Catching Up With Ken Wilber: Part Two
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| Proof of purchase. An early edition from 1996. |
Often throughout his books, as in the Introduction to A Theory of Everything, Ken Wilber asks the reader to take what they like from his ideas and to “see if you can improve them.” You don't find many leading-edge thinkers that (theoretically) open to constructive input. Yet, his recommendation is to read Sex, Ecology, Spirituality “one sentence at a time.” I have done that now, twice in my lifetime; once when I first purchased the book in 1996 and again just a few days ago. This is an overview. I will attempt to take one major concept at a time. I make no claim as to communicate everything that can be obtained (or disdained) in this delineation of the theory.
At any rate, learning Integral Theory begins with holons. A holon is a whole/part, a complete something that is part of a larger whole. Cells make organs. Both are holons. The cell is something unique to itself, yet it is part of the tissue of a body organ. The body organ, in turn, is a holon. It is a thing unto itself (has unique properties and processes) and yet is part of a functional physical body of some kind, another holon.
Obviously, if taken collectively, the unfolding of holons from a cell all the way to a functioning body creates a hierarchy of growth and development. You can apply that growth hierarchy to almost anything. Using molecules instead of cells as needed, it is essentially how every aspect of tangible reality works – quarks to superclusters.
Integral Theory is not just a expression of how an integrated approach to reality works well. It is equally concerned with how attempts at integration and failure to integrate are pathological. Wilber is immediately interested in the possible pathology of holonic hierarchies. “...the holism between levels, goes pathological when there is a breakdown between levels and a particular holon assumes a repressive, oppressive, arrogant role of dominance over other holons (whether in individual or social development). On the other hand, normal hierarchy, which is holism within any level, goes pathological when there is a blurring or fusion of that level with its environment: a particular holon doesn't stand out too much, it blends in too much; it doesn't arrogate itself above others, it loses itself in others...” (page 23 - all emphasis in Wilber quotes are his.)
Overall, however, holons and hierarchies make up reality. Dominator hierarchies are possible and they tend to produce pathological behavior. Growth hierarchies tend to drive everything in a positive or healthy way. Wilber outlines 20 tenets that he believes are fundamental to the workings of holons. For example: “The greater the vertical dimension of a holon (the more levels it contains), then the greater the depth of the holon; and the more holons on that level, then the wider its span.” (page 56) “Each successive level of evolution produces GREATER depth and LESS span. The greater the depth of a holon, the more precarious is its existence, since its existence depends also on the existence of a whole series of other holons internal to it. And since lower holons are components of the higher, there physically cannot be more numbers of the higher than there are numbers of components.” (pp. 56-57)
Don't worry about relating to “depth” and “span” right now. I was just using that as an example of a couple of these 20 tenets. Ultimately they all come down to this: “Each stage of growth, because it is a holon, faces a dual tension. As a whole, it is relatively autonomous and relatively 'healthy, happy, whole.' But as a part, it is in some sense alienated, set apart, or disconnected from those contexts that are beyond it own perception. And until it takes the larger and deeper context into account, the limitations of its own shallower position will torment it, inflict it with the agony of incompleteness, tear at its boundaries with hints of something deeper, higher, more meaningful...” (pp. 77 – 78)
Of course, Wilber is doing a bit of slight-of-hand here. He's attempting to be “abstract and general” about holons, but he is obviously relating it all to human development. His use of language here suggests a bias on his part. But, I don't want to dwell on that. This is just a basic concept that turns out to be much more useful later on.
For now, what Wilber wants to review is “the self-transcendent drive within biology pushed forth something beyond biology, pushed into symbols and tools that both created and depended upon new levels of social holons in which the users of symbols and tools could exist and reproduce themselves, but the reproduction was now the reproduction of culture through symbolic communication and not just the reproduction of bodies through sexuality.” (page 100)
Wilber uses levels of emergent (novel holons are emergent, that's important) geopolitical systems from kinship to village to empire to nation-state to planetary as an example of one hierarchy of holons. As this evolves or unfolds, the human “noosphere” (cultural mind or Lifeworld, basically) naturally emerges, the result of more complex cultural development. Here again, Wilber is interested in pathology. “Whenever evolution produces a new differentiation, and that differentiation is not integrated, a pathology results, and there are two fundamental ways to approach that pathology.
