Integral theory is Ken Wilber's attempt to place a wide diversity of theories and thinkers into one single framework. It is portrayed as a "theory of everything" ("the living Totality of matter, body, mind, soul, and spirit"),
trying "to draw together an already existing number of separate
paradigms into an interrelated network of approaches that are mutually
enriching."
Wilber's integral theory has been applied by some in a limited range of domains. The Integral Institute publishes the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice. Wilber's ideas have mainly attracted attention in specific subcultures, and have been widely ignored in academia.
Origins and background
Origins
Ken Wilber's "Integral Theory" started as early as the 1970s, with the publication of The Spectrum of Consciousness,
that attempted to synthesize eastern religious traditions with western
structural stage theory, models of psychology development that describe
human development as following a set course of stages of development.
Wilber's ideas have grown more and more inclusive over the years, incorporating ontology, epistemology, and methodology. Wilber, drawing on both Aurobindo's and Gebser's theories, as well as on the writings of many other authors, created a theory which he calls AQAL, "All Quadrants All Levels".
Background
Sri Aurobindo
The adjective integral was first used in a spiritual context by Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) from 1914 onward to describe his own spiritual teachings, which he referred to as Purna (Skt: "Full") Yoga. It appeared in The Synthesis of Yoga, a book that was first published in serial form in the journal Arya and was revised several times since.
Sri Aurobindo's work has been described as Integral Vedanta and Integral psychology (Sri Aurobindo) psychology, as well (the term coined by Indra Sen) and the psychotherapy that emerges from it. His writings influenced others who used the term "integral" in more philosophical or psychological contexts.
In the teachings of Sri Aurobindo, integral yoga refers to the
process of the union of all the parts of one's being with the Divine,
and the transmutation of all of their jarring elements into a harmonious
state of higher divine consciousness and existence.
As described by Sri Aurobindo and his co-worker The Mother (1878–1973), this spiritual teaching involves an integral divine transformation of the entire being, rather than the liberation of only a single faculty such as the intellect or the emotions or the body. According to Sri Aurobindo,
(T)he Divine is in his essence infinite and his manifestation too is multitudinously infinite. If that is so, it is not likely that our true integral perfection in being and in nature can come by one kind of realisation alone; it must combine many different strands of divine experience. It cannot be reached by the exclusive pursuit of a single line of identity till that is raised to its absolute; it must harmonise many aspects of the Infinite. An integral consciousness with a multiform dynamic experience is essential for the complete transformation of our nature. — Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 114
Aurobindo's ideas were further explored by Indra Sen
(1903–1994) in the 1940s and 1950s, a psychologist, and devotee of Sri
Aurobindo and The Mother. He was the first to coin the term "Integral
psychology" to describe the psychological observations he found in Sri
Aurobindo's writings (which he contrasted with those of Western
Psychology), and developed themes of "Integral Culture" and "Integral
Man".
These ideas were further developed by Haridas Chaudhuri (1913–1975), a Bengali philosopher and academic who founded in 1968 the California Institute of Integral Studies.
Jean Gebser
The word integral was independently suggested by Jean Gebser (1905–1973), a Swiss phenomenologist and interdisciplinary scholar, in 1939 to describe his own intuition regarding the next stage of human consciousness. Gebser was the author of The Ever-Present Origin, which describes human history as a series of mutations in consciousness. He only afterwards discovered the similarity between his own ideas and those of Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin. In his book The Ever-Present Origin,
Gebser distinguished between five structures of consciousness: archaic,
magic, mythical, mental, and integral. Gebser wrote that he was unaware
of Sri Aurobindo's prior usage of the term "integral", which coincides
to some extent with his own.
