Soul-body hylomorphism stands as one of the most generative and contested frameworks within the depth-psychology corpus. Originating in Aristotle’s De Anima — where soul (psyche) is defined as the first actuality of a natural body having life potentially within it, making soul and body inseparable as form and matter — the doctrine reverberates across millennia of psychological and philosophical speculation. Aristotle’s formulation displaces both Platonic dualism and materialist reductionism, insisting that soul is neither an immaterial prisoner of the body nor identical with bodily substance, but the organizing principle of organic life itself. Plotinus complicates this inheritance substantially: accepting the soul-as-form language while ultimately arguing for the soul’s transcendence and incorporeality, using the hylomorphic analogy as a foil rather than a foundation. Simondon challenges the schema at a deeper level, proposing that the soul-body problem is an artifact of imposing hylomorphic categories upon a being whose reality precedes and exceeds such polarization. Thompson’s phenomenological biology retrieves the Aristotelian vision against Cartesian bifurcation, reading hylomorphism as anticipating enactivist accounts of mind and life. Hillman, characteristically, dissolves the spatial literalism embedded in soul-body location questions, redirecting attention to imaginal interiority. The term thus anchors debates about psycho-physical unity, the seat of perception and affect, the possibility of soul-survival, and the ontological status of psychological phenomena throughout the library.
soul must be a substance in the sense of the form of a natural body having life potentially within it. But substance is actuality, and thus soul is the actuality of a body as above characterized.
This passage delivers Aristotle’s canonical hylomorphic definition of soul as the first actuality of an organized natural body, the locus classicus of the entire soul-body hylomorphism doctrine.
, On the Soul (De Anima), -350thesis
soul would not be a body. For the body, far from being one of the things said of a subject, stands rather itself as subject and is matter. It must then be the case that soul is substance as the form of a natural body which potentially has life.
Aristotle’s De Anima translation reinforces the hylomorphic formula by distinguishing soul as form from body as material subject, precluding any identification of soul with corporeal substance.
, De Anima (On the Soul), -350thesis
soul is not an immaterial substance, but in the broadest sense it is the capacity of the organism to be active in various ways… the soul is logically inseparable from the body.
Thompson recuperates Aristotelian hylomorphism against Cartesian dualism, reading the soul-body relation as one of logical inseparability anticipating contemporary enactivist and phenomenological accounts of mind-in-life.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
The impossibility of reaching a clear relation of the soul and the body merely expresses the being’s resistance to the imposition of the hylomorphic schema; the substantialized terms of soul and body can be nothing but artifacts.
Simondon mounts a fundamental critique of hylomorphism, arguing that ‘soul’ and ‘body’ are reductive artifacts produced by forcing the schema onto a being whose pre-individual reality exceeds any form-matter polarity.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020thesis
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 tests the hylomorphic analogy — soul as ideal-form in matter — only to argue that soul’s self-existent essence makes it a using principle transcendent to the body rather than constitutively bound to it.
, The Six Enneads, 270thesis
it is not the conjoint of body and idea that constitutes soul… An Entelechy is not a thing of parts; how then could it be present partwise in the partible body?
Plotinus argues against the Aristotelian entelechy formulation, insisting that soul’s substantial existence is independent of its function as form to body and persists through metasomatosis.
, The Six Enneads, 270thesis
Plato therefore is wise when, in treating of the All, he puts the body in its soul, and not its soul in the body… certain powers, that is, with which body has no concern.
Plotinus inverts the hylomorphic containment relation, placing body within soul rather than soul within body, reserving certain soul-powers from any bodily participation whatsoever.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
life must be brought upon the stage by some directing principle external and transcendent to all that is corporeal. In fact, body itself could not exist in
Plotinus argues that neither matter nor body in any mode can generate life of itself, requiring a transcendent directing principle — a position that structurally challenges the immanentism of Aristotelian hylomorphism.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
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.
Hillman reframes the hylomorphic question of soul’s location in body as an imaginal rather than spatial problem, dissolving the literal containment model while retaining the language of inherence.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting
body cannot traverse anything as a whole traversing a whole. But soul does this. It is therefore incorporeal.
Plotinus deploys an argument from extensionless pervasion to establish the soul’s incorporeality, directly contesting any hylomorphic reading that would assign soul the spatial properties of bodily form.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
the hylomorphic schema perhaps could not be constituted… What the hylomorphic schema primarily reflects is a socialized representation of labor and an equally socialized representation of the individual living being.
Simondon historicizes the hylomorphic schema, tracing its origin to social representations of labor rather than to metaphysical necessity, thereby undermining its claim to describe the soul-body relation objectively.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting
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 inquiry into affect-location by systematically canvassing the possible modes of soul-body composition, framing the hylomorphic problem through the question of where psychic affections are properly seated.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
body and soul never fuse into one, however closely they may be bound up with each other… By its union with the body the soul can be made unclean.
Rohde traces the Platonic-Orphic tradition in which soul and body coexist without genuine hylomorphic unity, remaining ontologically distinct even in intimate union, with body exerting a corrupting influence on soul.
, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, 1894supporting
the doctrine of soul subscribed to by Gorgias himself in the Helen… stressed a productive, therapeutic analogy between soul and body such that psyche-and thus bodily behavior, social character, and even health-could be treated by an external skill or craft.
Claus documents a pre-Platonic psychosomatic tradition in which soul and body are therapeutically analogous rather than hylomorphically unified, representing a practical rival to the Aristotelian formal account.
, Toward the Soul: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Psyche before Plato, 1981supporting
if that phase which becomes divisible in body holds indivisibility by communication from the superior power, then this one same thing may be at once indivisible and divisible; it will be, as it were, a blend.
Plotinus entertains a mediating position in which the soul-in-body participates in both divisibility and indivisibility, approaching a quasi-hylomorphic blend while maintaining the soul’s ultimate transcendence.
, The Six Enneads, 270aside
Cosmogony apart, there is a general similarity to Aristotle’s form and matter. But the principles are distinctively Stoic, not least because they introduce an all-pervasive divine causal agent immanent in matter.
The Stoic physics discussed here parallels Aristotelian hylomorphism in positing form and matter principles but radically transforms it by making the formal principle a corporeal, immanent divine agent, dissolving strict soul-body dualism.
, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987aside