Stoic Pneuma as World-Soul

The Stoic doctrine of πνεῦμα gives ratio pneuma its first rigorous physics. Pneuma is the active principle of the world, which pervades matter, the passive principle, in a relation Long & Sedley render as that of world-soul to the body of the world (Long & Sedley 1987). The Stoics inherit a Platonic precedent — the Timaeus’ world-soul — but break decisively with Plato by treating the world-soul as identical to the divine Craftsman and by totally rejecting Plato’s distinction between the physical world and the non-physical and everlasting Forms. As divine breath, the Stoics’ world-soul is coextensive with the grosser matter which forms the world’s body (Long & Sedley 1987).

The functional analysis is the tradition’s most precise. The breath in any body is what shapes and characterizes it. As ‘tenor’ breath makes it a unified object, as ‘physique’ it makes it an organism, as ‘soul’ it makes it an animate organism. And soul itself embodies a range of separate qualities, such as prudence, which are themselves portions of breath (Long & Sedley 1987). At the cosmic scale, the world-soul is rational or intelligent through and through; the aether houses the world’s commanding-faculty. Causation reduces to the operation of active ‘breath’, consisting of the elements air and fire, on the two inert elements earth and water (Long & Sedley 1987).

This is what ratio pneuma inherits philosophically: spirit is not other than body but is the active aspect of body; reasoning in the pneumatic register is reasoning about what sustains and characterizes an organism from within.

Relationships

Primary sources

The Hellenistic Philosophers (Long & Sedley 1987)
Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism (Inwood 1985)