The Great Chain of Being

Wilber's View

Wilber opens Sex, Ecology, Spirituality by reviving what he calls the Great Chain — the traditional (and, he argues, historically dominant) view of reality as nested domains of matter (the physiosphere), life (the biosphere), and mind (the noosphere), each interwoven with the others rather than separate. He's explicit that this isn't a fringe idea he's importing: he presents it as "the official philosophy of the larger part of civilized humankind through most of its history," embraced across most premodern wisdom traditions, East and West.

His account of what happened to it is a decline narrative: the rise of modern science — Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton — didn't just add knowledge, it caused this unified picture to fracture, in ways Wilber says none of those scientists intended. In particular, biology's arrow (evolution "winding up" into greater complexity) and physics' arrow (thermodynamic entropy "winding down") pointed in opposite directions, pulling matter and life apart into what looked like two separately-governed, unrelated domains — with mind cut loose from both. This is the setup for systems-theory, which Wilber presents as the modern, scientific rediscovery of exactly the kind of unifying pattern the Great Chain had described all along, just without needing to invoke it as tradition or dogma.

In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

"The Great Chain… has been the official philosophy of the larger part of civilized humankind through most of its history"

Now whatever we moderns might think of the Great Chain as a theory, it nonetheless "has been the official philosophy of the larger part of civilized humankind through most of its history"; and further, it was the worldview that "the greater number of the subtler speculative minds and of the great religious teachers [both East and West], in their various fashions, have been engaged in."

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, Book 1: The Web of Life

"With the rise of modern science… this great unified and holistic worldview began to fall apart"

But with the rise of modern science—associated particularly with the names of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Newton, Kelvin, Clausius—this great unified and holistic worldview began to fall apart, and fall apart in ways, it is clear, that none of these pioneering scientists themselves either foresaw or intended.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, Book 1: The Web of Life

"A mechanistic world slated to run down and an organic world seeming to wind up"

But although the methods of physics and biology were similar, their results were fundamentally incompatible, saddled, as Laszlo put it, with "the persistent contradiction between a mechanistic world slated to run down and an organic world seeming to wind up."

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, Book 1: The Web of Life

"The links in the entire Chain began to fall into alienated and seemingly unrelated spheres"

But with the separation of the physiosphere and the biosphere (due to their two different arrows of time), the links in the entire Chain began to fall into alienated and seemingly unrelated spheres—dead matter versus vital body versus disembodied mind.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, Book 1: The Web of Life

See Also

• systems-theory — the modern scientific development Wilber treats as vindicating this older, unifying picture
• holarchy — the structural pattern (nested, transcend-and-include levels) the Great Chain describes