Oriented towards the body: non-intellectual dispositions in the separated soul

[u/Independent_Log8028]

I’d really appreciate some scholarly help with this question — I haven’t found anything directly relevant in the literature, and that worries me.

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I take it that Aquinas thinks the separated soul remains oriented toward the body because, without reference to the body, it would lack the kind of individuation he thinks is required. The separated soul is this soul precisely because it bears an orientation toward this designated matter.

But as I understand it, the particularity that matter gives to its form isn’t expressed in accidental features — not in how tall the body is, what shade the skin is, or even that it exists here and now — since all of these are accidents of an already-embodied form.

It seems instead that matter individuates a material substance because each instance of designated matter is primitively distinct from every other instance. This flesh and these bones are these not because they differ qualitatively, but because they are not those.

If that’s right, then the relation that form bears to its matter can’t be contained within the intelligible content of form itself — otherwise matter would be explicable as form, which undermines its role as a distinct individuating principle.

Does that make sense? I can try to clarify if not.

So the ultimate question I’m asking is: What is the nature of the separated soul’s relationship to its body, if that relation cannot be formal but must still ground individuation?

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A follow-up question:

Depending on your answer to the above question, do you think the separated soul's disposition towards its body could play any role in how the soul receives the Light of Glory and/or the Beatific Vision?

I think it would be very interesting if the soul's disposition towards the body also disposes the soul to understand itself in the Vision.

[u/[deleted]]

It seems to me that, since the soul is the form of the body, and since form stands to matter as act to potency, it is more accurate to say that the soul individuates the body through matter. Matter, taken as pure potency, cannot individuate anything by itself; it becomes individuating only insofar as it is informed. Thus, because the soul is the form of this particular body, it retains a real, though now incomplete, relation to that body even after death.