Science and the GreatChain of Being

Huston Smith

I toyed with titling this paper "Science and Neoplatonism," butbecause I will be making few explicit references to Plato and hissuccessors, I have chosen the Great Chain of Being as a moregeneral designation for the hierarchical ontology that ascends fromlesser existences through intermediate planes up to the ensperfectissimum at its top. Arthur Lovejoy said that most educatedpersons everywhere accepted this groundplan of the universewithout question down to late in the eighteenth century,1 and KenWilber has added that belief in it has been "so overwhelminglywidespread that it is either the single greatest intellectual errorevery to appear in human history—an error so colossallywidespread as to literally stagger the mind—or it is the mostaccurate reflection of reality yet to appear."2 My object is to matchit with the scientific world view that in the eighteenth centuryreplaced the Great Chain of Being (hereafter the GCB) as thepresiding ethos in the West. I want to consider how they do and donot mesh.

As mine is the opening presentation in this conference, it seemsm order to direct a few words to the theme of our conference as awhole, "Neoplatonism and Contemporary Thought," before I turnto my specific topic. Neoplatonism—I shall be using that word andthe Great Chain of Being interchangeably—is a hierarchicalmetaphysics, and few words are in less favor today than those two,"metaphysics" and "hierarchy." So I feel we need to begin our

conference by manning the barricades and insisting that they arerespectable words.

2 NEOPLA TONISM AND CONTEMPORAR Y THO UGHT

Regarding metaphysics, I recently heard a theologian tell of atour he led to the main geographical centers of the ProtestantReformation. The participants were a select group of well-informedChristians. They were keenly interested in, and knew a lot about,Wittenburg and Guttenburg, Luther's Ninety-five Theses and hisplan of salvation. My informant was surprised, therefore, to findthat from his point of view his tour members missed the main point.They were not aware that Luther had a world view, a theologicalsystem that he thought spanned everything—all human life and theuniverse as well. They thought in terms of individualstatements—justification by faith, the priesthood of all believers,and the like. These isolated doctrines they held important, and theygave them their wholehearted assent. But not only did they not havewhat Calvin called "the Christian world and life view." They werehardly aware that such a thing existed, much less might beimportant if not essential. This marks a change, my informantconcluded. Whereas earlier in this century Christians of manydenominations vigorously opposed Darwinism as havingnaturalistic and atheistic implications, the situation today isdifferent. It is not so much that most Christians have beenpersuaded that evolution is true and can be reconciled with thetruths of Christianity. The two have been compartmentalized, sothat not only do they not conflict. They don't even seem to impinge

on each other.I relate this report as providing an instance of the indifferenceto world views that characterizes not just theology but our ethos asa whole today. At bottom the indifference derives from anincomprehension of what world views are and can contribute to life,and we have to admit that philosophy in our century has furtheredthat incomprehension. If we follow Jean-Francois Lyotard indefining postmodernism as "incredulity toward metanarratives,"twentieth century philosophers have fostered that incredulity.There are three kinds of postmodernism, three degrees of it wemight say. Minimal postmodernism contents itself with reportingthat we have no world view today, none that remotely approachesconsensus. Mainline postmodernism goes on to argue for thepermanence of this condition. Never again will we have a believableworld view; we know too well how little we can know. Lastly,Hardcore postmodernism adds to this contention, "good riddance."

SCIENCE AND THE GREA T CHAIN OF BEING 3

Metanarratives totalize, and in so doing marginalize minorities.They are oppressive power-plays, so we are better off without them.

What do we say to this three-pronged attack on metaphysics?We can say that each prong voices a half-truth, but not the fulltruth,3 while adding what Jacques Maritain said a half century ago;namely, that "a loss or weakening of the metaphysical spirit is anincalculable damage for the general order of intelligence and humanaffairs."4 If we are to say more than that, I so often find myselfagreeing with the critics of metaphysics if metaphysics is what theysay it is, that I feel the need to cut back behind technical definitionsto common sense understandings of the project.

