Archetype

The term archetype or archetypus (from the ancient Greek ἀρχέτυπον archétypon, German 'Urbild, Original') refers in philosophical usage first to Plato and his concept of the Idea, who means by it the metaphysical entity in which sensually perceptible things participate. According to Plato, the idea, or abstract metaphysical figure, is the true thing, since it alone is eternal, identical, and perfect. Such general archetypes can be found today, for example, in the representations of biology books as a primordial plant (Goethe) as a uniform structural plan or type of all flowering plants with the components root, stem, leaves and flower or as the basic pattern of an insect, a vertebrate, etc. This is an ideal pattern of a plant. This is an ideal-typical image of all insects, all vertebrates, etc., i.e. an archetype in each case. Living beings (plants or animals) with the same blueprint are also called homologous. Each blueprint represents a formal, anatomically or histologically verifiable criterion, but is also bound to a certain specific performance plan.

Archetypes are thus regarded as noumenon (mind thing) as opposed to phainomenon (sense thing). Archetypes are generally non-descriptive, non-empirical and therefore belong more to intuitive thinking.

Archetype was introduced into philosophy as a term by René Descartes and John Locke. The archetypes are the basis for ideas.

For Locke, archetypes also exist outside the cognizing subject (in: An Essay on the Human Mind). The subjective idealist George Berkeley, on the other hand, does not recognize the archetype outside the cognizing subject, since one cannot prove that it also exists. The question is whether we perceive the world as it is, or only as we construct it to ourselves.

Immanuel Kant used the term archetype in connection with "natura archetypa". He used it to refer to the archetypal nature that man recognizes only in reason and whose counterpart in the world of the senses is the imitated (natura ectypa) (in: Critique of Practical Reason). - In the Critique of Pure Reason, the term is used in the sense of divine reason (intellectus archetypus) in contrast to human reason (intellectus ectypus). By the divine view and by the self-understanding of God all objects are given by themselves (KrV B 68, 72, 135, 138 f., 145, 159, 723). Human reason (intellectus ectypus) was only discursive (conceptual), not contemplative (Prolegomena § 57). "The ideal [of pure reason] is to it [reason] the archetype (prototypon) of all things, which altogether as defective copies (ectypa) therefore take the material to their possibility [...] (B 606)."

Friedrich Nietzsche took into account the developmental aspect of archetypal images in dreams with the words: "In sleep and dreams we go through the whole pensum of earlier humanity". (Nietzsche)

Henri Bergson considered the archetypes as "les éternels incréés" (the eternally uncreated).