Platonic Synthesis

the distinction between the ancient philosophical (Platonic) and the modern psychological (earlier Jungian) conceptions of archetypes becomes especially relevant… Integrating these two views (much as Jung began to do in his final years under the influence of synchronicities), contemporary astrology suggests

Tarnas identifies the Platonic Synthesis as the explicit project of uniting cosmic-ontological Platonic archetypes with psychologically-interior Jungian archetypes, a move he argues contemporary archetypal astrology performs.

Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006thesis

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archetypes 'are cosmic perspectives in which the soul participates. They are the lords of its realms of being, the patterns for its mimesis. The soul cannot be, except in one of their patterns.'

By citing Hillman's formulation of archetypes as cosmic rather than merely intrapsychic, Tarnas grounds his archetypal astrology in a Platonic framework that treats the cosmos as the primary locus of archetypal reality.

Richard Tarnas, Prometheus the Awakener: An Essay on the Archetypal Meaning of the Planet Uranus, 1995supporting

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a vast synthesis of Christian faith, Thomist theology, Neoplatonic philosophy, medieval astronomy and astrology, classical epic, and the courtly troubador tradition… the theme of the Platonic-Pythagorean music of the celestial spheres

Tarnas reads Dante's Commedia as a historical exemplar of Platonic Synthesis, where Neoplatonic cosmology, Christian theology, and mystical gnosis are fused into a unified archetypal vision under a Uranus-Neptune conjunction.

Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006supporting

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'what you want is an archetypal Ficinian–Platonic academy'… as an idealism of ideas

Russell documents Hillman's sustained identification with a Ficinian-Platonic tradition, showing how the desire for a living Platonic academy shaped his understanding of archetypal psychology as a synthesis of ancient and modern soul-inquiry.

Russell, Dick, Life and Ideas of James Hillman, 2023supporting

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The deeper foundations of the Platonic philosophy, such as the nature of God, the distinction of the sensible and intellectual, the great original conceptions of time and space, also appear in it.

The Timaeus is identified as the primary source text for the cosmological foundations that later Platonic Synthesis projects must engage, anchoring any synthesis in Plato's own account of the sensible-intelligible distinction.

Plato, Timaeus, -360supporting

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It would be possible to frame a scheme in which all these various elements might have a place. But such a mode of proceeding would be unsatisfactory, because we have no reason to suppose that Plato intended his scattered thoughts to be collected in a system.

Jowett's introduction cautions against over-systematizing the Timaeus, implicitly registering the hermeneutical difficulty facing any Platonic Synthesis that would treat Plato's diverse dialogues as a unified philosophical system.

Plato, Timaeus, -360supporting

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Now comes the great moment. Aristotle's rationality was rational in its reference to something transcendent of rationality, but it has become increasingly strictly rational… against which the transcendence of the perennial philosophy comes as a threat.

Campbell's contrast between Aristotelian rationalism and the perennial philosophy implicitly frames the stakes of any Platonic Synthesis: the recovery of transcendence against a tradition that has progressively evacuated it.

Campbell, Joseph, Transformations of Myth Through Time, 1990aside

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These normal complexes that everyone has are what Jung called archetypes. The archetypes are more or less the inborn normal complexes that we all have.

Von Franz's account of Jungian archetypes as inborn psychic complexes marks precisely the interiorizing move that Platonic Synthesis seeks to reverse by restoring the ontological, cosmic dimension of the archetype.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014aside

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