Kosmos: A Brief History of the Word that means “Everything”

Reposted from the Andrew Cohen Blog.


Tom Huston

Let’s start with a definition:

Kos-mos
noun

  1. The multidimensional Whole of manifest reality—spanning physical, biological, psychological, psychic, and spiritual domains.

  2. An ordered, harmonious whole.

  3. Harmony and order as distinct from chaos.

So . . . what’s with the “K”?

Beginning with his 1995 tome Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution, philosopher Ken Wilber has successfully resuscitated an ancient Greek term: Kosmos. Distinguishing the concept from its Anglicized version, “Cosmos”—which in modern usage has become synonymous with little more than the insentient, cold, material universe of space, time, planets, and galaxies—Wilber’s use of “Kosmos” seeks to restore the multidimensional depth and richness to the Universe that the ancient Greeks rightly acknowledged and revered. In the words of the great third-century philosopher-sage Plotinus (3rd Ennead):

“The authentic and primal Kosmos . . . contains within itself no spatial distinction, and has none of the feebleness of division, and even its parts bring no incompleteness to it since here the individual is not severed from the entire. . . . [D]o but survey it, and surely this is the pleading you will hear:”

“I am made by a God: from that God I came perfect above all forms of life, adequate to my function, self-sufficing, lacking nothing: for I am the container of all, that is, of every plant and every animal, of all the kinds of created things, and many Gods and nations of Spirit-Beings and lofty souls and men happy in their goodness. . . . And all that is within me strives towards the Good; and each, to the measure of its faculty, attains. For from that Good all the heavens depend, [along] with all my own Soul and the Gods that dwell in my every part, and all that lives and grows, and even all in me that you may judge inanimate.”

In his book A Theory of Everything, published in 2000, Wilber makes a persuasive argument for using this term today over the more standard “cosmos”:

“The Greeks had a beautiful word, Kosmos, which means the patterned Whole of all existence, including the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual realms. Ultimate reality was not merely the cosmos, or the physical dimension, but the Kosmos, or the physical and emotional and mental and spiritual dimensions altogether. Not just matter, lifeless and insentient, but the living Totality of matter, body, mind, soul, and spirit. The Kosmos!—now there is a real theory of everything! But us poor moderns have reduced the Kosmos to the cosmos, we have reduced matter and body and mind and soul and spirit to nothing but matter alone, and in this drab and dreary world of scientific materialism, we are lulled into the notion that a theory uniting the physical dimension is actually a theory of
everything. . . . “