Platonic Forms, Ideas, and Archetypes
Ancient Wisdom for a Post-Material Paradigm? The Western Perspective.
The excessive emphasis our society lays on strictly linear rationalistic and materialistic thinking has literally led to a crippling of our innate powers of intuition. We look at reality as an object, a dead machine, and life as a ‘fortuitous coincidence’ that supposedly emerged only due to processes of natural selection and random mutations, in a meaningless and purposeless universe. Intuitive thinking, subliminal perception, or spiritual insight are relegated to a past made of emotional superstitions or, at best, to poetry. Only what the human reason and the analytic mind can understand in terms of logic, mathematics, and empiric evidence is accepted. Everything else that emerges from other cognitive abilities is a mirage, wishful thinking, a chimera.
Well, I admit I have exaggerated a bit. Fortunately, not everyone would agree with this worldview, even many scientists would not. Nevertheless, this is a rationalistic and materialistic view of life and ourselves that is still deeply rooted in our culture and conditions our choices at all levels.
Science was born out of the realization that our senses betray us. For example, it looks like the Sun orbits the Earth, but this is, of course, an illusion of the senses. That’s how the Copernican revolution came about and that gave the forthcoming Galilean and Newtonian science its final kick. However, there is still an illusion that the human species needs to overcome: Beyond the illusions of the senses we need to overcome the illusions of the mind. That mind that takes the superficial appearances of reality as they are, as the ultimate truth or, what is called more diplomatically, an ‘objective truth.’ Not only the senses can betray us, but a physical mind excessively focused on the materiality of things can delude us as well. This is a realization that still has not established itself in contemporary scientific, academic, and, to a lesser degree, but still strongly present, in philosophical thought. On top of that what dominates us subconsciously is the implicit assumption that only a science based on an analytic and rational mind can lead us to ultimate truths. If you think about it, this is a terribly anthropocentric assumption. Paradoxically precisely that mindset that the scientific revolution was supposed to overcome. So, how can we transition from this analytic and physicalist cage toward a less superficial vision of reality that gives intuition the ability to ‘see’ beyond appearances raising us to a more subtle discernment?
There are many approaches. But one way could be that of recollecting what good old philosophers and spiritual figures of the past had to tell us about the question of whether behind the appearances stands another reality. Are all the objects and phenomena we observe in that natural world just what they appear to our senses and mind? Or stand those appearances for something that is beyond them? I believe that pondering about these things is not just a sterile intellectual practice, but is an exercise that may help us to recover different ways of seeing reality and even Nature1 that remains very actual and might soon be reconsidered.
In this post, I will describe the Western approach first. The next post will focus on a similar philosophical line in the Eastern tradition.
Ideas, Forms, and Archetypes in Western Culture
Around the 3rd century BC, Plato, inspired by the Pythagoreans who posited that intelligible but not tangible structures, such as numbers, give objects their distinctive characters, developed his theory of Platonic Forms or Ideas (‘eidos’) as a philosophical concept to address questions about the relationship between the physical world and the world of ideas. The Platonic term ‘eidos’ is a Greek term (εἶδος) meaning ‘that which is seen,’ ‘visible form,’ ‘appearance,’ or ‘image,’ and for Plato, it meant an intelligible but not tangible realm of eternal ‘forms,’ ‘essences,’ or ‘types’ beyond the phenomenal appearances. These forms determine our perceptions of the phenomenal realm and the distinctive character of objects.2
Plato posited that pure mental forms, as abstract, non-material, and eternal entities, exist independently of our minds and the physical world, representing something perfect and unchanging as the true nature of things. It is about ‘essences’ that stand beyond the sensible world and yet give the world its form and meaning. For example, something has a specific form and beauty because it participates in the perfect form and beauty of something beyond itself, representing and standing for it. The physical world is a realm of imperfect copies or imitations of these perfect and changeless mental entities, while these copies are characterized by change, imperfection, and variability. Plato’s theory of Forms submits that there is a realm of Forms that exists beyond the material world, serving as the blueprints or ideal models–what would later be called 'universals'–including mathematical and geometrical ideas for everything we encounter in the physical world. Another example: According to Plato the perfect, unchanging, and immaterial Form of the circle exists in this realm of Forms. Any circle we encounter in the physical world is merely an imperfect copy or approximation of this perfect Form. In general, all physical objects derive their qualities and characteristics from the corresponding Forms in this world of ideas. Plato believed that knowledge is a form of recollection or remembering of our souls of the Forms. Through philosophical inquiry and dialectical reasoning, individuals could recollect this knowledge and come to understand the true nature of reality.
Plato's archetypal hypothesis had a significant influence on the history of philosophy.
