
Brad Inwood
transmigration is like, then Diogenes, like so many other critics in antiquity
and beyond, is simply fighting on the wrong battlefield.
And this is, in fact, what I believe to be the case. Theories of the
underlying metaphysics of body/soul relations come in two flavours: interactionist
(the essential interaction model) and starkly dualist (the contingent
visitor model). Arguments from one side of this divide against
the other are pointless unless they address the metaphysical issue –
and once you have shown that your opponent has the metaphysics
wrong then there should be little need for further argument. That is
why Aristotle comes off so well in his critique of transmigration in
book one of De anima (407b). And that is also why, I think, that the
only really interesting arguments about transmigration as such are the
ones which turn fundamentally on the question of the continuity of personal
identity, arguments which I have recently addressed elsewhere. 15
Hence I would like to close with a quick consideration of where
Diogenes stands from this point of view. If we hold that Empedocles’
transmigrating identity (whether it is something which all humans
have or is a rare form of special divinity which Empedocles, Pythagoras
and a few others might share) is a non-interactionist soul, as it was surely
meant to be, then do Diogenes’ arguments have any impact on him? Or
do any of Diogenes’ arguments go deep enough to challenge in a serious
way the non-interactionist soul itself? Let us look again at what remains
of the argument in Diogenes’ text, focussing especially on a point made
in columns II and III:
… he says that the souls migrate from body to body after they are first destroyed
and that this happens ad infinitum, as though someone won’t say to
him, ‘Empedocles, so if souls can persist on their own and … not to drag
them off into an animal nature and transfer them for this reason, what is the
meaning of your transmigration? 16 For in the intervening time, in which
they [the souls] experience transmigration, which punctuates animal nature,
17 they will be utterly disrupted. But if they are in no way able to persist
without a body, why do you bother yourself – or rather, bother them,
dragging them off and transferrring them into one animal after another, especially
considering …’
The feature of this fragment which most interests us here is the status of
the unembodied ‘soul’. For it was clear in column II that the souls have
a contingent visitor status with regard to the bodies of various animals.
15 Inwood 2006.
16 t¸ soi d¼matai B let²basir;
17 f]ou v¼sim [di]´wom.