What are We?

Since both Epicureans and Stoics regarded bodies as the only real existing things, in accounting for human beings’ self-consciousness and sense of personal identity they encountered the problems, still familiar to us, of the relation between mind and matter, between mind and body, and between the laws of physics and our sense of our own freedom of action. For the ancient Greeks questions about human functioning were questions relating not so much to the mind as to the ‘soul’ (psuchê). That term, if used at all nowadays, tends to indicate a spiritual self distinct both from mind and from body; but for the Greeks psuchê, which could denote simply ‘life’ or ‘life-force’, related to all the ways in which living things function which set them apart from inanimate objects – not only thought, characteristic of human beings, but also sensation and the apparent power of initiating their own movements. (The fact that we no longer talk about ‘soul’ in this way is due above all to Descartes, who wanted to draw a sharp line between reasoning, on the one hand, and the functions we share with the rest of the animals, on the other.) ¹