Possible Selves in Late Antiquity: Ideal Selfhood and Embodied Selves in Evagrian Anthropology (original) (raw)

A History of Mind and Body in Late Antiquity

2018

What is a soul? What is a body? What is a mind? How do these relate within the human being? Is the soul-body relationship antagonistic or complementary? For example, is the soul weighed down and imprisoned by the body, or aided by it and defined in relation to it? How do we think, and how are we aware of our own thoughts? How should bodily pleasure feature in our lives? If the mind is supposed to focus on and contemplate intelligible reality, how can it achieve this? What is the role of God, of the body, and of literature in the soul's attempts at contemplation? Throughout late antiquity, philosophers and theologians grappled creatively with mind-body issues, asking a diverse range of questions and giving answers often of striking originality and of abiding significance. Philosophical anthropological reflections about the nature of body, soul, and mind prompted and interacted with ethical and epistemological questions. The aim of this volume is to present together pagan and Christian ideas about mind and body in late antiquity, from roughly the 2 nd through the 6 th centuries. The mind-body relation is broadly conceived to include the soul-body relation. We explore a wide, interacting community of thinkers, mainly writing in Greek and in some cases in Latin. Our primary focus is on philosophical approaches to mind-body questions; however, a chapter from Edward Watts sheds light on their historical setting, and some contributors deploy less self-consciously philosophical sources, such as sermons and liturgy. This breadth of approach demonstrates the widespread significance of mind-body questions, which extended far beyond philosophical communities, and helps to bring out the historical specificity of late ancient enquiry into mind-body questions. It will also widen the range of likely interest in our volume, to secondarily include those whose concern is more social and historical than theological and philosophical. The mind-body relation was at the forefront of philosophy and theology in late antiquity. In addressing it, late ancient thinkers were partly picking up on themes from earlier antiquity. However, new contexts and ideas cast these themes in a fresh light: Plotinus' thought, especially his metaphysics and cosmology, reinvigorated Platonism and arguably sent it in a new direction; the rise of asceticism in the third and fourth centuries both accentuated the ethical aspects of mind-body questions and further grounded them in an intensely practical context; late antiquity saw the growth of Christianity. It thus fostered a social and political context in which pagan and Christian authors existed side by side, engaging with, disputing, and influencing each other against the backdrop of each community's fluctuating political fortunes. Late antiquity is a period of unique import for Christian-pagan interaction. It is also, relatedly, a bridge between the ancient and medieval worlds. Late ancient ideas are of enduring importance. This volume addresses a vital section of them. Across the period in question, mind-body issues were bound up with cosmological ones: to ask how the soul relates to the body is partly to ask how an intelligible, rational entity exists in the physical world. In Neoplatonic thought, the cosmological framework of mind-body questions was being reconfigured, thanks partly to a renewed emphasis on divine transcendence. If the divine is removed from the intelligible sphere, the soul may then be far removed from the body as it stretches up towards the now-distant divine. The soul may, equally, be pushed closer to the body because both, together, are sharply distinguished from the divine. In either case, the soul must interact with the body. This plays out in various ways. Early Neoplatonism often exhibits a strong, though complex, anthropological dualism; this can be seen giving way to a more positive approach to embodiment in later Neoplatonism. Paralleling questions of downwards interaction – how do the soul and mind relate to the body? – were questions of upwards interaction – how do soul and mind relate to other intelligibles and to transcendent reality? Correspondingly, this period also saw increasing introspection about the

The Ancient Self: Issues and Approaches

Ancient Philosophy of the Self, eds. P. Remes and J. Sihvola, 2008

In this essay, I consider the implications of two themes in ancient philosophy as a way of exploring current issues and approaches in the study of the self in antiquity. The first theme is the Cicero's presentation of Cato in 'On Duties' (1.112), considered in the context of his account of the theory of the four roles (personae). The second is Epictetus' recurrent theme in the 'Discourses' that we should focus our lives on exercising 'prohairesis' (rational agency or will), together with his three-topic programme of practical ethics.

Reflections on the Socratic notion of the self

Care of the self in early Greek philosophy, 2012

The ancient Greek notion of “care of the self” and the self-knowledge it presupposes is premised on the concept of introspection. Introspection obviously involves “consciousness”; more precisely, it implies a “conscious” notion of the “self.” Consciousness itself can be notorious difficult to define and explain. In this paper, I examine some of the historical precedents for “caring for the self” as we find them in Plato’s earlier dialogues, notably the Apology, and the kind of consciousness it presupposes. This was an invited paper for a panel on “Care of the self in early Greek philosophy” organized by Annie Larivée for the 80th Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, University of New Brunswick, May 2011. I’ve added a few references to my more recent work on the topic.

