The Cosmos as a World City: A Hylomorphic Foundation for Civic Renewal

Abstract

This paper contends that the West’s civic crisis is, at root, a cosmological crisis: civic renewal requires metaphysical repair. It is insufficient to endorse virtue ethics and demand civic virtues without a deeper account of reality that can sustain them. What is needed is a cosmology—one informed by contemporary science—in which nature, personhood, and political community are meaningfully situated within an ordered whole. Drawing on the Platonic isomorphism between soul, city, and cosmos, I outline a hylomorphic framework with the potential to integrate key elements of neo-Aristotelian, Stoic, and Thomist metaphysics with developments in contemporary physics. Against the dominant atomistic and holistic paradigms, I argue that hylomorphism offers a more adequate account of personhood, the polis, and the cosmos itself as an intelligible whole.

1. Introduction: A Civic Crisis with Cosmological Roots

Contemporary liberal democracies in the West are confronting what many commentators—both secular and religious—describe as a deepening civic crisis. This crisis is marked by increasing political polarisation, institutional fragility, cultural fragmentation, and the erosion of shared moral frameworks. Such developments expose more than mere dysfunction in our political institutions; they reflect a deeper uncertainty about the nature of human life and the kind of world we inhabit.

I wish to propose that this is not merely a political or cultural crisis, but a cosmological crisis.1 Every political order rests on some vision—whether implicit, or explicit—both of human nature and the world in which human lives unfold. Without a shared sense of what kind of beings we are, and what kind of cosmos we inhabit, public life loses its moral grounding. We become what Charles Taylor (2007) calls “buffered selves”—cut off from the world around us, and estranged from any sense of its normative significance. In such conditions, the language of civic virtue and the common good becomes untethered from a coherent vision of reality. We are left, in Alasdair MacIntyre’s terms, with a society of “emotivists”, in which ethical and political discourse persists but floats free of any metaphysical foundation (MacIntyre 1981)—or is rendered incoherent by rival visions of the good.

Much has been written about the anthropological assumptions of modern liberalism in its more individualistic forms, particularly regarding its atomistic conception of the self; however, insufficient attention has been given to the cosmological assumptions that underpin it. These assumptions, inherited from early modern science, reflect an atomistic metaphysics that continues to shape public reasoning and policy. Likewise, identity-based or collectivist views of the self, found in various forms of postmodern or progressive thought, have been widely discussed, but their metaphysical view of the world in which human beings are embedded is less frequently challenged. This opposite outlook reflects a holistic metaphysics, drawing on more contemporary science, in which individuals are subordinated to larger wholes. My aim is to challenge both of these cosmological pictures of reality, not only by appropriating classical philosophical resources, but by appealing to contemporary developments in physics.

To frame this inquiry, I turn to Plato’s isomorphism thesis in the Republic—the idea that the well-ordered soul, the just city, and the rational cosmos exhibit a structural harmony. In this vision, political order reflects a deeper ontological reality; a reality which, in my view, neither atomism nor cosmic holism truthfully represent. The paper proceeds by tracing a pathway to metaphysical repair: a hylomorphic cosmology that admits irreducible ‘forms’ at multiple physical levels. This metaphysical framework, grounded in the Aristotelian doctrine of hylomorphism (Simpson 2023a), conceives natural beings—including persons and communities—as structured unities ordered toward intelligible ends. Unlike atomistic or holistic accounts, hylomorphism affirms the layered complexity of nature while preserving the substantial integrity of human beings.

In the course of this discussion, I examine how the three rival cosmologies—atomism, holism, and hylomorphism—frame our understanding of personhood and the polis. I argue that only hylomorphism offers a robust account of the human as a rational, political animal, and of the polis as a natural form of life conducive to human flourishing. Hylomorphism, of course, is a family of theories that draw inspiration from Aristotle, and not all of its members are tenable for us today. I contend that only a precise version of hylomorphism that is developed in dialogue with contemporary physics and cosmology can provide a metaphysical repair that is both philosophically rich and scientifically credible.

The structure of the paper is as follows. Section 2 recalls Plato’s isomorphism and introduces two ancient cosmologies—one anticipating the scientific image of nature, the other upholding a religious vision of cosmic order. I note how the scientific image of nature has received rival atomist and holistic interpretations. Section 3 examines how atomism, holism, and hylomorphism shape our philosophical anthropology and political vision, arguing that hylomorphism offers a more adequate metaphysical foundation for civic life. Section 4 shows how quantum theory supports a hylomorphic understanding of nature as layered and directed, extending the concept of form to the cosmos itself. It further explains how this updated version of hylomorphism retains what is true in both atomism and holism, disambiguating the scientific image. Section 5 applies this cosmology to the local polis, arguing that hylomorphism offers a civic renewal which affirms reverence as a rational and political virtue. Section 6 closes with some concluding remarks.

2. Nature and the Polis: From Cosmic Order to Civic Form

2.1. The Rule of Law or the Rule of the Strong?

To understand how cosmological assumptions influence civic life, it is helpful to revisit classical philosophical debates about the foundations of political order. These are not merely historical artefacts; they remain deeply relevant to contemporary confusions about justice, law, and the common good.

Plato’s dialogues present two contrasting visions of political life. In the Gorgias, the character Callicles defends a radical view that nature is governed by domination, and that moral norms are mere social constructs devised by the weak to restrain the strong (Gorgias, 482c–484c). In this conception, the polis is an artificial constraint on the exercise of power, and the rule of law is an unnatural imposition upon human beings. By contrast, the Laws presents an affirmative picture. Here, the polis is not contrary to human nature but a part of its rational fulfilment. Politics is not the administration of conflict but a participation in the divine art of governance (Laws, Book X). Law is not an imposition upon nature but an expression of it (Meyer and Inwood, forthcoming). Political order, at its best, should reflect cosmic order.

In the Republic, this vision receives its most developed articulation. Plato argues that a just political order reflects the structure of the cosmos: a harmonious coordination of parts toward a higher end. In Book IV of the Republic (427e–434c), Plato describes how justice in the soul mirrors justice in the city. In Book X (608c–621d), he concludes with a cosmic eschatology: human life only finds its proper orientation within the moral structure of the universe. He thus identifies a structural correspondence—an isomorphism—between the individual soul (psyche), the city (polis), and the cosmos (kosmos). Just as the well-ordered soul maintains rational harmony among its faculties, and the just city maintains order among its classes, so too the cosmos, in Plato’s view, is a rational whole governed by the Good. The just polis, then, does not arise arbitrarily, but in imitation of the cosmic order. In this framework, political justice is not arbitrary but arises when human life is brought into alignment with the deep order of being.

These competing political visions—Callicles’ defence of strength and Plato’s vision of cosmic order—correspond to two underlying cosmologies:

• The first reflects a disenchanted vision of the cosmos, what might be called the Scientific Picture of Reality, in its reductive form. This picture, described in Book X of the Laws, sees the universe as governed solely by blind forces, without inherent order or purpose. Within such a framework, norms appear arbitrary, and political order becomes an instrument of will rather than an expression of nature.
• The second reflects a mythical or Religious Picture of Reality, in which the world is ordered, intelligible, and imbued with meaning. In Book IV of the Laws, Plato claims that political systems ought to imitate the mythical Golden Age of Cronus, in which humans lived in peace under divine guidance. Here, civic order arises from—and points back to—a more fundamental cosmic harmony.

2.2. Two ‘Scientific’ Visions of Society

These ancient and divergent cosmologies continue to echo in contemporary political thought, but it is the Scientific Picture of Reality that now dominates our institutions. From the rise of STEM disciplines in education to the cultural reach of popular science, scientific ideas now function as cultural imaginaries in the West—shaping our sense of what is real, possible, and valuable. Even so, there is no settled account of what the Scientific Picture of Reality actually contains, even among scientists. Instead, it has given rise to rival interpretations, torn between atomistic individualism and holistic collectivism.