Aristotle, a student of Plato, proposed a less radical thesis that reflected his empirical approach to the study of Nature. He believed that universals exist, but they exist in the individual things themselves rather than in a separate realm. This view is often referred to as ‘hylomorphism,’ where form and matter are inseparable. Aristotle’s concept of hylomorphism conceives every object as composed of two essential components: A material essence we call matter or substance (‘hyle’), and an immaterial form (‘morphe’). It is a metaphysical theory of substance that sees form as an essence giving every material object and living body its organization, structure, properties, and identity–that is, the ‘whatness’ and essence of a thing. This distinction implies that matter is brought into existence only if the form is already present and active in it as a causative principle. Hylomorphism is also closely related to Aristotle’s idea that potentiality exists for the sake of actuality. Similarly, matter exists for the sake of receiving its form. Matter represents the potentiality of an object, while form represents its actuality activating its potency. A potentiality that has a dynamic character determining the change from form to form by a gradual metamorphosis that contains in itself an indwelling impulse and telos. Something that highlights Aristoteles’s well-known teleological worldview.
Much later, in medieval scholastic philosophy, the ‘problem of universals’ returned to be one focus of philosophical speculation.
In the 13th century, Aquinas' Thomistic interpretation took up Aristotle’s hylomorphism with the idea that form and matter are two distinct categories. Matter cannot be without form, but form can preexist matter. It is form that causes matter to be. There are ‘substantial forms’ that determine the essential and immutable properties of a material object, and ‘accidental forms’ determining mutable non-essential properties. Moved by this idea, he postulated that the human soul is a transcendent substantial form, while the body reflects it as a material embodiment. This reflects Aquinas’ existentialism, which maintains that all things have transcendental properties of being: At the base of everything is the ‘being’ of things. This ‘being’ is a principle of and in things that are made of a ‘quiddity’ (‘whatness’) – that is, the essence, form, or nature of things. And, in line with the Aristotelian doctrine, all things have final causes, a purpose, and an aim.
Around the same time, the medieval scholastic philosopher Duns Scotus introduced the concept of ‘haecceity,’ which stands for the inherent uniqueness or individuality with its specific and irreducible characteristics that define an entity with its essential qualities that make it a distinct individual, separate from all other things. In short, for its ‘thisness’ (‘haec’ meaning ‘this’). 3
With the advent of German idealism, which emerged in the late 18th and early 19th centuries with philosophers like Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Hegel, a movement began that emphasized the importance of ideas or concepts in understanding reality.
Kant distinguished between a priori categories of knowledge and forms independent of sensory experiences and posteriori categories that depend on perceptions of our sensorial apparatus. A distinction reframed in the noumenon vs. phenomenon dichotomy–that is, the celebrated ‘thing-in-itself’ vs. its phenomenal appearance. A very different notion than Plato’s perfect Ideas and Forms because Kant’s noumenon emphasizes the limits of human knowledge remaining agnostic about its true essence, whereas Plato posits a ‘hyperuranion’ representing a world beyond the sensory world where timeless ideas and forms reside. Nonetheless, both point out how a reality must exist that is beyond appearances and our mental conceptualizations.
Inspired by Kant’s transcendental idealism, with various degrees of acceptance or rejection, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Hegel developed a view of Nature as an expression of a ‘World Soul’ or "The World as Will and Representation," and the "Phenomenology of Spirit," as their respective opus magnus were entitled, gave a new impulse to a natural philosophy that distanced itself from a mechanistic, empiricist, and positivistic tradition that had already become mainstream with the Galilean and Newtonian sciences. For some time, the universe returned to be a living entity developing itself according to inherent principles, at least until Darwin published his "The Origin of Species" in 1859.
It is this convergence of Romanticism and science that the archetypal conceptions related to more or less modified forms of Platonism or hylomorphism reemerged in the late 18th century with Goethe who forwarded the concept of the ‘Urpflanze,’ the primal or archetypal plant in his "The Metamorphosis of the Plant." It is the intuitive discernment of a general archetypal form of plants themselves that, in contrast to a Platonic static eidos, he conceived as a dynamic whole not only in space but in time and beyond both. Something he never depicted in a static image but rather a notion of a Gestalt in permanent metamorphosis. On the same lines, he developed a more general natural philosophy based on the concept of the ‘Urphänomen’–the primal or archetypal phenomenon–especially in his theory of colors. The Urpflanze or the primal phenomenon are not something we can understand by logical or inferential thought but must be apprehended by a long series of careful observations of the plant's growth or a variety of natural phenomena. Goethe's archetype is not an unchanging and timeless universal but something inherent in organisms as a holistic ‘time-form,’ a single unified form playing out through time, that shares qualities not immediately perceptible to the senses and the physical mind, but is a manifestation of the same motif embedded within the organism as a dynamic whole. A creative unity in permanent change and creative flux of forms determined by an intentional primal force. It is only by repeated observations of all types in their multiplicity with a disciplined ‘delicate empiricism,’ and thereby capturing the invariances common to all the organisms, that the mind—or, better an intuitive act of cognition that transcends the mind—can apprehend the archetype containing it, thinning the subject-object dichotomy. "There is a delicate empiricism that makes itself utterly identical with the object, thereby becoming true theory. But this enhancement of our mental powers belongs to a highly evolved age" (Goethe 1995, 307).
