Great Chain of Being
* Book: The Great Chain of Being. By Arthur O. Lovjejoy.
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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.