Ken Wilber: Difference between revisions

'''Kenneth Earl Wilber II''' (born January 31, 1949) is an American theorist and writer on [[transpersonal psychology]] and his own [[Integral theory (Ken Wilber)|integral theory]],<ref>Mark Der Forman, ''A guide to integral psychotherapy: complexity, integration, and spirituality in practice,'' [[SUNY Press]] 2010, p. 9. {{ISBN|978-1-4384-3023-2}}</ref> a four-quadrant grid which purports to encompass all human knowledge and experience.<ref name="wilberRentschler-intro2006" />

Wilber wrote ''[[Sex, Ecology, Spirituality]]'' (1995), the first volume of his ''Kosmos Trilogy'', presenting his "theory of everything," a four-quadrant grid in which he summarized his reading in psychology and Eastern and Western philosophy up to that time. ''A Brief History of Everything'' (1996) was the popularised summary of ''Sex, Ecology, Spirituality'' in interview format. ''The Eye of Spirit'' (1997) was a compilation of articles he had written for the journal ''ReVision'' on the relationship between science and religion. Throughout 1997, he had kept journals of his personal experiences, which were published in 1999 as ''One Taste'', a term for [[Cosmic consciousness|unitary consciousness]]. Over the next two years his publisher, [[Shambhala Publications]], released eight re-edited volumes of his ''Collected Works''. In 1999, he finished ''Integral Psychology'' and wrote ''[[A Theory of Everything]]'' (2000). In ''A Theory of Everything'' Wilber attempts to bridge business, politics, science and spirituality and show how they integrate with theories of developmental psychology, such as [[Spiral Dynamics]]. His novel, ''[[Boomeritis]]'' (2002), attempts to expose what he perceives as the [[egotism]] of the [[baby boomers|baby boom generation]]. Frank Visser's ''Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion'' (2003), a guide to Wilber's thought, was praised by Edward J. Sullivan<ref name="Sullivan-2006">{{Cite journal|last=Sullivan|first=Edward J.|date=Winter 2005–06|title=REVIEW: Sullivan/Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion|url=https://trace.tennessee.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1132&context=jaepl|journal=The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning|volume=11|pages=97–99}}</ref> and Daryl S. Paulson, with the latter calling it "an outstanding synthesis of Wilber's published works through the evolution of his thoughts over time. The book will be of value to any transpersonal humanist or integral philosophy student who does not want to read all of Wilber's works to understand his message."<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Paulson|first=Daryl S.|date=2004|title=Review of Thought as passion.|url=https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2005-08755-007|journal=Journal of Transpersonal Psychology|volume=36|pages=223–227|via=APA PsycNet}}</ref>

In 2012, Wilber joined the [[advisory board]] of the [[International Simultaneous Policy Organization]] which seeks to end the usual deadlock in tackling global issues through an international simultaneous policy.<ref name="About Simpol-UK">About Simpol-UK: [http://simpol.org/index.php?id=62 uk.simpol.org&nbsp;– About Simpol-UK] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130729182456/http://simpol.org/index.php?id=62 |date=July 29, 2013 }}</ref><ref name="Endorsements">Endorsements: [http://simpol.org/index.php?id=11 Simpol.org&nbsp;– Endorsements] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130729191229/http://simpol.org/index.php?id=11 |date=July 29, 2013 }}</ref>

All Quadrants All Levels (AQAL, pron. "ah-qwul") is the basic framework of integral theory. It models human knowledge and experience with a four-quadrant grid, along the axes of "interior-exterior" and "individual-collective". According to Wilber, it is a comprehensive approach to reality, a metatheory that attempts to explain how academic disciplines and every form of knowledge and experience fit together coherently.<ref name="wilberRentschler-intro2006">{{cite journal |last=Rentschler |first=Matt |url=http://iniciativaintegral.es/Documentos%20P%C3%BAblicos/1.-%20Teor%C3%ADa/AQAL_Glossary_01-27-07.pdf |title=AQAL Glossary |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171228172258/http://iniciativaintegral.es/Documentos%20P%C3%BAblicos/1.-%20Teor%C3%ADa/AQAL_Glossary_01-27-07.pdf |archive-date=December 28, 2017 |journal=AQAL: Journal of Integral Theory and Practice |date=Fall 2006 |volume=1 |number=3 |access-date=December 28, 2017}}</ref>

Wilber believes that the mystical traditions of the world provide access to, and knowledge of, a [[Transcendence (religion)|transcendental]] reality which is perennial, consistent throughout all times and cultures. This proposition underlies the whole of his conceptual edifice, and is an unquestioned assumption. According to David L. McMahan, the perennial position is "largely dismissed by scholars", but "has lost none of its popularity".<ref>{{cite book |last=McMahan |first=David L. |year=2008 |title=The Making of Buddhist Modernism |place=Oxford |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0195183276 |page=269, n. 9}}</ref> Mainstream academia favor a constructivist approach, which is rejected by Wilber as a dangerous relativism. Wilber juxtaposes this generalization to plain materialism, presented as the main paradigm of regular science.<ref name="mysticsWilber-2024" />{{refn|group=quote|Wilber: "Are the mystics and sages insane? Because they all tell variations on the same story, don't they? The story of awakening one morning and discovering you are one with the All, in a timeless and eternal and infinite fashion. Yes, maybe they are crazy, these divine fools. Maybe they are mumbling idiots in the face of the Abyss. Maybe they need a nice, understanding therapist. Yes, I'm sure that would help. But then, I wonder. Maybe the evolutionary sequence really is from matter to body to mind to soul to spirit, each transcending and including, each with a greater depth and greater consciousness and wider embrace. And in the highest reaches of evolution, maybe, just maybe, an individual's consciousness does indeed touch infinity—a total embrace of the entire Kosmos—a [[cosmic consciousness|Kosmic consciousness]] that is Spirit awakened to its own true nature. It's at least plausible. And tell me: is that story, sung by mystics and sages the world over, any crazier than the [[scientific materialism]] story, which is that the entire sequence is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying absolutely nothing? Listen very carefully: just which of those two stories actually sounds totally insane?"<ref name="mysticsWilber-2024">{{cite book |first=Ken |last=Wilber |title=A Brief History of Everything |year=2024 |edition=2nd |isbn=978-1-57062-740-8 |publisher=Shambhala }} pp. 42–3.</ref>}}

