Philosophical Questions - Archilogon

The confusion stems from the historical tradition, which separated the two paths. In ancient Philosophy, there is no philosophical path that is not, at the same time, esoteric—that is, a path that does not entail an inner transformation on the part of the learner. Ancient Wisdom was guarded by a caste of priests and transmitted after a long journey of initiation. Pythagoras first and then Plato made this practice “secular,” forming study groups independent of the priestly caste: the “Philosophers,” members of the Brotherhood of Wisdom. Modern Philosophy, which does not require the learner to reconfigure their basic logic but provides— in most cases — an almost immediate accessibility, is not, from the Platonic perspective, Episteme (objective truth) but Doxa (subjective opinion). In ancient Philosophy the only originality granted to the philosopher concerned the “method of transmission,” namely the way one tried to make the content of Wisdom understandable to untrained minds, educating minds shaped by the logic of the empirical world to Metaphysics.

In everyday usage, “metaphysical” can refer to a range of things, including imaginative projections or disguised theologies. Here, instead, the term is used in a Pythagorean–Platonic sense: Metaphysics is the study of the Intelligible World, that is, of Forms (Formal Relations) necessary to structure the order of reality. This does not imply “invisible objects”, but structural rules and constraints (analogous, in function, to the rules of a game as opposed to individual matches). Thus the metaphysical domain is “beyond the sensible” because it does not study sense-data; and it is “beyond our representations” in the sense that it is not an arbitrary construction, since the concepts and signs we use to make it explicit and communicable refer to constraints accessible through Structural Deduction within the framework of Synthetic Logic. This is a usage definition of the term within the project; the underlying rationale will be developed throughout the path.

Because Forms are objects which the history of human thought has shown to be irreducible to, and incapable of being homogenised with, those other three kinds of objects. Forms are constraints: they neither exist nor are they perceptible in the manner of Phenomena; they are not Concepts, even though they can be derived and transformed into Concepts; and they can be represented by Signs, understood as references to subsisting objects, without being exhausted by the Signs themselves. Any attempt to translate them entirely into one of these three registers produces distortions, thereby indicating that they belong to a further, necessary level of cognitive experience: a “fourth dimension”, understood, of course, not in an ontological sense, but as the plane that hosts the logical structure of Reality.

It depends on the field investigated by Science. Metaphysical Philosophy does not deal with empirical contents—everything that can be reached through the senses. For this kind of knowledge, Science is the only viable road. Metaphysics, instead, aims to reconstruct the Intelligible World, that is, the logical structure of Reality, made of Forms. Metaphysical Philosophy and Science meet when they try to reconstruct the laws of Theoretical Physics, because they speak the same language: they do not treat phenomena, but pure Forms.

This is neither a personal judgement nor a provocation. The same observation had already been made in antiquity by those who had understood Plato without the mediation of Aristotle, drawing from the very same source from which Plato himself had drawn. Plato does not elaborate an “original” philosophy in the modern sense of the term; rather, he studies and translates the ancient Wisdom transmitted through initiation, via various circles, among which the Pythagorean.

Aristotle, by contrast, was not an initiate and had no direct or privileged relationship with Plato. He merely interprets — and often criticises — what he is able to grasp: both the contents expressed in the Dialogues, and those conveyed through conversations with members of the inner circle of the Academy, such as Speusippus.

Every consciousness that has not been initiated, instructed, or re-educated in the contents of Wisdom tends, by its very nature, to translate into psychological and empirical terms principles that are, in truth, purely logical-metaphysical. Whoever aspires to comprehend the ancient Wisdom and Plato’s Idealism must first reconfigure the structure of the mind itself, passing from the “Logic of the Part” to the “Logic of the Whole”, with the aid of the archetypal diagram. Aristotle’s misunderstanding is therefore the natural limitation of a mind still bound to the domain of experience. The later Academics and Peripatetics — deprived of access to the original source — were unable to grasp Plato’s intention. Thus they transmitted to us an “aristotelianised” Plato, and therefore a distorted one, sincerely believing they were preserving the authentic version.

For a long time it was believed that Aristotle had been Plato’s "favoured disciple", yet it is more probable that within the circle of the Academy he remained an 'acusmaticos'. It should be remembered that no ancient source allows us to determine with certainty what kind of relationship truly existed between Plato and Aristotle.