In his influential 1994 work, The Astonishing Hypothesis, Francis Crick epitomised the spirit of atomistic reductionism when he famously asserted: “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells” (Crick 1994, p. 3). In Crick’s view, consciousness, agency, and personal identity are ultimately reducible to neural activity. His neurobiological anthropology rested on a broader metaphysical outlook. In Of Molecules and Men (Crick 1966), he argued that biology must ultimately be explained in terms of physics and chemistry. Like the early modern mechanists, Crick conceived of nature as a purposeless system of particles governed by deterministic laws. Organisms and minds, no less than rocks or machines, are products of microphysical processes. In this metaphysical framework, there is no cosmic order to which human life should conform—there are no natural ends to discover, only mechanical systems to understand and control.

Both Crick and his close collaborator, James Watson, recognised that their views had civic implications. Watson once reportedly said: “If we don’t play God, who will?” (Griffiths 1999, p. 294). Both men championed the idea that society should not remain at the mercy of biology but should instead learn to manage it through technological means. On this view, the polis is not a community of rational agents ordered to a common good, but a managerial system for regulating neural organisms.

By contrast, some scientifically sanctioned visions of reality lean toward collectivist holism instead, conceiving individuals as mere expressions of larger systems or structures. One of the most respected scientific proponents of a holistic cosmology of the last century was the theoretical physicist David Bohm (1917–1992), a protégé of Oppenheimer, and a pioneer of the de Broglie-Bohm (or “pilot wave”) theory of quantum mechanics. In Wholeness and the Implicate Order (Bohm 1980), Bohm argued that our modern s tendency to analyse the world into discrete parts distorts our understanding of reality. He proposed instead that the cosmos is structured by an “implicate order”, a deeper level of undivided wholeness from which the phenomena of everyday experience unfold. It is “misleading and indeed wrong”, he wrote, “to suppose… that each human being is an independent actuality who interacts with other human beings and with nature. Rather, all these are projections of a single totality” (p. 188).

This anthropology has political ramifications. Bohm saw atomistic fragmentation as the root of personal alienation and civic disintegration. A lifelong critic of both capitalist individualism and reductive materialism, and briefly a member of the American Communist Party, Bohm argued that a healthy society must reflect the unity of the cosmos, fostering coherence among individuals and between persons and their environment. On Bohm’s view, the polis is not a procedural system for managing preferences, but a dynamic field for realising a deeper wholeness, one rooted in the structure of the cosmos.

Despite their deep opposition, both of these scientifically informed visions stem from a shared cosmological premise: that the cosmos lacks an intrinsic order in which human beings have a meaningful place. The human level of existence is either reducible to the microphysical, or derivative of the cosmic level. What the examples I have discussed reveal (along with several others we will consider in the following section) is that our understanding of the political community—what it is, what it is for, and how it ought to be ordered—is inseparable from deeper assumptions about human nature and the cosmos. It is this isomorphic insight, glimpsed by Plato and developed in subsequent traditions, which I seek to demonstrate and deploy in advancing a cosmology for civic renewal.

3. Three Competing Cosmologies and Their Civic Consequences

3.1. Three Big Pictures

To explore this further, let us examine the three dominant cosmological frameworks in Western modernity, each of which has roots in ancient philosophy, and their respective implications for the soul and civic life.2

• The Atomistic Picture, derived from Democritus, views reality as composed of particles or other tiny fragments. All things, including humans, are reducible to the motion and arrangement of these micro-constituents.
• The Holistic Picture (or, Cosmic Holistic Picture), which recalls the monism of Parmenides (see Fragments, esp. 8), posits the cosmos as a single, unified whole. Individual entities are modes of a single substance or nodes in a web of relations.

We have already touched on the first two, which underpin the two ‘scientific’ visions of society I mentioned in the previous section. But there is a third that has shaped our history:

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The Hylomorphic Picture, developed by Aristotle as a corrective to both the atomism of Democritus and the monism of Parmenides, holds that the world is made up of substances with intrinsic natures, directed toward particular ends (Physics II.1, Metaphysics VII–VIII, De Anima II.1). These substances are composed of matter (hyle) and form (morphe) and span multiple scales of existence, including human life. According to the doctrine of hylomorphism, form is not a concept we impose upon nature, but the intelligible principle of unity, identity, and directedness within a substance.

All three of these pictures continue to influence our notions about human nature. The first two, however, are more visible and influential within mainstream culture. Let us consider each of these pictures in turn and consider how they have shaped the ideas of a number of prominent people who sway civic life in the West today.

3.2. Atomism and the Soul

The Atomistic Picture was reinvigorated in early modern philosophy by Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, and Pierre Gassendi, among others, who conceived the physical world in terms of matter, motion, and extension. Hobbes explicitly applied this picture to human beings: “For what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings…?” (Hobbes, Leviathan, Introduction). In his view, human reason and sensibilities are explicable in terms of functions of material motion, and constructing a society becomes a matter of engineering—of designing systems to constrain and direct those motions.

This mechanistic vision remains widespread in contemporary analytic philosophy. David Lewis, for instance, famously writes: “All there is to the world is a vast mosaic of local matters of particular fact, just one little thing and then another” (Lewis 1986, p. ix). In such a metaphysic, there is no cosmic unity, no intrinsic purpose, and no real agency—only micro-entities arranged in spatiotemporal patterns. This reductionist framework is often presented, albeit with qualifications, as the “scientific image” of reality. But attempts to compress human life into this Atomistic Picture face three serious difficulties.

• The Determinism Problem: If all causality lies in a closed system of purposeless micro-processes, then reasons, intentions, and moral responsibilities are rendered epiphenomenal or even illusory. Human agency is evacuated, and human reason becomes, in Hume’s phrase, “the slave of the passions”. (See e.g., Van Inwagen 1983).
• The Knowledge Problem: If only the empirical sciences deliver genuine knowledge, then claims about moral values, obligations, or human dignity must be treated as highly suspect. We are left with a form of moral subjectivism or emotivism, incapable of grounding shared norms. (See e.g., Ayer 1936).

Together, I believe, these two problems contribute to a distinctively civic crisis.

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The Virtue Problem: If human behaviour is ultimately explicable in terms of mechanical forces and self-interested drives, then the cultivation of civic virtues—habits ordered toward the common good—becomes unintelligible. Concepts like justice, solidarity, or shared responsibility lack any foundation.

3.3. Atomism and the Polis

The Virtue Problem, as I have called it, is not merely a theoretical concern confined to the ivory tower. When the Atomistic Picture comes to dominate civic practice, the consequences are visible and corrosive. If the human person is conceived by those with influence as merely a bundle of neural impulses, with no intrinsic ordering toward normative ends, the institutions they shape are reduced to platforms for performance, manipulation, and the pursuit of self-interest—regardless of whatever ideals they may publicly profess.

One stark example is the collapse of Enron in 2001. Jeffrey Skilling, the company’s disgraced CEO, explicitly cited Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene as formative to his worldview (Eichenwald 2005). Although Dawkins did not intend his biological metaphor as a moral or political theory, Skilling appropriated its atomistic vision of nature to justify a corporate culture of hyper-competition and deregulated ambition. Internal systems were designed to reward deception, punish vulnerability, and glorify strategic self-interest. The result was not merely a failure of regulation, but a collapse of civic virtue. Under Skilling’s leadership, Enron became a theatre for economic actors competing for personal gain. Human beings were treated not as persons with dignity and responsibility, but as units of utility to be managed and outperformed. When the fraud was exposed, the collapse destroyed billions in shareholder value, leaving behind a deep wound in public trust—both in corporate governance and the broader economic order.

