It’s a curious fact about Jan Smuts’ Holism and Evolution that his argument revolves tightly around the concept called sometimes the Chain of Being and sometimes the Levels of Being and yet he never once mentions the concept in his book. Given how widely read Smuts clearly was, it seems highly improbable that he would not have been familiar with the levels of being and so the question becomes why he did not acknowledge it in his work, especially since it would have helped to clarify his main argument.
I suspect a large part of the reason why Smuts left it out was the fact that the levels of being is a concept that had been integrated extensively into Catholic theology and it was not fashionable among the scholarly and upper classes of Western nations at the time he wrote his book to reference Christianity. Smuts gives very little mention to religion in his book and where he does it is usually not favourable, so I’m guessing that could have been the reason for the omission.
Of course, Smuts also showed signs of reverence for the ancients in his book, another fashionable belief among the upper classes of the West at that time, and so he could very well have used them as the source for the levels of being since it was from Greek thought that the early Christians adopted the levels of being and incorporated it into their theology.
The best explanation of the levels of being I’ve read was given by E.F. Schumacher in his book A Guide for the Perplexed. What’s particularly useful about his explanation is that Schumacher shows that there is nothing mystical about the levels of being. They refer to basic aspects of the world in which we live and which we are all able to perceive. Anybody who has seen a person or an animal die knows that something changes in the body of the deceased. There is a clear and unmistakable difference between a live and a dead body that is instantly recognisable even though it would be hard to describe the specific qualities. The transition from consciousness to unconsciousness and then to death transcends three levels of being and most people can tell the difference with no training required.
Despite the fact that we can all recognise the levels of being in practice, it’s also true that there is an inherent mystery to them and that is why philosophers, scientists and theologians have been talking about the subject for millennia. Even though Smuts doesn’t reference the concept directly, his entire book implies the levels of being and needs to be understood against the history of the idea.
Smuts’ implied levels of being concept is somewhat problematic and, in fact, he changes it during the book without making clear that he is doing so. This was of particular interest to me since the first version that Smuts proposes is almost identical to the one I used in my recent book, The Universal State of America, with civilisation or culture as a level above the human individual. That is how Smuts frames it near the beginning of the book only to do an about face at the end where he denies that culture/society is a Whole (and therefore a level of being).
For our introductory purposes in this post, we don’t need to worry about this issue and we can focus on the less controversial areas. The two levels of being that Smuts shares with the historical tradition are matter and life and Smuts follows the traditional version whereby life is “higher” than matter. This gives us the table as follows:-
| Level of Being |
| Life |
| Matter |
Smuts then proposes “mind” as the next level. Mind is a complex thing. We might divide it into the unconscious and conscious realms as per the psychoanalysts. But there is also intellect, reason, logic, will, imagination and other faculties to deal with. We would want to say that humans share with animals the lower and some of the upper levels of consciousness but we would probably want to draw the line at logic, intellect and reason and say that these were unique to humans. Smuts is not clear on where he draws the boundary in his book. Again, for our overview here it’s not necessary to resolve these ambiguities, so let’s just put mind in the table as follows:
| Level of Being |
| Mind |
| Life |
| Matter |
Above mind there is a faculty that Schumacher calls Self-Awareness. Meditation or similar practices provide perhaps the clearest experience of what this means since they involve the deliberate control of the mind. This raises the question: what is doing the controlling? The answer is Self-Awareness (we might also call it the will, the soul or something else).
Self-Awareness seems to sit “above” consciousness since it can control or view consciousness as if from the outside. When you do exercises in meditation or concentration, you realise that the thoughts going through your mind seem to have a will of their own and trying to shut them up is no easy task. Moreover, those thoughts are often not your own but come from the external source of the collective psyche of society.
Smuts proposes a similar faculty for the level of being above mind which he calls personality. This is an interesting idea in itself and we’ll look at it in a future post. For now, let’s just use Schumacher’s formulation.
| Level of Being |
| Self-Awareness |
| Mind |
| Life |
| Matter |
This gives us the levels of being as a series of properties. However, the way in which the levels of being were traditionally enunciated was as a list of beings. Smuts takes a similar approach but he call them “Wholes”, from whence comes his theory of Holism. We can add these beings or Wholes to the table as follows:-
| Level of Being | Beings/Wholes |
| Self-Awareness | Humans |
| Mind | Animals, Humans |
| Life | Plants, Animals, microorganisms (cells) |
| Matter | Minerals (atoms, molecules) |
Theological versions of the levels of being would add to the table extra levels above the human that pertain to God and other spiritual entities. Man’s role is then to strive upwards towards the spiritual and it’s this belief which certainly had a lot to do with the lack of attention paid to the lower levels of being prior to modern science. Matter was seen as something to be overcome. In some denominations, it was seen as inherently evil.
