book review

So, I just finished reading this massive tome by an amercian philosopher (well, I'll call him that to keep you reading) Ken Wilber. It was quite an interesting ride so I thought I'd do a mini-review. Of necessity, a mini-review of a massive book equals a pretty-monstrous blog post!

The book is called 'Sex, Ecology and Spirituality' (actually, there is very little 'Sex' in the book and I think that was just put there to move units).

The scope of the book is gargantuan to say the least – basically a philosophy of everything built from the ground up: from atoms to the entire cosmos and from basic perception via the emergence of reason to full non-dual spiritual transcendence. This leaves the impression that, even at 550 pages (plus another 250 of footnotes in tiny-type), we are left with a half filled-in sketch and not a full thesis. However, the depth of his scholarship is undeniably impressive, covering the gamut from Plato and the numerous Eastern sages through to Kant, Descartes, Hegel, Schelling all the way through to Derrida and Foucault.

On the down-side, Wilber's writing has flavours of 'undergraduateness' about it on occasions and I see how people who are serious boffins regarding particular thinkers may take objection to his often rather brief interpretations. Overall, the prose is very easy to read and feels remarkably straightforward given the complexity of the task. The text becomes repetitive beyond belief which does inevitably cause irritation. However, I can almost forgive Mr. W. on the grounds that some of the points he is arguing against are so deeply embedded in our ways of thinking that logic has to be supplemented with a little brute-force repetition in effort to dislodge the cobwebs...

First on the hit-list is the post-modern fallacy that all sets of values are equally valuable: How the heck do people out there go on not realising that 'all values are equally valuable' is a deeply value-laden statement‽ (and yes, that was an interrobang) Of course the position that all values should be respected is more valuable than one that says “only my values are valuable” but somehow this just gets warped into the same old meaningless contradiction of 'all values are relative' (except this one...). Just shows you the grip that a watered-down and simplified post-modernism has on much of public discourse (and this coming from a guy who digs his Derrida!).

Wilber's great skill is to take seemingly irreconcilable oppositions and situate them snugly within his overall schema. He manages to do this in such a way that each position makes sense as a partial response to a particular set of problems, and the contradiction between views appears as the manifestation of each party making the same mistake in different ways. Solutions are therefore always close at hand.

The schema is built from two basic concepts: holons, and the four quadrants.

For Wilber, everything in this reality is made up of 'holons' or whole/parts. Nothing is either completely whole, or completely a part, but everything is simultaneously both. Lower order holons aggregate via emergent processes to form new holons of greater complexity which maintain the properties of the lower levels but add novel features. The classic example is that interactions of atoms form molecules, molecules combine to form materials and so on up to organs and entire humans, each level adding greater complexity. To the extent that a holon is more 'whole' it experiences agency/independence, and to the extent that it is more a 'part' it experiences responsibility/boundedness. It is this necessary tension between the two which basically keeps the whole ship going.

The notion of the four quadrants divides the entirety of reality (or 'Kosmos', as Wilber calls it) along two dimensions: interior (left) – exterior (right) and individual (upper) – collective (lower).

Every single phenomena in the Kosmos has aspects in each of the four quadrants, and the scheme works remarkably well in allowing Wilber to locate, well, everything, in it. For example: 'mind' manifests as individual consciousness (upper left - interior individual), as physical processes in a material brain (upper right - external individual), as culture (lower left - interior collective) and as the manifestations of culture in architecture, institutions of education and government (lower right - exterior collective).

Centrally, Wilber posits the main conundrum of modernity as a false choice between two equally doomed alternatives, both emerging from the same fundamental misunderstanding – that of collapsing reality into its merely external (material) surfaces. He calls these two camps the 'Ego' and the 'Eco'.

The 'Ego' camp maintains that the liberation of the modern individual is found in the absolute freedom of the rational ego, released from social convention and mythical religious injunctions, and from the brutality of the natural world (including the 'natural' within the ego: the drives, the id etc). The material world is all there is, and the job of the ego (somehow spliced uncomfortably into this material-only world) is to reflect upon nature in order to gain mastery over it. This camp emphasises the wholeness of the ego, its independence from the natural world and from other egos. This tradition arises broadly from Kant and the liberal traditions including liberal feminism.

The 'Eco' camp, on the other hand, sees that the focus on the individual Ego-subject, abstracted and removed from nature, is the source of our alienation from nature, and hence is responsible for nature's impending destruction at our careless hands. Consequently, liberation is to be sought in immersing the ego entirely in ecology, in its inter-relatedness within the natural world. This perspective emphasises that the value of the individual arises only in its role as part of the 'great web of life', which itself is the only true source of value. From this perspective arises most of modern eco-philosophy, deep ecology, radical feminism etc.

