World

Plato's Timaeus sets out one of the principal images under which the Western tradition has conceived the world. The cosmos is not a heap of elements, nor a mere system of moving parts, but a living creature fashioned by a divine craftsman, the Demiurge, who looked to the eternal and unchanging Forms as his model and imposed order upon pre-existing, disordered matter. The result, Timaeus says, is a perceptible god, one and only-begotten, supreme in greatness, excellence, beauty, and perfection. The world-soul, compounded of Same, Other, and Being, is diffused through the cosmic body and endows it with rational order. Everything in the visible universe participates, however imperfectly, in the intelligible structure of the Forms. On this view the world is a single whole, and its unity is inseparable from its perfection: the creator made not two worlds or an infinite number of them, but one only, that the created copy might accord with its original.

The world on Plato's account is not without beginning. It comes into being when the Demiurge arranges the elements, which before that arrangement were without reason and measure. Time itself is generated with the world as a moving image of eternity, and the celestial bodies are set in regular motion to measure its passage. Yet once made, the cosmos is to endure forever. The goodness of the Demiurge ensures that the product is as good as a material thing can be; but matter introduces an element of necessity that reason cannot wholly master. The world is therefore not perfect in an absolute sense, but as nearly perfect as the constraints of the material allow. This tension between reason and necessity, between the divine plan and the resistance of the receptacle, runs through much of the later discussion of the world's structure and of the place of evil within an ordered whole, topics also treated under the ideas of Matter, Form, and Good and Evil.

The organic image of the cosmos in the Timaeus is not confined to that dialogue. In the Phaedrus the soul in her totality has the care of inanimate being everywhere; in the Laws the best soul takes care of the world and guides it along the good path. Plato thus proposes the first of the three great metaphors by which, as Adler notes, the structure of the world has been imaged: the living organism endowed with soul and intelligence. The alternative images of the world as a machine of interdependent parts, and as a hierarchy of diverse beings under divine law, will be developed by other writers; but the question whether the cosmos is animated and rational, or merely a system of bodies in motion, begins here.

Plato sets the terms for subsequent cosmology. Aristotle will argue that the world is eternal and needs no craftsman. Christian thinkers will retain the idea of a made cosmos but insist that creation is from nothing rather than from a pre-existing receptacle. Lucretius will reject the divine craftsman altogether and substitute the chance concourse of atoms in the void.

Aristotle parts company with Plato on the question whether the world had a beginning. For him the cosmos is eternal. Motion has always existed and will always exist, because every motion presupposes a prior motion, and the series cannot have a first member. Chaos or Night did not exist for an infinite time before the world; there was no time before the world, because time is the measure of motion, and motion has no beginning. He argues against those theologians who generate the world from Night, and against the atomists who ascribe the heavenly sphere and all the worlds to spontaneity or chance. When Anaxagoras said that reason was present throughout nature as the cause of order, he seemed, Aristotle remarks, like a sober man in contrast with the random talk of his predecessors.

The order of the world is explained not by a craftsman who fashions matter after an eternal model, but by the unmoved mover, the object of the world's desire. The first mover is pure actuality, eternal, immaterial, and engaged in the highest activity: thinking about thinking. It produces motion not by efficient causality, as a maker moves his material, but by final causality, as an object of love moves the lover. The heavens revolve in eternal circular motion because they are drawn toward the perfection of the unmoved mover. The relation of the world to God, on this account, is not that of creature to creator who brings being out of nothing, but that of an eternal cosmos to a prime cause of its everlasting motion. The chapters on Cause, God, and Eternity take up these distinctions at greater length.

Below the sphere of the moon the sublunary region is characterized by generation and corruption. Things come into being and pass away, composed of the four elements and subject to change. The cosmos as a whole is a single, finite, spherical system, with the earth at its center, surrounded by concentric celestial spheres. There is nothing outside it; beyond the outermost sphere there is neither void nor place. From the impossibility of an infinity of body or matter, and with it of an infinity of space, Aristotle concludes that there cannot be more worlds than one. If the universe is composed of the whole of matter, there is no other universe and no possibility of others being made. Heaven is one and unique and complete. The size and shape of the world, and the disposition of its matter, are further considered under the ideas of Space, Astronomy, and Matter.

