The Stoics on Bodies and Incorporeals

Abstract

IT WAS A WIDESPREAD VIEW IN LATE ANTIQUITY that the Stoics maintained theses contrary to common conceptions--absurd, incomprehensible, or simply false. In other words, the Stoics were generally accused of having been guilty of incongruity, self-contradiction, and absurdity. (1) Indeed some specific Stoic claims (2) must have been particularly baffling for authors coming from the Platonic and Aristotelian tradition, mostly because these sorts of tenets were in disagreement with some basic assumptions of such a tradition. Alexander of Aphrodisias, for example, correctly suggests that the tensional movement, attributed by the Stoics to [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], does not fall into the Aristotelian classification of [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. (3) No doubt Alexander is right in noting this point because, according to Aristotle's view, [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] movement would be neither substantial (generation/destruction), quantitative (increase/diminution), qualitative (alteration), nor locative (locomotion). Nonetheless Alexander's attempt to reject the Stoic thesis of tensional movement on this ground is misleading. The fact that the tensional movement is not included in Aristotle's scheme does not show that such a type of movement does not exist or that it is not possible to explain phenomena making use of an explanatory mechanism in which the tensional movement is crucial. It only indicates the impossibility of trying to grasp [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] and its properties with criteria which turn out to be useless for the assessment of such an entity that is for the most part described in our sources as moving simultaneously inwards and outwards ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]). (4) I have cited and briefly commented on Alexander's remark against the Stoics because I think that this type of criticism is representative of what we can find in the testimonies for early Stoicism, particularly in those sources hostile to the Stoics, such as Plotinus, Plutarch, Galen, and of course Alexander himself. Plotinus, for example, seems to be attacking the Stoic doctrine of principles when he says that if something is active and involves in some sense the characteristics of a form (or of an energeia), this something cannot be bodily or material. In other words, Plotinus cannot accept the Stoic thesis of the material principles (5) for, as he puts it, god for them [namely for the Stoics] is posterior to matter as well, for it is a body composed of matter and form. And where did it get its form from? But if he does not have matter, because of having the nature of a principle, that is to say, because of being reason ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), then god would have to be incorporeal, and the active would have to be incorporeal ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) .... then, how could matter be a principle if it is a body? (6) In fact, for Plotinus [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], that which involves greater value. (7) does not pertain to the sphere of the corporeal, since this is directly related to the material things that, as material, imply passivity and lack of form. Plutarch is in the same line of thought when arguing that if the Stoic god is neither something pure nor something simple but something composed, he must be dependent on something else (for the Stoics, matter, in being simple, involves the features of a principle). (8) By contrast, the Stoics held that only corporeal things have a real causal power with respect to other things. It seems to me that this thesis contains an implicit and serious attack on the Platonic and Aristotelian view according to which forms and ends are not only the real causal factors but also the items that especially deserve to be called causes, at least if they are compared to the material things whose causal agency is primarily restricted to the domain of necessary conditions. …

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