Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution [ILLUSTRATED] (Hardcover)

by Ken Wilber (Author) "I will not belabor the point by bringing out all the ghastly statistics, from the fact that we are at present exterminating approximately one hundred..." (more)
Key Phrases: great interlocking order, developmental signified, worldcentric rationality, Big Three, Right Hand, Age of Reason (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
This is the first in a projected set of three volumes charting recent thought in the title's interrelated areas, the title itself being a slight misnomer since sex and ecology are the foci of the forthcoming volumes. Here, however, Wilber elaborates at great length several contemporary systematic theories concerned with the biological, psychological, spiritual and metaphysical aspects of life and the various evolutionary stages of each. He then offers an overview of spiritual practices that can lead to an evolved "omega point" of consciousness. Wilber, a transpersonal psychologist and the author of No Boundary, among other works, has unfortunately tried too hard to cram everything possible into this massive undertaking. The result is that even the hundreds of pages of notes (sometimes useful, sometimes merely repetitive) become a mass of ideas and names. Wilber is a well-read, sophisticated and energetic thinker; yet his style veers from the discursively expansive to the overly condensed. Those seeking A Theory of Everything will be more than satisfied. For others, the book's sheer length and lack of organization may make this a very frustrating read.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
This is a sprawling synthesis of evolutionary and "systems" theory from the Presocratics to Piaget, permeated by the mysticism of Plotinus. Odd as it may seem for a book with more than 500 pages of text and 200 of notes, it suffers from a tendency to make unsubstantiated or inadequately referenced claims, especially in passing references to various feminisms and postmodernisms. But the reader can take this to be one aspect of the book's oral character: it reads like a composition dictated and transcribed. That is a strength as well as a weakness, since it imparts a lively and passionate tone to a text that could become simply tedious. The book's greatest strengths are its ambitious scope and its relentless attention to the materialist flattening of evolutionary and developmental theories in Western tradition. Wilber follows earlier devotees of Plotinus in insisting on a world composed not of parts and wholes but of wholes that are also parts and parts that are also wholes--wholes within wholes, remarkably similar to the "monads" of Anne Conway and Leibniz. Given a widespread hunger for spirituality and a widespread misunderstanding of materialist readings of development, even a flawed attempt to deepen developmental perspectives with developmental insights from mysticism is a step in the right direction. Steve Schroeder

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 816 pages
• Publisher: Shambhala; 1st edition (February 28, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1570620725
• ISBN-13: 978-1570620720
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 2.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #548,544 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wilber integrates and transcends., August 29, 2001

By	G. Merritt (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution, Second Edition (Paperback)

Emerson wrote of Shakespeare, "his mind is the horizon beyond which, at present, we do not see," and the same may be said of Ken Wilber. Wilber wrote SEX, ECOLOGY, SPIRITUALITY (hereafter, "SES") during a "three-year silent retreat"--"I lived the hermit's life; I saw exactly four people in four years," he recalls (p. xii), and in SES he lays the foundation for his integral philosophy, which he develops more fully in his subsequent books. Wilber was seeking "a world philosophy," in writing SES, he explains. "I sought an integral philosophy, one that would believably weave together the many pluralistic contexts of science, morals, aesthetics, Eastern as well as Western philosophy, and the world's great wisdom traditions. Not on the level of details--that is finitely impossible, but on the level of orienting generalizations: a way to suggest that the world really is one, undivided, whole, and related to itself in every way: a holistic philosophy for a holistic Kosmos: a world philosophy, an integral philosophy" (p. xii).

