Epilogue: How Integral Theory Cannot be Done Alone

[INDEX]

This paper is largely the result of me trying to do integral theory and failing at it. This paper expounds on why I believe it is impossible to do integral theory alone. While it leaves out some personal factors like income, motivation, reading speed, self-esteem, IQ, and discipline — factors which are all ‘sine qua non’ to be successful at integral theory -, it includes most of the factors that I experienced to be a challenge to doing integral theory located in the LR-quadrant, which are factors like finding the right ideas at the right time, reading the right books at the right time, getting something at the right resolution at the right time, speaking to the right people at the right time, and everything that has to do with knowledge transfer and communication from the visible, slightly autistic LR quadrant.

This paper could have been named ’40 (or so) challenges to doing integral theory in the LR-quadrant alone’. I am not sure how Wilber managed to pull it off, but creating your own integral theory, which is the core idea of integralism, seems almost impossibly difficult to me. I’m not talking about being an integrally informed specialist, i.e., someone who knows an integral model and uses it to expand their knowledge as a specialist and contextualize it into a bigger picture. Wilber is not integrally informed; he is doing the mapmaking itself, he is an integralist, and doing that is almost impossible as an individual without becoming what the German philosopher Herbert Schnädelbach calls a ‘universal dilettante’.

There are just so many challenges to integralism or grand narrative. Obviously, the huge complexity in all our disciplines. And much of the complexity is also hidden behind field-specific jargon. Add to that specialists lacking the interest to be as clear, short, and precise as possible. Add to that the phenomenon of bullshit. Add to that that there are no institutions to do integralism; you are basically left alone with it. Add to that that you cannot live on integralism.

The problem with grand narrative being so impossible to do well is that nevertheless what drives and orients communities are grand narrators. We experience them as prophetic. They set the narrative for entire collectives. And if our grand narrators are just bad grand narrators, fragmented and partial in their narratives themselves, that is what we end up being as societies. And the foundational fact that one self-absorbed grand narrator can wield more power and influence than millions of specialists put together is still as true today as it was a century ago.

My major ‘telos’ in this paper was an attempt to show how mapmaking could be done as a community of integralists working in tandem with specialists without even noticing it or mentioning integral explicitly, just by following general rules. This paper was supposed to show that if specialists make their knowledge practices transparent and accessible enough, i.e., the easier and faster we professionalize people, the easier and more doable becomes integralism itself. If, on the other hand, integralists get their grand narratives across in the form of orienting generalizations directly pressed into the medium they use itself, our specialized disciplines could contextualize their findings better within the ‘whole’.

I am of the conviction that integral theories without knowledge practices or the disciplines are empty. But the knowledge practices without integral theories to contextualize them are blind. Both need each other. And integralists who are not in close contact with specialists for me are thin soup at best, dangerous preachers and propagandists at worst.

I purposefully avoided the term ‘integral’ in this paper. It has had so many different interpretations it has become almost meaningless by now. But my attempt was to build integral, or what I take that term to mean, into the very fabric of the media we use. Thus, even without talking about integral theory, our interactions are guided to follow integral heuristics, such as including all perspectives, yet all perspectives being only partial and holding multiple opposing views at once, seeing the limits of one’s perspective, taking up injections, avoiding bullshit, grounding theory in practice, cross-referencing and cross-checking ideas between disciplines, being forced into grand narrative whether one wants to or not.

What I tried to do was bake integral theory into the very fabric of our LR-quadrant communicative structures. Every single communicative act thus comes with an explicit context of its framing, every single communicative act has only limited and narrow validity, every single communicative act is embedded with its opponents, every single communicative act is apt to change, every single communicative act includes its own limits, and so on.

I chose not to speak about integral theory because it has its own metaphorical framework and ‘style of thought’ or what I called ‘temperament’ throughout this paper. And to be honest, the major metaphors used by integral theory I have seen do more harm than actual good.

Like the ‘higher is better’ metaphor. Obviously, the point is that the ‘higher’ is higher, insofar as it ‘sees’ the lower. But in integral circles, this metaphor I saw most often to be taken as something to legitimize competitive fights over who is ‘the boss’. I never understood that because being higher actually is not ‘better’. Yes, it is better in being categorically demanded from everyone and an end-in-itself, and being a more ‘free’ state of mind, but as a whole, being ‘higher’ is a mostly painful experience of having more responsibilities and more dimensions of reality to coordinate. Nobody in their right mind wants to be ‘higher’ while obviously everyone wants to be ‘the boss’. We don’t ‘want’ to be ‘higher’, but we have no other choice but to try it.