“One...the higher structure relaxes its grip on consciousness, regresses to a previous level where the failed integration first occurred, repairs on that level by reliving it in a begin and healing context...regression in service of a higher reintegration...
“The other general approach is...Whenever evolution produces a new differentiation, that differentiation happens to go into pathological dissociation, then this approach seeks to permanently turn back the pages of emergent history to a time prior to the differentiation.” (page 105) To me, this passage sounds as if it is describing the present-day world and Donald Trump. Wilber wrote this in the mid-90's.
Wilber's concern so far is with the basic mechanics of human development and possible pathologies that might result if holons don't play well together. The more you exteriorize holons, the more your span within the physical world, which is much wider in 3-D space. The more you interiorize holons, the more your depth within the interior world. This is the contrast between span and depth, exterior (the physical span of the cosmos) and interior (the psychological depth of me or I).
The human noosphere contains emergent holons all within our thoughts and feelings. By “transcending but including,” a healthy hierarchy integrates “the information presented by its junior holons.” At this point, to my great pleasure, Wilber turns to Jurgen Habermas's theory of consciousness. As I have written, I am a huge fan of Habermas. Wilber writes: “...Jurgen Habermas, whom many (myself included) consider the world's foremost living philosopher and social theorist.” (page 118)
I did not realize Habermas, in his earliest work from the 1970's, before anything I have read by him, actually does have a theory about how human consciousness evolved into its present state. Wilber outlines it pretty well and that was a surprise to me in rereading this book. I did not recall that. Indeed, much of this book is familiar but new to me.
At this stage Wilber adds a layer of complexity to the mix. He introduces the idea that if you look at holons they come in a distinct dual antithesis of interior/exterior and individual/collective. These four components form a quadrant. On the left side you have interiors. On the right, exteriors. On top you have the individual. On bottom the social/collective. This allows a mix of individual interior (me or I), individual exterior (it), social individual (we), social exterior (its).
This is more useful than it first appears. Again, Wilber prefers to present all the basics, the building blocks for a larger construct that is already emerging. He makes a useful distinction between the exterior and interior, for example, “Whereas the Right half can be seen, the Left half must be interpreted.” Wilber then introduces the phrase “subtle reductionism.”
“My position is that every holon has these four aspects or four dimensions (or four 'quadrants') of its existence, and thus it can (and must) be studied in its intentional, behavioral, cultural and social settings. No holon simply exists in one of the four quadrants; each holon has four quadrants.” (page 129)
I'm not sure how rocks or fungi or clouds (which are, by definition, holons) have all quadrants. But obviously they can be readily applied to humans. Subtle reductionism occurs when everything on the Left side, interior side is mistakenly placed on the Right, exterior side. Everything is an object. There are no interiors at all, just “systems.” To articulate this by example Wilber turns to Habermas:
“...Habermas's withering attack on systems theory, and his demonstration that, although systems theory has its important but limited place, it is not, by virtue of its reductionism, one of the great modern enemies of the lifeworld – what he refers to as 'the colonialization of the lifeworld by the imperatives of functional systems, that externalize their costs on the others...a blind compulsion to system maintenance and system expansion.'” (page 130)
Wilber's invoking of “the colonialization of the lifeworld” profoundly meets with my own experience. I read this separately when Habermas first wrote it, years before Wilber quoted him, in The Theory of Communicative Action: Volume II (1987/1981) and in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1987/1985). It is a powerful and fundamentally useful modern awareness, one of Habermas's most profound concepts. And it tells us that Wilber sees something of the concept of the “lifeworld” in the noosphere, for example. It helps us flesh out what Wilber is driving at. It also confirms Wilber's deepest understanding of Habermas's critique of modernity, which happens to neatly fit with my own idea of Function. So, I'm really excited rereading this section.
