Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature: A Cosmopolitan Anthropology from Roman Syria by David Lloyd Dusenbury;

Author:David Lloyd Dusenbury; [Dusenbury, David Lloyd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192598981
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2021-07-09T00:00:00+00:00

4

The Organization of Powers

On Human Nature 6–28

En Route from Substance to Act

The argument of this chapter is that the physiological and psychological chapters of Nemesius’ text (Hum. Nat. 6–28), in which the medical anthropology of the Hippocratic–Galenic tradition comes to the fore, are not random memoranda on the human organism or disjecta membra extracted from a range of late-antique sources. On the contrary, they mark a decisive phase in the argument of Nemesius’ text. The human is defined by Nemesius as the only living being which is at once ruler and ruled. Because of this, the human—composed of body and soul—is for him an image of the world, or a ‘little world’.1 And in Hum. Nat. 6–28, this image of humankind is given an anatomical proof.2

It would be highly misleading to imply that the significance of Nemesius’ physiological and psychological chapters had simply gone unnoticed in the literature. Sensitive treatments of these chapters have been written in book-length studies by Bolesław Domanski, Werner Jaeger, and Alberto Siclari,3 and more recently, in articles by Armelle Debru and Susan Wessel.4 The chapters’ thematic unity has been sketched by Nemesius’ most recent editors in the introduction to a lavishly annotated translation of On Human Nature.5 Though not inconsistent with that sketch, the reconstruction offered here seeks to make new connections and bring new clarity to this bloc of text. Perhaps most notably, this is the first contribution to highlight Nemesius’ use of governmental terms and images.

To begin, it cannot be denied that the physiological and psychological chapters of On Human Nature seem disjointed. The first question which faces us is, therefore, not which argument Nemesius is advancing in these chapters, but whether he is advancing one at all. After all, Hum. Nat. 6–28 is a bloc of chapters which differ wildly in terms of length—from six lines to six pages in Moreno Morani’s critical edition.6 They proceed, at first glance, haphazardly from the power of imagination (Hum. Nat. 6) to the panoply of sensation (Hum. Nat. 7–11); from intellection and memory (Hum. Nat. 12–13) to the varieties of discursive reason (Hum. Nat. 14); from a pair of excursuses on the soul (Hum. Nat. 15–16) to the desiderative passions (Hum. Nat. 17–18); from the spirited passions (Hum. Nat. 19–21) to a further excursus on the soul (Hum. Nat. 22); from the nutritive power and pulsation (Hum. Nat. 23–4) to the system of generative organs (Hum. Nat. 25); from a final excursus on the soul (Hum. Nat. 26) to voluntary motion and the physiology of the spine (Hum. Nat. 27); before Nemesius concludes with a physiological account of respiration and a peroration on organs qua organs (Hum. Nat. 28).

Some of Nemesius’ commentators can be forgiven for treating this collection of themes more or less as a concatenation of chapters which present no single controlling intuition, much less a sharply defined line of reasoning.7 Nevertheless, there is reason to look for an argument here, because Nemesius himself states clearly—as we will see—that Hum. Nat. 6–28 contain an ‘argument’.

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