From Myth to Metacosmos: Symbolic Orders of Possibility: 5 Rationalist Symbolism: Enlightenment Systems and the Structuring of Potential

The Enlightenment transformed the symbolic orders of possibility by recasting the cosmos as a system comprehensible through reason, mathematics, and conceptual abstraction. Where allegory had multiplied layers of meaning and theology had bound potential to divine order, Enlightenment thought construed possibility as structured by universal principles, accessible to rational inquiry. Scientific law and philosophical systematisation became new symbolic architectures, expanding the horizons of potential while subjecting them to rigorous codification.

Newton’s Principia exemplifies this symbolic transformation. Gravity, expressed as a universal law, functions not merely as a physical force but as a symbolic condensation of cosmic order: a single principle capable of explaining the motions of planets, tides, and terrestrial bodies. Newton’s cosmos is a rational system where potential is calculable and governed by invariant rules. The symbolic power of this model lies in its generality: one law, abstractly formulated, orders both heaven and earth. Possibility is thus construed as law-governed and predictive, the cosmos a mechanism revealed through symbolic mathematics.

Leibniz offers a counterpoint: the world as the best of all possible worlds, structured by divine rationality and expressed through the relational harmony of monads. Here, possibility is not reducible to deterministic mechanics but unfolds through a symbolic logic of pre-established harmony. Each monad reflects the entire universe from its perspective, a model of relational construal that anticipates later perspectival philosophies. Leibniz thus extends rationalist symbolism beyond mechanics to metaphysical possibility, where the cosmos is ordered through conceptual and relational symmetry.

The Enlightenment’s rationalist systems signal a new mode of construal: possibility as something not merely intuited through myth or mediated by allegory, but abstracted into conceptual and mathematical form. These symbolic orders are generative: they enable technologies, scientific practices, and philosophical frameworks that transform both human understanding and material capacity. Yet they also constrain, since possibility is admitted only insofar as it can be rationally modelled.

In this shift, symbolic orders move decisively towards abstraction: the cosmos is no longer narrated or ritually sustained but systematised and symbolically formalised. Rationalist symbolism demonstrates that the structuring of potential is inseparable from the symbolic means through which it is codified—laws, systems, and principles that become the architecture of possibility itself.