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The chain begins with God and descends through angels, humans, animals and plants to minerals. [1] [2] [3] The great chain of being (from Latin scala naturae 'ladder of being') is a concept derived from Plato, Aristotle (in his Historia Animalium), Plotinus and Proclus. [4]
Arthur Oncken Lovejoy (October 10, 1873 – December 30, 1962) was an American philosopher and intellectual historian, who founded the discipline known as the history of ideas with his book The Great Chain of Being (1936), on the topic of that name, which is regarded as 'probably the single most influential work in the history of ideas in the United States during the last half century'. [1]
Wilber was born in 1949 in Oklahoma City. In 1967 he enrolled as a pre-med student at Duke University. [3] He became interested in psychology and Eastern spirituality. He left Duke and enrolled at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln studying biochemistry, but after a few years dropped out of university and began studying his own curriculum and writing.
Wilber borrowed the concept of holons from Arthur Koestler's description of the great chain of being, a mediaeval description of levels of being. "Holon" means that every entity and concept is both an entity on its own, and a hierarchical part of a larger whole.
Biology and the discovery of extinction (first described in the 1750s and put on a firm footing by Georges Cuvier in 1796) challenged ideas of a fixed immutable Aristotelian "great chain of being." Natural theology had earlier expected that scientific findings based on empirical evidence would help religious understanding.
Arthur Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being. Harvard University Press, 1936: ISBN 0-674-36153-9. Chapter IV "The Principle of Plenitude and the New Cosmography", p. 99–143. Chapter V "Plenitude and Sufficient Reason in Leibniz and Spinoza", p. 144–182.
The Anglo-American position recalls (and is presumably inspired by) 18th century concepts regarding the temporalization of The Great Chain of Being. Spiritual evolution, rather than being a physical (or physico-spiritual) process is based on the idea of realms or stages through which the soul or spirit passes in a non-temporal, qualitative way.
Arthur Lovejoy ('32–'33) "The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea" Wolfgang Köhler ('34–'35) "The Place of Value in a World of Facts" Étienne Gilson ('36–'37) "The Unity of Philosophical Experience" Kurt Goldstein ('38–'39) "Human Nature in the Light of Psychopathology"