William Irwin Thompson on Wilber

Heru over at the Lightmind Wilber Forum posted this excerpt from the book Twilight of the Clockwork God: Conversations on Science & Spirituality, which includes an interview with William Irwin Thompson and his views on Wilber and Gebser:

JE: In your book Coming Into Being you compare the work of Jean Gebser with Ken Wilber. Can you discuss the differences that you see in the approaches of both of these men to the evolution of consciousness?

WIT: Oh, it's almost classic cultured European versus Midwestern American hick. You know, I think people like Terence McKenna and Ken just grew up in Eastern Colorado and Nebraska in such culturally deprived areas that they get captured by a kind of abstract construction of what they imagine the big European thinker is, or the psychedelic hero in the case of McKenna. And Wilber, as I say in Coming Into Being, is just very abstract but Gebser is an artist. He has an incredible insight, for example, into the role of adjectives in Rilke, and what it means when you use language in a particular way to create an imaginative landscape that's more processive and less prospective of composed object nailed down into perspectival space. So there's an amazing senstivity to art and poetry and painting and the richness of European culture. But when I was teaching temporarily at the California Institute of Integral Studies, all the students didn't like Gebser because they can't remember a painting of Cezanne; they don't read Rilke. They're just into drugs and taking Extasy and going to Raves, and looking for some kind of psychotherapy technique. And so Wilber is their hero because he just gives them all these maps and charts, this Michelin guide. He's a control freak. There's no sense of humor, there's no sense of art, it's all just sterile and masculine in a very dry and abstract way.

I didn't want to be an egomaniac and say, well, my culture history is better than Wilber's. I didn't want to go into that. So I went out of my way to use Ken Wilber's Up From Eden as a textsbook, and had everybody read it in my Lindisfarne symposium at the cathedral. But when I did that, and went out of my way to give equal time and to really be open to Wilber, and read the book, and underlined it, I just thought, God, the difference between this and The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light--they cover exactly the same turf--is the difference between a textbook and a work of art!

And then I went back because I wanted to be fair, because I knew Treya Wilber and was corresponding with her when she was going through her crisis. She was also a friend of my wife's, and I had cancer, and so Treya and I were talking a lot about cancer. I've never met Ken face to face, but I knew Treya before she married Ken, and I wanted to go out of my way to be fair to Ken. So I got the new book Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, and I thought, God, this is ridiculous! Three-thousand pages that are going to explain everything. You know, this kind of German nineteenth century scholarship, that's over. I don't have the time to read 3000 pages! Then when he kept using this little slogan that his literary agent, John White, put on all his books: "the Einstein of the consciousness movement," I was revolted by the vulgarity of it. And then when he went beyond that to go and put his picture on the front of the book and say, "A Brief History of Everything!" Ken Wilber explains the entire universe to you, everything you wanted to know about everything. And I thought, this is just inflation; this is an ego that's just suffering from a hernia.

The interviewer above, John David Ebert, then commented in the end notes:

It occurs to me that Ken Wilber and William Irwin Thompson are modern incarnations of an archetypal dichotomy of intellectual temperament. Aristotle and Plato are perhaps the earliest manifestation in Western culture, but it has continued right down the line in such pairs as Newton and Leibniz, Kant and Goethe, Hegel and Schopenhauer. The Wilber type is the Systematist for whom the world is capable of reduction to a single clear architecture. There is one set of truths, eternal and unchanging, which the Systematist, whether he is Kant or Hegel, Newton or Aristotle, believes he has been uniquely privileged to discover. Everything is assigned to its niche, like the saints and apostles in a Gothic cathedral, and one system contains all the necessary answers for any question that should arise.

For Wilber, consequently, there is only one theory that is articulated over and over again in each of his books, all of which repeat the same schemas and diagrams endlessly. His work can be neatly divided in two halves, for Sex, Ecology, Spirituality marks the birth of his new Final Theory, in the light of which his earlier works are to be taken as precursors. Everything since that book contains a carbon copy of the same four-fold diagram of quadrants, as though consciousness can be mapped as neatly as the trajectory of a parabola on a Cartesian grid.

For the Thompson-Schopenhauer-Goethe-Leibniz-Plato type, the world is in flux and its truths are changing along with it. The ideas of these thinkers are never finished, always subject to revision, and constantly undergoing transformation as new truths are tested, or new theories acquired. The world is a state of perpetual Becoming and no system or body of knowledge can ever hope to be complete, capturing all that there is to know at last. No scholar has ever succeeded, for example, in capturing the fine nuances of Plato's ideas as they evolve through the course of his dialogues. Nothing but actually reading them through chronologically can replicate the experience of watching his thought ripen to its full maturity. Plato, like Nietzsche, was not afraid of contradicting himself, for the two were alike in their manner of constantly trying out new ideas on themselves to see what the resulting points of view would look like.

Something of this dichotomy is embodied, also, by Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. For the former, working in the medium of stone meant the production of complete masterpieces. Michelangelo almost always finished what he started--until later years, that is--and consequently we possess only a handful of unfinished works. The Sistine Chapel constitutes a veritable System of the Christian cosmos, complete in every respect from Genesis to Apocalypse. For Leonardo, on the other hand, the world was ever changing and so were his views. Rarely did he finish what he began. Each painting is a sort of test of an entirely provisional theory. His notebooks are unsystematic and no one has ever really managed to capture their full complexity in a synopsis.

Thompson, likewise, must be read in his entirety, every book, in order to grasp the substance of his vision, which is always changing. He is unsystematic, but always innovative, incorporating fresh insights with each new volume. Every book is a unique experience. For him, consequently, Wilber personifies that which Thompson most dreads: the Final Theory Engraved in Stone.

Some interesting discussion of this for those interested in the thread on the forum so check it out.

Comments

[ebuddha]

Very cool! Funny stuff, as well as eye-opening. (Sly, yet not mean, humor goes a long way with me).

[Marshall Sontag]

Thank you for this post. I really enjoyed the discussion of the dichotomy between the two kinds of views on truth. I have always been drawn to the system thinkers, be it Ayn Rand, Aristotle or Wilber. However, I inevitably transcend (to borrow a Wilber word) each of their systems to find myself in a flux of truth. It was interesting to read about DaVinci never finishing things -- that is largely the story of my life! I don't update my own blog often because I feel I will inevitably change my mind about whatever I write... but I regard this as a bad habit.
Also, I really enjoyed the discussion of the "trying on ideas" embodied by Nietzsche and Plato. I find I am drawn to trying on ideas in this manner, but have been largely afraid to in the past, thinking it violates my integrity. However, if the history of this quality is any indicator, the most I have to lose is history regarding me as one of the greatest thinkers of all time. ;-)