What opened the door to modern science was, in fact, a theological schism related directly to the levels of being. Descartes often gets the blame for splitting the mind and body and thereby severing the connection in the chain between matter, life and mind. Mind and body became separate substances or entities or whatever you want to call them. Having divided them, the question became how to put them back together i.e. how to explain the interaction between two substances that were now considered independent.
What is less well-recognised is that the theology of Luther and Calvin had also implied a division between soul and body since they asserted that nothing we do in the earthly realm of the body could make a difference to the fate of our souls. It is one of the many ironies around the Reformation that a belief system that was fixated on the spiritual should have given rise to modern materialism. By removing the importance of the body from theological considerations, the Protestants opened the way for scientific experimentation in that sphere, experimentation that the Catholic Church had previously suppressed.
This experimentation included the practice of vivisection. It’s a weird synchronicity that I just happened to read Patrick White’s book of that title, which I reviewed a couple of posts ago, before reading Smuts. The practice of vivisection, cutting open live animals, became justified within the Cartesian philosophy on the grounds that animals had no “soul” and were, therefore, little more than machines (automata). This led to some strange technical arguments about how the pain felt by animals had no “higher” meaning. Some apparently denied that animals felt pain at all. The vivisectors justified their practices on exactly this kind of philosophical basis. If anybody tells you philosophy doesn’t make a difference in the “real world”, cite vivisection as an example.
We can see that the schism that had taken place had broken the chain of being as inherited from the ancient world. The Reformation and the Cartesian philosophy opened the way for investigation into what had traditionally been considered the lowest of the levels of being: matter. The impressive results which followed led enthusiastic proponents to invert the paradigm. Matter became the “highest” level of being since it was the one we could know about with certainty. Some went even further and denied that anything existed beyond matter. Just as the vivisectors had used abstract arguments to convince themselves that the cries from the animals they were cutting up did not really denote pain, so too did scientific materialists use abstract arguments to convince themselves that nothing except matter really existed.
It’s against this backdrop that Smuts’ work needs to be understood. He was not alone in looking to overcome the schism that had been opened centuries earlier. Smuts took the implied primacy of matter and then combined it with the science of evolution to explain how the levels of being had evolved over time. The universe was no longer created from the top down, with all the various parts of the Wholes subservient to the power at the higher level of being. Rather, the lower levels of being were now the basis of reality. They provided the foundation on which the higher ones were built. This puts matter at the beginning of the story instead of God.
What makes Smuts’ version of this story ingenious is that he takes the results of materialist science and uses them to show that matter is a Whole, in fact, the first Whole. From the Whole of matter, he then charts the upwards progress through the other levels of being culminating in humanity. Atoms give rise to molecules which give rise to colloids and then cells, organisms, plants, animals and humans. Along the way, life is added to matter, mind to life and self-awareness to mind. The emergent story of evolution is one of creativity over time which tends towards increasing complexity.
As ingenious as Smuts’ argument undoubtedly is, does it do anything to address the central mysteries surrounding the levels of being? After all, the whole point of modern science is that it is able to explain how things work and not just that they work. Admittedly, I don’t keep up to date with the latest scientific research in this area, but I had a quick ten minute browse on the internet prior to writing this post and it seems that the science has not advanced much past where it was in Smuts’ day. That is, we still don’t know how life arose from matter let alone how mind arose from life or self-awareness from mind.
One of the articles I browsed was about a team of scientists trying to produce a cell that could divide successfully by removing different genes to figure out the minimum number that was needed. This is the same old reductionist approach of trying to break everything down into base elements. Note that this is also the same practice of vivisection only practiced at the micro-organic level, and instead of cutting up the phenotype we now cut up the genotype in the hope that we will find the answer there.
Herein lies a key point about the difference between the analytic and the holistic approach. The analytic wants to break everything down to the smallest irreducible components and then reverse engineer the whole process. The holistic approach starts with Wholes. For example, in relation to organisms, you start with the Whole which is the organism itself. The Whole then organises its own development by drawing in and coordinating the assembly of lower elements. This is the process of metabolism and metabolism is one of the key features that separates life from non-life.
