The Ego Camp and the Eco Camp (Ascenders vs. Descenders)

Wilber's View

This is Book Two's central polemic, and Wilber traces it back two thousand years before giving it modern names. In Plato and Plotinus, [[ascent-and-descent|Ascent and Descent]] were meant to be a single completed movement — flee the Many, find the One; having found the One, embrace the Many as the One. But once that unifying nondual insight is lost, the two movements split into rival camps that each claim to be the whole story: the Ascenders, who treat "this world" of nature, body, and sense as something to escape or transcend on the way to a higher, otherworldly One; and the Descenders, who treat the sensory, manifest world itself as the sole and sufficient reality, and who accuse the Ascenders of denying and repressing it. Each side has spent history accusing the other of being the source of all evil — the Ascenders calling the Descenders materialists and hedonists lost in the Cave of Shadows, the Descenders calling the Ascenders repressive, body-denying, and earth-destroying.

Wilber's genealogy runs this rivalry through Western intellectual history: Ascenders dominated from Plotinus through the Middle Ages, then the Renaissance and Enlightenment triggered what he calls "the great reversal," in which the Descenders decisively took over — and modern secular culture, science included, still lives inside that Descended victory. In the modern era the rivalry resurfaces under new names, the Ego camp (which keeps the Enlightenment's rational, agentic self but detaches it from nature) and the Eco camp (Romanticism, and later deep ecology, which wants to dissolve the Ego back into the great Web of Nature). His key diagnostic move is that both modern camps are secretly on the same, Descended, flatland ground — neither can integrate Ascent and Descent because both have already denied that there's any vertical dimension (any holarchy) to integrate. That's a genuinely sharp point: it explains why Ego-vs-Eco arguments (autonomy vs. communion, reason vs. nature, individualism vs. holism) tend to go in circles rather than resolve. What's more contestable is how neatly the whole of Western intellectual history gets sorted into just two teams — a lot of complexity (and a lot of thinkers who don't fit cleanly on either side) gets pressed into this binary for the sake of the narrative arc.

In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

…the two movements fall apart into warring opposites, into ascetic and repressive Ascenders, on the one hand, who seem willing to destroy "this world" (of nature, body, senses) in favor of anything they imagine as an "other world"; and, on the other hand, the shadow-hugging Descenders, who fuss about in the world of time looking for the Timeless, and who, in trying to turn the finite realm into an infinite value, end up distorting "this world" as horribly as do the Ascenders, precisely because they want from "this world" something that it could never deliver: salvation.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 9, "The Way Up Is the Way Down"

The Ascenders accuse the Descenders of being lost in the Cave of Shadows, of being materialists, hedonists, pantheists, reductionists, and "nothing-morists"… To the Ascenders, "this world" is, in form and function, illusory at best, evil at worst—and the Descenders are the primary representatives of that evil.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 10, "This-Worldly, Otherworldly"

This battle—it is still with us today—I will call the battle between the Ego and the Eco. Both were flatland to the core, which prevented their ever being synthesized in a higher union (they cannot be vertically integrated if both sides deny vertical holarchy). Rather, in a flatland world, the more there is of one, the less there must be of the other, and so the Ego camps and the Eco camps lined up as mortal enemies, each accusing the other, once again, of being the essence of Evil.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 12, "The Collapse of the Kosmos"

The Eco camp watched all of this with absolute alarm. The Ego wasn't just establishing its agency, this camp maintained; it was severing and repressing its connections and communions with nature—both external nature and, more important, internal nature (sensual, desirous, sexual, vital)… And the solution seemed equally obvious: the more Eco, and the less Ego, the better for all.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 12, "The Collapse of the Kosmos"

The Ascenders have recourse to various forms of Gnosticism, Theravadin Buddhism, a type of Advaita Vedanta, a "higher Inner Voice," the inner Holy Spirit, archetypal psychology, the care of the Soul, contacting the Higher Self—all of which are true enough and altogether important; but in their partiality, in their exclusively Ascending bent, they attempt to get out of flatland by denying it altogether: Phobos, the fear-laden hand of earth-denying, community-denying, body-denying, sensory-denying escape.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 14, "The Unpacking of God"

The Ascenders and the Descenders, after two thousand years, still at each other's throat—each still claiming to be the Whole, each still accusing the other of Evil, each perpetrating the same fractured insanity it despises in the other.

The Ascenders and the Descenders. Still crazy after all these years.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 14, "The Unpacking of God"

See Also

• ascent-and-descent — the nondual pairing this rivalry is a fractured, partisan version of
• eros-and-agape — Eros and Agape gone pathological (Phobos and Thanatos) are the motive forces behind the two camps
• dominator-vs-growth-hierarchy — Wilber's related complaint that the Eco camp's rejection of hierarchy as such is a category error
• flatland — the shared ground Wilber says both Ego and Eco camps stand on, which is why neither can integrate with the other
• wilber-on-plato — the nondual reading of Plato this rivalry is a falling-away from
• spirit-in-action — Schelling and Hegel's attempted synthesis of Ego and Eco
• Environmental Ethics / Holonic Ecology — Wilber's own constructive alternative to the Eco camp's flatland ecology
• Baruch Spinoza — the modern exemplar Wilber gives of pure Descent (the God of the Eco camp)
• Karl Marx — a Descender in Wilber's account, materialism without a transcendent dimension
• Charles Darwin — natural selection as the Descended alternative to any Eros-driven account of evolution
• Sigmund Freud — an avowed Descender in Wilber's reading, notoriously hostile to anything "oceanic"