Throughout Aristotle’s De Anima, a theoretical relationship between soul and body is gradually developed. In this paper, I will explain how Aristotle characterizes this relationship, as well as the compatibility of his view with the concept of the separability of soul. In doing so, it is also necessary to adequately describe Aristotle’s definition of soul, which evolves throughout the chapters.
In book one of De Anima, Aristotle offers a general account of the soul, suggesting that without the body, the soul is unable to act or be affected. He maintains that affections of the soul (i.e. emotion, gentleness, fear, pity, confidence, joy, loving, and hating), both affect the body and seem to require a body – “The affections of the soul are, insofar as they are affections of the soul, inseparable from the natural matter of animals [i.e. bodies]” (403b). Moreover, Aristotle conveys that it would be false to attribute motions, such as conditions in which we feel “moved” in a certain way (i.e. anger, pain, enjoyment), exclusively to the capacities of the soul. He claims that it would be wrong to say that the soul is angry, for instance, in that saying this would be like “saying that the soul weaves or builds houses” (408b). It is necessary, then, to attribute motion and the changes which follow from motion to the broader “human being,” rather than the soul. In other words, the human being is affected by motions, and does so by the soul. Motion, according to Aristotle, can either begin from the soul or reach as far as the soul, but motion is not exclusively contained within the soul nor is exclusively an action of the soul. For instance, Aristotle claims that perception is one of those things which “reaches as far as the soul,” while recollection “begins from the soul and extends itself outward” to the motions of the sense-organs within the body (408b). Both perception and recollection, then, ultimately rely on the sense-organs of the body, but also affect and are affected by the soul. It seems evident from this account that Aristotle views the soul and the body as two aspects of a unified thing, in that they work together (that is, they rely on the presence of one another) in order to create and sustain motion. This relationship is further examined within books two and three of De Anima.

Aristotle, in Book two, introduces the concepts of actuality and potentiality in terms of clarifying a soul-body relationship. Matter is the potentiality to be a determinate thing, given the addition of form. Form, meanwhile, is actuality, which is defined as “the state of knowing or the activity of attending to what one knows” (412a). Given this addition, a natural (living) body can be created – a compound of form and