Part Two of Integral Consciopusness
Ken Wilber
Of the dozen major approaches to consciousness studies that I listed in the Introduction, the quantum approaches are the only ones that I believe lack substantial evidence at this time, and when I say that they can be included in an integral theory of consciousness, I am generously holding open the possibility that they may eventually prove worthwhile. In Eye to Eye I review the various interpretations of quantum mechanics and its possible role in consciousness studies, and I will not repeat that discussion, except to say that to date the theoretical conclusions (such as that intentionality collapses the Schr<148>dinger wave function) are based on extremely speculative notions that most physicists themselves find quite dubious.
The central problem with these quantum approaches, as I see it, is that they are trying to solve the subject/object dualism on a level at which it cannot be solved; as I suggested above, that problem is (dis)solved only in postformal development, and no amount of formal propositions will come anywhere near the solution. Nonetheless, this is still a fruitful line of research, if for no other reason than what it demonstrates in its failures; and more positively, it might help to elucidate some of the interactions between biological intentionality and matter.
All of those approaches centre on the individual. But the cultural approaches to consciousness point out that individual consciousness does not, and cannot, arise on its own. All subjective events are always already intersubjective events. There is no private language; there is no radically autonomous consciousness. The very words we are both now sharing were not invented by you or me, were not created by you or me, do not come solely from my consciousness or from yours. Rather, you and I simply find ourselves in a vast intersubjective worldspace in which we live and move and have our being. This cultural worldspace (the Lower Left quadrant) has a hand in the very structure, shape, feel, and tone of your consciousness and of mine, and no theory of consciousness is complete that ignores this crucial dimension.
In these cultural hermeneutic approaches, the three strands are applied to the intersubjective circle itself, the deep semantics of the worlds of meaning in which you and I collectively exist. These cultural worldspaces evolve and develop (archaic to magic to mythic to mental, etc.), and the three strands applied to those worldspaces, under the auspices of mutual understanding and appropriateness, reveal those cultural contours of consciousness, which is exactly the course these important approaches take. This, too, is a crucial component of an integral theory of consciousness. [4]
Such are some of the very important (if partial) truths of cultural hermeneutics for individual consciousness. Likewise for the social sciences, which deal not so much with interior worldviews and interpretations, but with the exterior and objective and empirical aspects of social systems. Cultural hermeneutics (Lower Left) is a type of `interior holism' that constantly asks, `What does it mean?', whereas the social sciences (Lower Right) are a type of `exterior holism' that are constantly asking instead, `What does it do?' -- in other words, mutual understanding versus functional fit. But both of these approaches tell us something very important about the collectivities in which individual consciousness is thoroughly embedded.
As for the social sciences: the materialities of communication, the techno-economic base, and the social system in the objective sense reach deep into the contours of consciousness to mould the final product. The three strands, under the auspices of propositional truth and functional fit, expose these social determinants at each of their levels, which is exactly the appropriate research agenda of the empirical social sciences.
A narrow Marxist approach, of course, has long been discredited (precisely because it oversteps its warrant, reducing all quadrants to the Lower Right); but the moment of truth in historical materialism is that the modes of material production (e.g. foraging, horticultural, agrarian, industrial, informational) have a profound and constitutive influence on the actual contents of individual consciousness, and thus an understanding of these social determinants is absolutely crucial for an integral theory of consciousness. Such an understanding would take its rightful place alongside the dozen or so other significant approaches to the study of consciousness.
Summary and Conclusion
I hope that this outline, abbreviated as it is, is nonetheless enough to indicate the broad contours of the methodology of an integral theory of consciousness, and that it sufficiently indicates the inadequacy of any less comprehensive approaches. The integral aspect enters in simultaneously tracking each level and quadrant in its own terms and then noting the correlations between them. This is a methodology of phenomenologically and contemporaneously tracking the various levels and lines in each of the quadrants and then correlating their overall relations, each to all the others, and in no way trying to reduce any to the others.
This `simultracking' requires a judicious and balanced use of all four validity claims (truth, truthfulness, cultural meaning, functional fit), each of which is redeemed under the warrant of the three strands of valid knowledge acquisition (injunction, apprehension, confirmation) carried out across the dozen or more levels in each of the quadrants -- which means, in shorthand fashion, the investigation of sensory experience, mental experience, and spiritual experience: the eye of flesh, the eye of mind, and the eye of contemplation: all-level, all-quadrant.