In SES, Wilber unfolds "a broad orienting map of men and women's place in the larger Kosmos (of matter, life, mind, and spirit)" that "naturally touches on a great number of topics that have recently become 'hot,' from the ecological crisis to feminism, from the meaning of modernity and postmodernity to the nature of "liberation" in relation to sex, gender, race, class, creed; to the nature of techno-economic developments and their relation to various worldviews; to the various spritual and wisdom traditions the world over that have offered telling suggestions as to our place in a larger scheme of things" (p. 6). SES is a "cry of anger and anguish" (p. xxiii) against homogenized "flatland" paradigms, and is likely to alarm ecophilosophers, feminists, and fundamentalists, alike. We are on the "verge of planetary transformation" (p. 204), and Wilber is investing his hope in the "integrative power of vision-logic." He writes, "it is vision-logic with its centauric/planetary worldview that, in my opinion, holds the only hope for the integration of the biosphere and noosphere, the supranational organization of planetary consciousness, the genuine recognition of ecological balance, the unrestrained and unforced forms of global discourse, the nondominating and noncoercive forms of federated states, the unrestrained flow of worldwide communicative exchange, the production of genuine world citizens, and the enculturation of female agency (i.e., the integration of male and female in both the noosphere and biosphere)--all of which, in my opinon, is nevertheless simply the platform for the truly interesting forms of higher and transpersonal states of consciousness lying yet in our collective future--if there is one" (p. 192). Wilber covers a lot of ground in SES, making it difficult to summarize. Immensely challenging at times, and drawn from "voluminous research material," at the center of Wilber's philosophy, "surfaces extend; interiors intend--it's still almost as simple as that" (p. 134) he explains. "Going within = going beyond = greater embrace" (p. 263). SES should be read and then reread as an essential, visionary handbook for the new millennium.

G. Merritt

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It will blow your paradigm- over and over again..., February 4, 2004

By	Nicq MacDonald (Sioux Falls, SD United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution, Second Edition (Paperback)

Ken Wilber's "Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution", is my favorite book. And that isn't a title I award lightly.

SES is quite possibly the first attempt at putting together a syncretic, evolutionary worldview since Hegel's "Phenomenology". In an age when truth has been declared dead and multiple perspectives rule the roost, where philosophy lives in the shadow of Nietzsche's madman, Wilber, in this striking volume, challenges post-modernity. Unlike other challengers, arguing for a retreat to conservatism and cynical (or mythic-literal) traditionalism, Ken proposes a different idea- we need to integrate the strengths of Post-modernity (a recognition of the other, a bird's eye view of ideology, and a profound social and ecological awareness), Modernity (scientific rationality, empiricism, democracy), and Pre-modernity (religious wisdom and cultural bounty) into one complete, "integral" package.

Sounds like a tough mission for any thinker to take on. Of course, Wilber- living outside the academia, blending his scholastic persuits with Zen practice, and doing his best to live his own philosophy- is no ordinary thinker. In the 551 pages of text (not including extensive endnotes and bibliography), Wilber essentially lays out his "theory of everything". Based in the psychological work of Freud, Piaget, Kohlberg, Maslow, Jung, Gebser, and other thinkers, Wilber first constructs a socio-psychological map of civilization's evolution to date, and shows how it integrates with hard scientific data. Dividing the world into subject and object, Wilber shows how modern empiricism has attempted to colonize the subjective sphere by trying to render it irrelevant- a condition he refers to as "flatland". After providing this analysis, Wilber takes a gander at the cognitive structures still lying in our future, through several examples of such advanced minds- Emerson, St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila, Ramana Maharshi, and Meister Eckhart. After that, Wilber takes on the disease of the Post-modern world and it's primary culprits- a dissociation between what he refers to as the "Eco" camps (romantic, back-to-nature, web-of-life, holistic) and the "Ego" camps (rationalistic, modernistic, atomistic, disassociating the mind and body), and how these two contradictory (and self-contradictory) worldviews are becoming extremely destructive- in political discourse, academia, and the world in general.

Of course, as has been said before about SES, it's very hard to sum up in a simple outline- the book itself is practically a 500+ page outline. The main thrust of the work is to construct a coherent philosophy for the 21st century, and thus Wilber spends little time on details (which will be covered further in the next two volumes, Kosmic Karma and Creativity and The Spirit of Post-Modernity). But, that weakness aside, Wilber has proven himself the finest philosophical mind of the early 21st century, and the first great step beyond Foucault, Derrida, and the rest of the post-modern mess.

