Ken Wilber's Mysterianism
In a recent members-only video on Integral Life, titled "Can Evolutionary Science Explain Evolution Itself? / The Mystery of Evolution", Ken Wilber reiterates his view on evolution before a group of students. (Though the larger part of the video is about first-person consciousness, and the inability of science to explain it—or does science perhaps just say consciousness is not what we think it is? We will focus here on evolution proper).
In this video, Wilber clarifies his position: science is helpful with phenomena "once they have arisen", but is unable to explain phenomena "when they appear for the first time". For this, something else is needed, Wilber calls it in his writings and talks: Eros, Spirit-in-Action, or let's just call it God. Consequently, such a spiritual view of evolution generates feelings of awe, as testified by one of his students and approved by Wilber.
I consider this view to be the result of lazy thinking and in the end harmful. It does not explain anything. It is anti-science. It makes an easy division in on the on hand reductionistic science, which does its own job of clarifying the details of nature, and on the other hand, evolutionary spirituality, which "explains" evolution and provides an inspiring wordview of growth.
Read more:
http://www.integralworld.net/visser31.html
In this video, Wilber clarifies his position: science is helpful with phenomena "once they have arisen", but is unable to explain phenomena "when they appear for the first time". For this, something else is needed, Wilber calls it in his writings and talks: Eros, Spirit-in-Action, or let's just call it God. Consequently, such a spiritual view of evolution generates feelings of awe, as testified by one of his students and approved by Wilber.
I consider this view to be the result of lazy thinking and in the end harmful. It does not explain anything. It is anti-science. It makes an easy division in on the on hand reductionistic science, which does its own job of clarifying the details of nature, and on the other hand, evolutionary spirituality, which "explains" evolution and provides an inspiring wordview of growth.
Read more:
http://www.integralworld.net/visser31.html
posted by Frank Visser at 9:17 AM
5 Comments:
Frank, it may or may not be lazy, but I don't think it is meant to conform to science as explanatory and predictive. That's the point, we don't yet have any idea why, at root, novelty occurs. I don't find Ken's view harmful at all, I think for those who understand the limit problem posed by this issue actually can hold both the awesome role of science and the interesting mystery that all limit problems represent. This humility is both useful and awesome, to quote the student you mention. Or, thank God he's not obvious.
Anonymous,
Come to the United States and I'll show you how this kind of ideology can be harmful. Are you familiar with intelligent design theory?
Put another way: insisting on an ultimate answer for the arising of phenomena, a prime mover, and insisting that you have the means to make positive claims about it, is hardly a position of humility. It is a prophetic position. Presenting oneself as even an adequate spokesmodel for God is hardly a humble gesture, much less the Most Advanced Model.
I can't help it, I'm coming back for more.
I have argued elsewhere that integral theory would do well to think in a rigorously postmetaphysical way. Wilber has also made this claim but, for reasons that will be obvious in a moment, he does not actually do it. If you read Habermas and Rorty on the subject (the people who invented the concept of the postmetaphysical), you see that the imperative is not to produce some kind of Providential model from which Spirit can be articulated as an a priori to all tangibility. Instead it is a political gesture: a critical life predicated on *no* positive theological or metaphysical statements.
This means that Wilber's insistence that Nagarjunian emptiness is conflatable with, say, the nonduality of the Vedas or with Hegelian philosophy of right (it is not, but that is another set of problems Wilber has introduced) is hardly postmetaphysical. It is actually metaphysical. It is not scientific, to echo Visser's comment from before.
My position is that adherence to a doctrine or to the person of one who articulates a doctrine is a really poor measure of whether a theory is "integral" or not. The only thing this kind of "adherence measures is the degree to which one is a true believer. So you see critics dismissed a priori as "Wilber-bashers" (and some of them probably are); but authentic criticism in this case often involves pointing out the mistakes and contradictions that are in plain sight in Wilber's work.
I persist in pursuing this line of argument because I am committed to transformational practice. One might say that I, like Darko Suvin, see integral theory as a kind of "cognitive" science fiction that can help break things open. But also, like Stanislaw Lem, I see an untoward tendency *against* critical rigor and in favor of what sells.
In America, what sells is feel-good, emotive "values" and appeals to authority that are wrapped in theological language. A postmetaphysical society is impossible if one predicates it on these kinds of "value"-oriented gestures, but not impossible if one thinks of another way to do it. So, I persist in thinking of other ways, outside of the "right" and "left" political dichotomy that is a false dichotomy anyway. Ask Salvador Allende.
You can find disciplined defenses of these positions in my own recent stuff at the Integral Review, or you can just read Karel Kosik's _Dialectics of the Concrete_.
Anderson
Hi, I found this conversation with Wilber and a new author, I thought it might be interesting for your readers. I bought the novel, I will let you know what I think once it arrives.
http://www.articlesbase.com/book-reviews-articles/dialogues-ken-wilber-and-robert-bonomo-1128779.html
Blessings
I think there is a framework in which apparently opposing views can be reconciled, not precisely in the way that Wilbur describes, but in a tighter, more logical, mysticism-free, non-gnostic way based on interlocking gestalts (similar to the way Wilber discusses the Great Chain of Being). I think a lot if not all apparent differences are due to the inadequacies of language. And due to the (largely unrecognised) fact that all language statements are metaphors, not ultimate reality. And in fact, reality itself is the ultimate metaphor. I discuss this in more detail at:
my big TOE (theory of everything)
I hope you will stop by and have a read.
masterymistery at cosmic rapture
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