Aristotle's eternal and finite cosmos remains the dominant physical picture of the Western tradition until the rise of modern science. Aquinas will accept much of the physics while rejecting the claim that reason can prove the world has always existed. Newton will replace the concentric spheres with infinite space governed by mathematical law, yet the question whether the world is one or many, finite or infinite, created or everlasting, continues to be framed in terms first clarified in the Physics and On the Heavens.

Lucretius offers the principal materialist alternative to the cosmologies of Plato and Aristotle. The world was not made by a divine craftsman, nor is it sustained by an unmoved mover. It is the product of the random collision of atoms falling through infinite void. Given infinite time and infinite matter, atoms combine in every possible configuration; this world is simply one among the successful arrangements, neither designed nor unique. When Lucretius refers to the infinite universe, which spreads free from limit, he does not mean this world in which man now lives, but the void in which our world and other worlds are formed from the infinite number of atoms that, combining and separating, cause the birth and death of worlds. On this view it is improbable that this single earth and heaven alone should have been brought into being while so many bodies of matter do nothing outside them.

The therapeutic intent of the poem is inseparable from its cosmology. Lucretius writes to free men from the terror of religion. If the world is the work of gods, then men must live in fear of divine displeasure. But if nature does all things spontaneously of herself without the meddling of the gods, then there is nothing to fear from that quarter. The gods exist, dwelling in blissful indifference in the interspaces between worlds, but they neither created this world nor take any interest in it. Man is not wholly alien in a world of material forces, for he is one of nature's progeny; yet neither is he, like a beloved son, assured of nature's hospitality. The dominant note is that of man against the world, and in that unequal struggle science alone gives him the sense, or perhaps the illusion, that his mind may dominate his little corner of it. The chapters on Chance, Nature, and Man take up related aspects of this view.

The world, on Lucretius's account, is not eternal. It had a beginning when atoms first happened to combine in this particular way, and it will have an end when the bonds that hold it together give way. Many bodies ebb away from things; age breaks their powers and wastes them on the side of decay, until even the walls of the wide world fall to crumbling ruin. Lucretius sees evidence of aging all around him: the soil produces less, the rains diminish, the old virtues fade. The atoms themselves are eternal and uncreated; nothing is ever gotten out of nothing by divine power, and nothing is ever reduced to nothing. But compounds, including whole worlds, are subject to dissolution. Thus world succeeds world in the ceaseless activity of the eternal atoms, while the universe of matter and void has neither beginning nor end. Against those who suppose the gods designed all things for the sake of men, Lucretius judges from the arrangements of heaven itself that the nature of the world has by no means been made for us by divine power, so great are the defects with which it stands encumbered.

Lucretius marks the materialist pole of the cosmological conversation. His atoms and void will be taken up, in transformed form, by the mechanical philosophy of Descartes and the physics of Newton, even as both retain a role for God that Lucretius emphatically denies. The hypothesis of a plurality of worlds, which he shares with Newton on different grounds, remains a live question under the ideas of Space and Astronomy.

Plotinus reshapes Plato's cosmology into a theory of emanation. The world does not spring from a deliberate act of creation; it flows necessarily from the One, the utterly simple source of all being. From the One proceeds Intellect (Nous), which contains the Forms; from Intellect proceeds Soul, which animates the cosmos; from Soul proceeds the material world, the farthest extension of reality from its source. Each level of being is a diminished image of the level above it, as light weakens with distance from its origin. On this scheme the cosmic soul belongs only to the material universe and is third and lowest in the scale of the authentic existents. The One does not choose to create; it overflows by the fullness of its nature, as the sun radiates light without losing anything of itself. The world is therefore both necessary and good: necessary because the One cannot help producing it, good because everything that participates in being participates in the One's perfection, however dimly.

