A Alma do Mundo, o Todo e as Partes: Exemplo Textual

Jean-Baptiste Gourinat, J.-B., 2020, "Apospasma: The World Soul and its individual parts in Stoicism" in World Soul - Anima Mundi: On the Origins and Fortunes of a Fundamental Idea, ed. C. Helmig, 167-8

According to various Stoic texts and sources, our souls are parts of the World Soul; they are merê or apospasmata of the World Soul. What does this mean exactly? Not only does this have consequences regarding the relationship between the World Soul and the individual souls, but it also has consequences concerning the nature of both souls. A meros seems to designate a part belonging to a whole. This would mean that the World Soul is divided between the individual souls it is composed of, so that, in a way, the World Soul is composed or constituted of the individual souls. Therefore, the perceptions, reasonings, and will of the World Soul would be the sum or the result of the perceptions, reasonings, and wills of the individual souls. There would be no difference or conflict between them. This, however, hardly seems to be a consequence that the Stoics are willing to endorse. On the other hand, an apospasma seems to be a detached portion of the World Soul. In that case, the individual souls are autonomous parts of the World Soul. This is the most likely version of the relationship between the individual souls and the World soul, and this seems to be the version endorsed, at the end of the history of Stoicism, by Marcus Aurelius when he said that each individual human being’s soul is a ‘fragment’ (ἀπόσπασμα) of himself, which ‘Zeus has given to each man to guard and guide him’ (5.27). However, this version of the relationship appears syncretic, since Marcus described this guardian soul as a daimôn, a ‘god-like entity’, and this appears to be a notion borrowed, among others, from Plato’s Republic by the Stoics. Such a conception of the soul as a god-like entity seems to pertain mainly to the ‘divine’ part of the soul, not to the animal soul which, in the Stoic tradition, appears at birth by the transformation of a physical plant-like breath to an ensouled breath: in this version, the soul does not come from God from the outside, it is nothing else than the transformation of the qualities and properties of the breath, and it is not detached from God and does not supervene from the outside. In that case, the World Soul and the individual souls are simply analogous. Again, this is clearly not what the Stoics have in mind: the relationship between the World Soul and the individual souls is not an analogy, it rather seems to be a whole-parts relationship. Moreover, the Stoics seem to maintain both that the individual souls are generated by a transformation of the inner plant-like breath of the embryo and that it results from an exhalation of the Word Soul. They combine a medical theory of soul-formation with a cosmological, Heraclitean-like view of the formation of the individual souls from the World Soul, in a rather puzzling manner. To put it in a nutshell: the Stoics seem to endorse the cosmological view that the individual souls are parts and emanations of the World Soul, but this seems to conflict with their more medical description of the process of soul-formation, and, in addition, this creates difficulties concerning the kind of relationship between the parts and the whole. In order to address these issues, the present paper will first describe the Stoic conception of the World Soul and then proceed to the different accounts of the formation of the individual souls and their relation to the whole. 

Jean-Baptiste Gourinat, J.-B., 2020, "Apospasma: The World Soul and its individual parts in Stoicism" in World Soul - Anima Mundi: On the Origins and Fortunes of a Fundamental Idea, ed. C. Helmig, 167-87. Berlim/ Boston: Walter de Gruyter.

Saturno e a Melancolia - A Origem das Qualidades Saturninas: Exemplo Textual

 

Klibansky, R., E. Panofsky & F. Saxl, 1979, Saturn and Melancholy,137-8.

The Greeks at first developed the planetary doctrine transmitted to them in classical times in a purely scientific direction. In this, an astrophysical viewpoint seems from the beginning to have been adopted simultaneously with the purely astronomical. 

Epigenes of Byzantium, who is thought to have lived in early Alexandrian times and therefore to have been one of the oldest mediators between Babylon and Hellas, classified Saturn as "cold and windy". The epithet "cold", according both with the planet's great distance from the sun and with the god's great age adhered to Saturn throughout the years and was never questioned. The property of dryness, implied by "windy", on the other hand, came into conflict with the fact that Pythagorean and Orphic texts described the mythical Kronos as just the opposite, namely, as the god of rain or of the sea; and this accounts for the fact that in later, especially in astrological literature, we so often encounter the singular definition "natura frigida et sicca, sed accidentaliter humida", or something of the sort - a contradiction which can only be explained, if at all, with the help of laborious argumentation. 

Whether it was really Posidonius who reduced the elemental qualities of the planets to an orderly system, we would not venture to decide, but it would be safe to say that it was, within the framework of the Stoic system that the doctrine was efldowed with its full meaning. Not till the formation of a cosmological system in which the opposites heat and cold determined the basic structure of the universe, did the qualities hitherto more or less arbitrarily tributed to the stars reveal a general and universally applicable law of nature, valid for both heavenly and earthly things and therefore establishing for the first time a rationally comprehensible connexion between the one set and the other. To Saturn, which was cold because of its distance from the sun (whether the Stoics thought it moist or dry we do not know), everything cold on earth was first related and finally subordinated ; and it is clear that this embodying of planetary qualities in a universal framework of natural laws must have brought the basic tenet of astrology, namely, the dependence of all earthly things and events upon the "influence" of the heavenly bodies, considerably nearer to Greek thought. 

Klibansky, R., E. Panofsky & F. Saxl, 1979, Saturn and Melancholy. Nendeln/ Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint.