The Dismemberment of Physis & Kosmos
January 3rd, 2012 § Leave a Comment
According to Louis Dupre in Passage to Modernity:
“Only when the early humanist notion of human creativity came to form a combustive mixture with the negative conclusions of nominalist theology did it cause the cultural explosion that we refer to as modernity. Its impact shattered the organic unity of the Western view of the real.” (3)
And in describing this “early humanist notion of human creativity” that was destroyed by nominalism, Dupre references “the earliest Ionian concept of physis” which “combined a physical (in the modern sense!) with an anthropic and a divine component.” (3) Thus, the origin of early humanism rested upon a holistic understanding of human nature, one which not only possessed the basic constitution of the human body (physical), but also a universal form of man (anthropic), and an imprint of the divine (a soul or the Imago Dei). This organic unity of human nature was also a direct reflection of the organic unity of the universe itself as expressed by the classical notion of kosmos which, according to Dupre, “preserved the idea of the real as an harmonious, all-inclusive whole.” (3)
For my purposes, if the organic physis of the human person is epitomic of an equally harmonious kosmos, then there is an interplay of intelligibility between the human physis and that which corresponds to it in the kosmos. The activity of this interplay can be attributed to the human imagination which, above all else, actively perceives the nature of God as manifested and declared by the created order. If this is true, then at the moment the notion of human creativity animated by the classical physis was coupled with a dismembered kosmos stripped of its intrinsic intelligibility at the hands nominalist theology, the human physis also suffered a similar fate and was fundamentally changed. For the West, the consequences of this dismemberment are darkly summarized by Dupre when he concludes that “Only what it [the human mind] objectively constituted would count as real.” (3)