And this means that, where appropriate, researchers will have to engage various injunctions that transform their own consciousness, if they are to be adequate to the postformal data. You cannot vote on the truth of the Pythagorean Theorem if you do not learn geometry (the injunction); likewise, you cannot vote on the truth of Buddha Nature if you do not learn meditation. All valid knowledge has injunction, apprehension, and confirmation; the injunctions are all of the form, `If you want to know this, you must do this' -- and thus, when it comes to consciousness studies itself, the utterly obvious but much-resisted conclusion is that certain interior injunctions will have to be followed by researchers themselves. If we do not do this, then we will not know this. We will be the Churchmen refusing Galileo's injunction: look through this telescope and tell me what you see.
Thus, an integral approach to consciousness might include the following agendas:
1. Continue research on the various particular approaches. That is, continue to refine our understanding of the many pieces of the puzzle of consciousness. The twelve approaches I briefly outlined are twelve significant pieces to this extraordinary enigma; each is profoundly important; each deserves continued and vigorous research and development.
Why should we include all twelve of these approaches? Aren't some of them a little `spooky' and `far out'? And perhaps shouldn't we exclude some of those? At this early stage in integral studies, I believe we need to err on the side of generosity, if only because reality itself is so consistently weird.
No human mind, I believe, is capable of producing 100 per cent error. We might say, nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time. And that means that each of the dozen approaches almost certainly has some sort of important (if limited) truth to contribute; and, particularly at the beginning of our integral quest, I believe we should throw our net as wide as we possibly can.
2. Confront the simple fact that, in some cases, a change in consciousness on the part of researchers themselves is mandatory for the investigation of consciousness itself. As numerous approaches (e.g. 7, 9, 10) have pointed out, the higher or postformal stages of consciousness development can only be adequately accessed by those who have themselves developed to a postformal level. If we are investigating postformal domains, postformal injunctions are mandatory. Failure to do so does not insure `objectivity' in postformal studies: it insures failure to grasp the data at the very start.
3. Continue to grope our way toward a genuinely integral theory of consciousness itself. Because the twelve approaches have tended to remain separate (and sometimes antagonistic) branches of human inquiry, it does indeed appear that they are in some ways working with different data domains, and these differences are not to be casually denied or dismissed. At the same time, I take it as plainly obvious that the universe hangs together, and thus an equally legitimate endeavour is to investigate, both theoretically and methodologically, the ways that these various elements are intrinsically hooked together as aspects of the unbroken Kosmos. The fact that, for the most part, each approach has stayed in its own cage does not change the fact that reality itself leaps those cages all the time. To grope our way toward an integral approach means that we should attempt to follow reality and make those leaps as well.
This includes the actual methodology of `simultracking' the various phenomena in each level-quadrant and noting their actual interrelations and correlations (the simultracking of events in `all-quadrant, all-level' space). The quadrants and levels are in some sense quite different, but they are different aspects of the Kosmos, which means that they also intrinsically touch each other in profound ways. Let us note the ways in which they touch, and thus attempt theoretically to elucidate this wonderfully rich and interwoven tapestry.
Thus, each of the dozen approaches finds an important and indispensable place, not as an eclecticism, but as an intrinsic aspect of the holonic Kosmos. The methodologies that purport to give us a `theory of consciousness,' but which investigate only one quadrant (not to mention only one level in one quadrant) are clearly not giving us an adequate account of consciousness at all. Rather, an `all-quadrant, all-level' approach holds the only chance of an authentic and integral theory of consciousness, if such indeed exists.
Footnotes
1. See Jantsch (1980) for an extended discussion of this theme. Jantsch correlates `microevolution' (of individual holons) with `macroevolution' (their collective/social forms), pointing out the co- evolutionary interactions between individual and social. Thus, in the physiosphere, Jantsch traces microevolution across photons, leptons, baryons, light nuclei, light atoms, heavy atoms and molecules; with their corresponding macroevolution (or collective/social forms) moving across superclusters, clusters of galaxies, galaxies, stellar clusters, stars, planets and rock formations. Likewise, in the biosphere, he traces microevolution across dissipative structures, prokaryotes, eukaryotes, multicellular organisms and complex animals; with their corresponding macroevolution across planetary chemodynamics, Gaia system, heterotrophic ecosystems, societies with division of labour, and groups/families. All of these are simply and crudely summarized and condensed for Figure 1, which is meant to be nothing more than a simple outline. I have discussed these issues in greater detail in Wilber 1995b.