In Smuts’ explanation, the process of self-organisation at the Life level of being is an extension of the Matter level of being where we see that matter is “selective” i.e. it can attract and repel other entities. One of the differences is that a living Whole does not just attract or repel, it changes the other entity since that entity is put into service for the creation and reproduction of the living Whole itself. We’ll go into this topic more in a future post.
There is one last aspect of the levels of being worth touching on and it is one that Smuts also spends a great deal of time analysing in his book, even though he uses different words to denote it. This is the distinction I have been using extensively for the last couple of years between the Exoteric or outer aspect and the Esoteric or inner, hidden aspect.
It wasn’t that long ago that the atom was believed to be an indivisible base unit of reality. In that model, we could say that the atom was entirely Exoteric in nature since, setting aside forces that may emanate from it, it seemed to have no inner or Esoteric aspect to it. All that changed with the ideas around neutrons and electrons and then quantum mechanics. I haven’t kept up to date with the latest science, so I’m not sure where the latest theories are at, but what these developments did was to give even the base elements of matter an Esoteric dimension that had previously been missing.
Smuts acknowledges that even base matter has an Esoteric dimension. Therefore, it’s no longer a distinction between entirely Exoteric matter and entirely Esoteric mind but rather a gradient. Nevertheless, it’s true that the Esoteric dimension becomes more important as we ascend the levels of being. The internal (Esoteric) workings of a cell are incredibly complex. The internal complexity increases as we get to the organism where the inner workings arguably become the dominant property. By the time we get to mind, we seem to be entirely in the Esoteric, although mind too may connect back to matter via the unconscious. That leaves Self-Awareness which philosophers have been telling us for thousands of years is entirely Esoteric.
Rather than thinking of the levels of being using the up-down metaphor, we can think of them as being internal (Esoteric) and external (Exoteric). The addition of each new level of being results in an Esoteric intensification of the entity in question. There is more going on “inside” the cell than in the atom. There is more going on “inside” the mind than in the organism. But we must be careful not to think of these as separate entities. The mind is “in” the body. The severance between the two came with Luther and Descartes. We need to learn to put them back together.
A human being, a plant and a rock are all composed of matter. What differentiates them is the intensity of their Esoteric resonance. We assume that a rock has almost no Esoteric resonance. It’s for this reason that rocks, and matter in general, are amenable to the reductionist, mechanical method of explanation because the mechanical method is entirely concerned with Exoteric factors. Since plants, animals and humans are composed of Exoteric matter, we can apply the mechanical method to them too. It’s not wrong to do so, but if we only apply the mechanical method, we leave out all the Esoteric properties of those entities. Since the Esoteric become more dominant as we get higher up the levels of being, the mechanical method works less and less well. What’s needed then is another method that takes into account the Esoteric.
Would we call this other method “science”? Smuts seems to think we can and yet there is an inherent contradiction here. Smuts fully acknowledges that the Esoteric is creative, dynamic and evolutionary. In fact, he lauds that creativity and associates it with freedom. But science is supposed to be concerned with what can be known with certainty. If the Esoteric is free, then it need not follow the rules of science. How does one “do science” on the Esoteric given the whole point of science is to garner reproducible results? This is a question that Smuts doesn’t answer.
As a final conundrum in this respect, Smuts puts forward the interesting conjecture that matter used to be far more creative than it is now. In other words, matter went through a creative phase before settling down into the seemingly predictable and reliable phase in which we now view it. The reason we don’t find spontaneous creation in matter in our time is because the creative, Esoteric part of the world has moved “upwards” to the higher levels of being. It follows that science would once upon a time not have worked on matter, even if there had been scientists around to study it, because it was too unstable. Isn’t it the case that what we call science only works on those domains that have ceased to be creative and that science will only ever work on life, mind and self-awareness once those domains have ceased being dynamic and creative too.
It is exactly these kinds of issues that were behind ideas in the 20th century of finding a “third way” of doing science that could somehow incorporate the Esoteric and creative dimensions of the world. We’ll also look at some of those ideas in future posts.
Hi Simon,
I began reading your book ‘The Universal State of America’ earlier today. It’s very good and interesting.