A more disturbing case is found in the sordid career of Jeffrey Epstein. While publicly presenting himself as a scientific benefactor and patron of elite research, Epstein pursued a vision shaped by eugenics and transhumanist ambition. According to reports in The New York Times, The Guardian, and MIT Technology Review, he expressed a desire to “seed the human race with his DNA”, planning to impregnate multiple women. He also invested in projects exploring cryonics, brain preservation, and evolutionary fitness, and gathered leading scientists to discuss intelligence enhancement, genetic selection, and the engineering of future elites. What emerges from these activities is an anthropology in which human beings are not moral agents but biological instruments in a technocratic programme of optimisation and control. The civic damage has been extensive. Epstein’s ability to embed himself within elite academic networks through funding and influence—and to secure legal leniency despite well-known allegations—exposed a deeper institutional complicity, damaging public trust in science, law, and moral leadership.

I suggest a more muted expression of the same logic can be seen in Silicon Valley elites, like Elon Musk, whose techno-libertarian outlook treats the polis as a launchpad for individual ambition and liberation from earthly limits. “You must follow [the] laws of physics” in pursuing your goals, he mused in an interview with Rolling Stone, but “everything else is negotiable, including government regulations”. Musk’s public persona on social media seems to valorise disruption, as witnessed in his profane dismissals of elected leaders and his disdain for regulatory authority. Though far removed from the unprincipled extremes of Skilling or Epstein—and a public figure whose creative ventures have reshaped communication, transportation, and planetary aspiration—his outlook reflects, in part, the same atomistic impulse: to see human life not as a shared moral endeavour, but as a competitive arena navigated through power, invention, and status. Musk has acknowledged the formative influence of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, and traces of her radical individualism can be seen in his Promethean self-conception.

Taken together, such cases illustrate what happens when atomistic visions of the cosmos shape the public sphere. Without a conception of the person as an ordered whole capable of cultivating virtue, and finding fulfilment therein, the polis loses its moral form. Institutions become instruments of personal strategy; civic trust collapses; and a sense of reverence—for public office, for the dignity of persons, for the common good—is eroded. The polis loses not only its cohesion but its stability and civility, and public life is reduced to a contest of performance, manipulation, and rivalry. These examples are not incidental excesses; they are the natural outgrowth of a cosmology that has forgotten the soul.

3.4. Atomism Redeemed?

Could the Atomistic Picture be redeemed by positing something extra in the ontology—something that allows for rational agency and moral responsibility, even in a world that is ultimately composed of particles and fields? One classical strategy is dualism: the idea that an immaterial and separate soul governs the physical body. Plato famously defended a stark division between the immortal soul and the material world, though he did so within a broader teleological cosmology that is inconsistent with contemporary forms of atomism. Descartes, by contrast, advanced a version of substance dualism designed to accommodate the mechanistic worldview of early modern science. On this view, the soul is a thinking, non-extended substance that pilots the extended machine of the body. However, Cartesian dualism faces two well-known difficulties which remain unresolved.

4.

The Pairing Problem: What connects this particular soul to this particular body—that is, to this particular plurality of microscopic particles? The association seems arbitrary, lacking any metaphysical explanation that would preserve the unity of the person.

5.

The Instrumentalist Problem: By treating the body as an external tool of the soul, dualism fails to explain why violations of the body—such as torture or sexual assault—are violations of the person, not merely of their equipment.

As Elizabeth Anscombe famously argued, conceiving intention as a private and purely mental phenomenon decouples it from the bodily act it is meant to inform (Anscombe 1957, §§5–9). The result is moral fragmentation: an agent can always disown the ethical significance of their deeds—“That wasn’t what I really meant”—as if the soul’s intention and the body’s behaviour were wholly separable. Dualism thus fractures the person both metaphysically and morally, undermining the coherence of action and the integrity of human responsibility.

A more recent attempt to reconcile atomism with moral agency appeals to emergence. On this view, complex systems—brains, persons, societies—can exhibit properties not reducible to their atomic constituents. Moral choice and rational agency may be emergent features of neural networks, just as liquidity is an emergent feature of water molecules. Richard Dawkins, for instance, in The Selfish Gene (Dawkins 2016), insists that although “we are built as gene machines”, “we have the power to turn against our creators.” “We alone on earth,” he writes, “can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators” (p. 227). In such remarks, Dawkins gestures toward an emergentist anthropology: even if our impulses are shaped by evolution, our human agency transcends them.

Yet this gesture is philosophically thin and unconvincing. If the agent who “resists” their genetic programming is itself the product of genetic and environmental factors, then what is the source of that resistance? Emergence becomes a placeholder for mystery, not a satisfactory explanation of moral agency. One cannot preserve virtue simply by naming it as “emergent” without offering an account of how normativity arises from a purely physical, non-normative substrate. Otherwise, moral agency becomes epiphenomenal—a story we tell ourselves about neural processes over which we have no real control.

Emergentism, like dualism, thus attempts to preserve moral responsibility without revising the metaphysical assumptions that undermine it. Both are efforts to patch a picture of the world that lacks the resources to explain human freedom, virtue, or moral accountability. Yet the impulse to rescue virtue through dualism or emergence is revealing, betraying a sense that the atomistic picture is insufficient. What it cannot supply—unity, agency, intelligibility, and moral form—some have sought for instead in the opposite direction: not in discrete physical parts and their causal relations, but in the whole itself.

3.5. Holism and the Soul

The Holist Picture—the second vision in our ancient triad—was revived in early-modern philosophy by figures, such as Baruch Spinoza, whose Ethics rejected the Atomistic Picture in favour of a monistic metaphysics. For Spinoza, all finite things are merely modes of a single infinite substance—Deus sive Natura—expressing itself in infinite attributes. Individual minds and bodies are not independent entities but modifications of the one substance, defined entirely by their place in the whole. In this view, the self is not a substance but a system of relations.

Later, Romantic thinkers, such as Goethe, Schelling, and Coleridge, drew on this holistic impulse to oppose the mechanical reductionism of Enlightenment science. Though not necessarily strict holists, they saw nature as a living unity, organically developing through inner form rather than external force. Here too, the self was not an isolated individual but a participant in a dynamic whole—an expression of universal spirit or Geist.

This holistic orientation, shorn of romantic overtones, continues in contemporary philosophy of science, particularly in ontic structural realism, which holds that reality is not composed of discrete, self-subsisting things, but of networks of relations and patterns. As the philosopher of science James Ladyman puts it, “There are no things. Structure is all there is” (Ladyman and Ross 2007, p. 130). On this view, physics does not offer a catalogue of fundamental entities but a law-governed account of an evolving web of relations.

But holism is not limited to physicalist metaphysics. A more modest but widely influential strain appears in poststructuralist theory—particularly in the work of Foucault and Derrida—where the human subject is no longer conceived as having a stable essence but as the contingent product of historical, linguistic, and normative structures. Here too, relationality displaces substance; identity becomes fluid, and individuals are construed as effects of power and discourse. Though the metaphysical claims of poststructuralist theorists differ from those of structural realists, scientific metaphors are not absent from their arguments, and the ontological orientation is strikingly similar: what is most fundamental is not the individual, but the system or structure in which identity is constituted.

Both forms of holism—scientific and discursive—reject the reduction of all reality to microphysical particles, but neither offers a stable account of personal identity or moral agency. So long as these frameworks remain committed to a vision of reality as a closed system—whether defined by laws of physics or by regimes of discourse—they inherit versions of the Determinism and Knowledge Problems previously outlined. But they also present a distinctive civic challenge:

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The Identity Problem: If persons are nothing more than transient nodes in a dynamic relational web, then they lack stable natures and intrinsic dignity. Identity is a construct of systemic position or social function, not an expression of a rational, embodied nature.

3.6. Holism and the Polis

Again, the Identity Problem is not confined to the seminar room. It shapes mainstream politics, public administration, and institutional policy. Once persons are no longer conceived as individuals sharing a common nature, but as expressions of incommensurable group identities, the polis fragments into contesting moral and political narratives.