This account preserves the world's intelligibility while denying that it was made by a craftsman looking to an external model. Against the atomists Plotinus holds that there is nothing undesigned, nothing of chance, in all the process. It is an absurdity, he writes, to hand over the universe and its contents to material entities and out of the disorderly swirl thus occasioned to call order into being. The ordered universe, in its material mass, has existed forever and will forever endure. Matter, at the lowest level, is nearly nothing: not a positive substance but a privation, the absence of form and intelligibility. Evil is not a force or a being but the condition of maximum distance from the One. The soul's task is to reverse the direction of emanation, turning inward and upward from the material world toward Intellect and ultimately toward union with the One. Questions of hierarchy, of the grades of being, and of the relation of the sensible to the intelligible are also treated under the ideas of Being, One and Many, and Soul.

Emanation differs both from Platonic craftsmanship and from Christian creation. Plato's Demiurge fashions the universe after the eternal ideas in a pre-existing receptacle; Christian doctrine holds that God makes the world from nothing by a free act of will. Plotinus's production of the sensible and intelligible world from the transcendent All-One seems, as Adler remarks, more like generation or procreation than like creation in the sense of Genesis. For theologians such as Augustine and Aquinas, and for philosophers such as Berkeley, theories of this kind deny what is meant by creation in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Yet for Plotinus the hierarchy of being from pure spirit to bare matter, and the denial that chance could produce the cosmic order, remain essential.

Plotinus transmits to Augustine and the medieval tradition a vision of the world as the outpouring of divine fullness, ordered in degrees of being. Augustine will replace emanation with creation from nothing, but the hierarchical structure of reality will endure in Christian cosmology and in later speculative systems, including Hegel's account of the world as the self-manifestation of Spirit.

Augustine breaks with both the pagan and Neoplatonic traditions on the question how the world came to be. Against Aristotle he holds that the world is not eternal. Against Plotinus he holds that the world did not emanate necessarily from the divine nature. God created the world freely, from nothing, by an act of will. In the beginning God created heaven and earth. There was no pre-existing matter, no chaotic substrate awaiting form. Everything that is, apart from God, was brought into existence by divine fiat. On this view God is not part of the world, the world is not part of God, and there is no whole that embraces both. If "world" means the physical totality, then man belongs both to this world and to the order of spiritual creatures, which is also part of the created universe. The infinite distance between Creator and creation, and man's place of honor in the hierarchy of created beings, are themes that run through the chapters on God, Angel, and Man.

The question of what God was doing before creation receives Augustine's reply that the question is meaningless, because time itself is a creature. There was no "before" creation. Time began with the world, as Plato had suggested in the Timaeus, and God's eternity is not an infinite duration of time but the absence of temporal succession altogether. In God's eternal present there is no past or future, only an undivided now. Not in time but together with time God made the world. The relation of creation to eternity and time is further considered under the ideas of Eternity and Time.

The created world is good. Augustine insists on this against the Manichaeans, who held that the material world is the work of an evil principle. Evil is not a substance but a privation, a falling-away from the good. The world as God made it is wholly good; sin and death entered through the free choice of rational creatures, angels and men, not through any defect in creation itself. Augustine also challenges those who suppose either that this is not the only world, but that there are numberless worlds, or that it is the only one, yet dies and is born again at fixed intervals, times without number. On theological grounds he affirms the unity of the created order and the once-for-all character of its beginning. Impious and irreligious consequences follow, in his opinion, from the notion that God is the soul of the world and the world is as a body to Him. The organic metaphor of the world-soul, so important in Plato and Plotinus, is thus rejected as incompatible with the transcendence of the Creator.

Augustine's doctrine of creation from nothing becomes the foundation of subsequent Christian cosmology. Aquinas will develop it with greater philosophical precision, distinguishing what reason can demonstrate from what faith alone holds, but the essential claims remain in place: that the world is freely created, temporally finite, and fundamentally good.

Aquinas occupies a distinctive position in the conversation about the world. He accepts Aristotle's physics and metaphysics more fully than any previous Christian thinker, yet he refuses to follow Aristotle into the doctrine of an eternal world as a deliverance of reason alone. His solution is characteristically precise. Reason cannot prove that the world began in time; the arguments for a temporal beginning are no more demonstrative than the arguments against one. That the world did not always exist is held by faith alone; it cannot be proved demonstratively. Faith, grounded in Scripture, settles what reason leaves open. What reason can demonstrate is that the world is created, meaning that it depends entirely on God for its existence, whether or not it has always existed. Creation is not a change from nothing to something in time; it is the total dependence of the creature on the Creator. Even an eternal world, if such were possible, would still be a created world, provided its existence were sustained at every moment by God's will. The divine conservation is, as later writers also maintain, a continual creation.

