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There is much that I admire in the works of Ken Wilber, and I think it is essential reading for anyone who wants to think philosophically in the 21st century. That’s not to say that Wilber is right about most things; in many respects I think he isn’t, and I will critique his work in future posts. But before I get to critiquing Wilber’s work, I want to discuss why I admire it so.
Wilber sometimes seems to claim that his work is widely studied in academia. It isn’t, but that’s not a criticism. Wilber’s writing is exactly the kind of work that really needs to be done, but is rarely done within the confines of academic writing. Why? Because Wilber’s work looks at big questions: questions of truth wherever it can be found, the nature of the universe and our place in it, the good life. The traditional questions of philosophy, in other words. Academics generally refuse to investigate these questions, whichever of the three main academic approaches they take. Philologists often believe we have no right to discuss the questions in a text unless we’ve studied it in its own language for decades; analytic philosophers carve up questions into smaller and smaller pieces, leaving the bigger questions unanswered; postmodernists question any questions we might ask, so that the meta-questions are all that are left. (Why these approaches dominate is a question I’ll leave for another time.) Each of these approaches has its value; but each is missing something big.
Wilber’s work finds that “something big.” He takes what he calls an integral approach, meaning an attempt to integrate the valuable insights and truths from every possible source, Asian, Western or otherwise. This basic methodological idea is what makes Wilber’s work a valuable starting point for any cross-cultural philosophical inquiry.
I do look forward to reading more of your plaudits and critiques of Ken Wilber. I would love to know in more detail why you consider him “essential reading for anyone who wants to think philosophically” henceforth. That is a bold claim indeed!
I often think of Wilber as, in many respects, the Madame Blavatsky of our times– he runs a really fascinating personality cult and publishing industry that attracts well-educated cosmopolitan elites. He invents a system that syncretizes various religious systems both East and West with modern psychology and science. I find these sorts of movements useful as data for understanding globalization, progressivism, religious pluralism, and so on.
The academy doesn’t take Wilber very seriously as a philosopher, but it also doesn’t take Theosophy or Rajneesh’s Osho seriously either. So I look forward to learning what makes Wilber new and different from these other syncretistic gurus.
There is indeed a personality cult around Ken Wilber, as there is around Ayn Rand – or as there was around Jesus, and a lot of the academy does take his views pretty seriously. I think that Wilber has, unfortunately, done a fair bit to encourage this in more recent years, especially with his frequent claims to the effect that anyone who disagrees with him misunderstands him.
That said, what makes Wilber different from Osho is, briefly, the content of his thought. Wilber is not offering the kind of glib platitudes that Osho purveys. (I don’t know Blavatsky’s work well enough to compare them.) In most of his work I find a sincere effort to learn at least something from many different traditions at the same time – to think about the extent to which they actually are true. Much of the academy simply refuses to do that – academic philosophy looks to only one tradition, academic religious studies avoids truth claims. Wilber has, I think, so far made more progress than anyone else toward a genuine synthesis between different systems. (The distinction between synthesis and syncretism is crucial here, BTW.) If we think that he ultimately fails (and I suspect that he does) it’s nevertheless important to have his work in mind, in order to build on it and learn from its mistakes.
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