The problem which unites and dooms them both, says Wilber, is their 'subtle reductionism' which denotes the reduction of the entirety of reality to its external (right-hand) components and the neglect of the interior dimensions (individual consciousness, culture etc). It is this mistake that keeps both camps perpetually frustrated and perpetually at loggerheads.

Another aspect of the book which had a striking impact on me was the reminder that if there is some supposed opposition between 'hard', rational, Western philosophy and 'soft', mystical, Eastern philosophy, it is a complete fabrication. Wilber shows how thinkers from ancient Greece (notably Plato and Plotinus), via Christian mystics, all the way up to the German idealists in Schelling and Hegel (and to a lesser extent postmodernists such as Foucault and Derrida) made interrogations of reality that explored the same space (or at lest parts of it) as the most profound Eastern mystics. It is part of the 'subtle' reductionism of modernity that all the 'Spirit' gets crushed out of the great Western sages, and is left to be projected on the mystical, exotic East. And we are left with the philosophy of today, the majority of which deserves its reputation as dry, abstract and hollow.

Challenges for any critical reader will include his argument for (at the very least not to exclude) 'transrational' modes of apprehending reality. By working through Piaget and other developmental psychologists we see that human beings develop cognitive and moral capacities in a pretty much regular fashion, from basic sensations right up to formal rational thinking. The simple claim is – why stop at rationality? In each stage we reach a point where the current tools for interpreting the world meet problems for which they can not find a sufficient answer. Anyone who has every sat down for a while and thought about whether ethical frameworks are relative or universal, or about whether minds are just brains or indeed are something different, or have read about Godel's theorem, will have noticed that there are problems out there that rationality simply cannot solve. So maybe there are ways of knowing beyond the rational – and Wilber suggests that various Eastern and Western sages/thinkers have experienced and written about exactly that.

The best thing about this is that Wilber meets head on the charges of un-testability or non-falsifiability that are usually leveled at any claim about mystical or transrational experiences. In the end it's all about practice: If you want to understand what someone means when they say, 'the patterns in the bubble chamber demonstrate the creation of particle-non-particle pairs', (and you don't just want to take it on faith) you go and do a physics degree, spend ten years in a lab and then you understand. If you want to understand when a monk says 'the ground of all manifestation is emptiness', (and you don't want to take it on faith) you go and study zen, sit and meditate for 10 years and then you understand. The fact that we see the first practice as common-sense and the second one as bizarre is just a reflection of a faith in scientists, and a culturally-bound refusal to admit the existence of anything beyond the merely 'material'.

The other challenge will be the inevitable arising of the icky feeling that this could all be a bit too New-Agey. What comforted me is how Wilber persistently (and repetitively, in his signature style) differentiates the genuinely 'non-dual' spiritual traditions, that he endorses, from the various New-Age movements, which he sees as securely stuck in the 'Eco' half of the flatland modernity that he spends most of the book critiquing. New-Age philosophies are essentially all guilty of what he calls the 'pre/trans fallacy', that is, confusing pre-rational structures (sensuous embodiment, basic human desires, communing with nature) with genuine trans-rational structures (mystical awareness & higher order intuitions).

Not everyone will be sympathetic to Wilber's way of seeing things, but the book presents a pretty thorough going-through of many of the problems that I see underpinning what's wrong with contemporary reality, and places them in a relatively consistent and mostly complete historical and philosophical framework. The key to confronting the ecological and social crisis of modernity is not simply to be found in trying to understand and then managing the material world; and neither is it to be found by turning inward and solely focussing on individual personal/spiritual transformation (although this aspect has been largely excluded in modernity and definitely needs work); the real step forward lies in the integration of both of these, incorporating both internal and external, individual and collective aspects into our ways of understanding and our ways of acting.

A pretty glaring inadequacy of the book is its extremely dismissive treatment of theories of evolution (a couple of paragraphs) and its ignorance of fields such as evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology, which potentially provide other important insights into the evolution of consciousness. For the more kooky aspects, it's a case of take it or leave it. You can make a rational argument for an opening or a space for the transrational, but rationality by definition can't fill that space in. In my opnion, for all its limitations, Wilber in this book has got a lot of things right. If anyone's got a spare couple of months (and enough energy to keep an open mind without getting carried away) I'd say it's definitely worth the effort.