Aquinas provides a detailed account of God's creative activity and of the world's structure as an ordered community of beings. God creates by thinking: the divine ideas in the mind of God are the exemplar causes of all created things. The world is governed by divine providence, which extends to every particular, though this governance operates through secondary causes, including the natural operations that Aristotle had described. Nature is not opposed to divine action but is the instrument through which God ordinarily works. The parts of the universe are ordered to each other according as one acts on another and according as one is the end and exemplar of the other. The government of the universe by the divine reason produces a perfection of order in the whole, which is the intrinsic common good of the universe, and directs each thing to the attainment of its end. Yet the ultimate end of divine government is not the perfection of each thing or the order of the universe itself, but some good outside the whole universe, namely the goodness of God. This image of the world as a society under divine law and government is one of the three great metaphors of cosmic structure, and is more fully developed in Christian thought than in its Stoic anticipations.

On the question of one world or many, Aquinas holds that there is only one actual world. The very order of things created by God shows the unity of the world; whatever things come from God have relations of order to each other and to God himself, and so it is necessary that all things should belong to one world. Only those who do not acknowledge any ordaining wisdom, but rather believe in chance, as Democritus did, were able to assert many worlds. Yet because God does not act from natural necessity, and because the divine will is not determined of necessity to these creatures, Aquinas concludes that in no way is the present scheme of things produced with such necessity that other things could not come to be. This is not the best of all possible worlds in the absolute sense: given the things that actually exist, the universe cannot be better, for the order God has established most befits them; yet God could make other things, or add something to the present creation, and then there would be another and a better universe. The chapters on Will, God, and Good and Evil take up these issues of divine liberty and the perfection of the world.

Aquinas's reconciliation of Aristotelian physics with Christian theology holds as the principal framework until the scientific revolution. Descartes will replace Aristotelian matter theory with a mechanical universe, and Newton will introduce a new mathematical framework, but both will retain the idea of a created world governed by laws that God has established.

Descartes replaces the Aristotelian cosmos with a world built from two principles: extension and motion. The physical world is nothing but extended substance, infinitely divisible, filling all space without void. The qualities that the Aristotelians attributed to matter (hot and cold, wet and dry, the four elements, substantial forms) are eliminated. All physical phenomena, from the revolution of the planets to the growth of plants, are to be explained by the size, shape, and motion of particles of matter. All the variety in matter, all the diversity of its forms, depends on motion. Full-fledged mechanism may be thought to await seventeenth-century developments in the science of mechanics, when for Descartes, Newton, and others the laws of mechanics become the only laws of nature. The world is imaged as a system of interdependent moving parts, linked together from the least to the greatest in an unbroken chain of causation: the third of the three great metaphors of cosmic structure, alongside the living organism and the divinely governed society.

God's role is that of a first cause who created the material world and set it in motion, and who conserves it in existence at each moment. But having established the laws of motion, God does not intervene further in the ordinary course of nature. Descartes asks us to consider what would happen if God were now to create a new world somewhere in an imaginary space, agitate its matter into a chaos as confused as the poets ever feigned, and then merely lend His concurrence to Nature in the usual way, leaving her to act according to the laws He had established. Something like this orderly universe would be the result. The laws of matter in motion are of such a nature that even if God had created other worlds, He could not have created any in which these laws would fail to be observed. Descartes refers to the universe as a work of divine art, yet holds that God's purposes may not be visible to us in all its arrangements. The species of cause termed final finds no useful employment in physical things, for it does not appear that one can without temerity seek to investigate the inscrutable ends of God. This states a rule of method in natural science, not the denial of a cosmic plan. The chapters on Cause, Mechanics, and Nature take up the status of final causes more fully.

