R.J.

HANKINSON

BODY AND SOUL IN GREEK PHILOSOPHY

I. PLAT0 AND THE BODY

At the beginning of Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates seeks to reconcile his

cheerful acceptance of his own imminent death with his endorsement of a
general proscription on suicide. Even if it would be better for Evenus to
follow him as quickly as possible out of mortal life (61b), he should not
kill himself since suicide cannot be justified (61c). His interlocutor Cebes
reasonably inquires: “howcan you say, Socrates, that it is not right for the
philosopher to do violence to himself, yet he ought willingly to follow the
dying man” (61d)? Socrates seeks in what follows to resolve the apparent
paradox: we may readily allow that in certain circumstances it would be
better to die than to go on living (62a), and hence acquiesce willingly in
our own deaths, but we have no right to take steps actively to end our
own physical lives, since they are divine gifts, and we are the gods’
property, to be disposed of by them and them alone (62b-c). This
justification of the prohibition on suicide (or at least on what one might
label, by analogy with the euthanasia debate, ‘active’ suicide) then leads
naturally into the central theme of the dialogue, the immortality of the
soul.
Socrates’ defense of the traditional ban on talking one’s own life has,
as he himself acknowledges, roots in earlier Greek philosophy, in
particular that of the Pythagoreans (61d-e). But it is important to note at
the outset that Socrates’ reasons for rejecting suicide have nothing to do
with any concept of an obligation to the body as such. It is not that our
bodies, as individuals, have moral claims of any kind over us - it is
simply that ultimately they belong to someone else. Views of that sort,
that we are simply the custodians rather than the owners of what we
ordinarily think of as our bodies, crop up from time to time in the
Christian tradition.1 But they are not universal in the classical world, and
in any case derive not from any special acknowledgment of the rights of
the body as a body, but rather from a sense of alienation from it.²

M.J. Cherry (ed.), Persons and their Bodies: Rights, Responsibilities, Relationships, 35-56.
© 1999 KluwerAcademic Publishers. Printed in Great Britain.
36 R.J. HANKINSON

Not everybody in the ancient world, however, endorsed the Socratic

view, and some, apparently, misunderstoodit: one Cleombrotus is said, in
a celebrated epigram of Callimachus (n. 23) much quoted and discussed
in later antiquity, to have thrown himself off a high wall as a result of
reading the Phaedo.³ Suicide was widespread, and for the most part,
particularly in the Roman world, considered acceptable and sometimes
even noble. The Stoic philosophers, although differing among themselves
on the issue, tended to consider physical death a matter of indifference
(rather than something actively to be welcomed, as the Socratic-Platonic
tradition had it), and suicide, at least under certain circumstances, not
only to be permissible, but actually the right and proper thing to do.
Seneca, the Roman Stoic whose writings contain the most extensive Stoic
musings on suicide, was eventually obliged by his erstwhile patron, the
emperor Nero, to put his precepts into practice, which, according to
Tacitus (Annals 15 60-7), he duly did, with great courage and dignity.
Moreover, the Stoics, with their Platonically-influenced view that the
whole world was a single, integrated organism of which we as individuals
were mere parts, allied to their doctrine that true human freedom was to
be found in the freedom of the mind, tended to suppose that our bodies
were really quite distinct from ourselves, indeed not even really ours at all
(although not specificallyfor Socratic reasons):
What does Zeus say? ‘Epictetus: if I could have done I would have
made this little body and property of yours free and not prone to
impediment; but make no mistake: it is not yours, but only a subtle
mixture ofclay’ (Epictetus, Discourses 1 1).
This is constant Stoic refrain: what we ordinarily take to be our own
property, including our own bodies, is not really ours at all, and hence its
loss is no real loss to us (ibid. 1 19, 24, 25); and such an understanding is
the key to freedom from fear (ibid. 4 7).4
But Socrates’claim that we are not justified in simply disposing of our
bodies as we wish does not derive from any inclination on his part to
attach any genuine value to the body as such. His famous contention that
philosophy is a preparation for (bodily) death (Phaedo 64a, 67e) is
predicated on the belief that philosophy is the cultivation of the soul, and
that such cultivation consists in divorcing, so far as is possible, the soul
from the body and its concerns. Death is the separation of soul from body
(ibid. 64c); and the philosopher, qua philosopher at least, should be
indifferent to the particular pleasures associated with the body, those of