Claude Levi-Strauss tells us that one of the differences betweenmythic and scientific thinking is that myth-makers think that youdon't understand anything unless you understanding everything;and when we think of the way context controls meaning andperipheral vision affects focal vision, I think we can say that thosemyth-makers, our ancestors, were on the right track. Their insightcan be expanded as follows: Minds require econiches as much asorganisms do, and the mind's econiche is its world view, its senseof the whole of things, however much or little that sense isarticulated. Short of madness there has to be some fit between thetwo, and we constantly try to improve it. Signs of a poor fit are thesense of meaninglessness, alienation, and in acute cases anxiety thatpostmodernity knows so well. The proof of a good fit is that life andthe world make sense. When the fit feels perfect, the energies of thecosmos pour into the believer in startling degree. She knows thatshe belongs, and this produces an inner wholeness that is strong forbeing consonant with the wholeness of the All.

As for hierarchies, relentless unnuanced assaults from whatFrederick Crews calls the eclectic left have all but wrecked thisonce noble and still etymologically perfect word (in which we inthis Society have a vested interest, we might add, it having beencoined by one of our own number, Dionysius). I say etymologicallyperfect word, because I know no other single word that j oins the twovirtues—holiness, hieros; and sovereign power, arkhes—which,conjoined, announce the central religious claim. For as WilliamJames put the matter, "religion says that the best things are the moreeternal things, the things in the universe that throw the last stone,so to speak, and say the final world."5

4 NEOPLATONISMAND CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT

Three years ago Judith Plaskow, the feminist contributor to thejournal Tikkun, wrote an essay titled "What's Wrong withHierarchies."6 It said important things about the dangers ofhierarchies, but it was so unadmittedly one-sided that it wrung fromme a rejoinder titled "Is Anything Right about Hierarchies?" Agraduate student who read my piece said, "They will agree withyou, but they won't print it because it doesn't serve their politicalagenda."

What I said in my rejoinder was that, apart from the obviousfacts: first, that we live in a hierarchic universe (or holarchicuniverse as Arthur Koestler preferred to say) wherein gradations ofsize, power, and complexity confront us at every turn; and second,that the social world (animal as well as human) couldn't last a weekwithout accepted chains of command—aside from these twoobvious facts the decisive point is that hierarchies can beempowering as well as oppressive. A loving family with smallchildren is an example of an empowering hierarchy, as is a well-runclassroom. The definitive example of a benevolent hierarchy isGod's relation to the world and its creatures. In Christian idiom,"God became man that man might become God."

With metaphysics and hierarchies reaffirmed, I turn now toscience where I will begin by stating my strategy for relating it tothe Great Chain of Being.

II

I do not think we can get to the Great Chain of Being throughscience. But if we start with the GCB there is much in science thatcan encourage us, shoring up our conviction that it is true. Lookingat the findings of science through Neoplatonic eyes, we often findourselves exclaiming, "Why, of course! This is what we mightexpect in a world that in its entirety, metaphysically as well asphysically, is hierarchically arranged." Science doesn't prove theGCB. It's rather that its findings symbolize it. Approached from theNeoplatonic angle, they deflect our gaze in its direction. If there aresermons in stones and Allah did not disdain to use even a gnat fora symbol, may not science too have symbolic possibilities?

This brings me to the heart of my paper where I shall target fivescientific findings that have Neoplatonic "feel" to them.

SCIENCE AND THE GREA T CHAIN OF BEING 5

III

1. Science finds that its part of the whole—the part it deals with,the physical, material universe—carries the hierarchical signatureof the whole itself.

Mirroring the Neoplatonic metaphysical hierarchy—which inPlotinus's scheme descends from the One, through Nous, then Soul,to Matter—science finds that on the rung of the hierarchy it dealswith, matter, the hierarchical pattern of the whole reappears. AsStephen Jay Gould puts the matter, "nature is organized as ahierarchy—genes in organisms, organisms in populations, andpopulations in species."7 Beginning with size, the picture expandsfrom the micro-world of quantum physics, though the macro-worldour senses register, to the mega-world of the astronomers. And thereare levels of complexity as well. Aristotle's mineral, plant, animal,and rational kingdoms name them in one way, and the academicdisciplines of physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology refinethe list. Here as everywhere a level is defined by two things. First,it has a distinctive population; physicists deal with particles but notwith chemical compounds or biological cells. Second, eachpopulation is governed by its own distinctive laws. Newton' laws ofmotions do not hold for Brownian movements.

