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 | | Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution, Second Edition by Ken Wilber ISBN-10: 9781570627446 ISBN-10: 1-57062-744-4 ISBN-13: 9781570627446 ISBN-13: 978-1-57062-744-6 Paperback 2001-01-02 Shambhala Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description In this tour de force of scholarship and vision, Ken Wilber traces the course of evolution from matter to life to mind and describes the common patterns that evolution takes in all three of these domains. From the emergence of mind, he traces the evolution of human consciousness through its major stages of growth and development. He particularly focuses on modernity and postmodernity: what they mean; how they impact gender issues, psychotherapy, ecological concerns, and various liberation movements; and how the modern and postmodern world conceive of Spirit. This second edition features forty pages of new material, new diagrams, and extensively revised notes. | ||
Reviews | ||
I used to recommend this book. And I still do, to everyone I know, with the zeal of a newly converted novice in a hastily assembled cult. But with the following caveats. As everyone knows, Ken Wilber is the foremost genius of his generation. He is a tenth-stage OT-XIX bodhisattva. He is the Einstein of consciousness studies, the Michaelangelo of contemporary philosophy, and the Hegel of hyperbole. He has no equal, no peer, and positively NO EGO. I recognize the brilliance of his every gesture. You want verification? Just ask him. With all that understood, you should also know the following: Wilber has no understanding of Continental philosophy, apart from a kind of bastardized Hegelianism. Hegel-via-Aurobindo really. His claims about poststructuralism are largely ridiculous, the implausible incompetence of which could form the basis of a doctoral thesis on how neoconservative ideology can transform critique into strawman and then into mush. Allan Bloom has nothing on this guy. Wilber seems to understand Mahayana Buddhism, but then he top-to-bottom misrepresents it through his faux-Hegelian theological clingings. If you want to be laughed at, try to convince a knowledgeable Buddhist that "Spirit" as Wilber defines it has anything at all in common with "emptiness." Or a first-year comparative religion major. Wilber badly misunderstands science. He seems to think that scientists are personally responsible for the ideologies that produced the environmental catastrophe we are in, basically letting consumer capitalism off the hook for it. (There is the neocon thing again.) Check his comments on Kepler and Descartes. There are other problems with his treatment of evolution that David Lane makes short work of in his essay on Wilber, "the Art of Spiritual Hyperbole." An appropriate title for when you are dealing with the most important philosopher to emerge from a mortal woman's reproductive system. Wilber is a full-on neoconservative. He agrees with Francis Fukuyama on things that even Fukuyama has himself stepped away from. If you can deal with neoconservatism after eight years of it with Bush without wanting to vomit (and like Bush pretending this way of thinking has some kind of Spiritual Significance), then Wilber is absolutely your philosopher. What am I saying? Wilber is the philosopher for EVERYONE, bringing the New Paradigm that will save humanity from itself, just as Nixon and Reagan saved America from Sin and stuff and commies. Obviously. There are other things too but if you like to kid yourself about someone else's brilliance, then give this book three stars and, what the hell, buy some other stuff too. At the Integral Institute you can buy yourself the Integral Life Starter Kit, a Master's Degree in Wilberology at JFK University, and other delightful products. Buy now, before Wilber conclusively jumps the shark... (actually he probably jumped the shark right about the time he pulled Spiral Dynamics into his Systematic Worldview and wrote that embarrassment of a novel, Boomeritis... that is, the best most super-enlightening novel ever Buy buy buy) | ||
Volumes 2 & 3? This is not a review. It is a question to those reading it: Does anyone know when Volumes 2 & 3 of Wilber's trilogy will be released? It seems that they have been indefinitely delayed and I can find no information on his web-site. | ||
Great backup theory for Conservative Thinkers! This isn't an "easy read," in the sense of a book you take along to the beach. Wilber takes a scholarly approach to laying out an argument, filled with "-isms" and "-ists," and many references to historic thinkers, philosophers, academics, and so forth. Even so, if you exert the effort to shift mental gears into material at an adult reading level, it's a great book. Wilber has a particularly dry sense of humor, which shows through from time to time as he rips apart modern liberalism. The book isn't at all a political treatise; it's rather an overview of how evolution works and why it works that way. It examines human history and how we, as human beings, have arrived at today's stress-filled, anxiety-ridden, near nervous breakdown. Throughout the book, the central themes are "holons" and Wilber's four quadrants. Holons are a term for everything in existence acting both as a whole unto itself, and a part of something else. In his 20 tenets (explained at the start of the book), Wilber explains the dynamics at work between holons---how everything works together in existence. The quadrants are a way to visually express the two main sides of everything. The one, Righthand side is the external--appearances, observable data, the objective "it" language. The other, Lefthand side is the internal--meaning, interpretive data, the subjective "I" and "we" language. Wilber shows how mankind has evolved through three basic domains of reality: the physiosphere (atomic and molecular, physical interaction), biosphere (biochemical life), and noosphere (the mind and mental processing). He demonstrates most of humanity's philosophies and religions, along with how each one helped or hindered the progression toward more complexity and significance. Although the book looks formidable, it really has only about 500 pages of core content. The remaining pages are Notes. In the main content, though, Wilber makes a devastating argument against modern-day "eco-feminism" and "whole-Earth" environmentalists. Any conservative who's fed up with the exclusive "religion" of environmentalism, radical feminism, and multiculturalism, will find this book tremendously refreshing! On the other hand, Wilber takes an objective and fair approach to the overly intellecuatlized objectivity of modern day intellectual elitism. This balanced analysis of both the good and the bad is extremely helpful for anyone who really does want an overview of philosophic and theological history. Finally, you'll likely find an excellent companion book in "Dumbing Down our Kids..." by Charles Sykes. Reading how the American educational system is destroying our children, then reading Wilber's analysis of historic philosophic trends, the two books come together with a massive "Ah Hah!" moment. Wilber has completely explained how the educational system has collapsed into the miserable anti-educational circus it's become. Again: not such an easy book to "get into" right away, but if you take the time, it's well worth reading! | ||
Personally I found this brilliant beyond words - but I'll try We all love it when a book comes along that shatters our world apart, in the best sense, and provides meaning a coherence where there was only confusion and a lack of ability to articulate our experience of the world. Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, by Ken Wilber, is such a book for me. More than any book I have ever read this book has changed my life profoundly, and certainly for the better. There's no doubt that this is an intimidating read, over 800 pages and a fair portion of them are technical endnotes. However, even without the endnotes, I have to disagree with the editorial reviewers, that the contents of the book are confusing. Far from frustrated, I was in fact delighted at the extraordinary amount of synthesis in this work, and while he has been criticised for his use of sweeping overgeneralisation (although he explicitly states that his approach uses broad orienting generalisations), no one has come out with a better set of generalisations and metatheoria to replace the ones he outlines here, and in subsequent books. Wilber begins by looking at the state of the world in terms of the physical sciences, which somehow see the world as both winding up and down and how we can believably put together a theory (or metatheory - a theory of theories) that embraces the main orienting generalisations from the main areas of human enquiry AS WELL AS, and this is the important part, putting it into an evolutionary, developmental context that explicitly takes account of higher states of consciousness than just rational (Western, rational, reasonable mind that is the basis of Western society, mostly), into the transrational and the genuinely mystical or spiritual stages. If the second part of that sentence just put you off the book, well so be it, but the main reason for my love of this book is that it quietly tries to best explain how genuine spirituality (higher spiritual states and stages) can be logically, or we may so translogically, incorporated into what we know of the world through science and the various other knowledge disciplines - the humanities, systems theory, phenomenology, hermeneutics etc. That is, that spirit transcends and includes atoms, molecules, cells, theories, concepts, systems, institutions, dogma, religious traditions, etc, etc. In the process he conceives of what he calls the four quadrants (the inner and outer perspective of the individual and collective) and outlines in some detail the nature of the basic unit of the universe as being a holon (a whole which is also part of a larger whole), which have become a major part of the increasingly popular and widely-used Integral model, aka AQAL (All Quadrants, All Levels, All Lines, All States, All Types). Along the way - hence the book title - he looks at how this new conception of reality would influence our approach to gender/feminism and ecology and in both cases, I think, his insights are extraordinary and both of these have seriously refocussed my whole view of the world. For those of you who are interested in genuine transcendental spirituality in whatever form, you may just find this book an excellent antidote to the serious anti-intellectualism that is rife in spiritual circles, and may even find that these ideas form a kind of reorienting contextual framework in which a healthy spirituality can exist alongside every other thing in the kosmos. | ||
Highly recommended There is no question that Ken Wilber is a brilliant person who, although it is "his" vision, has a great vision for humanity. His intentions for the most part are very sincere and his ability to integrate such vast amounts of literature is unsurpassed. Most readers will agree that this is Wilber's most comprehensive work to date. If you have ample knowledge in the field of philosophy, spirituality, psychology, sociology, biology, physics etc, this book is certainly worth reading and the ideas put forth in this book are well worth contemplating. The only thing I didn't like too much about this book is that his writing is too one-sided. There is a place for these kinds of people who push for change with strong and convincing arguments. They serve as catalysts for social change in history. However, he seems so caught up in convincing the readers of his worldview that it actually takes away from his story. When people are truly confident in their views they usually are not so motivated to convince others to agree with them. The fact that other people may disagree or may not understand is also understandable to them. Despite this, I believe this book is a one of the best attempts to integrate many topics into one framework. Another absolutely fabulous book that does this on a small scale mostly in the field of psychology is Toru Sato's "Ever-Transcending Spirit". In contrast to "Sex, Ecology and Spirituality" it is actually readable for almost anyone without any expert background knowledge. In some ways, it goes beyond Wilber in that Wilber separates the four quadrants and Sato tries to integrate the four quadrants by using everyday experiences that relate to these quadrants and explaining how they go together. It is also an excellent book so I'd highly recommend it too! If you want to understand Wilber though, I found this to be the most satisfying. | ||