Microcosm

History

The origin of the concept of microcosm is hindouist and is related to the so fundamental concept of Immanence in this religion.

This theory of microcosm penetrates in occident from before our era, in ancient Greece (Plato). Treated apart from the context philosophico-monk which gave him birth, this concept gave place to strange speculations, not only in philosophy (Plato), but also in medicine (Hippocrates). This last lived at one time during which the dissection of late was prohibited (this prohibition was prolonged until the Renaissance); it thus developed its description of the human body by the reflection, the speech, the reasoning on what was allowed then. A consequence of this type of method was, for example, to say that: “the divine perfect form is the sphere, and the human head is close to the Sphère”; one concluded from it that the Man had something of divine. It is starting from this kind of analogical reasoning that in Europe the theory of microcosm is worked out, that is to say similarity of the human being with the totality of the Cosmos.

Nowadays, this theory is completely abandoned being given our progress in medicine, astronomy and thus in cosmology; in its time, this theory however proposed an answer to the problem of the intelligibility of the universe.

Contemporary direction

Today one uses especially this word in an ironic direction to indicate a reduced part of the company which is caught for the whole. Thus the " microcosm politique" indicate it the political world in what it of considered pretentious.

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