Dr. Freeman

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…