Although SES is an excellent book, it's not light reading, and readers without a background in philsophy, psychology, or cultural studies should take a look at a simpler introduction to Wilber's work, such as A Brief History of Everything- the condensed, more conversational version of SES.

38 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Feeds the soul and feeds the intellect, but not both at once, April 7, 2001

By	Todd I. Stark "Cellular Wetware plus Books" (Philadelphia, Pa USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution, Second Edition (Paperback)

For me, the modern age is characterized by some interesting excesses, and Wilber satisfyingly identifies many of them in his spiritual journey here. Three favorite targets I found were: (1) the attempt to make things simpler than they really are in order to explain them, which analytic philosopher Dan Dennett calls "greedy reductionism," (2) the "rage against reason" found in much postmodernism that rejects the notion of objective reality and confident knowledge; and (3) extreme conservative thinking unable to come to grips with the vision of a complex evolving universe.

Wilber has a brilliant imagination and he is a very engaging writer, and this book (probably his best) deals with all three of those excesses in a fascinating way. His overall approach is not original of course (it is essentially a spiritual interpretation of systems and process metaphysics, but there are some very original elements sprinkled here and there. And probably the best thing about this book is that it does a competent job of presenting and integrating ideas from many diverse fields, in addressing the modern excesses, and trying to come up with a satisfying spiritual worldview for our complex age.

This is beautifully ironic, since what he attempts is the very essence of reductionism (!), something Wilber rails against mightily in this book when the "reductionists" disagree with his ideas because the "reduction" is not spiritually meaningful.

For comparison, the conservative religious/creationist critique of Darwinism holds that a universe composed of material elements that interact algorithmically ("machines") cannot also contain spiritual meaning. The Catholic Pope avoided that bind in support of evolution by imbuing material with living Spirit. Wilber uses the metaphysics of systems and processes rather than living Spirit, making his version, (like that of theologian Haught), noticeably more (if still imperfectly) compatible with the scientific worldview.

But this attack of reductionism while using to make his point is the big flaw, to me, in an otherwise very compelling, ambitious, and scholarly synthesis of many of the most profound ideas ever recorded in human thinking.

Indeed, this book seems like it would be sure to appeal to a wide variety of people who, like me, are looking for a way of making sense of our world where we don't bury our head in the sand against uncomfortable aspects of the scientific worldview, nor reject the implications of being spiritual beings who crave meaning.

Technically, the main problem I found is Wilber's annoyingly spotty attention to analysis (which seems worse because he does it reasonably well when he does it), in favor of linking ideas through metaphor. It makes his ideas flow like repetitive New Age spiritual poetry, from science to theology to philosophy and back again, but it doesn't quite hold together for me. It feeds the soul in many places, and feeds the intellect in many places, but not quite both at once.

If this was just a book of inspiring metaphor, the science would be distracting, and as a work of argumentation it is largely devoid of rigor. The result is arguably appropriate to the topic, since one of his targets is the dictatorship of materialist reasoning in science. However, he seems to lapse briefly into some of the excesses of postmodernism or even wishful superstition when after building a perfectly good concept from the ground up, he throws out conclusions that only fit by analogy. The usual leap of faith needed to appreciate any book of religion is then required. This contrasts with the well-reasoned argument leading up to that point. It is perhaps, as other reviewers pointed out, that he has taken on so very much.

He is left, sadly, with the same problems that some populists of complexity theory have, their passion for applying their ideas goes beyond what they've actually demonstrated... they _could_ (probably ?) well be right, but they've at that point only built an illusion of scientific soundness by telling a masterful story.

This encyclopedic book joins Murphy's masterpiece, "Future of the Body," as another magnificent attempt to construct a new spirituality out of scientific, humanistic, and religious traditions. I applaud his efforts, and I think this is a very worthy book that introduces in understandable form many important complex ideas that most people would otherwise not have the chance to engage. For the sake of space, I'd like to refer interested readers to many of the excellent points made in Frederick Polgardy's very fine review previously here.