more from this thinker | more from this text
Full Idea
For the Stoics bodily health belongs in the 'indifferent [adiaphoron]' category: it does not matter if one is healthy. And yet, they created a subcategory of the 'preferable indifferent [adiaphoron proegmenon]', under which health falls.
Gist of Idea
Stoics said health is an 'indifferent', but they still considered it preferable
Source
report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Peter E. Pormann - Medical Conceptions of Health pre-Renaissance p.45
Book Ref
Adamson,Peter: 'Health: a history', ed/tr. Adamson,Peter [OUP 2019], p.45
A Reaction
You have to be pretty tough to consider ill-health as an indifferent. The only good may be virtue, but the platonic tradition says virtue is a sort of mental health.
3053 | Pythagoras taught that virtue is harmony, and health, and universal good, and God [Pythagoras, by Diog. Laertius] |
495 | Wisdom creates a healthy passion-free soul [Democritus] |
2129 | Goodness is mental health, badness is mental sickness [Plato] |
5154 | Excess and deficiency are bad for virtue, just as they are for bodily health [Aristotle] |
5268 | Disreputable pleasures are only pleasant to persons with diseased perception [Aristotle] |
5870 | Everything seeks, not a single good, but its own separate good [Aristotle] |
502 | Good breeding in men means having a good character [Democritus (attr)] |
22238 | Stoics said health is an 'indifferent', but they still considered it preferable [Stoic school, by Pormann] |
20861 | The health of the soul is a good blend of beliefs [Stoic school, by Stobaeus] |
22239 | Humans acquired the concept of virtue from an analogy with bodily health and strength [Seneca, by Allen] |
22237 | The Greeks had a single word meaning both 'beautiful' and 'good' [Pormann] |