Georg Feuerstein
The German indologist Georg Feuerstein
first wrote about Integralism in "Wholeness or Transcendence? Ancient
Lessons for the Emerging Global Civilization" (1992). Feuerstein used
this term to refer to a particular outlook on spirituality which he saw
present in the Indian tantric traditions. Feuerstein outlined three major approaches to life in Indian spirituality: nivritti-marga (path of cessation), pravritti-marga (path of activity) and purna-marga (path of wholeness). The path of cessation is the traditional path of renunciation and asceticism practiced by sanyasins
with the goal of liberation from this world, while the path of activity
is the pursuit of worldly goods and happiness. Feuerstein ties this
integral approach to nondual
Indian philosophy and the tantric tradition. According to Feuerstein
the integral or wholeness approach: "implies a total cognitive shift by
which the phenomenal world is rendered transparent through superior
wisdom. No longer are things seen as being strictly separated from one
another, as if they were insular realities in themselves, but everything
is seen together, understood together, and lived together. Whatever
distinctions there may be, these are variations or manifestations of and
within the selfsame Being."
An integral worldview also leads to body and sex positivism and an
absence of asceticism. Even negative experiences such as pain and
disgust are seen as integral to our life and world and thus are not
rejected by the integral approach, but used skillfully.
Collaboration with Don Beck
After completing SES, Ken Wilber started to collaborate with Don Beck, whose "Spiral Dynamics" shows strong correlates with Wilber's model.
In Spiral Dynamics, Don Beck and Chris Cowan use the term integral
for a developmental stage which sequentially follows the pluralistic
stage. The essential characteristic of this stage is that it continues
the inclusive nature of the pluralistic mentality, yet extends this
inclusiveness to those outside of the pluralistic mentality. In doing
so, it accepts the ideas of development and hierarchy, which the
pluralistic mentality finds difficult. Other ideas of Beck and Cowan
include the "first tier" and "second tier", which refer to major periods
of human development.
Theory
All Quadrants All Levels
Ken Wilber's AQAL, pronounced "ah-qwul", is the basic framework of
Integral Theory. It suggests that all human knowledge and experience can
be placed in a four-quadrant grid, along the axes of
"interior-exterior" and "individual-collective". According to Wilber, it
is one of the most comprehensive approaches to reality, a metatheory
that attempts to explain how academic disciplines and every form of
knowledge and experience fit together coherently.
AQAL is based on four fundamental concepts and a rest-category:
four quadrants, several levels and lines of development, several states
of consciousness, and "types", topics which don't fit into these four
concepts.
"Levels" are the stages of development, from pre-personal through
personal to transpersonal. "Lines" are lines of development, the several
domains of development, which may process uneven, with several stages
of development in place at the various domains.
"States" are states of consciousness; according to Wilber persons may
have a terminal experience of a higher developmental stage. "Types" is a rest-category, for phenomena which don't fit in the other four concepts.
In order for an account of the Kosmos to be complete, Wilber believes
that it must include each of these five categories. For Wilber, only
such an account can be accurately called "integral". In the essay,
"Excerpt C: The Ways We Are in This Together", Wilber describes AQAL as
"one suggested architecture of the Kosmos".
The model is topped with formless awareness, "the simple feeling
of being," which is equated with a range of "ultimates" from a variety
of eastern traditions. This formless awareness transcends the phenomenal
world, which is ultimately only an appearance of some transcendental
reality. According to Wilber, the AQAL categories—quadrants, lines,
levels, states, and types—describe the relative truth of the two truths doctrine of Buddhism.
Holons
Holons are the individual building blocks of Wilber's model. Wilber borrowed the concept of holons from Arthur Koestler's description of the great chain of being, a mediaeval description of levels of being. "Holon" means that every entity and concept
is both an entity on its own, and a hierarchical part of a larger
whole. For example, a cell in an organism is both a whole as a cell, and
at the same time a part of another whole, the organism. Likewise a
letter is a self-existing entity and simultaneously an integral part of a
word, which then is part of a sentence, which is part of a paragraph,
which is part of a page; and so on. Everything from quarks to matter to energy to ideas
can be looked at in this way. The relation between individuals and
society is not the same as between cells and organisms though, because
individual holons can be members but not parts of social holons.
In his book Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution, Wilber outlines twenty fundamental properties, called "tenets", that characterize all holons.
For example, they must be able to maintain their "wholeness" and also
their "part-ness;" a holon that cannot maintain its wholeness will cease
to exist and will break up into its constituent parts.
