Forms (Eidos)

The eidē or ideai are, in Plato, the intelligible realities of which sensible things are imperfect participations. In the Phaedo, Republic, Phaedrus, Timaeus, and [[plato-meno|Meno]] the forms are the objects of the soul’s pre-incarnate knowing; learning in this life is recollection of what the soul beheld before its descent. In Plotinus and the Platonic tradition the forms become the contents of Nous, the divine intellect whose contemplation by Psychē sustains the cosmos.

The Platonic forms are one of the two classical roots of Jung’s archetype concept — the other being the instinctual substrate of the psyche. Jung writes of the archetype per se as formal, not imagistic: the crystalline axial structure on which any particular image precipitates. The philological continuity is not decorative. Without Plato’s eidos, the Jungian archetype has no philosophical grammar.

Relationships

• plato
• anamnesis
• archetype
• plotinus