Dear Aristotle,

A couples of weeks ago, in my Philosophy class, I had to briefly answer to a question taking into account Aristotle's perspectives. The dilemma Mr. Yulo requested to ponder on is

"Can a soul be hurt?"

Taking inspiration from Jill Bolte's stroke of insight, my notes, and a couples of readings, here is how I would answer to Aristotle:

Dear Aristotle,

according to you, everything that exists is a combination of form and matter.
Matter seen as the actual bones, flesh, the body; and form as the soul, the function of a thing. You also say that the movement, the progression is defined by the change of state from potential to actual; where matter decreases leaving space to the growing form, reaching God, which is pure thought, a thought thinking about itself. At this point there is no matter, it is the most actual thing.
While pondering about the question, I think about your piece “On the soul” where you give the example of the eye and the sight. You claim that a blind eye, without sight, is not an eye but for the name. The sight is the form of the matter, the eye, and therefore going back to his equation; a thing with only matter cannot exist, as a thing with only form cannot either. So, soul is not separable from the body, in contrary, it belongs to the body. It is the capacity, not the thing that has the capacity.
With that in mind, we can say that neither form nor matter will ever reach their primal state, for they need each other to exist. This lead to the deduction that in the moment the matter ceases to exist, as in the case of a person’s death, soul cannot exist by itself, and it’s therefore denied to live.
My answer, in conclusion, is that a soul is constantly retained, “hurt” from reaching actuality. And as I write this a question arises for you, Aristotle

"Can a soul then be healed?"

Sincerely,

the Apopotamus

"I'm a Hopeless Dreamer"
- ღĴęNňζ™