If, on the other hand, you look at the purely formal model for the exchange of communicative acts that I presented, you never hear the term ‘higher’, yet precisely this is what is implied by cross-referencing ideas and making their framing conscious. Here we can focus on doing the stuff that gets us ‘higher’ immediately because it is about specific concrete practices instead of fighting over metaphors. At least this was the hope behind my approach. The hope to get meanings across through the structure of a medium without getting tangled up in narratives and surfaces and fighting over who has the best narrative.

I guess it’s becoming more obvious by now: I hate narratives. And I hate to write. And since I am not much of a narrator to come up with the next set of metaphors that is more difficult to hijack than the ones used in the integral model, I thought, why not avoid all narratives as a whole and build integral directly into the structure of the media that we already use. Thus, it would tacitly do its job, people wouldn’t be fighting over nonsense, and it would force minds into mutual recognition without them even noticing that they are silently doing integral. Like anonymous integralists. I intuitively liked the idea of exerting influence without influencing. It has something beautiful to me. And wicked.

I am aware the above perspective is merely a limited LR-quadrant approach to communication and learning. It is a disembodied approach to information exchange. I am aware of the necessity to complement this perspective with solid UL — and LL-practices, traditions, actual spaces, and incentivize it with proper funding, culture, narratives, and community. Obviously, none of the above presented in the paper could be implemented if there was no way to pay for it and also financially reward effort.

But while I don’t have much to say about the other involved quadrants and areas, I believe the LR-perspective itself to be of importance. And I don’t see us paying much attention to it, as if we could use our current information technologies to get grand narratives across. Well, we can’t. Grand narratives are extremely difficult to communicate, and there are structural reasons why most grand narrators are lone wolves and why you cannot communicate them, particularly not over social media.

So far, we have not come even close to realizing the potential of new media for grand narrative though. Social media, as of their current state, cause more fragmentation of knowledge and polarization than they elicit the witness in you or let you grasp grand pictures and connections. Unfortunately, we are very far from having reached the actual potential of new media. But their current state is a particularly big disappointment, given that really intelligent solutions and developments already exist out there, like Hypothesis or the memex-tools. Whatever the overall grand picture of the future will be, it has to include a coherent account of how to distribute intelligence using also techniques for information exchange available in the LR-quadrant.

All the aspects of Bildung that I laid out in the paper are inherent to integral theory. A major job of integral theory is to curate. Most people I have met so far, even those who don’t like the theory, I have found to agree that the sources put together by Wilber are pretty outstanding. He has basically put together some of the best representatives of any field you could think of. People who wouldn’t even talk to each other, if they had been locked in a room, he has put together as equally important voices in his bibliographies. This very selection alone, of roughly 2000 sources, is one of the finest collections of diverse voices I can think of. You might not like developmental theory, but the sources you find in his bibliographies will still point you to some of its best representatives. The same thing with phenomenology. You might think it’s silly, but some of its best representatives are there, in Wilber’s bibliographies. And instead of talking about these curated sources, I thought of a system that would allow showing these curated sources immediately.

But when it comes to studying these sources, it actually gets difficult. Because you are basically left alone with it. No focused study groups, no abstracts, no annotations are available. Thus, a normal person with normal reading abilities needs quite some time to get through these sources and put all the details together. If, on the other hand, you choose to enter an institution and study some of the sources together with others, you would lose the integral scope and spend years in just one field. Including many details that are not relevant to an integral picture, where one looks out for the deep structures. Doing academic work and integralism at once is almost impossible, and one has to choose either one or the other. But not so with the memex. You can jump into study groups, read abstracts where necessary, skim for repeating ideas and patterns, gloss over entire disciplines, and figure out the center of gravity of an entire discourse in no time.

Another aspect of integral theory is the grand narrative part. It is an attempt to bridge disciplines and even go beyond that, all knowledge traditions. Here one faces the challenge that the disciplines themselves are not inherently interested in spilling their beans. They are not interested in saying what they have to say in the most accessible way possible. Oftentimes, they obscure their actual insights and blow them out of proportion. But not so with the memex. By adding multiple layers onto one single unit of knowledge, it allows students to provide a more comprehensive explanation of an idea or a more comprehensive first approach to the idea, more adequate metaphors, and provide the evidence. You know the drill.