A formative influence on this shift in our political imagination is Herbert Marcuse, who, drawing on Marxist materialism and Freudian psychoanalysis, argued in Repressive Tolerance (Marcuse 1965) that genuine liberation requires the suppression of dominant voices—particularly from the political right—to dismantle structures of oppression. Marcuse did not advocate violence, but his ideas profoundly shaped the radical student movements of the 1960s and were later invoked by extremist groups like the Red Army Faction. In this vision, the human person is not an individual bearer of dignity but a node in a system of power; justice is redefined in terms of ideological struggle and the dismantling of systemic hierarchies, rather than the cultivation of civic friendship or shared virtue.

Marcuse’s influence persists in contemporary policies shaped by structuralist thinking. Affirmative action, for instance—though often motivated by the desire to redress injustice—has produced systems where opportunity is allocated not by individual merit or need, but by group membership. This can unintentionally generate resentment among those disadvantaged by such schemes, many of whom may themselves come from difficult backgrounds, eroding civic trust and deepening social division. Institutions that once pursued goods internal to their practices—such as truth in the university, justice in the law, or health in medicine—are increasingly repurposed as instruments of social transformation; their teloi subordinated to an ever-shifting goal of redressing structural injustice.3 The result is a flattening of institutional life and a dilution of standards, as every practice is enlisted to serve the same ideological imperative.

Another expression of the Identity Problem is found in the work of Judith Butler, whose Gender Trouble (Butler 1999) argues that gender is not a biological or metaphysical fact but something “performatively” produced (p. 33). There is no “doer behind the deed” (p. 181), she argues, denying the existence of a stable self. Butler’s anti-essentialist and holistic metaphysics has had far-reaching civic effects. In many institutions, gender self-identification has taken legal and procedural priority over biological sex, sparking intense controversy. A recent U.K. Supreme Court ruling (issued on 16 April 2025), reaffirming the legal relevance of biological sex, reflects growing concern—especially among feminists—that gender theory risks erasing the category of “woman” from public life, thereby undermining hard-won protections for women in law, healthcare, and sport.

In short, when a holistic vision comes to shape civic life, it tends to support collectivist ideologies in which individuals are defined not by rational agency, moral character, or publicly accessible facts, but by systemic position. Policies emphasising equity-based hiring or ideological curriculum reform are favoured over appeals to shared reason, established tradition, or the common good. Public institutions become instruments for managing and redistributing structural power. The result is a civic order no longer directed toward the cultivation of virtuous persons, but toward the recognition of those group-identities prioritised by prevailing policy at the present time. In such a system, moral formation is replaced by ideological alignment and public life becomes a battleground of group interests, where a shared pursuit of justice becomes increasingly difficult to sustain.

Collectivist schemes fragment the civic body into antagonistic tribes, just as atomistic visions fragment it into selfish individuals. One dissolves the polis into systemic positions and the other into strategic agents. In both cases, what is lost is a shared nature—a unifying basis for mutual recognition and moral community.

3.7. Holism Redeemed?

Might the holist picture of reality be redeemed by appealing to a deeper unity—one that neither fragments persons into atoms nor divides them into tribal collectives, but gathers them into a shared ontological foundation? One increasingly influential answer is cosmopsychism, a form of panpsychism; the view that consciousness is neither an emergent property of the brain nor reducible to physical processes but is part of the fundamental fabric of the cosmos. On this view—often associated with “Eastern philosophy”, but also resonant with Romantic intuitions about spirit and unity—all individual minds are expressions or localisations of cosmic consciousness. Every human being, whatever their group-identity, thus participates in a single, all-encompassing consciousness.

Contemporary proponents of this idea include Philip Goff, Yujin Nagasawa, and Miri Albahari. In Why? The Purpose of the Universe (Goff 2023), Goff argues that cosmopsychism “transforms our ethical situation” (p. 137): if we recognise that we all partake in the same universal consciousness, we should be more inclined to treat everybody with dignity, solidarity, and compassion—not just our kith and kin, our class, or our identity collective. The philosophical aim is to foster a spiritually serious worldview that does not involve “postulating something supernatural outside of the universe” (p. 94).

Goff’s ambition is noble, and at first glance, seems to offer what contemporary forms of holism have erased: a shared nature. If consciousness is the common ground of all being, then the human person is not merely a node in a system of power, but a participant in a conscious cosmos—a thing of intrinsic value and significance. Yet this metaphysical move also comes at a significant cost:

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The Decombination Problem: If there is a universal, fundamental consciousness, how does it decompose into a plurality of particular minds? How do distinct, finite, subjects, with their own first-person perspectives, emerge from a single, unified, all-encompassing consciousness (Miller 2018)?

The risk of embracing cosmopsychism, as many critics have noted, is that individuals are dismissed as an illusion, or downgraded to eddies and flows within a more fundamental field, devoid of selfhood in any robust or meaningful sense.

This metaphysical erasure is not politically innocent. Throughout history, spiritual systems which have asserted an unqualified metaphysical unity have often licensed coercive or authoritarian regimes. In certain expressions of Vedantic monism, for instance, the doctrine that all is Brahman has been used to delegitimise protest or critique—since the individual ego is seen as an illusion to be overcome. Likewise, in some forms of Tibetan theocracy, or in Zen-inflected nationalism in wartime Japan, appeals to cosmic unity were employed to suppress dissent and elevate conformity over conscience. The danger, then, is not only the erasure of the individual, but the justification of authoritarianism in the polis, when persons are viewed merely as passing expressions of a higher unity, subject to redirection or suppression by those who claim to speak for the whole.

Cosmopsychism, like dualism, gestures toward something important: that the human person cannot be reduced to micro-constituents or systemic roles. Yet it fails to secure the integrity of persons as unified, rational, and embodied agents, capable of bearing rights, forming moral communities, and participating in shared deliberation. What is needed is a metaphysical framework that preserves both unity and plurality, both relationality and substance, both structure and agency—without collapsing one into the other.

3.8. Hylomorphism and the Soul

Let us now consider the third cosmological vision: hylomorphism. Though first developed in Aristotle’s metaphysics, the Hylomorphic Picture did not remain confined to antiquity. It received systematic articulation through the work of medieval thinkers, especially Thomas Aquinas, who famously held that anima est forma corporis—“the soul is the form of the body” (ST I.76.1). This principle became the cornerstone of his Christian anthropology, in which the human person is a single, unified substance: a living body in-formed by a rational soul. For centuries, this hylomorphic vision shaped the Latin West’s understanding of nature and the human being, until it was gradually eclipsed by the rise of mechanistic science and Cartesian dualism in the seventeenth century.

Hylomorphism has remained less prominent than atomism or holism in contemporary moral and civic discourse, with fewer public advocates, though it is now experiencing a quiet revival in several areas of contemporary philosophy (Koons 2014; Simpson 2023a). Properly speaking, hylomorphism is not a single doctrine but a family of views tracing their roots to Aristotle’s account of nature, soul, and substance. As David Charles has shown in his recent edited collection, The History of Hylomorphism (Charles 2023), there is considerable variation in how form and matter have been understood within this long tradition. Still, a number of common commitments are emerging in current debates.

Most contemporary hylomorphists affirm that all natural entities are composites of form and matter. But form and matter are not separate substances, as in Descartes’ dualism of body and soul. As William Jaworski conceives it, form is the organising principle of a material thing—its internal structure, which explains its functional capacities and causal powers (Jaworski 2016). David Charles goes further in emphasising a more ontologically robust notion: form not only structures matter but determines it, grounding the unity and identity of a substance (Charles 2021). On either account, form is immanent to the things it informs. It is not, as in Plato’s metaphysics, a separate exemplar in a transcendent realm. Rather, form is intrinsic to the being of natural things. It is what explains why an oak tree grows, why a heart beats, why a citizen deliberates about justice.