The earliest testimonies portraying Aristotle as Plato’s “beloved pupil” are of later date and lack direct corroboration. There is no reason to suppose that Plato regarded Aristotle as the continuator of his own philosophy. The two in fact pursue profoundly different aims: Plato investigates transcendent Forms, while Aristotle studies Phenomena.

Neither Speusippus nor Xenocrates — Plato’s immediate successors as heads of the Academy — left us any direct testimony concerning Aristotle. What we know of their relationship derives from later sources, such as Aristoxenus of Tarentum, a defector from the Academy and later a disciple of Aristotle, who alludes to both personal and intellectual tensions between Aristotle and the Platonic Academy.

Later on, Cicero and Plutarch would retrospectively interpret this relationship as that of a master and his brilliant yet unfaithful pupil. The Byzantine Suda perpetuated the same tradition, depicting Aristotle as the gifted student of the Academy who “corrects” his master.

The figure of Aristotle as Plato’s “favoured pupil” is thus a later construction, born of the genealogical needs of historiography rather than of direct evidence. Hellenistic and late-antique commentators — and subsequently modern historiography — idealised that connection in order to trace a line of continuity between two systems which, in reality, stand at opposite poles.

We sometimes forget how strongly the transmission of ancient Philosophy has been conditioned by translations and interpretations, often produced by scholars trained within a predominantly empirical horizon. Yet this process of distortion does not begin in the modern period: already many ancient and late-antique commentators read these texts at a time when the original metaphysical points of reference had been largely lost or obscured, and they reinterpret them in accordance with categories that had by then become quite different. When modernity then takes these commentators as authoritative points of reference, no longer having direct access to the original metaphysical key, the misunderstanding is consolidated and moves still further away from the perspective of the ancient authors themselves. Thus a reader who does not admit the reality of the Intelligible World is led to bend non-empirical concepts in two opposite but equally misleading directions: on the one hand, towards a ‘naturalistic’ paraphrase that reduces everything to Psychology or Cosmology; on the other, towards an abstract, technicist rendering that preserves the words while emptying them of sense, thereby creating the impression that the ancients upheld irrational theses.

In this work I adopt a different hypothesis: certain very ancient concepts, such as 'the One', are conceived within a precise formal structure (an ‘archetypal diagram’ of relations). If this structure is not at least partially reconstructed, the transmission of the content is inevitably distorted.

Within this framework, Philology is necessary but not sufficient. It is a fundamental discipline for establishing the text, controlling the manuscript tradition, and clarifying the lexicon and historical context. However, when the object is not an empirical content but a metaphysical one – bound up with a diagrammatic structure no longer explicitly present in the texts – our chances of recovering the original sense are slim if we restrict ourselves to an examination of the words.

Moreover, one must bear in mind that the words used by the ancient philosophers were polysemous out of communicative necessity: tradition sometimes takes them in a purely literal sense and thereby petrifies their meaning, bequeathing to later interpretations a relationship between Concept and Sign that is already altered.

In our case, the constraint that matters to us is not the individual textual occurrence, but the coherence of the whole: a reconstruction is genuine if it renders the entire system necessary, simple, and structurally unified, and not merely if it is the most literal. For this reason, in the metaphysical domain I do not regard a quotation torn from its logical context as reliable: the Part makes sense only in relation to the Whole.

I call this work of structural reconstruction ‘hermeneutics’: not an arbitrary game of interpretations, but the attempt to retrace, through the texts, the network of logical relations that makes them possible. It is at this level – more than on the plane of mere philology – that, in my view, one can distinguish between a personal projection and a faithful restitution of ancient Metaphysics.

That is intentional. The aim is not an inventory, but a structure. Within the framework of Realist Idealism, the philosopher’s task is not to enumerate every difference, but to reduce them by identifying elements of identity: that is, to pass over the manifold in order to grasp the Form in which each phenomenon participates. To make a Form visible, one must necessarily bracket many particular determinations which, within the structure, are merely accessory.

Pure speculation is, by its nature, a movement of reduction to what is essential, ascending towards unity. This inevitably entails a loss of information—precisely what analysis reproaches. Yet one cannot criticise a synthetic method by the very criteria of the analytic method. They are two logics that proceed in opposite directions, in a dialectical sense: the analytic tends towards conceptual proliferation; the synthetic towards reduction.