Body Soul

the soul is logically inseparable from the body. Precisely in the way it is inconsistent to suppose that the act of seeing can exist without the functioning of the eye… so it is inconsistent to suppose that the soul—the vital capacities of the body—can exist without a living body

Thompson distills Aristotle’s hylomorphism into a rigorous logical proposition: soul and body are co-constitutive, neither capable of coherent existence without the other.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis

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soul is substance as the form of a natural body which potentially has life, and since this substance is actuality, soul will be the actuality of such a body.

Aristotle establishes the foundational hylomorphic account: soul is neither separable substance nor mere body but the first actuality that makes a body living.

Aristotle, De Anima (On the Soul), -350thesis

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Plato therefore is wise when, in treating of the All, he puts the body in its soul, and not its soul in the body, and says that, while there is a region of that soul which contains body, there is another region to which body does not enter.

Plotinus inverts the common intuition, arguing that soul contains and exceeds body rather than being housed within it, preserving soul’s trans-corporeal reach.

Plotinus, The Six Enneads, 270thesis

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body and soul never fuse into one, however closely they may be bound up with each other. And yet the body and its impulses have the power to influence profoundly the immortal being that dwells within it.

Rohde articulates the Platonic-Pythagorean position that body and soul remain ontologically distinct even in union, with the body capable of corrupting the soul through its passions.

Rohde, Erwin, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, 1894thesis

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The sense of ‘in-ness’ refers neither to location nor to physical containment. It is not a spatial idea, but an imaginal metaphor for the soul’s nonvisible and nonliteral inherence, the imaginal psychic quality within all events.

Hillman dissolves the ancient problem of soul’s bodily location by reframing ‘in-ness’ as an imaginal rather than spatial category, freeing soul from anatomical literalism.

Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975thesis

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the soul forms the body, yet it is itself without body and therefore it cannot be located in an organ, a cell, or a gene, any more than the form of the sock can be located in the wool.

Hillman, via Aristotle, insists on soul’s incorporeality: as form, soul cannot be identified with any material substrate, rendering all anatomical localizations category errors.

Hillman, James, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999thesis

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When we relate to our bodies as having soul, we attend to their beauty, their poetry and their expressiveness. Our very habit of treating the body as a machine… forces its poetry underground, so that we experience the body as an instrument and see its poetics only in illness.

Moore argues that soul-care requires attending to the body as an imaginal, expressive entity rather than a mechanical system, locating pathology in the desouling of somatic experience.

Moore, Thomas, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992thesis

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Jung holds body and consciousness together as both being soul manifestations. The body that soul creates, as Jung demonstrates through uncovering the tradition in this area, is the whole cosmos in microcosmic form.

Sardello, reading Jung, proposes that body is a soul-creation rather than soul’s container—a microcosmic expression of the world soul made visible through individual human form.

Sardello, Robert, Facing the World with Soul: The Reimagination of Modern Life, 1992thesis

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That something is soul, ie connecting link between mind and body. Soul, however, is not simply a linking factor… It unites spirit and matter in its own way. In adapting itself to both, in its Janus character, soul draws unique qualities from mind and from body.

Moore, drawing on Ficino, presents soul as a Janus-faced mediator between mind and body that generates its own distinctive mode of expression—images, dreams, and stories—rather than merely transmitting between poles.

Moore, Thomas, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1990thesis

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That something is soul, ie connecting link between mind and body. Soul, however, is not simply a linking factor, a way of bringing mind and body together. It unites spirit and matter in its own way.

An earlier edition of Moore’s formulation: soul as Ficinian mediator between mind and body that exceeds mere linkage by generating its own imaginal idiom.

Moore, Thomas, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1982supporting

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The free soul, therefore, is always active outside the body; it is not bound to it like the body souls… it is impossible for the free soul to continue its worldly existence when the body is dead.

Bremmer distinguishes the ‘free soul’—active only when the body is passive or dead—from ‘body souls’ that animate waking life, mapping an archaic Greek dualism within the soul concept itself.

Jan N. Bremmer, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul, 1983thesis

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the body when asleep has no perception; but the soul when awake has cognizance of all things—sees what is visible, hears what is audible, walks, touches, feels pain, ponders. In a word, all the functions of body and soul are performed by the soul during sleep.

Hippocrates, as cited by Bremmer, illustrates the early Greek free-soul doctrine: during bodily sleep the soul assumes total governance, performing all somatic and cognitive functions autonomously.

Jan N. Bremmer, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul, 1983supporting

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Is it the power of the body in its many varied parts to create a polycentric field for the soul? Hillman and Sardello suggest that it is the function of the body to give us emotions and images proper to its highly articulated organs.

Moore relays Hillman’s and Sardello’s shared conviction that the body’s anatomical complexity functions as a polycentric imaginal field through which soul differentiates its emotional and symbolic life.

Moore, Thomas, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992supporting

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Let us then suppose Soul to be in body as Ideal-Form in Matter. Now if the Soul is an essence, a self-existent, it can be present only as separable form and will therefore all the more decidedly be the Using-Principle.

Plotinus explores the analogy of soul-in-body as ideal form in matter, arguing that as self-existent essence soul must be the unaffected ‘using-principle’ that employs the body without being altered by it.

Plotinus, The Six Enneads, 270supporting

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Pleasure and distress, fear and courage, desire and aversion, where have these affections and experiences their seat? Clearly, either in the Soul alone, or in the Soul as employing the body, or in some third entity deriving from both.

Plotinus opens the Enneads with the central psychosomatic question: whether affections belong to soul alone, to soul-body conjunction, or to a tertium quid—establishing the architectonic problem of body-soul interaction.

Plotinus, The Six Enneads, 270supporting

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In the early life of a person, during childhood, all the powers of the soul are bound up in bodily development; they make the body. Later, during adolescence, the soul forces go into the development of the ego.

Sardello offers a developmental account in which soul-forces progressively differentiate from their initial investment in bodily formation, suggesting an ontogenetic trajectory from somatic to ego to world soul.

Sardello, Robert, Facing the World with Soul: The Reimagination of Modern Life, 1992supporting

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in our culture, there is a failure of imagination. We confuse spiritual or soul food with actual material food. As a result, the soul is left starving and the body is abandoned.

Woodman diagnoses a cultural collapse of the soul-body distinction, where the failure to feed the soul imagistically results in somatic symptoms such as eating disorders.

Woodman, Marion, Conscious Femininity: Interviews With Marion Woodman, 1993supporting

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the soul interacts with the body when it is sick and being cut, and the body with the soul; thus when the soul feels s[hame]… no incorporeal interacts with a body, and no body with an incorporeal, but one body interacts with another body.

The Stoic position, as documented by Long and Sedley, resolves the body-soul interaction problem by rendering soul itself corporeal—a material pneuma—so that genuine causal reciprocity becomes possible.

A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987supporting

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The entry of soul into body takes place under two forms. Firstly, there is the entry—metensomatosis—of a soul present in body by change from one frame to another… Secondly, there is the entry from the wholly bodiless into any kind of body.

Plotinus taxonomizes the modes of ensoulment, distinguishing metempsychotic transfer between bodies from the originary descent of a wholly bodiless soul into its first material habitation.

Plotinus, The Six Enneads, 270supporting

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soul does this. It is therefore incorporeal.

Plotinus derives the incorporeality of soul from its demonstrated capacity to traverse body wholly through itself—an impossibility for any extended, divisible material substance.

Plotinus, The Six Enneads, 270supporting

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Stage 1 starts with the original state of oneness: the world, the body, the soul and the spirit are all identified with one another—there’s no distinction whatsoever. They all go to make up the original entity and don’t yet exist separately.

Edinger maps the coniunctio stages onto a differentiation of body, soul, and spirit from an original undivided unity, treating their progressive separation as the precondition for conscious integration.

Edinger, Edward F., The Mysterium Lectures: A Journey Through C.G. Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis, 1995supporting

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bodily disturbances in the newly incarnated impede thought, although education (paideusis) may help… humours can produce low spirits, rashness, and cowardice, as well as forgetfulness and slowness to learn.

Sorabji documents the ancient tradition—from Plato through the Epicureans—that somatic conditions (humors, climate, wine) directly modulate soul’s psychological states, making body a causal factor in psychic life.

Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000supporting

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the Body-Kind, already fettered within the All-Soul, imprisons all that it grasps. But the Soul of the Universe cannot be in bond to what itself has bound: it is sovereign and therefore immune of the lower things.

Plotinus contrasts the human soul’s entrapment within body with the All-Soul’s sovereign immunity, arguing that embodiment constitutes a secondary bondage within an already circumscribed material principle.

Plotinus, The Six Enneads, 270supporting

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Experience and suffering are terms long associated with soul. ‘Soul’ cannot be accurately defined, nor is it respectable in scientific discussion as scientific discussion is now understood.

Hillman marks soul as an essentially contestable term resistant to scientific operationalization, insisting its meaning emerges from experiential and suffering contexts rather than empirical definition.

Hillman, James, Suicide and the Soul, 1964aside

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As man comes naked out of his mother’s womb, so the soul comes naked out of the body. One soul comes out pure and luminous; another, blemished by faults; a third, black with its many sins.

The Philokalia presents a moral-eschatological account of the soul’s departure from the body, where somatic life functions as a moral proving ground whose traces the soul carries into the afterlife.

Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995aside

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