This return to form is not confined to metaphysics narrowly conceived. In recent work by Robert Koons and myself, among others, hylomorphism has been extended into the philosophy of science (Simpson et al. 2017, 2021; Koons 2021; Simpson 2023a). In our view, form is part of the ontological fabric of the physical world and makes a real difference to how it unfolds. This ‘staunch’ kind of hylomorphism challenges the flattening tendencies of both reductionism and structuralism, offering a layered account of causation and intelligibility in nature (Koons 2014).

Unlike atomism and holism, hylomorphism affirms a stratified universe in which causes operate at multiple levels—physical, biological, rational, political—and in which intelligibility is linked to form rather than merely to quantity. This layered picture enables hylomorphism to resist both the Determinism Problem (which threatens human freedom by reducing action to mechanical or systemic forces) and the Knowledge Problem (which dissolves normativity by denying natural ends). Because the form of a human being is a rational soul, whose operations include deliberation, choice, and desire for the good, hylomorphism grounds moral and epistemic norms in the real structure of human nature (Koons 2019a).

Moreover, the hylomorphic account of the soul—as the form of a living body—avoids the major metaphysical pitfalls of rival anthropologies. Unlike dualism, it does not fall prey to the Pairing Problem (how distinct souls are linked to distinct bodies) or the Instrumentalist Problem (in which the body is merely a tool for the soul). Soul and body are not two substances in tension. A human being is a single unified substance (Charles 2021).

At the same time, hylomorphism avoids the Decombination Problem of cosmopsychism: the difficulty of explaining how individual minds emerge from an undifferentiated field of cosmic consciousness. For hylomorphism, each human being is a distinct unity of body and soul, not merely a fragment of a greater whole. Individuality is real, rooted in substantial form—it is not a surface phenomenon awaiting dissolution.

What hylomorphism offers, then, is a philosophical anthropology fit to ground moral responsibility. It affirms that human beings are rational, embodied, and teleologically ordered—neither autonomous machines nor programmable nodes, but persons whose very nature invites the pursuit of shared goods.

3.9. Hylomorphism and the Polis

Hylomorphism also provides a natural home for the polis. It neither reduces political life to a contract among sovereign individuals, like Hobbes, nor subsumes it into impersonal historical or systemic forces, like Marcuse. Instead, it views the polis as a natural form of human association—an organic whole arising from our nature as zoōn politikon (“a political animal”). For Aristotle, political life is not an external constraint upon human flourishing but its proper context and condition. The state is a form-structured whole, which is ordered toward the common good. Hylomorphism avoids the civic failures of atomistic liberalism and collectivist progressivism because it avoids the metaphysical moves from which they arise —namely, atomism and holism, respectively.

In the first place, it avoids the Virtue Problem for atomism by grounding moral norms in the structure of human nature. Human beings are not mere machines governed by blind impulses, as in atomism, but rational animals with intrinsic ends, whose flourishing depends on participation in shared goods. This is the central theme of Alasdair MacIntyre’s celebrated After Virtue (MacIntyre 1981). Once moral discourse is severed from a shared conception of human nature, it degenerates into emotivism—expressions of subjective preference masquerading as principle. The civic result is a politics of manipulation and moral incommensurability. MacIntyre’s remedy—to recover virtue through practices rooted in traditions that cultivate character—finds a secure home in hylomorphism, where the normative force of such practices derives from the nature of the beings they form.

Hylomorphism thus provides us with a framework for civic diagnosis. Skilling’s corporate culture at Enron, for example, driven by performance metrics and game theory, turned human persons into disposable units of strategic value. Epstein’s pursuit of techno-eugenic “human enhancement” was animated by a mechanistic anthropology that viewed persons as biological raw material to be edited and optimised at will. Both illustrate how the loss of a hylomorphic understanding of human persons, as ordered to certain common goods, leads not just to individual corruption, but to institutional systems that cannot sustain responsibility, trust, and the pursuit of the common good.

In the second place, hylomorphism avoids the Identity Problem for holism by affirming the substantial and embodied unity of the human person. We are not reducible to shifting social positions or effects of discourse, but are unified rational beings, whose identity is formed through bodily, relational lives. Here again, MacIntyre is a crucial guide. In Dependent Rational Animals (MacIntyre 1999), he rejects disembodied conceptions of agency—whether individualist or collectivist—and argues that human flourishing depends on the integrated development of both our rational and animal capacities. His anthropology is deeply hylomorphic: we are form–matter unities whose ends as rational animals are realised through embodied practices of care, virtue, and community life. On this view, rational agency is not abstract, free-floating, or illusory, but embedded in the concrete life of the community.

The hylomorphic framework sheds a critical light on Butler’s gender theory and on identity-based collectivism more broadly. While recognising the role of social formation in shaping the self, hylomorphism affirms that our bodies are not blank matter to be inscribed by an inner will, but expressions of our nature—carriers of intelligible form and moral significance. Butler’s performative model, by contrast, treats identity as a series of repeated acts without an underlying subject—a view that dissolves the unity of the person and evacuates the body of intrinsic meaning. In civic life, this metaphysics has legitimised policies that prioritise subjective identity claims over objective, embodied reality—compromising sex-based rights, obscuring the referential clarity of law and language, and fracturing the common life of the polis. What emerges is not liberation, but instability: a society ruled less by reasoned deliberation than by expressive volatility. Hylomorphism, by recovering the unity of body and soul, offers an anthropology capable of grounding both rights and responsibilities—preserving personal integrity and enabling a politics rooted in nature and publicly intelligible realities rather than private constructions.

Hylomorphism also illuminates the philosophical assumptions behind key civic documents in the Western tradition, as well as its traditional institutions. The American Declaration of Independence appeals to “unalienable rights” grounded in human nature; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms that all people are “endowed with reason and conscience”. Both presume a vision of the person as a rational being with intrinsic dignity. Hylomorphism gives ontological depth to these assumptions, sustaining both the integrity of the person and the intelligibility of the polis. This vision also explains why institutions, like the university, a medieval invention, originally flourished as structured communities ordered to truth. A university is not an instrument of ideological imposition or a tool for social engineering; it is a layered commonwealth of learners and teachers, ordered toward the discovery of shared goods. Hylomorphism accounts for such complex wholes, allowing for unity within plurality. In this vision, a polis is not flat. It is composed of nested forms whose teloi contribute to a greater good—a community not of isolated wills or tribal factions, but of embodied souls, in pursuit of the true and the good. But this raises an important question: can hylomorphism be reconciled with modern science?

4. Hylomorphism in a Scientific Age

The revival of hylomorphic ideas in philosophy may appear surprising. Historically, hylomorphic philosophies of nature were largely abandoned in the wake of the Scientific Revolution. Francis Bacon in The New Organon rejected final causes as “barren virgins” in the pursuit of knowledge, arguing that such explanations yielded no fruitful results for scientific inquiry (Bacon 2000, p. 107). Descartes in Principles of Philosophy dismissed substantial form as “a philosophical being unknown to me” (Descartes 1983, I.51), and Henry Oldenburg, the first Secretary of the Royal Society, praised Robert Boyle for having “driven out that drivel of substantial forms” which had, in his view, obstructed scientific progress.4 This metaphysical shift favoured the Atomistic Picture, replacing a hylomorphic conception of substances with a corpuscularian conception of matter. But does this cosmology still serve us well in the light of recent developments in modern science?

4.1. Atomism, Holism, and Quantum Physics

In my own work, I have argued that atomism and holism can no longer claim the exclusive sanction of modern science (e.g., Simpson and Horsley 2022). The resurgence of teleological language in the philosophy of biology, for example—especially in the work of Denis Walsh (Walsh 2015)—already signals a reappraisal of nature’s goal-directedness. More striking still is the revolution in physics brought about by quantum mechanics, which has called into question the corpuscularian conception of matter. For reasons of scope, and in the interests of advancing a hylomorphic cosmology, my discussion will focus primarily on physics.