On similar lines worked Schelling's natural philosophy, who also considered the organism and not mere mechanism to be the driving force of the activities of Nature. He went even further, positing that the will should be understood as the most fundamental constitutive element of reality, and Nature itself as constitutively willing and meaningful (Pitkänen, 2019). In this regard, Schelling answered the objection of whether the sense of unity in life and the purposiveness of natural products dwelling in themselves, seemingly following an ‘Idea,’ is only an arbitrary or necessary conjunction of our concepts.
"Whenever you conjoin things which are separated in space in a single aggregate, you act quite freely; the unity which you bestow on them you transfer to them simply from your thoughts; there is no reason residing in the things themselves which required you to think of them as one. But when you think of each plant as an individual, in which everything concurs together for one purpose, you must seek the reason for that in the thing outside you; you feel yourself constrained in your judgment; you must therefore confess that the unity with which you think is not merely logical (in your thoughts), but real (actually outside you)"[my emphasis] (Schelling [1797] 1988, 32).
In other words, there is unity and purposiveness in Nature and life with a deeper organization that remains ineliminable and can't be brushed aside as a mere illusion or trick of our mind. There is in organisms an a priori archetypal phenomenon. There is an internal relationship of forms that is unthinkable without an archetype which lies at the basis of all its divergences and expressions.
However, both Goethe and Schelling denied any form of teleology or divine causation. They postulated that organisms are not merely passive objects subjected to the environment but apprehended them as participatory, agential, and purposeful synthetic unities in the natural history of a world soul, whose metamorphosis is determined by internal drives.
Finally, when speaking about archetypes one can’t omit Jung’s perspective. Jung's concept of the archetype, as a fundamental, universal symbol and pattern that exists in the collective unconscious, bears some resemblance to Plato’s ideal, unchanging, and transcendent Forms. Both involve the idea of abstract, idealized entities that shape our perceptions and experiences. Jung’s archetypes are not related to mathematical or geometrical entities but to psychological qualities that represent universal, innate, and symbolic patterns or images that reside in the collective unconscious of all humans and that influence our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Just as Plato’s Forms are the ultimate reality and the source of knowledge, Jung’s archetypes of the human psyche and culture are fundamental concepts that shape our understanding of recurring themes, characters, and symbols across different cultures, literature, and art.
So, all this to say what? Is this only abstract philosophical speculation?
I think not.
One must not become a Platonist (I myself see his approach to reality as something questionable and limited), or return to Aristotle positing the Earth at the center of the universe. There is no need to resurrect their theories embracing them as they are. However, the question is whether these diverse worldviews were only philosophical abstract phantasies or were the reflection of a deeper truth that was captured by an intuitive mind? As we shall see in the next post, similar ideas are present in Eastern culture as well. Was this only a coincidence, or a trans-cultural cross-fertilization of which we have lost memory? Or, to put it in Jungian terms, was it, instead, a shared spiritual knowledge in the collective unconscious that inevitably emerges all over the world in different times and different cultures?
I submit that, even though these archetypal and idealist philosophies were mainly a product of the mind, they could and can help us transcend the mind. They can exercise the intuitive mind to detach from the physical mind that believes only in what physical appearances suggest. Something that is badly needed in our present society which is still enslaved by materialistic thinking and materialistic feeling and that has lost its contact with its inner intimate soul.
References
Goethe, J. W. [1798] (1995). Empirical Observation and Science. In Scientific Studies. Edited and translated by Douglas Miller. In Goethe: The Collected Works edited by Victor Lange, Eric Blackall, and Cyrus Hamlin, vol. 12. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 24-25.
Kastner, R. E. (2023). Quantum Haecceity. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A.381:20220106.20220106 http://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2022.0106
Pitkänen, O.P. (2019). Schelling, esotericism and the meaning of life. Human Affairs, 29(4), 497-504. doi: 10.1515/humaff-2019-0045
Schelling, F. W. J. [1797] (1988). Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature as Introduction to the Study of This Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
What is missing here is the worldview of indigenous cultures. I apologize for this omission but it is not a subject I feel to have sufficient expertise. Nonetheless, that might be worth researching for a future post.
In modern terminology, we could say that Plato’s worldview is archetypal. The archetype comes from the Greek ‘archétypos,’ (ἄρχω (árkhō), and means ‘to begin,’ ‘to start,’ while τύπος (túpos) means ‘pattern,’ ‘sort,’ or ‘type’) and refers to an ‘original pattern from which copies are made.’ In metaphysics, it represents a first transcendent or universal principle that affects and structures the world of human experience on different levels.
This might sound like a play of words but it has been recently used to explain the weird fact that according to modern quantum theory, electrons are perfectly indistinguishable particles. How can we perceive it then as separate entities? Because of its haecceity! (Kastner, 2003)