Criticism of developmental stages and brief notes on materialism

Wilber's work is premised upon the existence of distinct stages and there are critics of this approach, some arguing that it has been discredited by various psychologists.150 However, development and evolution is at the base of all his work, and while he clearly supports an adaptation of the perennial philosophy, he has drawn much of his developmental framework from much-respected developmental philosophers and psychologists such as Jean Piaget, Cook -Greuter, Kegan and Loevinger.151 In this way, Wilber is in the school of thought of developmental psychologists who believe individuals advance through a series of qualitative stages, as opposed to the other psychological school of thought which sees development as a quantitative increase in knowledge.152 However, as Visser notes, to explain how this development actually occurs, Wilber does not use Piaget's approach of discrete biological stages or the cognitive science approach, which sees systems as purely processors of information. Rather, and particularly in his earlier works, he uses the metaphysical approach of the perennial philosophy, and the stages of development are more closely aligned to the dimensions or planes in that philosophy, the higher encapsulating the lower and showing qualitative differences.153 This reliance on the perennial framework as a "pre-given" to explain the nuances of a complicated developmental process could be seen as a weakness. However, Wilber does not discount either Piaget's biological approach or that of other developmental psychologists as there is value in a multitude of perspectives. As previously noted, he credits the influence of a wide range of developmental theorists.154

The discipline of philosophy of development broadly defines development as a process of incremental change, with the emergence of a number of qualitative stages, each emerging from the necessary condition of the prior stages.155 These stages are "reconstructed" through an analysis of events that have already occurred. The philosophy of development also aims to integrate three broad steams of developmental thought: mechanistic cognitive science, which focuses on physics and the processing of information (quadrants of objective/interobjective or behaviours/systems); organismic models, which have a biological base and view development as having (at least biological) importance (again, objective/interobjective-

150

Visser, Ken Wilber, pp.12-13, p. 258. 151 Ibid.,, pp.71-76, p.245. 152 Ibid., p.257. 153 Ibid., p.259. 154

Wilber, Integral Psychology, pp. 471-476. 155

37 behaviours/systems); and the narrative/contextualism approach, which interprets development as a "life story" related to its human meanings and value (subjective/intersubjective - experiences/culture).156 In this sense, the philosophy of development has at least the components of a partly integrative approach. Mark Antley takes this further and uses general systems theory to develop an integrative framework for the three streams of developmental thought, by demonstrating how the frameworks in each stream can be interpreted in terms of systems theory.157 He recognizes that each stream has value in describing and explaining reality, whether that stream uses the reductionist analysis of mechanism, or the holistic analysis of organicism and contextualism, and he entreats us to "dispense with the simplistic notion of a single, ideal developmental trajectory and embrace the rich complexity of the phenomenon of human development."158 Like Wilber's integral model, the philosophy of development emphasizes "the distinction between the logic of a model and the dynamic of a model. The logic of a model describes the various stages as a strictly linear sequence. The dynamic of a model examines how development actually occurs in reality. Since no one develops precisely according to the book, the dynamic aspect of the developmental process is also worthy of study."159 This mirrors Wilber's defense of the linear nature of the integral model, which he says is “just a map… not the territory.”160 Many of the earliest critics of Wilber's work and his developmental model were from within the field of transpersonal psychology, for example Stanislav Grof and Michael Washburn.161 Their approach was one of depth psychology, where spiritual development is seen as a return to a "state of unconscious union with the spiritual Self."162 For Wilber, while there is space in his developmental framework for a 'body' based prepersonal stage (which can 'look' like the spiritual Self when preconscious experience is 'relived' and interpreted), this higher spiritual self is only reached through a process of development. In that sense his is a height psychology rather than a depth psychology as posited by Grof and his ilk.163

As Frank Visser notes, Wilber's integral approach is premised on the idea of subjective and intersubjective dimensions and on development or evolution in each of those dimensions. Unless these aspects can stand up to scrutiny, the entire edifice falls.164 However, Visser examines some of the scientific views on consciousness, which reduce subjective experience to neurological and biochemical processes. Drawing on the work of the philosopher Huston Smith165 he concludes that "if only if only a materialist answer is

156

Ibid., p.261. 157

Mark W Antley, 2010, Toward a Metatheoretical Integration of Developmental Paradigms, Integral Review, July 2010, Volume 6, No. 3, pp.175-189.

158

Ibid., p.186. 159

Visser, Ken Wilber, pp. 261-262. 160

Wilber, 'Introduction to Integral theory and Practice', p.3. Visser, p. 285. 161

Visser, Ken Wilber, p.267-271. 162 Ibid., p. 271. 163 Ibid., p.271-273. 164 Ibid., p.244. 165

Wilber takes many of his perennialist labels and metaphors from Smith's works, for example the terminology of the four great links of the great Chain of Being (body, mind, soul, spirit). See Visser, p.244, pp. 248-249 and Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth: The Primordial Tradition, Harper and Row, 1976. Unlike the perennialists, Wilber has more respect for modern Western culture, which

38 acceptable, materialism is begging the question, since it claims that the individual is a material being because materialism is the only acceptable point of view."166 The use of sensory perception as the key source of scientific knowledge is fine for the physical sciences as visible matter is what those sciences seek to study. But, for those disciplines seeking to study and understand subjective experiences - or interiors - such an approach is "disastrous", and "there is as yet not one materialist theory of consciousness that does justice to subjective human experience." 167 However, it is worth noting that Wilber has continually increased the space in his theories that is allocated to the objective and interobjective. The exterior physical and the interior interpretive run in concert; while the interior cannot be reduced to physical processes alone, each quadrant arises together and each leaves its mark on the other.168 This arising of the four quadrants or dimensions of reality is what is called in EZI a tetra-arising or the "tetra-mesh."169 The other criticism apart from the hard or materialist science one is the rejection of hierarchies, and some of the more extreme forms of postmodernism.