In this video, Elias Artista addresses the theme of Platonic Idealism as interpreted by the Neo-Kantian Marburg School. Beginning with Kant and his notion of the “transcendental,” the inquiry shows how Natorp, Cohen, and Cassirer reinterpreted Plato, oscillating between psychologism and pure logic. Central to this reading is Natorp’s idea of “native Idealism.” From the standpoint of the Archilogon, Idealism is not an original doctrine but the outcome of Synthetic Logic in action, understood as a psychic predisposition to spatial and visual thought. The account links the Neo-Kantian tradition to the Archilogon project, preparing the way for the analysis of the celebrated passage of the “Divided Line” in Plato’s Republic.
Archilogon – The key to Synthetic Logic. A project by Elias Artista.
Bibliography
Works Cited
- Paul Natorp, La Dottrina platonica delle Idee – Una introduzione all’Idealismo, Vita e Pensiero, Milan, 2000, p. 5.
- Manfred Kühn, “Interpreting Kant correctly – On the Kant of the Neo-Kantians,” in Neo-Kantianism in Contemporary Philosophy, ed. R. A. Makkreel and S. Luft, Indiana University Press, Bloomington–Indianapolis, 2010, p. 119.
- Giacomo Borbone, Forma e Idea – L’interpretazione di Platone nella Scuola di Marburgo e in Ernst Cassirer, Mimesis, Milan/Udine, 2023, p. 15.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, quoted in Borbone, 2023, pp. 17–18.
Video Transcription
By Idealism we mean that philosophical conception which holds that reality is not exhausted by the material, perceptible, sensible world, but also embraces an “ideal” or “spiritual” dimension non-existent, yet wholly intelligible, that is, accessible to thought. Emerging with Plato, Idealism originally presented itself in a “realist” form. The World of Forms is not, in fact, a mere product of the mind, but a truly objective dimension that shapes Thought and Language.
With Kant, however, in the XVIII century Idealism underwent a radical transformation. In the passage from the transcendent to the transcendental, Idealism shifted its horizon. From a “science of objective Forms”, it became the study of the “conditions of possibility” of thought. Thus Kant enclosed Philosophy in a kind of “objective psychologism”, confining himself to investigating the structural forms of human thought. For, he warns, we cannot know any dimension beyond thought itself, as Plato had maintained. Any hypothesis in this regard, in the absence of shared foundations, would be nothing but the fruit of imagination.
On these premises, the Neo-Kantian philosophers of the Marburg School — Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp and Ernst Cassirer — built their analyses. Natorp, co-founder of the school, in his most famous work, The Platonic Doctrine of Ideas, wrote: “In Plato, Idealism is spontaneous, one might say ‘native’. Arising from Socrates’ genuine discovery of the concept, Idealism emerged and grew with an inner necessity from which no philosophical thought could easily withdraw. At no stage did Idealism harden into scholastic formulae but dwelt, to the last, in the liveliest mobility. Here lies the inexhaustible stimulus, here the immortal didactic value of the study of Plato. To be introduced to Plato is to be educated into Philosophy itself.”
When Natorp writes that in Plato Idealism is spontaneous, “native”, he seems to point to a natural predisposition. Yet it remains unclear whether Idealism arose from Plato as an individual, or whether Idealism, or Philosophy itself, first incarnated in Plato. The question may be posed thus: did Plato invent Idealism as an original philosophical doctrine, or is Idealism the expression of a universal psychic predisposition that surfaced for the first time in him?
To take a clear stance is crucial. If Idealism emerged naturally, then it derives not from an original theory, to which later philosophers adhered by indoctrination or partisan choice, but from a psychic potential inherent in human beings. The thesis we shall sustain here is that Idealism, the very heart of philosophical inquiry, is a theoretical position arising from a universal psychic predisposition to spatial and visual thought. We have named this mode of thinking: Synthetic Logic. Over the course of our journey, we shall attempt to lay the foundations for its formalization, tracing its historical roots to Pythagorean thought.