The Aristotelian distinction between the sublunary region, where things change and decay, and the celestial region, where motion is eternal and perfect, is abolished. The same laws of motion apply everywhere. The cosmos is indefinitely large, perhaps infinite, and contains an indefinite number of solar systems. There is no center and no privileged position. Man inhabits one planet among many, in one vortex among many. Descartes proposes a vortex theory of planetary motion: the planets are swept along in great swirling streams of fine matter that carry them around the sun. The perfection of particular things is judged, in this framework, in relation to the whole: the same thing which might seem imperfect if regarded by itself is found to be very perfect if regarded as part of the whole universe.

Descartes formulates the program of modern physics. Newton will replace the vortex theory with gravitational attraction and supply the mathematical precision that Descartes lacked, but the project of explaining the world by matter and motion remains fundamental. The mechanical image of the cosmos, once established, continues to shape the debate over chance and design that Lucretius had begun and that Newton will reopen on different terms.

Newton achieves a unified physics of the entire material world, from falling bodies to orbiting planets. The law of universal gravitation, stated with mathematical exactness, replaces both the Aristotelian natural motions and the Cartesian vortices. Every body in the universe attracts every other body with a force proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. From this single law the motions of the planets, the tides, and the precession of the equinoxes follow. Newton's universe is not a plenum like Descartes's but a system of bodies moving through absolute space and absolute time. Space is infinite, homogeneous, and exists independently of the bodies it contains. Time flows uniformly, regardless of what happens in it. These are not properties of matter but the framework within which matter exists and moves. The chapters on Space and Time treat these absolute magnitudes at greater length.

Newton and Lucretius agree that the world is built of atomic particles and that its structure is determined by the motions of its parts through the forces that body exerts upon body. Both favor the hypothesis of a plurality of worlds. But they disagree on decisive points. For Lucretius the atoms are eternal and each particular world has a chance beginning and end. For Newton the atoms are indestructible but not eternal: it seems probable that God in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable particles of such sizes and figures as most conduced to the end for which He formed them. Not through the chance colligation of atoms, but through their being variously associated in the first creation by the counsel of an intelligent agent, is the world formed. Being once formed, it may continue by the laws of nature through many ages; but it is unphilosophical to pretend that it might arise out of a chaos by the mere laws of nature. Since space is divisible in infinitum and matter is not necessarily in all places, Newton allows that God is able to create particles of several sizes and figures, and thereby to vary the laws of nature and make worlds of several sorts in several parts of the universe. He sees nothing of contradiction in this.

For Newton the mathematical order of the world points to a divine intelligence. This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being. The laws of motion do not of themselves explain why the planets move in the same direction, in nearly the same plane; that regularity requires a designing hand. God is for him both the first cause who set things in motion and the ongoing superintendent of the cosmic order. Newton speaks of God's most wise and excellent contrivance of things, and of final causes. Though he is a mechanist in the sense that the laws of mechanics govern nature, he does not favor chance rather than design. The world may be considered as a vast machine, yet it is a machine whose arrangement manifests purpose. Absolute space is sometimes identified with the sensorium of God, the medium through which God is present to His creation. The relation of mechanism to final causality is also discussed under the ideas of Mechanics, Cause, and God.

Newton's mathematical cosmos becomes the model of the intelligible universe and a principal exhibit for the argument from design. Kant will accept the physics while subjecting the theological inference to critical limits, arguing that the order of phenomena tells us about the structure of our knowledge rather than about the nature of things in themselves or the existence of a divine lawgiver.

Kant intervenes in the cosmological conversation by arguing that its most fundamental questions exceed the legitimate employment of reason. In the Antinomy of Pure Reason he shows that reason can construct equally valid proofs for opposite conclusions about the world. The world has a beginning in time, and the world has no beginning; the world is spatially finite, and the world is spatially infinite; every composite substance consists of simple parts, and no composite substance consists of simple parts. Both sides of each antinomy can be demonstrated, and neither can be refuted by speculative reason alone. The traditional issues concerning the world (whether there are many worlds or only one, what the structure of the world is, and whether the world has a beginning and an end) are thus brought under a new critical discipline. The chapters on Space, Time, and Infinity treat the spatial and temporal sides of these antinomies more fully.

