Ken Wilber and The Flower Power Book Club

The following is shamelessly extracted from the excellent Wikipedia article on Ken Wilber

Upper-Left (UL) "I" Interior Individual Intentional e.g. Freud	Upper-Right (UR) "It" Exterior Individual Behavioral e.g. Skinner
Lower-Left (LL) "We" Interior Collective Cultural e.g. Gadamer	Lower-Right (LR) "Its" Exterior Collective Social e.g. Marx

One can crudely categorize the perspectives taken on people and their behavior in different schools of thought:

• Individual interior accounts (upper-left quadrant) include Freudian psychoanalysis, which interprets people's interior experiences and focuses on "I"
• Interior plural accounts (lower-left) include Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics which seeks to interpret the collective consciousness of a society, or plurality of people and focuses on "We"
• Exterior individual accounts (upper-right) include B. F. Skinner's behaviorism, which limits itself to the observation of the behavior of organisms and treats the internal experience, decision making or volition of the subject as a black box, and which with the fourth perspective emphasizes the subject as a specimen to examine, or "It".
• Exterior plural accounts (lower-right) include Marxist economi shared c theory which focuses upon the behavior of a society (ie a plurality of people) as functional entities seen from outside.


This is a very powerful way of looking at things and Wilber makes excellent use of it. It's a way of sorting out the *way* we know things.


Lots of people think only things that exist in the "real" world are real (upper right). Others point out that all we know and experience is going on in the upper left (inside our heads). Wilber does an excellent job pointing out that shared knowledge, emerging between the minds of groups of people, is perhaps the most important kind of knowledge. So-called "objective" or Scientific knowledge must first emerge as an experience to an individual who follows a certain procedure (an "injunction"), then be verified or falsified in the course of discussion with other human beings. So the knowledge is not as "objective" as it seems.


What's more, the same procedure can be applied to phenomena that don't exist outside the human mind at all, such as the whole world of Mathematics. Mathematical proof specifically rules out appeal to experiments in the real world, yet the truths of Mathematics are the "gold standard" of knowledge -- beyond any reasonable refutation.


I'm indebted to Wilber for this insight, but I'm afraid I must classify it as just a useful diagram. The world is far more complex than this and Wilber seems to spend a lot of time shoe-horning a lot of pretty wild ideas into his framework. Most notably, he feels it necessary to find mystical, trans-human knowledge into the scheme. Sorry Wilber -- I wish you good luck but that's where we part company.


Wilber has an overall project of reconciling Science and Religion, which is pretty close to what I try to do in this blog. His description of Science is quite accurate, but not nearly as original or controversial as he claims. 


In spite of his impressive research on the topic, Wilber seems to avoided any practical  understanding of religion. Surprise surprise, he concludes that all religions basically boil down to he believes, which seems to be that the universe is in some sense alive and that "God" can be reached by peering inside our own minds (roughly referred to as "New Age" mysticism). Of course, the process of knowing your inner God can be greatly assisted by courses and books offered by Wilber. By the year 2000, "Integral Psychology" has emerged as a business, complete with it's own impenetrable jargon, understood only by "qualified" professionals and eager to solve whatever problems you may have in exchange for whatever money you may have. 


Whatever the merits of Wilber's project, it shares little with my own. Specifically:

• I see myth as central to all human thinking, including religious thinking. There are different myths for different religions and even isolated communities within sects of the same religion. Our minds automatically arrange our experience into stories and our world view is inevitably mythical  Wilber seems to think we need to toss out mythical thinking altogether as "pre-modern". 
• Wilber also expresses strong contempt for tradition (all that pre-modern stuff). In my view, we need to understand that some of what we think of as "Christian" or "Muslim" or "Hindu" is mere tradition. We are free to modify religious practices and we do it all the time. Any demand to eliminate tradition altogether fails to deal with human beings as they exist in the real world.
• I don't see mystical practice (meditation, contemplation, prayer) as central to Christianity. In fact, mystical sects of Christianity (such as the Gnosticism) were apparently rejected as heresy by the early Church. At least as I understand it, Christianity is all about how we act toward each other. All the prayer in the world will not substitute for following the injunction to "love one another". This puts Christianity squarely in the lower-left quadrant of Wilber's diagram, not the upper left -- the world where we can supposedly become one with God. 
• In my view, God is part of the mythical world and part of our tradition. You may or may not take the myth seriously. You may find it impossible to separate "God talk" from your liturgy  I'd just like you to understand that there is a difference between myth (lower left quadrant) and objective reality (upper right). It is obvious to me that, within some communities, God is as real as, for example, The United States of America. For many of us, "God talk" is so woven into our language that it's hard to communicate without it.
• I'm not sure that important "inner" truths can be seen as specifically human or "inner" at all. I'm quite sure that 2+2 will be 4 whenever any sentient being does the operation. What's more, I'm quite sure that 2+2 "is" 4 no matter if nobody does the calculation. I've always wondered about this, but Wilber has only managed to get me wondering again ...

Wilber and I do agree on one central issue: Reality is to be determined by observation,  evidence and open, respectful dialogue. Skepticism would seem to be fundamental  for both of us, yet Wilber's mysticism doesn't pass the "sniff test" for me. Wilber is best when he is telling us what a mess we're in, but he loses steam as soon as he tries to put up something useful of his own in the place. In the end, his insights do not seem to depend on his analysis (which is still worth reading). All his massive research and brilliant thinking just leads him back to the world view that would sound perfect to any hippie in the 70's. This particular error has been well described by others (such as MacIntyre) who point out that philosophers all seem to wind up justifying the philosophy that's in the air in the time and place they write. Wilber's fame dates from 1973 and his ideas have a strong whiff of flower power.

With this, I turn the reader back to the excellent Wikipedia article previously mentioned.