Self and World

For premoderns – ancients and medievals – there was a homology between the self and the world. Man was seen as microcosm, and, as Seigel puts it, they believed that “the world, like the self, is structured so as to fulfill intelligible moral ends.” The initial shift in early modernity, and one that created a crisis in the understanding of the self, was not so much anthropological as cosmological. The heavens, the natural world on earth, eventually the human body “took on mechanical or quasi-mechanical features, its movement and growth subject to explanations in which the old idea of form had no place.”