Can Ken Wilber be considered as contemporary underappreciated genius?

[Oeaohoo]

1 hour ago, Breakingthewall said:

all your speech is very beautiful and looks very cultivated, but its essence is: reactionary

Of course. To paraphrase one of Leo’s favourite phrases: “That’s not a bug, it’s a small creature!” At the same time, whilst there is an obvious affinity between reactionary thought and Perennial Traditionalism, they aren’t the same thing. Wilber himself opens his book Spectrum of Consciousness with a quotation from Frithjof Schuon and the first footnote in his book Integral Psychology is a reference to the main exponents of the Perennial Philosophy, who I have mentioned above. Why doesn’t he include their negative vision of history, not as Spiral Progress but as cyclical decay, in one of his handy little “developmental charts”? 

Schillber’s writing can be very beautiful but it’s essence is: progressive. When it isn’t an appeal to a purely hypothetical future in which the degradations of postmodern nihilism and deconstruction have magically given rise to a spectacular New Age inhabited only by Tier 2 Systems Thinkers, “honouring” and “embracing” every “stage of development” (for lack of any humans left still worth honouring and embracing!), his defence of modernity is literally just the same old tired appeals to “liberal democracy” and “feminism”… Why does he fail to “integrate” any of the completely valid objections that have been raised against these demonstrably terrible ideas?

I call him Schillber because, as I have demonstrated, his so-called “Integral Theory” is conveniently selective as to what it “integrates”…

[Carl-Richard]

26 minutes ago, Oeaohoo said:

Why doesn’t he include their negative vision of history, not as Spiral Progress but as cyclical decay, in one of his handy little “developmental charts”? 

I talked about this many months ago, but I think it goes back to his fixation on science, specifically the stage models from developmental psychology, which all contain linear or "progressive" assumptions (Piaget, Kohlberg, Loevinger, Erikson, Fowler, etc.). There are so many of them that you'll undoubtedly be very tempted to make it center stage of an integrative framework.

Edited January 1, 2023 by Carl-Richard

[Oeaohoo]

15 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

I talked about this many months ago, but I think it goes back to his fixation on science, specifically the stage models from developmental psychology, which all contain linear or "progressive" assumptions (Piaget, Kohlberg, Loevinger, Erikson, Fowler, etc.). There are so many of them that you'll undoubtedly be very tempted to make it center stage of an integrative framework.

Yeah, that is definitely the reason. There is the additional component that - since Hegel and the adaptation of his ideas by Marx, along with the “enlightenment” Philosophes - modern philosophy in general has tended towards progressism. Even here, though, we could wonder why Schillber fails to integrate all of the criticisms of these developments, for example those of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in the first case and Burke and Carlyle in the second. It would seem that all of this is just dismissed as belonging to a “lower stage of development”: this is a false argument, however, because the people who created the theories of progress to which these people were reacting belonged to the same “stage of development”! To me at least, it all comes off as an arbitrary personal preference for liberal progressism masquerading as “integral” thought.

I must admit that I am not so familiar with developmental psychology. I do know, however, that it was a field based on the most extreme form of positivistic rationalism and scientific materialism. It is not surprising that, if genuine progress was to be found anywhere, it would be found in a field with these premises: nobody could deny that, within certain limits and in merely material terms, progress can be demonstrated. The trouble is that, even when this material progress does not serve to actively deny spirituality, it generally only serves as a comparatively empty compensation for a lost spiritual potency. It also seems very strange to me to combine the discoveries of this field with the revelations of what Schillber himself calls the Perennial Philosophy, whose epistemology is completely antithetical, as though there is no real discrepancy here?

@A_v_E I don’t understand everything that you have said. I suspect that we have slightly different reasons for objecting to Schillber; nonetheless, some of what I do understand is very funny and on-point! Particularly: 

17 hours ago, A_v_E said:

at high level of cognition speaking become so non sense, and you understand communication is almost absolutely futile that you turn what the midwit call " a troll " just because fuck it, they are boring anyway to not get fucking shit about the relative of their sequences.

17 hours ago, A_v_E said:

you right, wilber "made sense" ( or curiosity maybe ) for me, up til I reached 24 years old or something, I then met more "real life".

 they were a good way to perceive life for ken, but they are irrelevant in the face of reality.

if your role model is ken wilber, you really lost in mind salad forever, he is a good boat for a little ride, to just to study how hard can go a complex deluded mind, that's a bit sad, but there is worst to waste your life away.

This is my impression too. Schillber seems more concerned with creating a cosy private fantasy world - in which lines, streams and waves of developmental growth and evolutionary progressivism must infinitely ascend into the clouds of relativistic integration, forever and ever - than engaging with reality as it actually presents itself…

21 hours ago, UnbornTao said:

@Oeaohoo Thanks for your input.

I suggest checking out the creation vs destruction video.

Thanks for the suggestion. I watched a little bit of this video when it came out, though I didn’t get very far… I will consider watching it again!

[Topspin715]

Wilber is totally a genius but his content is so esoteric that it will be deeply appreciated by a narrow group of ppl which is why he has a cult following and misunderstood or ignored by masses.  Leo is like that too in my opinion.  There are very few truth seeking philosophers in this world but many of them are very private and very unlikely to be professional or academic philosophers.

[effortlesslumen]

As Ido Portal stated: There is a dynamic sleeve in which you can move in as long as you are not out of this sleeve you are still within the boundaries of achieving results The result is adaptation of all these elements inside to keep you in the sleeve. The sleeve is not constricted, as we once thought. 

[Oeaohoo]

1 hour ago, Topspin715 said:

Wilber is totally a genius but his content is so esoteric that it will be deeply appreciated by a narrow group of ppl which is why he has a cult following and misunderstood or ignored by masses.  Leo is like that too in my opinion.  There are very few truth seeking philosophers in this world but many of them are very private and very unlikely to be professional or academic philosophers.

This is another thing that I find quite odd about Wilber: he inhabits a strange middle-ground between espousing the esotericism that you are describing and selling out to whatever is trending in postmodern academia. I think he probably thought - as Mircea Eliade, Henry Corbin, Louis Massignon and a few other academics had done before him - that by combining the Perennial Philosophy with contemporary academic developments, he might be able to reintegrate genuine metaphysics into secular academia. This seems like a rather futile effort to me; I suppose we will have to see…

[A_v_E]

@Topspin715  

learn art, learn to be more beautiful 

THAT IS THE ONLY WAY