The Great Chain of Being

The inherited metaphysical ordering of all beings from the most subtle to the most manifest and dense, with ØNE at the top and all creation nested below.

This is a borrowed instrument, and the Field should say so. The Great Chain is a long-standing ordering from the classical and medieval traditions; the canon carries it as one line in the Lexicon and builds nothing on it. Its work in this Field has been taken over by two pages that do the job better and in the canon's own voice: Levels of Abstraction, which gives an explicit ladder from Source through Logos, Energy, matter, the kingdoms, and the scales of human and living systems; and Levels Of Scale, which gives the nesting the Pattern Language actually uses.

It is kept here for two reasons. First, so the inheritance is visible: the canon's cosmology did not appear from nowhere, and naming where a shape came from is part of Provenance. Second, because the Chain carries a hazard worth naming. A ladder of beings ranked by subtlety slides easily into a ranking of worth, and from there into domination justified by nature. Holarchy is the canon's correction — the higher does not dominate the lower, it coheres it — and Sovereignty Of Consciousness holds that every conscious being has irreducible dignity regardless of position on any ladder.

The canon's own discipline applies with full force: the categories are not the depth, and mistaking the level for the truth is its own collapse. Where hierarchy and differentiated levels become mechanisms for domination rather than service and support, they are being misused.

Also called: scala naturae (inherited) Stands on: Emanation · Sacred Order · Being Opens onto: Levels of Abstraction · Holarchy · Levels Of Scale · Holon In play: Not met in play. It appears only in reading, and chiefly as background to the pages that replaced it. Sources: The LIØNSBERG Lexicon, Pillar I ("the metaphysical ordering of all beings from the most subtle to the most manifest and dense"; states Work In Progress) · Levels of Abstraction (root page, mature) · Holarchy (root page) · lionsberg.wiki: Levels of Abstraction. Open: The Concept Field judges this concept not load-bearing — "inherited furniture" — with Levels of Abstraction and Levels of Scale doing the actual work. It is written here as an inherited term, flagged, and not developed.