Holons form natural "holarchies", like Russian dolls, where a whole is a part of another whole, in turn part of another whole, and so on.
Quadrants
Each holon
can be seen from within (subjective, interior perspective) and from the
outside (objective, exterior perspective), and from an individual or a
collective perspective.
Each of the four approaches has a valid perspective to offer. The
subjective emotional pain of a person who suffers a tragedy is one
perspective; the social statistics about such tragedies are different
perspectives on the same matter. According to Wilber all are needed for
real appreciation of a matter.
Wilber uses this grid to categorize the perspectives of various theories and scholars, for example:
- Interior individual perspective (upper-left quadrant) include Freudian psychoanalysis, which interprets people's interior experiences and focuses on "I"
- Interior plural perspective (lower-left) include Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics which seeks to interpret the collective consciousness of a society, or plurality of people and focuses on "We"
- Exterior individual perspective (upper-right) include B. F. Skinner's behaviorism, which limits itself to the observation of the behavior of organisms and treats the internal experience, decision making or volition of the subject as a black box, and which with the fourth perspective emphasizes the subject as a specimen to examine, or "It".
- Exterior plural perspective (lower-right) include Marxist economic theory which focuses upon the behavior of a society (i.e. a plurality of people) as functional entities seen from outside, e.g. "They".
According to Wilber, all four perspectives offer complementary,
rather than contradictory, perspectives. It is possible for all to be
correct, and all are necessary for a complete account of human
existence. According to Wilber, each by itself offers only a partial
view of reality.
According to Wilber modern western society has a pathological
focus on the exterior or objective perspective. Such perspectives value
that which can be externally measured and tested in a laboratory, but
tend to deny or marginalize the left sides (subjectivity, individual
experience, feelings, values) as unproven or having no meaning.
Wilber identifies this as a fundamental cause of society's malaise, and
names the situation resulting from such perspectives, "flatland".
Levels or stages
Wilber discerns various structural stages of development, following several structural stage theories of developmental psychology. According to Wilber, these stages can be grouped in pre-personal (subconscious motivations), personal (conscious mental processes), and transpersonal (integrative and mystical structures) stages.
All of these mental structures are considered to be complementary
and legitimate, rather than mutual exclusive. Wilber's equates the
levels in psychological and cultural development, with the hierarchical
nature of matter itself.
Lines, streams, or intelligences
According to Wilber, various domains or lines of development, or intelligences can be discerned. They include cognitive, ethical, aesthetic, spiritual, kinesthetic, affective, musical, spatial, logical-mathematical, karmic,
etc. For example, one can be highly developed cognitively (cerebrally
smart) without being highly developed morally (as in the case of Nazi doctors).
States
States
are temporary states of consciousness, such as waking, dreaming and
sleeping, bodily sensations, and drug-induced and meditation-induced
states. Some states are interpreted as temporary intimations of higher
stages of development. Wilber's formulation is: "States are free but structures are earned." A person has to build
or earn structure; it cannot be peak-experienced for free. What can be
peak-experienced, however, are higher states of freedom from the stage a
person is habituated to, so these deeper or higher states can be
experienced at any level.
Types
These are models and theories that don't fit into Wilber’s other categorizations. Masculine/feminine, the nine Enneagram categories, and Jung's archetypes
and typologies, among innumerable others, are all valid types in
Wilber's schema. Wilber makes types part of his model in order to point
out that these distinctions are different from the already mentioned
distinctions: quadrants, lines, levels and states.
Other approaches
Bonnitta Roy has introduced a "Process Model" of integral theory, combining Western process philosophy, Dzogchen ideas, and Wilberian theory. She distinguishes between Wilber's concept of perspective and the Dzogchen concept of view, arguing that Wilber's view is situated within a framework or structural enfoldment which constrains it, in contrast to the Dzogchen intention of being mindful of view.