The little light bulb went on 🙂 , and please feel free to correct me here. So to put the direction of your work in its most basic terms, you wrote The Devouring Mother book, and analysed and observed the archetype at work during, well, you know what crazy time. And from there, that must have begun the process of you considering how do archetypes interact (I’m not entirely certain that is the correct word to use) within the larger historical, societal and civilisational context?
Dare I suggest that historians have taken the easy way out of that analysis by simply recounting and analysing events?
It interests me that my own profession of accounting prefers to look back in an objective numerical manner, and resists commenting upon the forces at play, but also the guidance as to what is going on – in the wider business perspective.
It’s an ambitious project. Respect.
Cheers
Chris
Hey Chris, yes, that’s a concise summary of the situation 😉
I think that’s a little bit unfair to historians. Recording facts and demanding that they be accurate was a pretty huge advance on what came before, which was impossible to distinguish from myth/story. Actually, I talk about this later in the book and I assume you haven’t got that far yet. The word “story” is actually a shortened version of “history”. In ancient times, they meant almost the same thing. In modern German, they still use the same word for “story” and “history” (geschichte) and I assume it’s true for most European languages.
It’s an interesting point about accounting. It’s a similar pattern, I think. Just getting to an “objective” account of the facts was a big achievement and a huge part of the success of modern science. How do we move forward into inherently more subjective areas without losing the rigor of science? That’s a big question and probably part of the reason why official science sticks to the pretense of objectivity even in fields where it’s not really possible.
How does something like astrology fit into this ? As in a field that uses careful observation to make predictions, which when it boils down to it is what a lot of science is trying to do.
Skip – not sure what to make of astrology. I think the underlying principle of cycles is absolutely correct. If Smuts is right about matter no longer being creative, then the position of the planets should make no difference since they are just balls of matter. However, the cycles that exist in the currently active Esoteric realm would still be valid. Which is, of course, exactly what the comparative historians had analysed. Who needs astrology when you’ve got Spengler and Toynbee.
The thing about astrology is that it doesn’t attempt to explain why it works materially (sort of but no real mechanism of action) it just says hey these things match up. There is no further rational interrogation into causality, merely the observation of phenomena and then a relational model without a reductive reason. In many ways it is actually looking at the whole.
What then differentiates it from science ? You could say it’s science without reduction. But this gets to what I was saying on your last post in that humans traditionally do this all the time. Many old agricultural methods are based off of peasant almanacs that didn’t attempt a reductive explanation but just gave techniques to use and perhaps a story behind it. The fact that these seems a distant way to approach things now is interesting.
I’ll admit I don’t have much time for astrology. Did any astrologer predict the GFC or corona? I mean, really predict that something big was gonna happen, not just vague assertions.
It may be with astrology that the main value is simply a willingness to consider inter-relationships, and that is a kind of holistic thinking. The irony is that even if astrology itself is bogus, believing in it would make people more likely to be open to actual holistic thinking. I think this is a point JMG has talked about: the difference between training the mind and informing it. Astrology does not inform but it does train.
Yeah there are plenty of astrologers who make pretty hard and fast predictions with mixed results (JMG included), and a fair few who predicted something huge was coming in 2020. What keyed me into it was noticing that the things biodynamic ag had to say about the moon and constellations seems to actually work in the real world, and I saw it happen with the plants on my farm. I gave up trying to understanding why.
At the end of the day like you I’m less interested in whether it works or not, merely that it is an example of something that could be science without reduction, and why then it is observed to be pseudoscience and superstition. If it is because it doesn’t make rock solid accurate predictions, it is at least as accurate as many of the ridiculously bad models of the future that modern reductive science comes up with, and has a very old lineage of observation to go off.
Hi Simon,
Thanks for the confirmation of my understanding.
Alas, I’m unable to skim read books. 😉 I’ll be interested to read your thoughts about the manacles of such tools and knowledge. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s work Historia Regum Britanniae, is probably a classic example of what went on beforehand, and who is to argue truth, fiction, or a little bit of either? But we do build upon the shoulders of the past, and so can’t lightly shake any of that off. In fact I’m guessing that would be an error to do so, but don’t really know.
The question to my mind would be, what would be an ideal way to present history?
I read an essay this evening written by David Graeber in relation to his book Bullshit Jobs, and the author made a really fascinating observation that the workforce and work arrangements, reflects the desires and concerns of the very wealthiest in society. Now, if you take that thought, and extend it just a little bit to encompass other activities where say, people claim to objectivity, what does that suggest to you about the tools and knowledge mentioned above?