Wilber describes the state of the "hard" sciences as limited to "narrow science", which only allows evidence from the lowest realm of consciousness, the [[wikt:sensorimotor|sensorimotor]] (the five senses and their extensions). Wilber sees science in the broad sense as characterized by involving three steps:<ref name="RothbergKelly1998-p12">{{cite book|author1=Donald Jay Rothberg|author2=Sean M. Kelly|author3=Sean Kelly|title=Ken Wilber in Dialogue: Conversations with Leading Transpersonal Thinkers|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Q1GUlPmlPD0C&pg=PA12|date=February 1, 1998|publisher=Quest Books|isbn=978-0-8356-0766-7|pages=12}}</ref>

He has presented these as "three strands of valid knowledge" in Part III of his book ''[[The Marriage of Sense and Soul]]''.<ref name="Wilber2011-p187">{{cite book|author=Ken Wilber|title=The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=uQGmVyPN6rUC&pg=PT187|date=August 3, 2011|publisher=Random House Publishing Group|isbn=978-0-307-79956-2|pages=187}}</ref>

Wilber has referred to [[Stuart Kauffman]], [[Ilya Prigogine]], [[Alfred North Whitehead]], and others who also articulate his [[Vitalism|vitalistic]] and [[Teleology|teleological]] understanding of reality, which is deeply at odds with the [[Neo-Darwinism|modern evolutionary synthesis]].<ref name="SCWilber"/>{{refn|group=quote|Wilber: "I am not alone in seeing that chance and natural selection by themselves are not enough to account for the emergence that we see in evolution. Stuart Kaufman{{sic}} and many others have criticized mere change and natural selection as not adequate to account for this emergence (he sees the necessity of adding self-organization). Of course I understand that natural selection is not acting on mere randomness or chance—because natural selection saves previous selections, and this reduces dramatically the probability that higher, adequate forms will emerge. But even that is not enough, in my opinion, to account for the remarkable emergence of some of the extraordinarily complex forms that nature has produced. After all, from the big bang and dirt to the poems of William Shakespeare is quite a distance, and many philosophers of science agree that mere chance and selection are just not adequate to account for these remarkable emergences. The universe is slightly tilted toward self-organizing processes, and these processes—as Prigogine was the first to elaborate—escape present-level turmoil by jumping to higher levels of self-organization, and I see that "pressure" as operating throughout the physiosphere, the biosphere, and the noosphere. And that is what I metaphorically mean when I use the example of a wing (or elsewhere, the example of an eyeball) to indicate the remarkableness of increasing emergence. But I don't mean that as a specific model or actual example of how biological emergence works! Natural selection carries forth previous individual mutations—but again that just isn't enough to account for creative emergence (or what Whitehead called "the creative advance into novelty," which, according to Whitehead, is the fundamental nature of this manifest universe)."<ref name="SCWilber">{{cite web |first=Ken |last=Wilber |url=http://www.kenwilber.com/blog/show/390 |title=Re: Some Criticisms of My Understanding of Evolution |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110907151307/http://www.kenwilber.com/blog/show/390 |archive-date=September 7, 2011 }}</ref>}}

Frank Visser writes that Wilber's 1977 book ''The Spectrum of Consciousness'' was praised by [[Transpersonal psychology|transpersonal psychologists]], but also that support for him "even in transpersonal circles" had waned by the early 1990s.<ref name="Sullivan-2006"/> Edward J. Sullivan argued, in his review of Visser's guide ''Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion'', that in the field of composition studies "Wilber's melding of life’s journeys with abstract theorizing could provide an eclectic and challenging model of 'personal-academic' writing", but that "teachers of writing may be critical of his all-too-frequent totalizing assumptions".<ref name="Sullivan-2006" /> Sullivan also said that Visser's book overall gave an impression that Wilber "should think more and publish less."<ref name="Sullivan-2006" />

[[Steve McIntosh]] praises Wilber's work but also argues that Wilber fails to distinguish "philosophy" from his own Vedantic and Buddhist religion.<ref name=McIntosh>Steve McIntosh, ''Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution'', Paragon House, St Paul Minnesota, 2007, {{ISBN|978-1-55778-867-2}} pp. 227f.</ref> [[Christopher Bache]] is complimentary of some aspects of Wilber's work, but calls Wilber's writing style glib.<ref>Notes to Chapter 6 of ''Dark Night Early Dawn: Steps to a Deep Ecology of Mind'' SUNY Press, 2000</ref>