“The Big Three” is the term Wilber gives to the concepts of “it,” “we,” and “I.” He summarizes Habermas's insight this way: “We are inescapably situated in relation to the Big Three, each of which has its own validity claim and its own standards, and none of which can be reduced to the others.” Wilber writes “the great achievement of the Enlightenment (and 'modernity') is the necessary differentiation of the Big Three, the great task of 'postmodernity' is their integration...” (page 148) Of course, years later, Wilber will criticize postmodernity as almost completely screwing things up for not integrating anything at all.
Nevertheless, the basic idea is that the healthy higher stages of development always transcend and include all their previous stages. Wilber will contend this is a fundamentally integrated way to live your life, of realizing your full four-quadrant potential, hence Integral Theory. Of course, this is easier said than done. Each new stage of development meets a certain degree of resistance to transcending and including. As examples, he points to “the unfortunate resistance to today's feminism...a resistance to the emergence of an entirely novel structure of consciousness...” Another area of resistance is in the emergence of environmentalism. Tribal consciousness was closer to nature but it nevertheless depleted nature wherever tribes settled. Today we lack the same basic degree of wisdom (or lack of wisdom) toward nature, only we have far greater capacity to devastate the environment. So there are plenty of challenges with transcending but including.
Nevertheless, at every stage, there are individuals capable of this healthy transcendence. Again Wilber turns to Habermas who: “...strongly believes, for example, that even in preoperational magical times, some individuals clearly developed cognitive capacities all the way up to formal operational cognition, not as fully formed structures but as potentials for understanding...the most advanced mode at the time was not just formal operational, although I believe that was clearly present, but beyond that to the psychic level, again not as fully formed structures but as a potential for a certain type of understanding and awareness.
“My point is that in each epoch, the most advanced mode of the time – in a very small number of individuals existing in relational exchange in microcommunities (lodges, academies, sanghas) of the similarly depthed - began to penetrate not only into higher modes of ordinary cognition (the Aristotles of the time) but also into genuinely transcendental, transpersonal, mystical stages of awareness (the Buddhas of the time).
“Thus, in the magical, as I just mentioned, the most advanced mode seems to have been the psychic (embodied in a few genuine shamans or pioneers of yogic awareness); in mythological times the most advanced mode seems to have reached into what is known as the subtle level (embodied in a few genuine saints); and in mental-egoic times the most advanced modes reached into the causal level (embodied in a few genuine sages)...
“But the average mode of the mythological epoch did not reach into these subtler and transpersonal dimensions, but remained grounded in a concrete-literal interpretation of myth (e.g., Moses actually did part the Red Sea, as an empirical fact). There is precious little that is transpersonally inspired about such myths; rather, as Habermas suggests, they clearly represent the sociocentric-literal integration offered by concrete operational and conventional morality, and for that reason were extremely important in moving social integration beyond tribal and the preconventional...” (pp. 172 – 173)
For Wilber (and Habermas among others) human culture (as a holon) has emerged/evolved through various stages (holons) of magical-animistic to mythological to mythic-rational to rational. This is a widely respected interpretation of the development from, say, the Neolithic mind to the modern mind. Not only is this true of human cultural history but it is also true of each human individual. As infants, our consciousness more or less begins at the archaic-magic stage and (theoretically) work our way up, stage by stage, to rationality.
Just as importantly, at each stage you can have exceptional individuals or “microcommunities” of individuals that emerge in a higher (or even lower, if pathological) stage from the “average” of whatever stage it might be. A simple example is that Aristotle was at the rational stage when all the rest of the world was at a magic or mythic stage. Those dynamics represent “the spirit of evolution” as manifested in “the emergence of human nature” in its most basic sense.