In the Atomistic Picture, as we have seen, all phenomena are constituted by microphysical properties, which are intrinsic to particles or fields, or are instantiated at spatiotemporal points, as in Lewis’s microphysical mosaic, with causation and explanation proceeding from the bottom up. This metaphysical picture is widely supposed to express the scientific image. To many thinkers, it seemed well suited for the classical physics of Isaac Newton and James Clerk Maxwell—the kind of physics one learns at school. Quantum mechanics, however, makes trouble for Lewis’s microphysical mosaic, as various philosophers have pointed out (for example, see Maudlin 2007, chap. 2).

In standard formulations of quantum theory, the state of a quantum system is described not by a set of local properties in ordinary space, but by a wavefunction defined over a high-dimensional space, where each point in this space picks out a total state of the physical system. When particles become “entangled”, their joint quantum state cannot be decomposed into the states of their individual spatial components. This phenomenon, known as “non-separability”, implies that the properties of each part are dependent upon the state of the whole. The system exhibits holistic features that are irreducible to its parts. As Ladyman observes, “entanglement flatly contradicts [the] proposal that everything is exhaustively structured by… ‘micro-based’ properties” (Ladyman and Ross 2007, p. 47).

Entanglement might seem to favour holism instead. The metaphysician Jonathan Schaffer, for instance, appeals to entanglement in support of his theory of “priority monism”—the view that the cosmos is the fundamental entity, and everything else is ontologically derivative (Schaffer 2010). Since every particle is entangled through an unbroken chain of interactions stretching back to the Big Bang, middle-sized entities—including human beings—are, on this view, dependent on the cosmos, lacking individual substantiality of their own. Popular science writers, like Fritjof Capra and Jeremy Lent, also invoke entanglement in support of their Taoist-inflected visions of ecological and social interdependence (Capra 1975, 1996; Lent 2021). The Holist Picture finds explanatory unity in the totality, regarding all subsystems as derivatives of an indissoluble whole.

However, while popular forms of holism enjoy a certain urgency and appeal—especially in light of environmental crises—the inference from quantum entanglement to any strict kind of cosmic holism is problematic. Granted, entanglement shows that many-body systems exhibit properties irreducible to their spatially separated parts: the state of a pair of entangled particles, for instance, cannot be fully described by reference to either particle alone. But this does not entail that all explanation or ontological grounding must ultimately reside at the cosmic level, and nowhere else. In scientific practice, explanation operates across multiple levels—molecular, thermodynamic, biological, psychological—none of which is reducible to micro-physics or cosmic structure.

This is especially evident in the physics of open quantum systems, where subsystems interact with their environments (Cuffaro and Hartmann 2025). Their behaviour is influenced not just by entanglement, but by macroscopic conditions: boundary constraints, temperature, and other contextual factors. These are not derivable from either their constituent fields or particles, or from a global wavefunction. Rather, they reflect dynamical dependencies on features defined at the mesoscopic and macroscopic scales—a level of reality that neither atomism nor holism, which privilege reality at the microscopic and cosmic scales, respectively, can adequately accommodate.

What quantum theory points to, I suggest, is neither a flattened world of atoms, nor a single cosmic totality, but a layered reality in which explanatory power is distributed across levels. It suggests a world in which wholes and parts, systems, and contexts, must be jointly acknowledged—a picture more consonant with the hylomorphic tradition.

4.2. Hylomorphism and Quantum Physics

I think recent work in foundations of physics—especially by the cosmologist George Ellis, the condensed matter physicist Barabara Drossel, and the philosopher of physics Laura Ruetsche—has helped to illuminate how hylomorphic principles are implicit in contemporary quantum theory. Ellis has long maintained that mesoscopic and macroscopic contexts exert “top-down causation” on microscopic physical systems (Ellis 2012; Ellis et al. 2012). On this view, higher-level conditions—such as boundary constraints, spatial organisation, and thermodynamic parameters—modulate the evolution of lower-level entities.

Drossel also takes aim at the assumption of reductionism in physics, arguing that many complex systems resist a purely quantum mechanical description in terms of microphysical properties (Drossel 2015). She contends that the irreversibility and stochasticity of these systems should be taken as real properties. Ellis and Drossel, both working physicists, have even jointly proposed that the evolution of a quantum system is constrained by macroscopic factors, including temperature, chemical entropy, or gravitational thresholds (Drossel and Ellis 2018). This work suggests that, in any realistic approach to quantum theory, the macroscopic and mesoscopic structure of a physical system is not epiphenomenal but causally efficacious. The assumption that only micro-level processes drive the dynamics has thus been challenged from within physics itself.

Parallel insights appear in Ruetsche’s (2011) interpretation of quantum field theory (QFT). Ruetsche emphasises that in algebraic QFT, no unique, universal representation of the algebra of observables exists. Instead, different macroscopic contexts give rise to different “unitarily inequivalent” representations. The quantum field cannot be pinned down from a single, all-encompassing perspective; its description is shaped by the large-scale features of the physical system under study—thermal baths, boundary conditions, spacetime curvature, and so forth. Ruetsche argues that these inequivalent representations are not merely epistemic artifacts but reflect the real, context-sensitive structure of the physical world. In other words, macroscopic structure matters: the field behaves differently in differently formed contexts. This layering of reality undermines the monolithic ambitions of both atomism and holism, which privilege one scale, opening the door to a metaphysics that takes form seriously—as Koons (2021) has recently argued.5

Building on these insights, I have been working on a contextual approach to QFT that incorporates both top-down causation and unitarily inequivalent representations. This approach begins with “Bohmian mechanics”, a version of quantum theory that develops the ideas of the physicists Louis de Broglie and David Bohm.6 In standard Bohmian theory, the world’s particles are “piloted” by a global wavefunction defined on a high-dimensional configuration space; a type of influence which can be understood in terms of formal causation (Simpson 2021a, 2023b). The physical state of the world is expressed by a tuple: (Q, Ψ), where Q is the configuration of particles, and Ψ is the global wavefunction.

In a sense, the Bohmian framework unites elements of both the Atomistic Picture and the Holist Picture: the world is made (from the bottom-up) of physical particles Q, but these particles are choreographed (from the top-down) by a global wave function Ψ. However, standard Bohmian mechanics assumes a fixed, global representation of the wavefunction—a limitation that becomes problematic for QFT when it is applied to complex physical systems, as Ruetsche points out, where no single representation suffices.

My proposal modifies this picture in two key ways (Simpson, forthcoming). First, it incorporates contextual constraints—lab setups, thermodynamic parameters, spatial, and temporal boundaries—as causally relevant features, as Ellis and Drossel maintain. These are not merely external “conditions”, in my model, but expressions of real forms which contribute to determining particle trajectories and modulating processes of particle creation and annihilation. Second, and more radically, I propose that the global wavefunction itself must be cast in different contextually appropriate, unitarily inequivalent representations, a la Ruetsche.

In a nutshell, this means that both the configuration of the particles (Q) and the wavefunction (Ψ) are form-sensitive, co-determined by the macro-context (Λ) within which they are embedded. The result is a triadic model: (Q, Ψ, Λ), where Q is the configuration of particles, Ψ is the context-sensitive wavefunction, and Λ represents the structured macro-context—its boundary conditions, thermodynamic state, etc.

This triadic structure avoids both the reductionism of atomism and the overreach of strict holism. It rejects the atomist’s claim that the world can be explained entirely from the bottom-up in terms of its micro-constituents (Q), and it repudiates the holist’s claim that it can be explained completely from the top-down in terms of the state of the cosmos as a whole (Ψ). It recovers the hylomorphic idea that matter is always in-formed (Λ); the intelligibility of nature arises not from one privileged physical scale, but from the interplay of different levels, including the cosmic level.

