The Four Quadrants: A Map of All Knowledge

Ken Wilber’s map of knowledge and the human experience

Ken Wilber’s model of the Four Quadrants is the centrepiece of the Integral philosophy and it is one of the most useful tools you’ll ever come across for conceptualising the different dimensions of the human experience and the different domains of knowledge.

With relevance to what we’ve been exploring about recently on the channel it’s a way of understanding the voice of Jordan Peterson in contrast to that of Michel Foucault and the social justice movement. It’s also a good way of situating a lot of the material we have looked at in the past such as the faultline between materialist atheists and traditional Buddhists .We’ll see where Jung and Freud’s work fits in, where Nietzsche is operating from and where schools like Semiotics, Empiricism and Phenomenology fit on the map.

In Wilber’s work, this four quadrants model is a map of the entirety of reality. It’s the central point of his attempt to integrate all human knowledge and experience together so that we find ourselves in a unified holistic Kosmos again rather than having to choose which school of thought we align with.

It’s a really interesting theory that maps everything from the internal experience of bacteria to the Gaia hypothesis, the Big Bang…