Ken Wilber's Critique of Ecological Spirituality Michael E. Zimmerman
Influenced by thinkers such as Plotinus, Schelling, and Aurobindo, Wilber maintains that humankind is one aspect of the evolutionary processes by which spirit returns to self-consciousness after having emptied itself into matter-energy at the Big Bang. In his view, the solution to modernity's inadequate conception of the relation among spirit, nature, and humankind lies not in returning to pre-modern social relations and religious beliefs, but rather in moving ahead to a mode of awareness that reintegrates what modernity has dissociated...
He has been particularly inspired by Sri Aurobindo's effort to integrate the Western evolutionary perspective with the Eastern spiritual perspective, but Wilber has also attempted to interpret the Hellenstic thinker, Plotinus, as anticipating many of Aurobindo's insights. Of course, one could argue that Aurobindo himself, living in colonized India, was infected with Eurocentric ideas, but he was also a staunch Indian nationalist. If Aurobindo was influenced by Western ideas, Plotinus was apparently influenced by Eastern thought. In the future, I suspect, using terms such as "Eurocentric" will become increasingly uninformative, since a global culture is emerging in which individuals will inevitably be shaped by many different perspectives.
In view of Europe's important achievements, moreover, one should scarcely wonder that European values and practices have such a planetary influence. These influences would have spread, albeit more slowly, even without Europe's unfortunate colonial history, which helps to explain suspicion about Eurocentrism on the part of many Third World and Euro-American critics of modernity. Michael Zimmerman is author of Environmental Philosophy, Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity, and Contesting Earth's Future. michaelz@tulane.edu
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