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06/20/2002 "Resurgence: Nov Dec 96 CONSCIOUSNESS AND COSMOLOGY David Lorimer"

Resurgence: Nov Dec 96 CONSCIOUSNESS AND COSMOLOGY David Lorimer
A Review of A Brief history of Everything by Ken Wilber (Gill and MacMillan, 1996)

...where the manifest world was seen as an embodiment of the Good. The key Enlightenment figure in this respect is Schelling, who understood the necessity of differentiating mind and nature but saw that the transcendental and unifying ground of both had been forgotten.

Schelling goes further by insisting that Spirit is the only reality: "Spirit descends into manifestation, but this manifestation is nevertheless Spirit itself a form or expression of Spirit itself." Nature is "God-in-the-making"; the processes of nature are themselves spiritual processes. Wilber sums this up by stating that "Spirit knows itself objectively as nature; knows itself subjectively as mind; and knows itself absolutely as Spirit - the Source, the Summit and the Eros of the entire sequence."

He goes beyond Schelling in his understanding of the transcending of the mind itself through the creative emergence of non dual consciousness which is both its source and goal. It is a process which, as he says, goes from pre-personal to personal to transpersonal, from biosphere to noosphere to theosphere, from subconscious to self-conscious to superconscious.

This dialectic was misunderstood by Schelling's pupil, Hegel, and was not pursued to its logical conclusion by Idealism, which provided no transpersonal practice consonant with its insights. This part of the book is the clearest and most succinct account of the evolution of consciousness which I know,

Wilber's remarks on eco-philosophy and environmental ethics are both instructive and controversial. As might be guessed from my account of subtle reductionism above, he traces the roots of eco-philosophy to the Romantic movement, which itself was a feeling reaction against the rational mechanistic impulse of the new science.

Their mistake, according to Wilber, is to reject transcendence as ruining nature instead of realizing with Schelling that nature is an expression of the Spirit. Thus they recommend a regressive return to an earlier form of society, which is itself romanticized.

I found his criticisms appropriate in the light of his thesis, and would encourage eco-philosophers to re-situate themselves within a Schelling metaphysic:

We are not just parts of the Web, but, at a deep level, We are the Web itself.

Wilber's ideas on environmental ethics are based on his distinction between ground, intrinsic and extrinsic values: all holons have equal ground value as manifestations of the same spirit; every holon has the intrinsic value of its own wholeness and depth; then each holon has an extrinsic, instrumental value for other holons.

This leads to the injunction to protect or promote as much depth or consciousness as possible.

Deep ecology tends to conflate these three values while Wilber's distinctions can bring greater clarity to ethical discussions, especially those involving relationships between different species.

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