Cheers
Chris
Skip – there’s a good analogy for this in the world of IT/electronic engineering. White box testing is when you know all the component parts inside the box and you test them individually and also in their interaction with each other. Black box testing is the observation of the box from the outside. Black box testing can be done without knowing any of the inner workings and Gerald Weinberg showed that black box testing can find things that white box testing cannot find. Actually, the fact that black box testing exists is a proof for the existence of Wholes as Smuts defines them since a Whole must be more than the sum of its parts. It’s noteworthy that black box testing relies on heuristics and therefore cannot provide certain results. Even in technical domains there is a desire for fake certainty.
Chris – “history is written by the victors.” You can see why some historians insist that only what is verifiable fact be admitted into history since the subjective accounts are mostly self-serving BS. Just look at the nonsense that gets written in the public debate during our time and now imagine that some future historian reads that and thinks that it’s an accurate account of what is actually going on. I always liked Kenneth Clark’s idea that the best way to do history is to study art. Ironically, because art is not supposed to be “factual” it can end up being more true than the “facts”.
“Matter was seen as something to be overcome. In some denominations, it was seen as inherently evil.”
Wilber posits that one of the defining features of the “leap” into Integral consciousness is a change in attitude towards the function of higher levels of development vis a vis lower levels, away from “transcend and dismiss” to “transcend and include”. Only integral leaders are capable of governing without oppressing or infantalisating. This may be why Smuts was so successful. The failure of the UN has demonstrated though that others have not been at his level.
“That is, we still don’t know how life arose from matter let alone how mind arose from life or self-awareness from mind.”
Problem gets solved quick-smart when you assume mind to be prior to matter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RGizqsLumo
Skip forward to 1:18:10.
“By the time we get to mind, we seem to be entirely in the Esoteric, although mind too may connect back to matter via the unconscious.”
Wilber uses the AQAL methodology to remind researchers that every level of subjective-esoteric development will always have correlates in the material-exoteric domain (and vice versa). Mind’s connection to matter is always there but it is a feature of higher development that that connection is made conscious and used consciously.
“How does one “do science” on the Esoteric given the whole point of science is to garner reproducible results? This is a question that Smuts doesn’t answer.”
The mind can be trained to be extremely honest and disciplined about what creatively effective actions it is enacting while any given experiment is run.
“Isn’t it the case that what we call science only works on those domains that have ceased to be creative and that science will only ever work on life, mind and self-awareness once those domains have ceased being dynamic and creative too.”
Matter that has ceased to be creative is the difference between a dead and living body. That is, matter in a living body is “wired” into the mind of the individual with that carries the body. But dead flesh is not inherently wired into the mind of any particular individual. It can be animated, however, by powerful minds that have trained to deliberately “connect” with that flesh. (Or think Luke Skywalker balancing rocks telekinetically). But once the conscious effort ceases, so too does the connection. Matter that is wired can also be rewired by way of conscious effort – thus brain plasticity and spiritual possession.
Jinasiri – technology is interesting in this connection. Take a car. It belongs to the domain of matter and follows the rules of that domain eg. entropy. But a car is really the product of Mind in its design. I know it’s not what you meant by the idea of being “wired” into mind but it feels analogous to me. A car that is no longer associated with the human mind that maintains it quickly degrades back to base elements (at least, quicker than it otherwise would with a human maintaining it and otherwise taking care of it).
The point about science is one I think that Wilber made which is that there is genuine novelty available at any moment that cannot be predicted and therefore cannot be reached by science as we typically know it. Whether other faculties such as “will” can be used is another question. Interestingly, this resolves the main gripe that the existentialists (Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Shestov) had with materialist science since there is no longer a contradiction between novelty and scientific “laws”.
“car that is no longer associated with the human mind that maintains it quickly degrades back to base elements (at least, quicker than it otherwise would with a human maintaining it and otherwise taking care of it).”
Agreed. Actually, this is a kind of wiring. Many petrolheads would maintain their car is an extension of their body. A friend of mine used to say he needed to “re-energise” spaces by sweeping them. This is probably what indigenous Australians meant by singing up the land to stop it from dying.
‘Whether other faculties such as “will” can be used is another question.’
Exactly. To what extent can the mind be honed to do science that the bots can’t? A question pivotal to the self respect of all humans of this age.
I’ve been told I should read Dune…
Another example that I have some experience with would be a musical instrument. That definitely feels like being “wired in” to matter (when things are going well).