In this way, my version of hylomorphism can be seen not merely as an abstract metaphysical doctrine but as a live, scientifically responsible interpretation of quantum theory—one that integrates form and layered causation into a coherent ontology. Macroscopic systems—such as detectors, organisms, and ecosystems—are not merely microphysical aggregates. They are structured wholes that exert causal influence.

I do not claim that the approach I have outlined in this section is the only way to approach quantum theory, and I concede that it is a work in progress. Other hylomorphists may adopt a different approach. Such a view, however, retrieves the hylomorphic ideas discarded by Bacon, Boyle and Oldenburg in a way that is well-motivated, without imposing upon our best physics. Far from being obsolete, form now appears as a scientifically indispensable category. In hylomorphic terms, these macro-contexts (Λ) are not mere backdrops but real formal causes—structuring matter’s potentialities into actual patterns of physical behaviour. And if local forms play a constitutive role in particle behaviour, then it is natural to ask whether there exists a form at the widest scale—the cosmos itself—that governs and unifies; an intrinsic principle of order and intelligibility that binds its manifold elements into a coherent whole.

4.3. Beyond Aristotle—A Hylomorphic Cosmology

Aristotle did not posit a single unifying form of the cosmos, but his metaphysics of form provided fertile soil for philosophical developments. Stoicism and Neoplatonism extended this idea, envisioning the universe as structured by a Logos—a rational principle that informs all things. Neoplatonism, in particular, was conceived as a sophisticated synthesis of Platonic and Aristotelian insights, retaining Plato’s hierarchical vision of reality and metaphysical priority of unity, while incorporating Aristotle’s emphasis on the immanence of natural forms. In this light, the incorporation of a “cosmic form”—a unifying principle of order and intelligibility—can be interpreted not as a break from Aristotelianism, but as its fuller unfolding within a more comprehensive framework.

From a contemporary scientific perspective, the idea of a cosmic form emerges not as a speculative luxury, but as a plausible explanatory principle. For instance, within the Bohmian approach to QFT that I described, the global wavefunction (Ψ) functions as a kind of cosmic structure that coordinates the behaviour of local subsystems. Applying the hylomorphic framework I discussed, in which the physical state of the world is specified by the triple (Q, Ψ, Λ), it is natural to conceive the quantum state (Ψ) of the universe as grounded in a cosmic form—something that plays an essential role in modulating the development of the matter (Q) in cooperation with the local forms encoded in (Λ). In my version of Bohmian theory, the phenomenon of quantum entanglement arises due to the interplay between the particles (Q), the wavefunction (Ψ), and the structured macro-context in which they are embedded (Λ). Entangled systems, on this view, are not governed by local mechanisms alone, nor dissolved into a global totality, but are coordinated by a cosmic form that spans multiple levels. This cosmic form does not override local forms but works with them—guiding the evolution of matter through layered influences that reflect both global structure and contextual specificity.

Modern cosmology also furnishes us with facts which seem to favour a cosmic form. The early universe began in a relatively simple and undifferentiated state, with few local forms. The richness of structure we observe today—atoms, stars, organisms, and minds—emerged only gradually, through a temporally extended process. A viable hylomorphic cosmology must, therefore, accommodate not only the synchronic ordering of parts within wholes, but also the diachronic emergence of novel forms over time. The cosmic form, on this picture, is not merely a static structure that preserves a global order, but a dynamic principle which fosters the emergence of life.

Such an ontology offers a promising way to interpret the so-called fine-tuning of the cosmos. It is well known that the physical constants of the laws of physics and the initial conditions of the cosmos appear precisely calibrated to allow for the eventual emergence of life (Lewis and Barnes 2020). In a hylomorphic cosmology, this calibration need not be dismissed as a brute fact nor explained away as an anthropic selection effect—it could be an intelligible and intrinsic feature of the cosmos itself (cf. Goff 2023, chap. 2). The order of the universe would not be accidental, it would be teleological. The cosmos would unfold within a form-directed structure that enables the realisation of higher-level unities at different scales and at different stages of cosmic evolution: living organisms, rational agents, and political communities.

Hylomorphism incorporates the concept of emergence without mystifying it. Rather than treating emergence as a placeholder for ignorance, the hylomorphic framework interprets it as the actualisation of higher-level forms; something made possible by the structured interplay of matter and cosmic order. Novel forms do not simply “appear” from below, nor are they imposed ex machina from above; they emerge through a diachronic unfolding that is internally directed by form-sensitive principles. On this view, the emergence of complexity is not an inexplicable contingency, but an intelligible teleology—the unfolding of potentials implicit in the structure of the cosmos itself.

This hylomorphic cosmology thus opens the door to a more hospitable and humane metaphysics than either the atomistic or holistic models can provide. Rather than a universe of detached atoms or impersonal relations, the cosmos is a hierarchy of forms nested within a comprehensive whole—one in which human beings and communities are meaningfully situated. As Koons and I have suggested, this cosmic whole may be aptly conceived as a kind of civitas; a layered and global community of interacting parts (Simpson and Koons 2025). Just as a city contains laws, institutions, and structures that constrain and empower its members, enabling them to flourish, so too might the cosmos possess a form that constrains and empowers its parts, not as a tyrant, but as a constitution—fostering participation in goods no part could achieve alone.

On the view that I wish to put forward, the cosmos is neither a strict substance, as the holist claims, nor a mere aggregation of indifferent parts, as the atomist maintains. It is a purposive and intelligible whole—a quasi-substance ordered in such a way that its parts—like citizens of a well-ordered city—flourish not by being absorbed into the collective, but by participating in a shared order that sustains and directs diverse forms of being.

5. From Cosmos to Civitas: The Civic Meaning of Metaphysical Order

5.1. The Form of the Polis: Recovering Civic Life as Participation in Cosmic Order

If the cosmos possesses a form—a principle of intelligibility ordered toward the emergence of life—then the polis, as Plato saw, should be its civic analogue: a political community ordered toward the flourishing of human life, mirroring on its own macroscopic scale the intelligible order of the cosmos. In Book IV of the Republic (427e–434c), Plato describes how justice in the soul mirrors justice in the city; in Book X of the Republic (608c–621d) and in the Timaeus (30c–31a), he identifies a structural correspondence between psyche, polis, and cosmos. Each is a rational whole, governed by form, ordered toward the Good. In this framework, political justice arises when human life is brought into alignment with the deep order of being.

The hylomorphic cosmology laid out in the preceding sections allows us to retrieve and to deepen this vision. Hylomorphism affirms that natural wholes—including human beings and societies—are constituted of matter and form. Forms are not externally imposed but intrinsic principles of intelligibility and directedness—what make a thing what it is, and enable it to act as it does. The polis, in this light, is not a contractual artefact nor a procedural mechanism, but a real and natural form: the communal expression of human beings as rational and political animals (Politics, I.2, 1253a2), ordered to their proper ends.

This hylomorphic vision stands in sharp contrast to the dominant cosmologies of atomism and holism. Atomism fragments reality into disconnected parts, reducing political community to a negotiation between self-interested individuals, driven by their instincts and passions. Holism, in contrast, absorbs individuals into collectivist abstractions, dissolving agency and responsibility within the flow of systemic forces manipulated by managerial elites. Both fail to account for the polis as a formative whole in which rational agents participate, deliberate, and flourish in pursuit of the common good.

Hylomorphism offers a middle path. It affirms the reality of wholes without denying the integrity of their parts. The polis, in this vision, is not merely a platform for negotiation, nor a nexus of coercive power, but the natural context in which human potential is realised, where persons are formed through law, friendship, and shared purpose. Its laws are not alien impositions but rational articulations of natural justice—expressions of our common nature, and of the intelligible order in which we are embedded (Simpson and Dyer, forthcoming).

