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race, class, or gender, it was a short step to the view that each person owns himor
herself. All humans share equally in the world-governing reason. Thus, all share
equally in the responsibilities of membership in the universal human community,
especially in the responsibility of attuning one’s life and character to the logos,
serenely indifferent to the vagaries of external events. The idea of self-possession is
thus linked to that of responsibility for oneself, which is linked to responsibility to the
human community, all of which are based on the individual’s psychological
relationship to him- or herself.
Chrysippus, in what is thought to be the first use
ever
of the word consciousness ,
wrote that every animal appropriates (
oikeiosis ) not only “its own constitution,”
but “its consciousness” of its own constitution. In making animals, he wrote,
nature ensures that each one “appropriates” itself “to itself” so that it will behave
in self-interested ways, that is, will reject things that hurt it and pursue things that
help it:
22
Later, Roman Stoics elaborated this view. Seneca (4 b.c.e. -65 c.e. ), for
instance, wrote that every animal instinctively appropriates its own body: “Nature
cares for its own products, and because the safest protection is the closest, each
product of nature has been entrusted to itself ”;
23
and Hierocles (fl. 100 c.e. ) wrote
that “as soon as an animal is born, it perceives itself” so that henceforth it can “be
pleased with itself,” for “an animal, having got its first conception of itself is at
once appropriated to itself and its own constitution.”
24
Hierocles then went on to
suggest that “each one of us is, as it were, entirely encompassed by many circles,
some smaller, others larger.” In the “first and closest” of these circles, “the indi-
vidual has drawn as though around a center, his own mind.” This first circle also
“encloses the body and anything taken for the sake of the body; for it is a circle of
virtually minimal radius, and almost touches the center itself.” The second circle,
“further removed from the center, but enclosing the first circle” includes “par-
ents, siblings, wife, and children.” The
“outermost and largest circle” encom-
passes “the whole human race.”
25
Explicitly accounting for the psychological construction of the self was not a
central, high-visibility concern during the classical period, or even during the
Middle Ages. Nevertheless, it would emerge again, at the end of the seventeenth
century, as one of John Locke’s most important preoccupations, and again toward
the end of the nineteenth century, in the thought of William James. Chrysippus,
it should be noted, anticipated an idea that would be central to Locke’s view,
namely that humans are both “lumps of matter” and also “persons” and that
their identities as lumps of matter may be determined on a different basis than
their identities as persons.
In Chrysippus’s view, whereas any change may make one a different lump
of matter, it does not thereby make one a different person. Instead, he held the