I’ve just published a new article critiquing Ken Wilber‘s recent work in the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice, a journal devoted to his thought. Sadly, it’s behind a pay wall, as JITP is a conventional academic journal rather than a free online journal. (This is entirely understandable, since unfortunately free online journals do tend to get less academic credibility, despite making their work available to a much wider audience.) Most universities don’t have this journal yet, but if you’d like to see the article and you’re academically affiliated, you can request it through interlibrary loan (or better yet ask your library to subscribe to the journal!) Here’s the reference:
Lele, Amod. 2012. “Beyond enacted experiences.” Journal of Integral Theory and Practice 7(2): 72-87.
[JITP is published by SUNY Press in Albany.]
At some later point I might post a blog-post-length précis of the article here, but for now I’ll just say the article criticizes Wilber’s perennialist view that mystical experience is at the core of the various “religious” traditions. The critique is primarily historical, but I also make sure to address the implications of the historical critique for constructive philosophy and integral thought (which I think are pretty major).
Congratulations. Going counter to the natural assumption that religion has at its core an encounter with the divine which is supra rational/supernatural is a difficult proposition. There is a strand in Wilber’s though which regards the mystic as universally accessible, the Zen mind is your everyday mind sort of thing. From that perspective then religion (religio) is natural without that being an admission of a naturalistic type reduction. A popular stance amongst the analytics at the moment is that religion if not based on narrowly conceived reasons is not worthy of a rational man’s consideration. My own investigation into the conversion to theism of a surprising number of philosophers indicates that non rational considerations predominate or beyond ‘the pairs of opposites’ anyway.
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