Self, Self-Fashioning, and Individuality in Late Antiquity New Perspectives Edited by

“The Senses, the Self, and the Christian Roman Imperial Subject: Hagia Sophia as a Space of Directed Interiority,” in The Self in Antiquity, eds. M. Niehoff and J. Levinson, (Tübingen, 2019), pp. 211-224.

Technologies of the self must have left a larger footprint than we often see if they were as important in antiquity as we claim. To show this, it argues that the great Constantinopolitan church of Hagia Sophia created a deliberately overwhelming sensory experience in a effort to encourage self-reflection in worshippers. But the church also featured a decorative scheme and set sensory experiences that directed worshippers—who were already encouraged to engage in interior self-regard—to understand their experience in terms that reaffirmed a specific Roman and Christian identity.

Some Ancient Greek Theories of (Divine and Mortal) Mind

This paper suggests that consideration of alternative models—of ancient Greek religion, the nature of the individual, and theories of mind—raise questions about the ancient conceptions of the individual experience and mind—and lead to a reconsideration of the nature of ’private reflection in private spaces’.

Individuality and Identity-formation in Late Antique Monasticism

There are several problems that confront the scholar who tries to better understand the concept of individuality in early Christian monasticism. The first is our understanding of individuality in this context. On the one hand, the concept of the monk stands as an affirmation of radical individuality to the rest of society, an individual par excellence, a master of le souci de soi. 2 But on the other hand, if by individuality we mean a form of individualism which implies a consistent suspicion of community and authority, and a way of life whose basis and fulfilment could be found in the power of self-determination, then the early Christian monk, in general, will disappoint. A second problem revolves around the ways in which identities of the individual monk -I mean here the ideal individual monk -were formed, and how these ought to be approached and assessed methodologically. What are these ways, and how do we access them? Do we examine (if it were possible) all evidence relating to early monks from hagiography, apophthegmata, letters, treatises, papyri fragments, ostraca, architectural remains and so on and find common denominators? If so, do we divide the sources by region (if so, how?), do we establish chronological markers (if so, why?) and do we conduct our research with or without reference to such categories as orthodoxy and heresy? My own answers to such questions are still, and perhaps always will be, in a state of development. The third problem to face the scholar is how to distinguish the concept of individuality in early monasticism from individuality not simply in wider Christian circles, but in the non-Christian world. How far do the notions overlap or influence one another, if, that is, we can even speak of a distinct concept of individuality peculiar to the early monastic world? 1

The Material Soul: Strategies for Naturalising the Soul in an Early Modern Epicurean Context

We usually portray the early modern period as one characterised by the ‘birth of subjectivity’ with Luther and Descartes as two alternate representatives of this radical break with the past, each ushering in the new era in which ‘I’ am the locus of judgements about the world. A sub-narrative under the heading ‘the mind-body problem’ recounts how Cartesian dualism, responding to the new promise of a mechanistic science of nature, “split off” the world of the soul/mind/self from the world of extended, physical substance – a split which has preoccupied the philosophy of mind up until the present day. We would like to call attention to a different constellation of texts – neither a robust ‘tradition’ nor an isolated ‘episode’, somewhere in between – which have in common their indebtedness to, and promotion of an embodied, Epicurean approach to the soul. These texts follow the evocative hint given in Lucretius’ De rerum natura (III, 327-330) that ‘the soul is to the body as scent is to incense’ (in an anonymous early modern French version); in other words they neither assert the autonomy of the soul, nor the dualism of body and soul, nor again a sheer physicalism in which ‘psychic’ or ‘intentional’ properties are reduced to the basic properties of matter. Rather, to borrow the title of one of these treatises (L’âme matérielle), they seek to articulate the concept of a material soul. By reconstructing some elements of the tradition of a corporeal, mortal and ultimately material soul, at the intersection of medicine, natural philosophy and metaphysics, including sections devoted to Malebranche and Willis, but focusing primarily on texts including the 1675 Discours anatomiques by the Epicurean physician Guillaume Lamy; the anonymous manuscript from circa 1725 entitled L’âme matérielle, which is essentially a compendium of texts from the later seventeenth century such as Malebranche and Bayle, along with excerpts from Lucretius; and materialist writings such Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s L’Homme-Machine (1748), we seek to articulate this concept of a ‘material soul’ with its implications for notions of embodiment, the nature of mental states, and selfhood.