Dr. Freeman

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“The excitement of transcendental experience is found only at the edge of language… and the only way to find that excitement is to test those edges and those limits.” John Dominic Crossan The Dark Interval (1980)

My own approach to post-metaphysics (see the Source Code blog on this site) calls us to live with paradox - the creative tension between opposing perspectives. And since paradoxes are un-objectifiable (i.e. structurally open to Not-Knowing) and since they have no “fixed center of meaning” they refuse to be pinned down by the rational accounting of metaphysics (including an Integral Post-Metaphysics) which is still deeply conditioned by the traditional assumptions that underpin the rational-scientific demand for evidence and the quest for cognitive certainty. In other words, the paradoxical nature of reality frustrates our desire to possess or “get a handle” on the Mystery, for truth be told the mystery of God simply does not depend on what we think about it…

Historically, the foremost example of paradox being utilized as a skillful means for facilitating God-realization is found in the parabolic discourse of Jesus of Nazareth who consistently disrupted conventional wisdom (the myth of the given) by celebrating the ambiguity of those truth-events that show up at the very limits of human experience…

To draw out the key difference between Ken Wilber’s IPM and Jesus’ paradoxes we can briefly refer to the structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss who famously argued that “in every system of myth we will find a persistent sequence of binary discriminations as inside/outside, up/down, one/many, followed by a ‘mediation’ of the paired categories thus distinguished.”

This description of myth is a perfect description of what Integral theory claims to do. That is, the basic contours of Integral theory perform the same specific task of reconciling or mediating opposites. The conviction that ultimate reconciliation is possible is the heart of all mythic religion, so much so that more important than the proposed solution itself (religious or philosophical) is the belief in the possibility of a solution…

Now, the opposite of myth (i.e. a story that reconciles opposites) is paradox which creates contradiction and dissonance where previously there was seamless certainty, bringing not peace but a sword. Jesus’ paradoxes are hidden in stories like the Prodigal Son and the Friend at Midnight, stories that shatter the deep structure of the commonly accepted world (which can only paste over the cracks through which the Kingdom irrupts) and thereby render clear and evident to us the relativity and historical contingency of the conventional world…

Jesus’ paradoxes they do not furnish us with easy assurance of myth but challenge us with an explosive reversal of meaning that they removes our defences and makes us vulnerable to God… In this manner Jesus’ parables show us the seams and edges of “the Myth of the Given” (traditional metaphysics) by shattering expectations and creating contradiction within a situation of complacent security…

So rather than providing a pre-packaged program of rules and procedures for admission into the Kingdom of God, the paradoxical strategy of Jesus disrupts the quest for cognitive certainty and thereby sets up the necessary conditions for the decision of faith with an ‘aporetic anxiety’ that invites and challenges one to follow to this singular teacher’s own realization of the Kingdom of God. By interrupting commonplace metaphysical assumptions with an outrageous abrogation of our fundamental laws of logic, the post-metaphysical heart of Jesus’ teachings consistently refuse to give us straightforward answers in response to our quest for what is Real, as his paradoxes call for a free movements of faith that is made in the face of an impossible situation, involving risk, uncertainty and an openness to the unexpected that is grounded in a confession of ultimate not-knowing (which is itself the very occasion of Satori or Enlightenment!)…

In contrast to the logical calculus and pin point clarity of an IPM, in view of the post-metaphysical paradoxes of Jesus an authentic faith commitment is structurally blind and takes root only when the road seems obscure and when the storm clouds of life buffet us, when we are overwhelmed, when we stumble, and fall, and yet still move forward in spite of all evidence to the contrary… For just as Kierkegaard wrote, the “infinite passion of inwardness” (i.e. Christian faith) that has nothing to do with objective explanation at all, and as such the real journey only begins when forgo all metaphysical anchors and confess that we don’t see directly where we are going…

So in my view, Christian paradox is Integral grown self-aware and self-critical… Paradox (e.g. security comes from accepting insecurity as our mortal lot) enhances our knowledge of ignorance, which is the beginning of philosophy and the heart of mystical experience… So where Mythic consolations (e.g. the AQAL co-ordinates of an Integral Post-Metaphysics) establish a world, Paradox subverts this world with a story deliberately calculated to show the limitations of myth, and shatters its presupposed categories so that its relativity becomes apparent…

And by keeping us humble through the dark night of truth, where the idolatry of metaphysics in its demand for cognitive certainty is exposed for the vital-lie that it is, we are precisely therein and thereby broken open to an encounter with transcendence…

In all in Jesus’ teachings, the Kingdom eventuates when ones world is overturned and challenged in its depths… The powerful distinction in Integral theory between exoteric (bad) and esoteric (good) religion can therefore be defined thus: exoteric religion gives one the final word about “reality” and thereby excludes the authentic experience of Mystery, and esoteric religion (paradoxical) continually and deliberately subverts final words about “reality” and thereby introduces the possibility of transcendence.

So Jesus’ paradoxes ask us why things might not be just as well some other way rather than the way we expected and presumed – they tell us that the reverse side also has a reverse side… and remind us that God, particularly in the Judeo-Christian tradition, does not play the game by our rules…

We can conclude this key distinction between the logical clarity IPM and the enigmatic vision and challenge of Jesus with Heidegger who wrote that “in the openness of authentic disclosure (the meaning of Being) we admit the possibility of something unknown, even contradictory, to our world; for we put into question our own faculties rather than blindly measuring and evaluating what is real on the basis of these.”