Our approach to Plato — the perspective that animates the Archilogon project — is detached from any school position, for it proceeds from a “native” Idealism, in Natorp’s phrase. We have devoted ourselves less to Platonism than to our own mode of thought. It was vital for us to understand why the spatial and visual inferential mode, innate to us, had been so brutally marginalized in modern Philosophy, relegated instead to the “esoteric”. In seeking the origins of this “native” idealism of ours, we found crucial support in the interpretation of the Marburg School. Of course, the transcendental premise on which the Neo-Kantians founded their thought is unacceptable to us, for it creates more aporias than it resolves, as we shall see in the chapter on Nous. Yet Natorp’s attention to Forms, which marks, after centuries, a decisive separation of Plato from Aristotle, proved for us illuminating and fertile.
Despite their prejudice against the “transcendence” of Forms, the Neo-Kantians could not dispense with Plato. Manfred Kühn, author of a biography of Kant, writes: “The Kant of Marburg leads to Plato, or rather, is based upon Plato. To understand Kant correctly, therefore, means to situate him within the Platonic tradition.”
Hermann Cohen, co-founder of the School, expressed his approach already in the title of his foundational work of 1866: The Development of the Platonic Doctrine of Ideas According to Psychology. In that work, in deference to modernity, Cohen stripped Plato of his Realism, treating Forms as Concepts, as if Plato were unaware of their difference — though this is made strikingly clear in the dialogue between Socrates and Parmenides, which we shall later examine. Later, Cohen softened his “psychologism” in Platonic Ideas and Mathematics (1878), coming to describe Platonic Ideas as “hypotheses”, yet still confining them within the dimension of Thought.
Paul Natorp came to argue that Plato’s was a pure and objective logic, yet refrained from defining the dimension to which such “logic” might belong. Objectivity, he claimed, derives from a “legality” that somehow transcends both Being and Thought. This “legality” resembles what Hermann Lotze had called “validity”. For Natorp, then, the Idea may be interpreted as “law”, and this represents a crucial advance in the understanding of Plato, for it frees us, after centuries, from Aristotle’s ruinous interpretation of Ideas as “perfect copies of things in the world”.
The orientation of the Marburg School may be summed up in Nietzsche’s well-known judgment: “The doctrine of Ideas is an inestimable preparation for Kantian Idealism.” In sharp contrast, our aim here is to demonstrate that Kant’s Transcendental Idealism is an idealism not fully expressed, hampered by its own mental interpretation of the a priori forms on which his system rests. At the same time, we shall argue, with logical demonstration, that Platonic Realism is not an “immature Kantianism”, but, on the contrary, the only philosophically sustainable position.
The Marburg School began from Neo-Kantian premises, yet Cassirer, it seems to us, attempted — perhaps timidly — the reverse operation from Cohen, namely, to interpret Kant in a metaphysical sense. For Idealism in Cassirer appears “native”, inherent to his logic. Strangely, Cassirer never devoted a monograph to Plato, and yet his philosophy is permeated with a form of Idealism as pure as one can find in modernity, though at times it seems “restrained”. As Giacomo Borbone observes: “Cassirer’s constant references to Plato’s Dialogues, scattered throughout his vast scholarly work, are in no way a mere display of erudition, nor merely an aesthetic ornament.” Indeed so: Cassirer’s references to Plato are not erudite citations, but are — as we would add — expressions of Synthetic Logic alive and in action.
Cassirer is one of the rare philosophers who reasons in a spontaneously and authentically dialectical manner. His thought will help us to untie some of the most difficult theoretical knots. Yet we shall not begin from his Symbolic Forms, still marked by a certain Neo-Kantian caution. We shall begin from Geometry, from the use of the archetypal diagram as an instrument for representing metaphysical Forms.
Many scholars of Plato highlight what seems a secondary aspect: his insistence on vision. Plato often alludes to the “contemplation of the Forms.” To illuminate the role he assigns to vision, the next stage of our journey will therefore begin from one of the densest and most emblematic passages of the Republic: the celebrated account of the Divided Line. To the Principle!
