Dolf's Blog
Integral thoughts about development, humanity, spirituality
Integral Spirituality - A Review of a Review
10 February 2007
Frank Visser, Dutch translator of some of Ken Wilber's
books, has written a sour review of Wilber's latest book, Integral
Spirituality (see:
http://www.integralworld.net/index.html?visser16.html). He finds
the book overall "disappointing" and I did not expect anything else
from him, given the fact that Visser was dissed big time by Wilber
in last year's series of "Wyatt Earpy" blogs (see:
http://www.kenwilber.com/blog/post/46?page=77). In any case, I
believe Visser focusses too much on petty elements and does no
justice to some truly relevant points Wilber introduces in his book.
Visser's petty and not-so-petty points:
- Style: Wilber would be not scientific enough in this book,
lacking references, using the word "simply" too often, reassuring
the reader too much, etc. I guess it depends on your expectations of
a book whether you need these elements in it or not. Wilber has
indeed been popularising his views in the past few years, but that
is exactly his intention. He aims at transforming as many people as
possible to a higher plane of consciousness and you need to be able
to reach those people. If you decide only to write academic stuff,
only the academics will read it and the impact of the message
remains limited. By the way: for more academic approaches, Visser
should read the Appendices.
I do agree with Visser's point on self-promotion: Wilber
annoyingly often refers to the various websites of the Multiplex
(all starting with http://www.integral.../ of course) and encourages
the reader to visit those. This is a tendency that occurs in his
blog entries all the time as well. At some point I'd think the
message is clear and one should stop referring to the same thing all
the time. Frank Visser does a good job promoting his own book on his
site as well, by the way, but so would I, once I'd publish a book...
- More to the point, Visser continues to present the core
thesis of Wilber's book as "unless spirituality comes to terms with
the demands of modernity and especially postmodernity, it is doomed."
I had not interpreted Wilber like this. Both Modernity and
post-modernity have had their share in attacking traditional
religions and religiosity, but that's not necessarily anything to do
with Spirituality (which I see more as the transcendent part of
everyday life and not necessarily bound to any religion. Read like
that, I'd say that traditional religions should just adapt to the
current time and reinvent themselves based on today's demands.
Religions should also evolve when humanity evolves and not keep
people behind. But Spirituality in general is independent of
religions, so will survive nevertheless.
- Explaining the extension of the Integral Model to eight
perspectives instead of four quadrants, Visser complains about his
early suggestion about the quadrants being perspectives not being
heard by Wilber and states that "this new innovation is an implicit
confession that all wasn't well on the integral front with the
quadrants." Whatever. Although Wilber arguably has a hard time
dealing with criticism, shouldn't this extension be welcomed rather
than served off as a "confession"? - The Wilber-Combs lattice is in
my opinion the core part of the book and it helped me at least quite
a bit further defining the higher states and stages of life. Here,
Visser makes the point that there are several inconsistencies and
open ends in this theory and he is right. I had that same feeling
when reading the initial version of the book (which Visser refers to
as the "Manuscript") and Integral Spirituality did a better job
explaining this, but there is much more to develop in this model and
I am looking forward to seeing this appear.
- I am personally not mourning Wilber's depart from Spiral
Dynamics as a developmental model, as Visser seems to do. The book
Spiral Dynamics is the worst book about Spiral Dynamics I've read
and I believe it is, due to its simplification of development,
highly overrated. More importantly, as Wilber already showed in
Integral Psychology, Spiral Dynamics is just one of many
developmental models that are basically showing similar stages in
development of various aspects of humans. SD focussed on values,
Maslow on needs, Piaget on Cognition, etc. The core message is that
none of those models should claim to be all-encompassing, as they
all just hold part of the truth. If the developers of SD do claim to
be all-encompassing, they just don't get the point.
- I like the idea of the Conveyor-belt, which basically
says that development can occur and be accelerated by people at a
higher stage of development "pulling up" people that are still at a
lower level of development. Visser rightly states that there is much
more to be fleshed out here, so I'd say: what keeps you from doing
so? In fact, I am using the idea of the conveyor belt at the moment
in my job as a manager of an ever-growing group of engineers, where
more senior ones work with more junior ones to improve the overall
level of the group.
Visser does not deal with some other points that I will
take the liberty to comment on.
- The Shadow. This part has become the core of the Wyatt
Earpy polemics and has perhaps therefore been ignored by Frank in
his review. The psychology of the shadow is definitely an important
one, but is totally misplaced in the context of a book about
spirituality. It even seems that "Shadow work" has been proclaimed
as one of the cornerstones of Integral Institute's Integral Life
Practice (ILP). I see this as simply part of mainstream
psychotherapy, where it is an important technique, but nothing more
(or less) than that. It's a riddle to me why Wilber has promoted
this technique so much. Integral Post-Metaphysics. This is described
in Appendix 2 and is by far the most complex part, also due to the
use of another Wilber-invention, Integral Maths. Integral Maths is
as much bullshit as it is to use mathematics in economic sciences.
It just tries to give a scientific flavor to something that can
better be described without it. In any case, the message of Appendix
2 if you skip the maths, is very important. It says that whenever
you discuss a certain subject, you should first describe the
perspective+developmental level (= Kosmic Address) that you, as the
speaker, come from and then also define what the perspective+developmental
level of the subject you are dealing with is. So I can describe God
in my own way, but that description is dependent on where I come
from: am I speaking from my own internal perspective which may be at
a Yellow level or am I speaking from a cultural perspective that may
be at an Orange level? And what God am I speaking of? God as a
spirit of my ancestors, as used in pre-personal rituals? Or God as
all-encompassing Love, according to transpersonal perspectives? If
you understand this, you also understand Wilber's points in his
Wyatt Earpy blogs, namely that his works are all too often discussed
from totally different angles than the angle from which it was
written. And in that case you are just not talking about the same
subject anymore, but the discussion becomes a Harold Pinter play.
This is what happens to a great extent on Frank Visser's website, I
am afraid. If people cannot take the perspective of the person they
are communicate with, and grasp the actual way in which the subject
matter is discussed, communication is dead and leads to nothing.
