Tuesday, April 16, 2002

In the Wilber interview I linked to earlier, he describes the thesis of his new novel as:
Beyond pluralism and irony, there is spirit and ecstacy.

This is actually a composite of phrases, and not a direct quotation, but I think that he would approve of it. I also think that his holism can be summarized in the following way:
All objects are also, in some sense, subjects.

Other times, Wilber seems to being saying something very similar but more controversial:
All objects are a single subject.

And I think this summary shows the commonality between what I have termed the four schools of holism: the Indian (the Buddha and the Vedas), the Greek (Heraclitus, Plato, Plotinus, Augustine, Dante*), the German (Goethe, Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhaur, Emerson, Rilke) and the contemporary (Aurobindo, Wilber).

*I know that Dante and Augustine were not Greek (in fact, Augustine was African--Carthaginian?), but they were certainly Platonists. Emerson was not German, but he was a Hegelian--although it may be more accurate, as well as more convenient for the purposes of this notebook, to say that he was a Goethean. I believe that there are more contemporary holists than Aurobindo and Wilber, and some quotations indicating such are here.

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