WorksSex, Ecology, Spirituality

Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

The Spirit of Evolution

Year: 1995 (rev. 2001) · Format: Book

Description

SES. Volume one of the projected Kosmos Trilogy and Wilber's central theoretical work: the full statement of the four-quadrant AQAL model, holons and holarchies, and an argument that evolution — cosmic, biological, and cultural — has a directionality toward greater depth and consciousness. Dense and academic; the book this wiki's annotation work is meant to start with.

In-Depth Overview

SES is the book where Wilber's mature framework gets its full, technical statement — roughly 800 pages of main text plus extensive endnotes that carry independent arguments of their own. Part One, "The Patterns of Existence," opens with "The Web of Life" and then "The Pattern That Connects," where Wilber draws on Arthur Koestler's concept of the holon (a whole that is simultaneously a part of some larger whole — an atom within a molecule, a cell within an organ, a person within a family) and on Ludwig von Bertalanffy's general systems theory to lay out roughly twenty tenets that, he argues, govern how holons behave at every level of reality: self-preservation and self-adaptation, self-transcendence (the capacity to give rise to genuinely novel, higher-order wholes) and self-dissolution, and a tendency for holons to organize into holarchies — hierarchies in the strict sense of each level transcending but including the one below it, not dominating it. Chapter three, "Individual and Social," adds a second axis (individual/collective) to the existing interior/exterior axis already implicit in the holon concept, producing the four quadrants that became Wilber's signature diagram: intentional (I), behavioral (it), cultural (we), and social (its) — four irreducible perspectives from which any holon, from an atom to a nation, can be described.

The rest of the book traces this pattern through three domains in sequence: the evolution of matter into life (cosmology, physics, the emergence of biological organization), the evolution of life into mind (biological and psychological development), and the evolution of human consciousness through successive cultural structures (archaic, magic, mythic, rational, and — prospectively — integral or "vision-logic," drawing on Jean Gebser). Running underneath all three is Wilber's most contested claim: that evolution, at every one of these levels, has a real directionality toward greater depth, complexity, and consciousness — not mere random drift or exclusively externally-selected change. The second half of the book turns polemical, arguing that modern science and much of Western philosophy since the Enlightenment collapsed reality into what Wilber calls "flatland" — a picture with only exteriors (matter, systems, behavior) and no legitimate interiors (meaning, value, consciousness) — and that postmodernism, while right to critique the arrogance of a single "view from nowhere," undermines itself when it denies any developmental hierarchy at all. A revised edition in 2000/2001 added substantial new material responding to critics of the first edition.

This is the book SES — Wilber's central theoretical work and, by his own account, the first installment of a planned Kosmos Trilogy that was never completed as originally conceived (later books like The Eye of Spirit function as companion volumes rather than numbered sequels). It's also the book that has drawn the most sustained academic criticism of Wilber's scholarship — most extensively in Jeff Meyerhoff's book-length critique Bald Ambition — largely over how reliably its enormous range of cited source material is actually represented. Both the ambition and that criticism are worth tracking here as this wiki's annotation work on the book develops.

Pilot pass of the concept wiki, sourced from reading notes on this book:

Notes

(Space for personal notes and annotations. Empty for now.)

Links to this page:

  1. Works by Ken Wilber
Built with LogoFlowershow