A Guide for the Perplexed

A Guide for the Perplexed is a short book by E.F. Schumacher, published in 1977. While better known for his 1974 environmental economics bestseller Small is Beautiful, which made him a leading figure within the ecology movement, Schumacher himself considered A Guide for the Perplexed to be his most important achievement. His daughter wrote that her father handed her the book on his deathbed, five days before he died and he told her "this is what my life has been leading to"'.{{Ref|Pearce}} As the Chicago Tribune wrote "A Guide for the Perplexed is really a statement of the philosophical underpinnings that inform Small is Beautiful."

Reflections

Schumacher's treatise is as relevant today as when it first written. It is a book that is highly popular among the religious and spiritual community, because it provides a powerful defence for the religious and spiritual spheres that is grounded solely in scientific argument.

Related Topics:
Religious - Spiritual

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Schumacher's argument stands or falls on his view that there are levels of being, that there are ontological differences between mineral, life, animal and human. The dominant scientific view still remains that there is no such differentiation of being, and so from that perspective Schumacher's initial assumptions are fatally flawed.

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However, Schumacher's argument that life, consciousness and self consciousness are mysteries that cannot be explained by science remains largely correct as of 2005. Intriguingly there seems to have been far more scientific interest in attempting to explain consciousness and self consciousness than life itself.

Related Topics:
Life - Consciousness - Self consciousness - As of 2005

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One necessary update to its argument is that Schumacher seems to have been unaware in 1977 that dolphins, chimpanzees and orangutans have repeatedly passed the mirror test for self awareness; and so Schumacher's argument that humans are unique in self consciousness seems questionable if you accept the legitimacy of the test. In his later years Schumacher turned to Catholicism and so it is interesting to speculate as to how and whether he would have amended his argument to take into account this test, which implies humans are not unique on Earth.

Related Topics:
Dolphin - Chimpanzee - Orangutan - Mirror test - Catholicism

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A more interesting perspective on Schumacher's ideas of levels of being can be taken by considering alternative theories of being. Over the second half of the 20th century a number of other thinkers have proposed various theories founded on levels of being. Gregory Bateson, the systems theorist and philosopher, argued in his book Mind and Nature that there is a more simple divide between the inanimate (pleroma) and living (creatura). Robert Pirsig, in his philosophical novel , argues that reality is divided into five different types of pattern: inanimate, biological, social, intellectual and dynamic. Ken Wilber, a transpersonal theorist, has developed an Integral theory that seems to mirror some of Schumacher's ideas directly. In his masterwork Sex, Ecology, Spirituality and his more accessible A Brief History of Everything, Wilber ties everything to "four quadrants" which are similar to Schumacher's "four fields of knowledge", and also relates to the "great chain of being" in an epistemological sense much like Schumacher's progressions.

Related Topics:
Gregory Bateson - Mind and Nature - Robert Pirsig - Ken Wilber - Integral theory - Sex, Ecology, Spirituality - A Brief History of Everything

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