I mentioned that Arthur Koestler preferred "holarchy" to"hierarchy." This has the advantage of avoiding the coerciveconnotations that have been foisted on the word "hierarchy," whileat the same time implying, accurately, that complex objectssurround and contain simpler ones. The obvious model for ahierarchy is a ladder of ascent, or a chain composed of links ofdecreasing size; whereas holarchies suggest concentric circles inwhich atoms are inside molecules, genes are within organisms, andso on. There is a trade-off, however. Among spatial metaphors it isverticality—the vertical axis—that monitors worth, as phrases like"superior intelligence" and "the higher things of life" attest. Inscience, where questions of values are secondary if they appear atall, holarchy is clearly the better word, whereas in metaphysicshierarchy has the edge for keeping the qualitative issue central.

2. Only seemingly does science invert the Neoplatonic hierarchy.The preceding point—that the physical universe retains

(holographically, we might say) the hierarchical structure of the

6 NEOPLATONISMAND CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT

whole in its part; "as above, so below," as the hermeticists used tosay—seems obvious. But there appears to be a glaring differencebetween the hierarchies of science and the Great Chain of Being.In the latter, the less derives from the more, whereas science showsthe more as deriving from the less.

Or does science show this?In popular understanding, it does. Dramatically obvious in

biology where life begins in slime and ends in intelligence, thesequence seems to apply across the board—from cosmogony (wheremolecules arrive after atoms) all the way to developmentalpsychology where maturation takes time. But interesting thingshave been happening in our century.

Even in classical physics, order comes first and is the "more"that precedes the dissipations of entropy. (I don't think IlyaPrigogene's work retires the second law of thermodynamics. Timewill tell.) Be that as it may, 20th century science carries the issue of"less from more" beyond the question of entropy.

Plotinus speaks of the fall of soul into matter, and that fall canbe given a scientific reading. In Neoplatonism the fall occursbecause, out of its generosity the One veils itself progressively toallow the Many to appear. But 'veils itself is only a metaphor.What actually goes on in the veiling? Science answers as follows:Photons are the bridge from the immaterial to the material. (Theimmaterial as such will be the topic of my next, third, point.)Photons pump power into the spatio-temporal world, but are notthemselves subject to space and time. A photon that reaches theearth light years after it left Sirus arrives with the same energy ithad when it left home. Time exacts no toll from it; how could itwhen all clocks stop at the speed of light? The nuclear particles thatphotons produce are subject to time, but not to space, for nodefinite position can be assigned to them. They are definitelymaterial, though, in having rest mass and charge, which photonslack. Atoms, for their part, are even more fallen, even morematerial, for being locked into both space andiime. Still, they arenot as "fallen" as molecules are, for atoms are free to absorb andrelease energy which molecules—almost completely imprisoned inthe determinism of our macro-, inanimate world—cannot. (I sayalmost completely imprisoned, for molecules can become excited,but the conditions are unusual.)8

SCIENCE AND THE GREA T CHAIN OF BEING 1

You get my point. Science seems to show that the more derivesfrom the less, but when we look carefully, this "less" derives atevery step from what is demonstrably greater in power, andseemingly in freedom as well.

When science bumps into places where the less seems toproduce the more—life from non-life; animals from vegetables,language where none previously existed—it explains theprogressions with a word, emergence, which actually has noexplanatory power whatsoever. To say that an attribute emergesdescribes what happens, but doesn't explain what happens. I amsurprised at how many philosophers, even, fail to notice this. Theyjoin the scientists in trying to cover the nakedness of emergence-as-an-explanatory-concept by covering it with metaphors. The standardone is water. Neither hydrogen nor oxygen are wet, but H20 is,which is taken to prove that a new ontological category has beenproduced. But wetness is a subjective experience, as is dryness, thepresumed state of molecules in isolation. Chemically speaking, H^Oisn't wet. It is simply molecules configurated differently from theway they were before hydrogen and oxygen combined. Subj ectivelyspeaking, dryness changes into wetness; chemically speaking H +H + O changes into H20. No new category of being—ontologicalcategory—has emerged.

3. Science now concedes that Reality is not exclusively material.I shall be using the words material and visible interchangeably andwill define the visible as that which impacts our physical senses,with or without the help of instruments such as telescopes andelectron-microscopes.

