Adaptations and Similar Concepts
The American spiritual writer and philosopher Ken Wilber uses a concept called the "Great Nest of Being" which is similar to the Great Chain of Being, and which he claims to belong to a culture-independent "perennial philosophy" traceable across 3000 years of mystical and esoteric writings. Wilber's system corresponds with other concepts of transpersonal psychology.
In the 1977 book "A Guide for the Perplexed", British philosopher and economist E. F. Schumacher wrote that fundamental gaps exist between the existence of minerals, plants, animals and humans, where each of the four classes of existence is marked by a level of existence not shared by that below. Clearly influenced by the Great Chain of Being, but lacking the angels and God, he called his hierarchy the "levels of being". In the book, he claims that science has generally avoided seriously discussing these discontinuities, because they present such difficulties for strictly materialistic science, and they largely remain mysteries.
Read more about this topic: Great Chain Of Being
Famous quotes containing the words similar and/or concepts:
“Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived.”
—Bible: Hebrew Job, 3:3.
A similar imprecation is found in Jeremiah 20:14-15.
“During our twenties...we act toward the new adulthood the way sociologists tell us new waves of immigrants acted on becoming Americans: we adopt the host culture’s values in an exaggerated and rigid fashion until we can rethink them and make them our own. Our idea of what adults are and what we’re supposed to be is composed of outdated childhood concepts brought forward.”
—Roger Gould (20th century)