Wendelin Küpers, a German scholar specializing in
phenomenological research, has proposed that an "integral
pheno-practice" based on aspects of the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty
can provide the basis of an "adequate phenomenology" useful in integral
research. His proposed approach claims to offer a more inclusive and
coherent approach than classical phenomenology, including procedures and
techniques called epoché, bracketing, reduction, and free variation.
Sean Esbjörn-Hargens has proposed a new approach to climate change
called Integral Pluralism, which builds on Wilber's recent work but
emphasizes elements such as Ontological Pluralism that are understated
or absent in Wilber's own writings.
Contemporary figures
Some individuals affiliated with Ken Wilber have claimed that there exists a loosely defined "Integral movement". Others, however, have disagreed.
Whatever its status as a "movement", there are a variety of religious
organizations, think tanks, conferences, workshops, and publications in
the US and internationally that use the term integral.
According to John Bothwell and David Geier, among the top thinkers in the integral movement are Stanislav Grof, Fred Kofman, George Leonard, Michael Murphy, Jenny Wade, Roger Walsh, Ken Wilber, and Michael E. Zimmerman. Australian academic Alex Burns mentions among integral theorists Jean Gebser, Clare W. Graves, Jane Loevinger and Ken Wilber. In 2007, Steve McIntosh pointed to Henri Bergson and Teilhard de Chardin as pre-figuring Wilber as integral thinkers. While in the same year, the editors of What Is Enlightenment? listed as contemporary Integralists Don Beck, Allan Combs, Robert Godwin, Sally Goerner, George Leonard, Michael Murphy, William Irwin Thompson, and Wilber.
Gary Hampson suggested that there are six intertwined
genealogical branches of Integral, based on those who first used the
term: those aligned with Aurobindo, Gebser, Wilber, Gangadean, László
and Steiner (noting that the Steiner branch is via the conduit of
Gidley).
Applications
Michael E. Zimmerman
and Sean Esbjörn-Hargens have applied Wilber's integral theory in their
environmental studies and ecological research, calling it "integral
ecology".
"Integral leadership" is presented as a style of leadership that attempts to integrate major styles of leadership. Don Beck, Lawrence Chickering, Jack Crittenden, David Sprecher, and Ken Wilber have applied the AQAL-model to issues in political philosophy and applications in government, calling it "integral politics". Sen has called the Yoga psychology of Sri Aurobindo "Integral psychology."
For Wilber, "integral psychology" is psychology that is inclusive or
holistic rather than exclusivist or reductive, and values and integrates
multiple explanations and methodologies. Marilyn Hamilton used the term "integral city", describing the city as a living human system, using an integral lens.
Integral Life Practice (ILP) applies Ken Wilber's Integral model
through nine modules of personal practice. Examples of "integral
practice" not associated with Ken Wilber, and derived from alternate
approaches, are Integral Transformative Practice (ITP), Holistic
Integration, and Integral Lifework.
Reception in mainstream academia
Integral Theory is widely ignored, at mainstream academic institutions, and has been sharply contested by critics.
The independent scholar Frank Visser says that there is a problematic
relation between Wilber and academia for several reasons, including a
"self-referential discourse" wherein Wilber tends to describe his work
as being at the forefront of science. Visser has compiled a bibliography of online criticism of Wilber's Integral Theory and produced an overview of their objections.
Another Wilber critic, the independent scholar Andrew P. Smith,
observes that most of Wilber's work has not been published by university
presses, a fact that discourages some academics from taking his ideas
seriously. Wilber's failure to respond to critics of Integral Theory is
also said to contribute to the field's chilly reception in some
quarters.
Forman and Esbjörn-Hargens have countered criticisms regarding
the academic standing of integral studies in part by claiming that the
divide between Integral Theory and academia is exaggerated by critics
who themselves lack academic credentials or standing. They also said
that participants at the first Integral Theory Conference in 2008 had
largely mainstream academic credentials and pointed to existing programs
in alternative universities like John F. Kennedy University or Fielding Graduate University as an indication of the field's emergence.
Criticism
The
AQAL system has been critiqued for not taking into account the lack of
change in the biological structure of the brain at the human level
(complex neocortex), this role being taken instead by human-made
artifacts.