2. This becomes extremely important in individual psychotherapy and depth psychology, because those disciplines have fundamentally exposed the ways in which I might be untruthful to myself about my own interior status. `Repression' is basically a set of deceptions, concealments, or lies about the contours of my own interior space, and `therapy' is essentially learning ways to be more honest and truthful in interpreting my interior texts. Therapy is the sustained application of the validity criterion of truthfulness to one's own estate.
3. Of course, not everybody who takes up Zen -- or any contemplative endeavour -- ends up fully mastering the discipline, just as not everybody who takes up quantum physics ends up fully comprehending it. But those who do succeed -- in both contemplation and physics, and indeed, in any legitimate knowledge quest -- constitute the circle of competence against which validity claims are struck, and Zen is no exception in this regard.
4. The fact that we all exist in cultural worldspaces that are governed largely by interpretive and not merely empirical realities, and the fact that these cultural interpretations are partially constructed and relative, has been blown all out of proportion by the postmodern poststructuralists, who in effect claim this quadrant is the only quadrant in existence. They thus attempt to reduce all truth and all validity claims to nothing but arbitrary cultural construction driven only by power or prejudice or race or gender. This cultural constructivist stance thus lands itself in a welter of performative self-contradictions: it claims that it is true that there is no such thing as truth; it claims that it is universally the case that only relativities are real; it claims that it is the unbiased truth that all truth is biased; and thus, in all ways, it exempts its own truth claims from the restrictions it places on everybody else's: by any other name, hypocrisy. As I have suggested elsewhere (Wilber, 1995a, 1997), whenever the other quadrants are denied reality, they in effect sneak back into one's system in the form of internal self-contradictions -- the banished and denied validity claims reassert themselves in internal ruptures. Thus the extreme cultural constructivists implicitly claim objective and universal truth for their own stance, a stance which explicitly denies the existence of both universality and truth. Hence John Searle (1995) had to beat this approach back in his wonderful The Construction of Social Reality, as opposed to `the social construction of reality', the idea being that cultural realities are constructed on a base of correspondence truth which grounds the construction itself, without which no construction at all could get under way in the first place. Once again, we can accept the partial truths of a given quadrant -- many cultural meanings are indeed constructed and relative -- without going overboard and attempting to reduce all other quadrants and all other truths to that partial glimpse.
References
[A more complete bibliography of the various approaches can be found in Wilber 1995b]
Chalmers, D. (1995), `The puzzle of conscious experience', Scientific American, December, 1995.
Dennett, D. (1995), Darwin's Dangerous Idea (New York: Simon and Schuster).
Habermas, J. (1979), Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans.T. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press).
Jantsch, E. (1980), The Self-Organizing Universe (New York: Pergamon).
Joravsky, D. (1982), `Body, mind, and machine', New York Review of Books, Oct. 21, 1982.
Lovejoy, A. (1964 [1936]), The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press).
Scott, A. (1995), Stairway to the Mind (New York: Copernicus).
Searle, J. (1995), The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press).
Smith, H. (1976), Forgotten Truth (New York: Harper).
Varela, F., Thompson, E. and Rosch, E. (1993), The Embodied Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press).
Walsh, R. and Vaughan, F. (ed. 1993), Paths beyond Ego (Los Angeles: Tarcher).
Wilber, K. (1995a), `An informal overview of transpersonal studies', Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 27, pp. 107-29.
Wilber, K. (1995b), Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution (Boston and London: Shambhala).
Wilber, K. (1996a [1980]), The Atman Project, second edition (Wheaton, IL: Quest).
Wilber, K. (1996b [1981]), Up from Eden, second edition (Wheaton, IL: Quest).
Wilber, K. (1996c [1983]), Eye to Eye, third edition (Boston and London: Shambhala.
Wilber, K. (1996d), A Brief History of Everything (Boston and London: Shambhala).
Wilber, K. (1997), The Eye of Spirit: An Integral Vision for a World Gone Slightly Mad (Boston and London: Shambhala).
Wilber, K., Engler, J. and Brown, D. (1986), Transformations of Consciousness (Boston and London: Shambhala).
Article received 5 August 1996.
Part One