The resolution lies in recognizing that the questions arise from a misuse of reason. The world as it is in itself, the noumenal world, is not accessible to human knowledge. What we call "the world" is the sum of appearances structured by the forms of intuition, space and time, and by the categories of the understanding, causality, substance, and the rest. The cosmological questions ask about things in themselves, and about these theoretical reason has nothing legitimate to say. The order that Newton discovered in the cosmos is real as an order of phenomena; it is the lawfulness of appearances, from which one may not infer a divine lawgiver as if that lawfulness belonged to reality as such. We cannot pass from the lawfulness of nature to the existence of God by a theoretical proof, because that lawfulness belongs to our mode of cognition. Kant denies knowledge, he says, to make room for faith: the cosmological idea may still have a practical or regulative use, yet it is not an object of speculative demonstration.

This shifts the question from what the world is in itself to how the world appears to us and what the conditions of that appearance are. Cosmology as a branch of metaphysics claiming to know the absolute constitution of the universe is set within limits. The dispute between those who affirm a created beginning and those who affirm an eternal motion, between those who hold the world finite and those who hold it infinite, is not settled in favor of either party; both overstep the bounds of possible experience. Whether the universe in which we live is infinite, or finite in the manner of a spherical space without bounds, is a question that, as later writers including Einstein would also note in another register, experience may be far from sufficient to answer. Kant's critical result does not abolish scientific cosmology, but it severs the direct inference from the structure of phenomena to the ultimate origin and end of the world.

After Kant, the question of the world's ultimate nature is no longer treated as a question that pure reason can settle by demonstration. Hegel will attempt to restore speculative cosmology by identifying the world with the self-development of Spirit, but the critical limits remain a boundary that subsequent thinkers must either accept or argue against.

Hegel proposes a cosmology in which the world is the self-realization of Absolute Spirit. Nature is not something other than mind, nor a mechanical system indifferent to mind's existence. It is mind in its otherness, the Idea externalized in space and time. The physical world is a necessary stage in the Absolute's process of coming to know itself, and history is the medium through which this self-knowledge unfolds. On this view cosmology merges with theology: to know the world is to know God, and the order of the world is the indwelling divinity itself. Such a position belongs, as Adler notes, with the theories of Aristotle, Plotinus, and Spinoza, in which the universe is uncreated and co-eternal with the divinity that dwells in it, or is the manifestation of Absolute Spirit in both physical and psychical nature. The chapters on God, Nature, and History take up related aspects of this identification.

The world, on Hegel's account, is neither created from nothing, as the Christians held, nor merely eternal and self-sufficient in the Aristotelian sense, nor a mechanical assemblage of atoms, as Lucretius and the materialists held. It is a rational whole, a process rather than a static thing, in which every element has its meaning only in relation to the whole. Nature passes over into spirit; spirit comprehends nature; and in that comprehension the Absolute achieves the self-transparency that is its goal. What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational: on this conviction, Hegel writes, the plain man like the philosopher takes his stand, and from it philosophy starts in its study of the universe of mind as well as the universe of nature. Rationality is affirmed as the foundation of existence. Against this notion of the world as a perfectly ordered whole, later critics such as William James will propose a pluralistic or "concatenated" universe in which the contemporaneity of disjointed events does not form a rational bond uniting them into a single block cosmos. The problem of the world's order is thus stated in terms of its rationality as well as of its goodness and beauty.

History is therefore central to understanding the world. The history of the world is nothing but the development of the idea of freedom. The succession of civilizations is not random; it is the progressive self-revelation of Spirit, moving from forms of political life in which only one is free, through those in which some are free, to those in which all are known to be free. The world has a direction and a meaning, and that meaning is rational. Man is not, on this view, a stranger in a godless machine, nor a creature set over against a nature that is merely material force. He is a participant in the process by which the Absolute comes to self-knowledge. The microcosm-macrocosm relation, already present in the doctrine of the world-soul, reappears here as the claim that the life of thought and the life of the universe are one process.

Hegel identifies the universe with the life of thought itself. In that identification the three traditional questions of cosmology (one world or many, structure, beginning and end) are absorbed into a single process of Spirit's self-manifestation. Whether this completes Western metaphysics or is a construction that later philosophy must dismantle remains disputed in the tradition after him.