The Great Plenitude
The Great Plenitude
Wilber's View
Wilber leans hard on Arthur Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being to give the Great Chain's Descending half a name and a history: the principle of Plenitude, summarized as "the greater the diversity, the greater the Goodness." Where the Ascending path (see ascent-and-descent) sought the One by withdrawing from the Many, the Descending or "Effluxing" path — Wilber traces it through the Timaeus, Plotinus, and medieval nondual philosophers like Nicholas Cusanus — found the One's Goodness in the Many's sheer variety: no possible kind of being can be missing without diminishing Goodness itself, hence "there are no gaps in nature." Wilber's most interesting move is historical rather than metaphysical: he argues, following Lovejoy, that Plenitude wasn't just a background belief for Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers but an actual research program — an a priori commitment (nature must be a graded, unbroken plenum) that scientists then went looking for confirming evidence of, rather than a conclusion empirical discovery led them to. The examples are genuinely striking: Bruno's plurality-of-worlds cosmology preceding any evidence for it, Leibniz predicting microorganisms before Leeuwenhoek's microscope, and the long, half-comic hunt for "missing links" between species that predates Darwin by over a century.
Wilber uses this to make a bigger point later in the book: Plenitude was originally only half the Plotinian equation (the Descending half, meant to be balanced against Ascent), but once the Ascending God was rejected wholesale (see The Death of God), Plenitude's "maximize diversity" imperative became the whole picture and hardened into systems theory — see Systems Theory and the Sciences of Complexity. The history-of-science claim is worth some skepticism on its own terms: "a priori assumption preceded and shaped the search" and "the assumption was the sole cause of the discovery" are different, stronger claims, and Wilber mostly argues the former while sometimes writing as though he's shown the latter — actual scientific practice (observation feeding back into and revising the guiding picture) is messier than a clean research-program-first narrative allows.
In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality
In order to understand the coming dominance of the Descenders, it is necessary to understand how the nondual system of Plato/Plotinus viewed the Descending Path of Efflux or Plenitude, which was only half of the equation, but which may be summarized in the modern phrase "Biodiversity is good."
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 10
Lovejoy demonstrates that wherever the Descending current was acknowledged—under the general name of the principle of Plenitude—it was always of the form: the Goodness of the One is reflected in the "variety of its parts"; the greater the diversity, the greater the Goodness. Maximization of diversity is, so to speak, what Plenitude seeks.
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 10
And the central point of this Great Holarchy or Great Chain of (Apparent) Being was summarized in the phrase: there are no gaps in nature.
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 10
Lovejoy demonstrates, quite convincingly I think, that many of the "scientific discoveries" from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment were not originally empirical and "surprising" discoveries, but were in fact a priori assumptions derived directly (and consciously) from the two main tenets of the Platonic/Plotinian doctrine of Plenitude: nature is graded in a holarchy of being, and there are no missing links anywhere.
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 11
"The change from a geocentric to a heliocentric system was far less momentous than the change from a heliocentric to an acentric one."
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 11 (footnote)
"Every discovery of a new form could be regarded, not as the disclosure of an additional unrelated fact in nature, but as a step toward the completion of a systematic structure of which the general plan was known in advance."
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 11 (footnote)
The doctrine of Plenitude as a research agenda: there was the Descending God of Infinite Efflux released from its confinement in the Middle Ages and set loose with all its delight in glorious diversity.
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 11
See Also
- The Great Chain of Being — the larger picture Plenitude supplies the Descending, diversity-loving half of
- ascent-and-descent — the polarity (Ascending vs. Descending) Plenitude is one half of
- The Death of God — how Plenitude went from half an equation to the whole picture once the Ascending God was rejected
- Systems Theory and the Sciences of Complexity — Plenitude's eventual, secularized modern heir
- Plotinus — the source of the nondual Descending vision Plenitude articulates
