Meditations 4.27 · 4.27

Marcus poses the fundamental cosmological choice in its barest form, a variant of the "providence or atoms" disjunction: either the whole is a κόσμος διατεταγμένος, an ordered and arranged world, or a κυκεὼν συμπεφυρμένος, a "posset stirred together," a chaotic slop with no plan. The Greek turns on the word κόσμος itself, which means both "order" and "the universe," so that to call the world a cosmos is already to say it is ordered. He does not labour the proof; he simply says ἀλλὰ μὴν κόσμος — "but surely it is order."

The argument he does give is an a fortiori from the part to the whole. You yourself, a mere fragment of the universe, are capable of inner order — a rational, self-governing mind. Could it really be that order can arise in the part while the whole from which the part came is mere disorder (ἀκοσμία)? That would be incoherent. And the improbability deepens when you notice how the cosmos actually behaves: all things are at once διακεκριμένα, distinct and articulated into kinds, yet συμπαθῆ, bound together in mutual "sympathy" — the Stoic doctrine that every part of the universe feels and answers to every other. Such articulated interconnection is precisely what order looks like. The undercurrent is that the rationality a person finds within is evidence of, and continuous with, the rationality of the Whole.

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