Wilber also relies heavily on the work of Jean Gebser in tandem with Habermas to flesh out these various stages in terms of the four-quadrants component of Integral Theory. As mentioned earlier, each stage has its own place in all four quadrants. Or perhaps it is better to say all four quadrants are present at each stage of development. Wilber offers this remarkably flexible and versatile scheme as follows:
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| Stages within the four quadrants as presented in the book. |
For Wilber this centauric level, along with “vision-logic” of the Upper-Left, represents “the coming transformation...in the hearts and minds of those individuals who themselves evolve to centauric planetary vision. For those individuals create a 'cognitive potential' in the form of new worldviews that in turn feed back into the ongoing mainstream of social institutions, until the previously 'marginalized' worldview becomes anchored in institutional forms which then catapult a collective consciousness to new and higher release.” (page 197)
So, back in 1995, Wilber seems very optimistic that the next stage of transcending and including is upon us. Feminism, environmentalism, and other leading-edge “isms” are laying the groundwork for this to happen. For reasons expressed in my previous blog post on Wilber, the leading-edge ended up not leading to inclusion at all, which is one reason Wilber is so concerned with pathologies and resistances in this work. Instead, we got polarization even though progress was clearly made in areas such as gay rights and green energy.
But let's not get off topic here. Wilber '95 was simply pointing out how human development works on an individual and cultural basis and how it fits in with the exterior world of objects and social systems. I think the model has a great degree of practical merit. Further, it accommodates today's postmodern pathologies and resistances without breaking its method. In fact, the challenges facing “the coming transformation” only serve to further validate Wilber's four-quadrant perspective on human development.
Wilber is not finished with all the things that can go wrong with interpreting healthy human development. His next topic is actually one of his best known ones – the pre/trans fallacy. Simply put, the stages before the rational (such as magic and mythic) and the theoretical stages after rational (transrational or transpersonal) are, by definition, not rational. Therefore, they can easily get entangled as the same when observed rationally.
On the one hand, higher experiences of consciousness can be “seen as a regression or a throwback” to prerational states and are, therefore, incorrectly reduced as below rationality. On the other, those who experience higher states of consciousness often “elevate all prerational states to some transrational glory.” In short, infantile experiences of bliss and unity are not the same as undifferentiated states experienced by contemplative practice.
“Spirit is indeed nonrational; but it is trans, not pre. It transcends and includes reason; it does not regress and exclude it.” (page 207) As an example, Wilber points out that “Freud was a reductionist, Jung was an elevationist.” To further explain this, Wilber turns to the work of Jean Piaget. Although the terminology is different, Piaget's stages of development map on well to Wilber's. There is the “preoperational” (magic and mythic), the “concrete operational” (mythic and mythic-rational), the ego (rational), and the “formal operational,” which Wilber classifies as “the first truly ecological mode of awareness, in the sense of grasping mutual interrelationships” (worldcentric).
Wilber articulates it this way: “”Thus, we have seen moral development move from preconventional orientation, which is strongly egocentirc, geocentric, biocentric, narcissistic, bound to the body's separate feelings and nature's impulses, to a conventional or sociocentric or ethnocentric orientation, bound to one's society, culture, tribe, or race, to a postconventional or worldcentric orientation in the space of universal pluralism and global grasp.” (pp.234 – 235)
Ideally, as you move to postconventional you will take on greater depth of understanding as not only do you include all the egocentric and ethnocentric stages of reality but you will include all of this as you transcend everything into a new global or pluralistic experience. Wilber refers to all of this as the “Kosmos,” his term for the collective nature of the four quadrants, as distinct from “cosmos” which resides in the Right-Hand exteriors.
The Kosmos is (sloppily) progressing. “Gone is the time (in the developed East and West) when one could settle comfortably in the magic or even the mythic mode. The center of gravity of the 'world soul,' so to speak, has moved into rational modes of universal pluralism, and the earliest one can abort transformation, without social censure, is somewhere around mythic-rational. And indeed the majority of individuals in rational societies still settle in somewhere around the mythic-rational, using all the formidable powers of rationality to prop up a particular, divisive, imperialistic mythology and as aggressively fundamentalistic program of systematic intolerance. As such, they are constantly at war with magic, with other myths, and with reason, all of which they view simply as the devil's work.