Many contemporary calls for civic renewal invoke virtue, community, or the need for shared narratives. Yet without a framework that explains what a person is, what the polis is, and what kind of world we inhabit, such efforts lack traction. They fail to connect because they do not engage the scientific cosmologies that shape our cultural imaginaries. If the cosmos is disordered or indifferent, according to whatever cosmology enthrals us, then civic ideals are merely rhetorical ornamentation. This is why metaphysical repair is a civic necessity. A true polis must be more than a social contract. It must be a natural and formative order—a microcosmic reflection of a cosmos that is intelligible, purposive, and worthy of reverence.

5.2. Reverence and the Soul: Recovering Civic Piety in a Disenchanted Age

If the polis is the civic analogue of the cosmos, then the soul is its personal reflection. As Plato taught, the well-ordered soul, the just city, and the ordered cosmos share a common form. This is not merely a metaphor: in this hylomorphic framework, soul, city, and cosmos are layered wholes, each possessing a form that orders it toward a natural good.

Yet no city can sustain justice, and no soul can attain virtue, without a posture of reverence. Reverence is not sentimentality, but a rational response to the reality and order of things. It is the recognition that the natural world is not raw material for manipulation, and that human beings are not mere objects of use. To revere something is to acknowledge its form: its intrinsic intelligibility, directedness, and dignity within the natural order.

Neither atomism nor holism can support the kind of reverence that sustains the polis. Atomism reduces the world to value-neutral and manipulable material. Holism dissolves agency into systemic flows, revering only the impersonal totality. In both, the human scale of meaning disappears. Hylomorphism, by contrast, affirms that there is an intelligible order within nature which is real and discoverable; that forms exist at many physical scales; and that human beings have natural ends. Within a Hylomorphic Picture, reverence is a fitting response to the deep structure of reality.

This insight is embodied in exemplary fashion in Tolkien’s legendarium, which depicts “Middle-earth” as a world ordered by form and finality. Its heroes revere the given order, while its antagonists seek to mechanise and dominate it. In The Two Towers, Saruman stands accused of having “a mind of metal and wheels”. Of Sauron, it is said: “what does he not hate?” Isengard, the city of Saruman, is reduced to an industrial wasteland teeming with Orcs; Minas Morgul, a fortress of Sauron, is a silent city of wraiths, stripped of individuality and will. They are anti-hylomorphic figures, rejecting form in nature. The wise—like Gandalf and Faramir—respond by contrast with care and gratitude toward the given order, delighting in the beauty of nature, of hearth and of city.

Beauty plays a central role in disclosing the fittingness of things and exciting reverence. It is not merely a subjective preference, “in the eye of the beholder”, but the perceptible radiance of form—what Aquinas described as the splendour of order (splendor ordinis). It is revealed in the harmonious integration of parts within a whole, whether in a work of art, a well-ordered soul, or a just polity. In awakening delight and awe, beauty is an immediate source of reverence, drawing the soul toward what is good by making its order luminous. In Jackson’s cinematic rendering of The Return of the King, Faramir declares of the “White City” of Minas Tirith, “I will gladly give my life to defend her beauty”.

This reverence is essential to civic life, embracing both its affective and aesthetic dimensions. It sustains law by rooting it in something deeper than consent: the shared participation of rational agents in an order that accords with the human form and is not of our own making. It protects institutions from cynicism and empty proceduralism by grounding them in what the classical tradition calls natural law (Simpson and Dyer, forthcoming), and what hylomorphism locates in the natures of things (De Haan and Simpson, forthcoming). Civic life, too, depends on beauty to sustain that reverence—not only in its architecture and rituals, but in the cultivation of virtues that make life itself admirable. A polis that neglects beauty will struggle to inspire love, loyalty, or a sense of belonging; a culture that devalues it will find reverence difficult to sustain.

Reverence is often associated with the Religious Picture of Reality, yet even in a disenchanted age, its echoes sound in surprising places. Richard Dawkins, for instance, though an outspoken critic of religion, describes his experience of scientific endeavour as one of “awed wonder” and “aesthetic passion” (Dawkins 1998). Yet the reverence he displays for the natural world sits uneasily within his atomistic worldview. As David Lewis has argued, even the laws of nature, on such a view, are not expressions of rational order but merely the most efficient descriptions of brute facts (Lewis 1987). If the world is ultimately blind, indifferent, and directionless, why should we revere it? If science is nothing more than an exercise in summarising how microphysical properties just happen to be distributed in physical space, why should such practices inspire awe? Without form or finality, Dawkins’ reverence is reduced to a vestigial sentiment, preserved perhaps by the lingering cultural memory of Christianity still present in the older colleges of Oxford.

A hylomorphic cosmology, however, dissolves this tension. The beauty of the world and its capacity to excite wonder are neither psychological projections nor evolutionary spandrels. They reflect something about the world itself: its form, its order, its end. The world is not a machine but a meaningful cosmos, and reverence is a rational response.

This opens the door to a renewed civic piety—something increasingly rare in a modern world oppressed by the twin forces of holistic collectivism in our institutions and atomistic individualism in our digitised culture. The polis becomes a place not only of justice and deliberation but also of moral and spiritual formation, where the soul is befriended and shaped in harmony with the structure of reality. Without it, public life is reduced to manipulation by the self-centred and hollow formalism by the cynical. With it, persons are honoured as rational agents; nature as meaningful order; and community as a formative fellowship. To recover reverence, in the light of Plato’s isomorphism, is to restore the inner link between soul, city, and cosmos. The traditional religion of the polis—Dawkins’ scepticism notwithstanding—has a critical role to play in cultivating and supporting this posture: awakening our souls to beauty, orienting our affections toward what is good, and inviting individuals into a shared life through its traditions and practices.

6. Concluding Remarks

This paper has argued that the civic crisis of the modern West is not merely institutional. Beneath our moral and political disintegration lies a series of deeper ruptures: of soul from body, person from nature, citizen from polis, and cosmos from form.

Civic renewal, I have suggested, requires more than dialogue, deliberation or policy reform. It requires metaphysical repair. The cosmologies that dominate our age constrain our civic possibilities. Each, in its own way, is deeply corrosive to civic life. Atomism reduces persons to particles; holism dissolves them into systems. Neither, despite frequent claims to the contrary, is scientifically unquestionable or should be regarded as scientifically privileged. Both erode the foundations of moral agency and civic virtue.

What is needed is a vision capable of sustaining a richer anthropology and a more humane politics—a metaphysic that engages, but is not confined to, the scientific imaginaries that shape our cultural horizons. The kind of hylomorphism I have outlined in this paper offers such a vision. It affirms that persons are unified substances—dependent rational animals—and that the polis is a natural outgrowth of our social nature. It recognises layered levels of causality, from the physical to the political, all of which participate in an intelligible cosmos ordered toward natural ends. It is, in short—and with further development—a metaphysic capable of grounding the moral form of civic life: one that is flourishing, humane, and just.

While this paper has focused on the structural isomorphism between the soul, polis, and cosmos, future work might develop its spiritual and dynamic dimensions—how each domain is marked not only by formal order but also by the potential for distortion and decay. This opens up conceptual space for a theological contribution to civic renewal by retrieving the spiritual motif of “the fall” and examining the interplay of euteleology and dysteleology, of virtue and vice, not only in the soul but also in the life of the polis and even the cosmos. In this light, the religion of the polis may be seen not merely as a source of reverence, but as a vital agent of moral and spiritual formation, shaping citizens through teaching and beautiful liturgy, and helping to resist civic disintegration in a world fractured by both atomistic disenchantment and collectivist ideology.

In closing, let me observe that the classical isomorphism of soul, city, and cosmos offers more than a philosophical schema of interest to historians. It provides an architecture in which freedom, justice, and community find their proper place. Without such a vision, civic life remains procedural and hollow. With it, politics becomes again a shared pursuit of the good: informed by science, ordered by justice, and sustained by reverence.