And as Kierkegaard reminds us, “Everyone shall be remembered, but each became great in proportion to his expectation. One became great by expecting the possible; another by expecting the eternal, but he who expected the impossible became greater than all…”

In the present day the door has been slammed firmly shut on the 2500 year quest of metaphysics - the classical search for a “fixed center of the universe” somewhere out there, existing independently of us that can explain the ultimate meaning of Being… I therefore want to start an (all too brief) inquiry into Ken Wilber’s Integral Post-Metaphysics (IPM), which is both the latest innovation in his thought and the most recent attempt of a contemporary philosopher to a) move beyond the washed up history of the Western metaphysical tradition, while b) preserving the important truths of the world’s great religious traditions. I take it as given that this is probably the single greatest challenge that faces religion and spirituality in the 21st century…

One of the key themes of Wilber’s magus opus Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (1995) is that ever since Plato carved out the basic vocabulary of metaphysics by making everything turn on clear-cut distinctions between ideal/material, appearance/reality, subject/object (ad infinitum) the subsequent history Western civilization has been caught up in a series of intractable dualisms – what Ken Wilber calls our the fractured footnotes to Plato, the result being that traditional metaphysical approaches to religion and spirituality have been proclaimed dead by virtually every major philosopher of the last 100 years.

The final nail in the coffin of metaphysics came with Jacques Derrida’s relentless deconstruction of the entire tradition of Western metaphysics as the search for a “non-existent fixed center of meaning” (e.g. Being, Spirit, Essence), but since then there have been a number of attempts at post-metaphysics which claim to answer the question of Being while jettisoning from their self-representations the now discredited adherence to traditional metaphysics - or what is also called the “Myth of the Given”

The first of these attempts, was Heidegger’s call for “the gods before who I can sing and dance” as well as the mystical-poetic turn of his later writings, which were deeply inspired by Zen scholar D. T. Suzuki. Then there was the appeal of Emmanuel Levinas to God without reference to “the totality of Being” where the ethical response to the wholly other and hospitality to the one that is different comes before any rational accounting of the Divine. And then there is Catholic thinker Jean-Luc Marion who re-affirms the vanity of metaphysics as a discipline that is always at a loss to find linguistic expression for God. For Marion, the mystery of God is given in a way that far exceeds our grasp, and so the short-coming has to do with the failure of our metaphysical concepts, not with overflowing excess of our experience of the Divine.

And now we have Ken Wilber’s IPM which maintains that any holon (or actual occasion) can be known in a post-metaphysical fashion by identifying its Kosmic address - i.e. (as a bare minimum) its Quadrant (perspective) and Level (altitude) – with the added condition that the Kosmic Address must be specified for both the object being perceived and the subject that is perceiving it. In this manner an IPM removes the need to postulate any ‘pre-given’ or ‘independently existing’ realities while applying a method of advanced perspective taking that can account for the entire spectrum of phenomena that are enacted by human beings across their respective world-spaces.

So how does this Kosmic Address system of an IPM compare to these previous approaches to post-metaphysics, particularly in relation to the disclosure of spiritual realities? Firstly, specifying the AQAL co-ordinates of any given holon is precisely what one would expect from an IPM. But while the indexing system of an IPM accounts well for phenomena that arise in the manifest world, metaphysics has always been is concerned with the question of Being as such – i.e. “what is the meaning of Being?” and in this respect – i.e. when it comes to spiritual (un-manifest) realities, IPM doesn’t hold up so well.

The basic problem with an IPM is that its Kosmic address system is still metaphysical because constitutes the grounds by which God or Being may enter into the domain of knowledge. In other words, an IPM pre-determines the conceptual horizon in which Spirit is allowed to show up and therefore forecloses on the true mark of the Mystery as an event that arrives as a Gift, as an event that tends to disrupt any pre-supposed horizon of truth and meaning…

As Heidegger writes in Identity and Difference with a critique of metaphysics (as onto-theology) that also holds for IPM, “the deity can come into philosophy only insofar as philosophy, of its own accord and by its own nature, requires and determines that and how the deity enters it”. In other words, in so far as the indexing system of an IPM permits the objectification and subordination of God to human conceptualization (AQAL), it reflects the hubris that wants to encompass everything within the limits and possibilities of ordinary, descriptive representational thinking…

As post-metaphysical theologian Emmanuel Levinas says, Spirit absolves itself from human knowledge as the intentionality of adequation and appropriation, which means that the notion of God as a source of knowledge to be accumulated and owned constitutes an inappropriate human posture toward the sacred dimension of life, in proper relation to which alone humankind can flourish…

And so while IPM succeeds in formulating a calculus of perspectives for the manifest world that no longer ascribes to any “fixed center of the universe”, it still remains within the metaphysical desire to have God at it’s disposal by rendering ultimate reality intelligible in terms of the distinctions and conceptual categories of ancient Greek thought. The bottom line is that Ken Wilber’s IPM has more in common with the genius of the ancient Greeks than the prophets of Judeo-Christianity, and as far as I can see the real excitement of transcendental experience is found only at the edge of language… and the only way to find that excitement is to test those edges and those limits…To be continued…