Another aspect of integral theory is systematicity. Wilber has also made this explicit, that he follows the rule of looking for evidence for a claim within several quadrants. If there is evidence spread all over the quadrants, he takes something to be most likely real. Here again, the memex provides you with the curated connections. All you have to do is follow them up, but you have all the “evidence” already gathered together around what it belongs to. We distribute it to the community to figure out what the relevant topics are and which disciplines they are hooked to. The community itself creates the connections between specific claims and diverse disciplines out there supporting them. Doing this as an individual is almost impossible.

Wilber himself has considered the kind of knowledge the integral map itself provides to be a form of systemic meta-knowledge. Meta-knowledge or “vision-logic” that is typical of what he calls the “centaur,” or the lower integral stage. Where the sense of identity shifts to a disidentification with narrative consciousness. A shift towards the witness takes place, our ability to experience narratives as having a background, that space of consciousness within which they arise and manifest themselves. The centaur is thus the first structure of consciousness truly free to, as the Germans call it, “think.” It can freely move between interpretations and eclectically produce new perspectives which are the result of integrative attempts. It is the first structure of consciousness that is capable of recognizing beings as valuable across differences of opinion and socialization. As it pulls together perspectives, it pulls together people of various backgrounds.

To put it in cheesy terms, integral theory is grounded in love. And that is why it is very difficult to communicate to people who don’t share this spiritual intuition of mutual recognition. The spiritual intuition is that all of manifestation is beautiful. All of it. Skyscrapers as much as trees. Fast racing cars as much as composting. Designer clothes as much as running around naked on the beach. Just a joke, I happen to hate sand. And particularly naked people on sand. That’s okay. You can hate naked people on sand.

The point of integral theory is to communicate that intuition of love through knowledge. Knowledge is not regarded as an end in itself but something that serves the higher purpose of appreciating that which we get to ‘see’ in the act of knowledge. Of appreciating those who came up with something to see.

This shows up pretty well in Wilber’s early works. They are mostly a collection of ‘uuh, look at this’ and ‘whoa, look at that’. If integral theory can use knowledge to communicate and induce that intuition in others, why should it be impossible to use the structure of new media to induce that intuition of mutual appreciation? Just a thought. If social media can polarize and invoke simplistic framing as something addictive, they can potentially also do the opposite. It is just a matter of time until we figure out how to make people addicted to development. After all, addiction is addiction, and you are engaged with the content in both cases.

We will see how it will work out. I’m pretty pessimistic though. I doubt we can compete with cats. I doubt we will get along in this century. After all, looking at how integral theory is received, I oftentimes doubt we can agree on this minimal version of integral, that alter deserves recognition and everybody sees something that is worth sharing and embracing. Even before Wilber had come up with the quadrants, this intuition was there in his works and expressed itself in the fact that he stuck with reading people excessively even though he disagreed with them.

The bare minimum we should be able to share after encountering integral theory is not to agree on quadrants and lines and states and stages, but to agree on the drive to recognize others across mutual disagreements, to sense their struggle and show respect, at the very least the respect to understand the referential totality of their world. That’s why if you check early Wilber, you will see he insisted he always read everything somebody published, all of their works. He read all of Alan Watts. He read all of Krishnamurti. He read all of Foucault. That is a recognition of their worldview.

I guess this is a matter of taste. My personal approach is to give new authors that I consider to be of depth at least two months in which I will try to listen to and read as much of their work as possible and slap myself for every smug comment on their writings or speeches in which I obviously know everything better than they do. So instead of jumping with a Petersonian high-pitched voice right at every sentence they utter and wiggling my finger, I try to silence that Peterson in me and shut up. This, for me, is a spiritual practice. It is extremely difficult for me not to immediately frame an argument as silly and let the speaker do their own framing. But as with every spiritual practice, it is something you can practice and get better at.

If we can’t do that, devote this much attention to each other and listen before we jump to conclusions, I don’t think agreeing on the quadrants and all the rest would make any difference. Integral would have lost its soul and become an autistic attempt at putting everything into boxes. That’s not what integral is about. Integral is about connecting you with other souls. At its deepest, with the world-soul. And I would love it if it was possible for media to immediately do precisely that.

I am aware that Bildung itself can become catastrophic. There are possible states of the world in which focusing on just Bildung will get us killed. There are possible situations in which you cannot but act in accordance with either defending your perspective, values, or bodily integrity, situations in which you cannot but draw boundaries and chop off limbs. And maybe some of us who are better at witnessing are not so good when it comes to actual chopping off of limbs when things get serious. But ever since I am aware of Bildung, I have heard the excuse that we are supposedly at war with others and cannot afford to sit back and listen and witness but must stab the enemy before it is too late. Maybe that’s precisely why we are at war. Maybe that’s precisely why we are enemies in the first place.