Great Chain of Being
* Book: The Great Chain of Being. By Arthur O. Lovjejoy.
URL =
Review
Michel Bauwens, 2003:
This is the book that has often been cited by Ken Wilber as a key summary of the history of a complex of ideas, related to the hierarchical nature of the universe as a "chain of being" culminating in the Absolute It was delivered as a series of lectures in Harvard during 1933, as a "William James Lecture", and the author says that 'just one hundred years ago', this was still the domimant philosophical idea in the Western world.
The first chapter distinguishes the specificity of the discipline of the 'history of ideas' from the general history of philosophy.
The second chapter discusses the genesis of the idea in the work of Plato, after first contrasting the 'otherworldlines' from 'thisworldlynes' and the idea of a perfect self-sufficient Being from one that creates all possible living things in its image (the principle of Plenitude).
Plotinus wrote: The One is Perfect, it seeks nothing, and possesses nothing, and, being perfect, it overflows, and thus, in its overAbundance produces the Other.
Aristotle was more modest, in his view of the necessity of the world: his unmoved Mover did not create things, or only as a final cause because of its attraction. Within Aristotle's work we find a contrast between his belief in classification, and his reputation as the father of logic, and his insistence on continuity, that there are no sharp distinctions in nature, only gradations. This it was he, rather than Plato, who explicitely mentioned gradations and rankings in beings, whether dependent on scale (the degree of development at birth, from zoophytes to the human), or in terms of the 'powers of the soul': "ech order possessing all the powers of those below, plus an additional differentiating set of its own". This is the root of the later conception of the 'Great Chain of Being', whih was first explicitely formulated by Plotinus, and neo-Platonism, in the doctrine of emanation, which fuses the principles of plenitude, continuity, and gradation.
Chapter 3 is on the chain of being in medieval thought and some of its contradictions. The christian implications of the neoplatonic doctrine of plenitude, being first formulated by St. Augustine and by the unknown 5th cy author "Pseudo-Dyionisius". Augustine states clearly that "ifall things were equal, all things could not exist.",i.e. equality precedes diversity. A first contradiction is between the creative and generative power of God, which necessarityl creates things, and the opposite stress on his freedom and discretion in that process of creation, i.e. the divine Will, "the world contains whatever the Maker has wanted to put in it"; thus he can conceive of anything, but can will the non-existence of things as well. Another contradiciton in medieval thought was that between God as the Idea of the Good, the self-sufficient Absolute Being, to which all should aspire (through initiation, contemplation, absorption), i.e. the ASCENDING process for Man; and God as Goodness, i.e. te creative emanation in the plenitude of Creation, the delight in existence, the DESCENDING phase.