Is Integral Theory Idealist?
Published by timbomb November 13th, 2005 in IntegralI’m reading the end of Ken Wilber’s “Integral Psychology” at the same time as Excerpt G of his unpublished “Kosmos vol. 2″ and the notion of Spirit as the Formless Ground of all reality… or at least that’s how he’s often read. A summary of my fretting goes something like:
- Anglo Modernism tends towards a physical reduction to exteriors, the gross realm
- Idealism presents a reduction to interiors.
- English-language accounts of Gnosticism and Buddhism tend towards an Idealist presentation (world=illusion)
- From a Modernist perspective,
- there seems to be evidence that the physical world exists
- there doesn’t seem to be evidence that our internal, felt perceptions of mind, soul and spirit during spiritual evolution are perceptions of exterior (interobjective) phenomena
- it doesn’t seem sensible to explain the objective physical world as “arising from” Formless Ground or non-dual Spirit, even though perceptions of the exterior seem to arise from this non-dual emptiness once clear perception of it is attained (I conclude this from accounts of nirvana, without personal experience)
- it does seem sensible to me to understand this felt experience of the Formless Ground of consciousness and perception to be the source of our perceptions of the world, though not of the world itself.
- Wilber tends to use language from Asian mystery traditions (specifically, Vedanta and Tibetan Buddhism) and this language (at least in translation) seems to privilege the interior over the exterior - Spirit as the ultimate source, even though we only have evidence to show that Spirit is an intersubjective interior phenomenon.
- I think Integral Theory needs more work to present a contextualised view of these three trains of thought - physicalism, idealism and dualism. This may well be a language expression issue rather than a logical theory issue.
- The key may be to tease out Wilber’s use of “kosmos” - rather than “reality” or “universe” - a term which implicitly wraps internal and external universes together. Spirit could be said to the the Formless Ground of the Kosmos, since there is no Kosmos without our perception (in Wilber’s definition of Kosmos)
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Another problem that you raise, but which is not spelled out explicitly, is the question of how language shapes our perceptions of reality/universe/kosmos. This is key to the internality/externality question. I don’t know if it makes sense to say:
“This may well be a language expression issue rather than a logical theory issue”
in this context, as the theory is not really a logical one - in the sense that logics are closed symoblic manipulations - and Wilber is concerned with philosophical issues.
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