In the Great Chain of Being matter is an island in the sea ofsentience which in itself isn't material. Modern science reversesthat picture. For science, sentience exists only (as far as we know)on our planet, and on that planet only in the stream of organic lifethat inhabits it; so sentience (or consciousness) is the island speckin the fifteen-billion-light-years-across sea of dead matter thatenvelopes it. Hardcore materialists and behaviorists do notacknowledge that that island exists.

Since the demise of positivism things have changed markedlyon this front. It is a confusing topic, for matter and energy areprimitive terms in science and cannot be precisely defined, whichmakes it difficult to define their opposites, the invisible and

8 NEOPLATONISM AND CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT

immaterial. Still, it is obvious that invisibles occupy a larger andmore respected place in science than they previously did.

A mere catalogue must suffice.a) Whatever preceded the Big Bang is invisible if not

immaterial, for what we recognize as matter derives entirely fromit.

b) Dark matter, which is known only by the gravitational pull itexerts on detectable matter, is invisible for eluding even the mostsensitive scientific instruments. Scientists call it matter becausethat's all they know that exerts gravitational pull, but for all theyknow about what dark matter is, it might just as well be Aristotle'sUnmoved Mover; Stephen Hawking refers to it as "absoluteelsewhere." Be that as it may, the entire universe is now calculatedto consist almost entirely of this invisible X, for the current recipefor the universe reads, "70 parts cold dark matter, about 30 parts hotdark matter, and just a pinch for all the rest."9

c) Dark matter may eventually become visible through improveddetection devices—the issue is still up in the air—but no scientistexpects that the wave packets (from whose collapse particlesderive) will ever be seen.

d) What about psychosomatic medicine? From the commonsense (and even medical) point of view this important developmentof the last half-century looks like a clear case where science nowtakes invisibles seriously, for no one has ever seen a thought or anemotion, yet demonstrably they can affect the body's immunesystem. In ordinary language, stress creates ulcers, but inphilosophy this whole issue remains ambiguous because mainstreamphilosophers of mind are epiphenomenalists (John Searle) wherethey are not rank materialists (Daniel Dennett); dualists like KarlPopper and John Eccles are out of fashion. So even where themainliners concede that thoughts are not material, they continue toassume that they derive from their neurological underpinnings. Bythis account, ulcers are caused by neurological disturbances in thebrain which we experience as stress, not that experience itself."Mental materialism is back, with a vengeance. It is not only back,but back in an unapologetic, out-of-the-closet, almostexhibitionistic form. This later incarnation might be called'exuberant materialism.'"10 Given this neuroscientific triumphalism,we cannot unambiguously cite psychosomatic medicine as a domainwhere science countenances invisibiles.

SCIENCE AND THE GREA T CHAIN OF BEING 9

4. Returning from living forms (where the working assumption inbiology and psychology is that the more has to derive from the less)to physics, my fourth point is that in making room for theimmaterial/unseen, science also honors it. In two ways: first, bygranting it causal priority; and second, by crediting it with greaterpower than its material derivatives possess.

Causal priority has already been mentioned. Whateverprecededthe Big Bang is presumably immaterial, for everything that werecognize as matter has proceeded from it.

As for greater power, in nature power is inversely related tosize. The well-founded law that the shorter the wavelength thelarger the energy that is compressed into it, produces the conclusionthat "in a thimbleful of vacuum there is more energy than would bereleased by all the atomic bomb fuel in the universe."11 Expressedin terms of particles instead of waves,

the amount of energy associated with light corpuscles increases as thesize is reduced. The energy necessary to create a proton is containedin a light pulse only about 10"13 centimeters in diameter. And theenergy of a million protons would be contained in a light pulse amillion times smaller.

5. My fifth and last point is that science has joined Neoplatonismin being, in the end, apophatic. If "to penetrate into thetransintelligible is the deepest desire of our intellect,"13 science hascome to honor that dictum. I will let a single quotation, from JohnWheeler, the father of superspace, make my point.

A drastic conclusion emerges out of quantum geometrodynamics:there is no such thing as spacetime in the real world of quantumphysics....