“The modern solution to this developmental nightmare is that the rationality structure of the democratic state tolerates magic and mythic subholons, but it has, via the all-important separation of church and state, removed the worldviews of those subholons from the organizing regime of society, which itself is defined by a rational tolerance of everything but intolerance.” (page 252)
This progress, according to Wilber, is propelled by “strange Attractors lying in our future.” Obviously, Wilber's use of the word “spirit” and “transpersonal” are his own extension of the various academic theories of human development (Habermas, Gebser, Piaget, etc.) and are rarely found in “mainstream” academia. There is a reason for this that we will come to in a future blog post. For now, it is important to realize that Wilber's theory of holons framed as “attractors” pulling the evolution of consciousness along is somewhat a matter of faith. It is his attempt to incorporate the interior, contemplative venue of consciousness exploration into a theory that readily includes traditional science and rationality. I submit to you that the value in this lies not so much in the degree of “truth” expounded but, rather, in the degree of usefulness to each of us as humans in the personal application of Integral Theory.
The Attractor(s), the emergence of the noosphere, the transpersonal aspects of human development are all posturing toward the future. Wilber believes that “the great and rare mystics of the past” (Jesus, Buddha, etc.) were actually individuals “ahead of their time.” He devotes the remainder of Book One of Sex, Ecology, Spirituality to a rather risky but potentially rewarding analysis of tomorrow. “I intend to emphasize this heavily, centauric vision-logic can integrate physiosphere, biosphere, and noosphere in its own compound individuality.” This is “the next stage of leading-edge global transformation.” (page 260)
“...the only cure for existential angst is the transcendence of the existential condition, that is, the transcendence of the centaur, negating and preserving it in a yet higher and wider awareness.” (page 264) What Wilber intends by the “depth” and “span” earlier in the book is now more obvious. He rather optimistically contends that “they can only be experienced by a transcendental contemplative development, whose stages unfold in the same manner as any other developmental stages, and whose experiences are every bit as real as any others.” (page 268)
Wilber discusses the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Arthur Schopenhauer, Teresa of Ávila, Aurobindo, Meister Eckhart and Ramana Maharshi to flesh out the liberating possibility of human experience as a “witness” to the unfolding of life. “The observer in you, the Witness in you, transcends the isolated person in you and opens instead onto a vast expanse of awareness no longer obsessed with the individual bodymind...” (page 281) In particular, Ramana Maharshi's take on being “the Witness” resonates with me. I discovered this Advaitic Hindu master's teachings when I spent time in India in the 1980's and they have been a part of me ever since.
Book One ends with a tip of the hat to Francis Fukuyama's idea of “the end of history.” Wilber contextualizes this controversial contemporary (at the time) idea this way, quoting Fukuyama as necessary: “The 'struggle for recognition' is simply the theme, developed from Hegel to Habermas, that mutual recognition is an omega point that pulls history and communication forward [Attractor?] toward the free emergence of that mutual recognition. Short of that emergence, history is a brutalization of one self or group of selves trying to triumph over, dominate, or subjugate others.
“When, on the other hand, human beings universally recognize each other 'as beings with a certain worth or dignity,' then history in that sense 'comes to an end because the longing that had driven the historical process – the struggle for recognition – has been satisfied in a society characterized by universal and reciprocal recognition. No other arrangement of human social institutions is better able to satisfy this longing, and hence, no further progressive historical change is possible.'” (pp. 312 – 313)
But Wilber respectfully disagrees. Looking forward: “...further historical changes are indeed possible...there are indeed structures of consciousness beyond the egoic...History would not have ended, only Egoic History.” (page 313) This is a rather bold conclusion, predicting stages of consciousness beyond the ego that will drive “future history.” There are “structural potentials” still available to humankind. Wilber will devote the rest of this work to defining what those are, how they can manifest, and some of the challenges facing these potentials in the postmodern world.
(to be continued)
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