Editing Mircea Eliade (section)

====Platonism and "primitive ontology"====
According to Eliade, traditional man feels that things "acquire their reality, their identity, only to the extent of their participation in a transcendent reality".<ref name="Eliade, p.5">Eliade, ''The Myth of the Eternal Return'', p. 5</ref> To traditional man, the profane world is "meaningless", and a thing rises out of the profane world only by conforming to an ideal, mythical model.<ref name="Eliade, p.34">Eliade, ''The Myth of the Eternal Return'', p. 34</ref>

Eliade describes this view of reality as a fundamental part of "primitive [[ontology]]" (the study of "existence" or "reality").<ref name="Eliade, p.34"/> Here he sees a similarity with the philosophy of [[Plato]], who believed that physical phenomena are pale and transient imitations of eternal models or "Forms" (''see [[Theory of forms]]''). He argued:
<blockquote>Plato could be regarded as the outstanding philosopher of 'primitive mentality,' that is, as the thinker who succeeded in giving philosophic currency and validity to the modes of life and behavior of archaic humanity.<ref name="Eliade, p.34"/></blockquote>

Eliade thinks the [[Platonic realism|Platonic]] ''[[theory of forms]]'' is "primitive ontology" persisting in [[Greek philosophy]]. He claims that Platonism is the "most fully elaborated" version of this primitive ontology.<ref>Eliade, in Dadosky, p. 105</ref>

In ''The Structure of Religious Knowing: Encountering the Sacred in Eliade and Lonergan'', [[John Daniel Dadosky]] argues that, by making this statement, Eliade was acknowledging "indebtedness to Greek philosophy in general, and to Plato's theory of forms specifically, for his own theory of archetypes and repetition".<ref>Dadosky, p. 105</ref> However, Dadosky also states that "one should be cautious when trying to assess Eliade's indebtedness to Plato".<ref>Dadosky, p. 106</ref> Dadosky quotes [[Robert Segal]], a professor of religion, who draws a distinction between Platonism and Eliade's "primitive ontology": for Eliade, the ideal models are patterns that a person or object may or may not imitate; for Plato, there is a Form for everything, and everything imitates a Form by the very fact that it exists.<ref>Segal, in Dadosky, pp. 105–106</ref>