On this picture physics is a staircase. Each tread registers a law.Each riser marks the transcendence of that law. The staircase climbsfrom step to step: density, and density found alterable; valence law,and valence law melted away; conservation of net baryon and netlepton number, and these conservation laws transcended;conservation of energy and angular momentum, and these lawslikewise overstepped; and then the top tread displaying all the keyconstants and basic dynamic laws—but above, a final riser leadingupward into nothingness. It bears a message: With the collapse of theuniverse, the framework falls down for every law of physics. There isno dynamic principle that does not require space and time for its

10 NEOPLA TON1SM AND CONTEMPORAR Y THO UGHT

formulation; but space and time collapse; and with their collapseevery known dynamic principle collapses.14

IV

My conclusion?As I said at the outset, if we proceed from the whole (The Great

Chain of Being) to the part of the whole that science deals with,science's findings seem not only compatible with that Chain, theyseem actually to support it, to incline in its direction, in that fromthe Neoplatonic perspective they turn out to be the kinds of thingswe could expect science to discover.

The opposite does not hold, however. We can no more get fromscience to the Great Chain of Being than we can get from that Chainto the specifics of science, DNA and the like. For quality eludesscience, and the Great Chain of Being is above all else a qualitativehierarchy. Playing upon the vertical dimension, which (as I noted)among spatial metaphors always and everywhere monitors degreesof worth, the Great Chain of Being proclaims that its higher levelsare better and more real than the lower ones.

But the notion of degrees of reality, while easily grasped bychildren and the general public, has no place in science andtherefore—I am asserting a causal connection here—is currentlysuspect in philosophy. That disparity, between children and thegeneral public on the one hand (who accept as a matter of coursethat some things are more real than others) and on the other handscientists and intellectuals who can't make head nor tail of thenotion, says a lot about how out of touch with life philosophy hasgrown. So I want to insert two examples to drive that out-of-touchness home.

A former chairman of mine, after arguing well into the nightagainst degrees of reality, toward the end of his diatribe grewsuddenly thoughtful as he recalled that the previous evening his sixyear old son had introduced the notion in a context where (mychairman had to admit) it did seem to make sense. His son waswatching a TV western. As the gunfire and fatalities mounted, hebecame alarmed and asked his father, "Dad, is this real?"

In some region of their psyches, adults too respond to the ideathat reality is graded. Marketing agents know this well and turn it

SCIENCE AND THE GREAT CHAIN OF BEING 11

to their advantage. On the day that I left for this conference, thecereal box on my breakfast table carried (as its inducement forcostumers to select it over competing brands) two words that couldhave been scripted for our gathering: "Get Real!"

But to complete my conclusion: If the idea of a hierarchy ofmeaning, worth, significance, and in the end reality, has no place inscience and has become suspect in philosophy, all the more need fora society dedicated to preserving the idea: The International Societyfor Neoplatonic Studies.

Syracuse University

NOTES1. Arthur Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1936), p. 59.2. Ken Wilber, "The Great Chain of Being," Journal of Humanistic

Psychology, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Summer 1993), p. 53.3. I spell out this retort in "The Religious Significance of

Postmodernism," Faith and Philosophy, Vol. 11, No. 4 (October1994).

4. Jacques Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge (New York: CharlesScribner's Sons, 1959), p. 59.

5. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York:The Macmillan Company).

6. Judith Plaskow, "What's Wrong with Hierarchies," Tikkun, 7:1,1992.

7. S. J. Gould, The New York Review of Books, November 19, 1992,p. 47.

8. This paragraph has followed closely Arthur Young's The ReflexiveUniverse (San Francisco: Delacorte Press, 1976). See especiallythe diagram on page 9.

9. As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, October 1, 1992, p.A16.

10. The New York Review of Books, April 8, 1993.11. Quoted in Harold Schilling, The New Consciousness in Science

and Religion (Philadelphia: United Church Press, 1973), p. 110.12. Arthur Young, Which Way Out? (Berkeley: Robert Briggs

Associates, 1980), p. 2.13. Jacques Maritain, op. cit., p. 219.14. "From Relativity to Mutability," in Jagdish Mehra (ed.), The

Physicist's Conception of Nature (Dordrecht, Holland; Boston,U.S.A.: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1973), pp. 227, 241.