[MD] The Trouble With Wilber

[david buchanan]

Krimel said:
...Flatland is perhaps the scariest [boogeyman) of them all. ...surely 
Wilber knows that Flatland is a Euclidian fable written by Edwin Abbott in 
the mid 1880's. In it a Square describes his adventures in three dimensional 
space to his fellow Flatlanders. Like prophets everywhere his news is not 
taken well. ...This is a tale of mathematical vision as transcendent vision. 
And this is what Wilber is denouncing? Maybe he was just naming his bogeyman 
and found "flatland" catchy. But the story Flatland calls upon its reader to 
think both above and below their current level of conception. ...Is this 
bogeyman ironic? Is it a misunderstanding? A misrepresentation? Or is it 
demonizing the enemy? Abbott's Flatland carries out a rational expansion of 
awareness that is at odds with Wilber's phantom Spirit. And so we get stuff 
like... what was it? Oh, yeah, "...this flat and faded landscape, armed with 
good intentions and a weakest-noodle science..." ...Wilber needs to vilify 
flatland. Abbott is not his friend. Abbott is teaches a lesson in rational 
transcendence while Wilber talks about learning from the spirit of trees and 
the interpretation of hallucination.

dmb replies:
I promised myself to respond to just one post on account of the holiday, but 
I've seen your other objections too. This one seems very central and you've 
been less vague here than elsewhere. (The word "poppycock" is NOT an 
argument, for example.)

Wilber is using the idea of "flatland" in very much the same way that Abbot 
did. He too is asking the readers "to think both above and below their 
current level of conception". They have different ideas about what lies 
beyond flatland but they are both saying that the current conceptions are 
incomplete, that there are unseen dimensions that have been left out of the 
present worldview. In Wilber's case, "flatland" is the term he uses to 
characterize scientific materialism or what Pirsig calls SOM.

Wilber's notion of holons is designed to unflatten flatland. A holon, he 
says, not only has both a individual and collective component, as even a 
materialist could concede, but both of those compotents also has an interior 
dimension. Reasserting these interior dimensions is very similar to Pirsig's 
reassertion of the "subjective". Wilber's assertion that even the most basic 
"objects" like atoms and particles pushes the idea of subjectivity all the 
way down. And this is very much like Pirsig's assertion that the so-called 
laws of nature are better concieved of in terms of patterns of preference, 
extremely persistant patterns of preference. They are both doing battle with 
the downside of the Enlightenment. They're both trying to save the baby (our 
"spiritual" dimension) that it threw out with the bathwater (mythical 
thinking). Here the emphasis and parenthetical info is Wilber's...

"In other words, the 'sciences of man' and the new 'dehumaninzing humanism' 
did not just study the objective aspects of human beings (which would be 
fine), the REDUCED human beings to their merely objective and empirical 
components (which was a crime). Human wer not 'subjects in communication' 
but merely 'objects of information'. And because that REDUCTION is not 
supported by the Kosmos, it must be driven by something other than truth; it 
must be driven in large measure by self-aggranding POWER, according to both 
Foucault and Habermas.
And with this, the whole dark side of the Enlightenment come lurching to the 
fore. The catastrophe was not the emergence of reason, but reason CONFINED 
to and initially CAPTURED by empiric-analytic modes - objectifying, 
monological, positivistic - modes which see ONLY the Right-Hand dimensiions 
and never the Left-Hand (even though its own operations depend on them). It 
was a reason that differentiated the Big Three only to let them fall into 
dissociation , with the resultant emphasis solely on the Right-Hand (the Big 
Threee reduced to the Big One of it-language)." Wilber, SES 464

The big three, by the way, are Art, Morals and Science. We can see how the 
first two are reduced to the third one in such things as behaviourism or 
neurological explanations. Whether it becomes a matter of observing the 
actions of an organism or the function of the brain, these are sciences 
which try to explain our interior dimensions via the examination of 
"objects" that can be located in space. So, as I understand it, the reason 
Wilber's assertions seem so objectionable to you is simple. He is directly 
attacking your worldview. The flatland he attacks is the one you live in.

It kinda funny, actually. To over-simplify a bit, your response to their 
attack on scientific materialism is simply to re-assert the very thing they 
attack. Thus my line about trying to sell the idea of the internal 
combustion engine to Ed Begeley Jr.. He's not only going to refuse that 
alternative, he's going to be amused that anyone would offer the problem as 
an answer to the solution. And he's be right to laugh. Its like offering 
Newtonian physics to Einstein or trying to sell a horse to Henry Ford. See 
what I mean?

dmb

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