Long term readers would know that I often write my blog posts in an exploratory fashion. Especially with series of posts such as this one, I set out to answer a question or explore a topic as opposed to having a position already worked out in advance. One of the things that happens semi-regularly when I do this is that I’ll get a key part of the answer to a particular topic from a reader.
A prime example of that was back in my Age of the Orphan series of posts. In that series, I had set out to explore and define the Orphan archetype in more detail. A huge breakthrough came when a commenter (h/t Austin) referred me to the work of Rene Guenon. From Guenon I got two concepts that became crucial to the Orphan analysis and which led directly to what ended up becoming my most recent book The Universal State of America.
Firstly, there was the Exoteric/Esoteric distinction, which has a long tradition in theology, Guenon’s primary concern in his writings. I had been focused on the Esoteric (psychological) dimensions in my archetypal analysis but what Guenon made me realise was that the Esoteric and the Exoteric are two sides of the same coin and to examine one without the other was an error.
The second big idea I got from Guenon, which is central to the Orphan archetype, was initiation. Initiation also needs to be understood as having an Esoteric and an Exoteric dimension and this distinction became key to my Orphan analysis. But initiation also implies a second archetype: the Elder. The Elder is the one giving the initiation. The Orphan is the one receiving it. This gave me another crucial insight into the archetypes which is that they must be understood in pairs (Child-Parent, Orphan-Elder). All these became core concepts that drove the analysis of what ended up becoming my most recent book.
Another important referral I received from a reader was during another series of posts this time exploring the Devouring Mother archetype. I was following an idea introduced by Jung in his book Answer to Job where he suggested that the incorporation of the feminine in the modern world was the expansion of the Christian trinity to a quaternity.
The referral in this case was from a commenter named William and was to Jean Gebser’s work The Ever Present Origin. It turned out that Gebser and Jung were both trying to address the same problem that Jan Smuts and a number of other thinkers at that time were writing about which was how to heal a perceived rift that had opened in western civilisation. I’ve mentioned that Descartes often gets the blame for that rift and yet what both Jung and Gebser had noted was that the Catholic Church was involved too.
What Smuts and other holists posit is that even base matter like atoms and molecules have a tiny bit of “mind” in them and that this mind is the precursor to the more obvious forms of mind in living organisms. This idea had been explicitly stamped out by the Catholic Church many centuries earlier. The Church had ruled matter to be “inert” and had persecuted those, such as the alchemists, who explored any ideas to the contrary. It was only once the Church’s influence had waned sufficiently that thinkers could once again consider the idea that matter was not inert.
If we consider the point made a couple of posts ago that modern holism is the rediscovery of the ancient concept of the levels of being, it has two big differences from earlier versions of that idea. The first is that matter is now given full membership, so to speak, alongside the more traditional Esoteric ideas around spirit. The second is that the levels of being are not eternal Platonic forms but show evolution and change. A third difference that might not seem related at first was the one that Jung pointed out, which was that these changes corresponded with the rise of the modern feminist movement, and this was not arbitrary since matter had also traditionally been associated with the feminine.
All of these were the breadcrumbs I had been following ever since I realised that the pattern of dominance exercised in the modern West in recent decades followed the Devouring Mother archetype. What almost all these thinkers have in common is a concern with the idea of Wholeness, of trying to heal a perceived split in the western mind/soul. Inadvertently, I had stumbled onto the same pathway through my archetypal analysis.
But, I had also been on that pathway in another respect since I make extensive use of systems theory in my line of work and the systems theorists of the 20th century were also trying to incorporate the lessons of materialist science into a more holistic view. Without realising it, I have been practising a form of holism in a practical sense for more than a decade. No doubt it’s for all these reasons that’s Jan Smuts’ Holism and Evolution resonated with me so much.
But here is where the story takes a familiar twist because yet again I set out to write this series of posts in an exploratory fashion and yet again it is a referral from a reader (major hat tip to Jinasiri) which has unlocked new insights. This time the referral is to the work of Ken Wilber. As it turns out, Wilber was majorly influenced by both Smuts and Gebser. In fact, the breadcrumbs I have been following in the last four years were almost the same ones Wilber had discovered. The big difference is that he’s been following them for a lot longer; fifty years to be exact.
Even though I could see the relevance of Wilber from a quick overview of his work, I hadn’t intended to read him as part of this series of posts since I had other things planned. Sometimes, though, the universe has other ideas. I was doing an internet search for a related topic and what should pop up except a link to some of Wilber’s writing. I began reading and didn’t stop. Given that the topic of this series of posts was to try and figure out where my most recent book, The Universal State of America, fitted into the grand scheme of things, I have now found the definitive answer. It fits within Wilber’s Integral Theory. It’s fits so well, in fact, that I was astonished how many of the exact same conclusions I had drawn had already been covered by Wilber. (Even my Devouring Mother analysis is almost identical to what Wilber calls the Mean Green Meme).
These correspondences make a lot of sense since, from what I can tell, Wilber started in an almost identical place as myself with a focus on psychology and particularly on developmental psychology. For example, Wilber divides the human lifecycle into three parts: pre-personal, personal and spiritual. These map exactly onto the archetypal progression I have been using of Child (pre-personal), Orphan-Adult (personal) and Elder (spiritual).
Wilber then made the same connection that I did and it’s one that fits within the theory of holism. If humans are Wholes and they show developmental stages, then other Wholes should also show developmental structure over time. Wilber makes this explicit by using the concept of the holon (a Whole composed of parts that are also Wholes). Thus, Wilber’s integral theory seems to me to be a logical and rigourous expansion of Jan Smuts’ original idea of holism, which Smuts had always said was intended as an introduction.
I’ll be covering some of my main takeaways from what I’ve read of Wilber in the next few posts, but the concept of his that has given me the answer to the question that motivated this series of posts (where does my archetypal calculus concept fits into the larger schemes of thing?) is, I think, his most interesting idea. It’s called the AQAL framework and it revolves around two of the major concepts I have been working with in the last four years; namely, the Exoteric-Esoteric distinction I picked up from Rene Guenon and the individual-collective distinction I picked up mostly through Jung (collective unconscious). Combining the two gives four quadrants as follows:-
The four quadrants are four perspectives on any given holon. Smuts noted that every Whole had a Field and that the Field is just as important as the Whole itself. In Wilber’s quadrants, the Fields are covered in the lower row which is the collective axis while the upper row covers the individual. Thus, the holon concept combined with the four quadrants captures both the Whole-Part distinction within a Whole as well as the Whole-Field distinction that connects Wholes externally to their environment.
This scheme can be applied to any holon. We can look at an atom in its individual interior and exterior form as well as how the atom connects with others from interior and exterior perspectives. The same is true of molecules, cells and organisms. By the time we get to humans, the interior individual form is our first person subjective experience while our body is the external, objective view. Humans also belong to collectives (culture, society, civilisation) which can be analysed from interior and exterior points of view.
The upper right (UR) quadrant of the AQAL diagram relates to what we generally call modern materialist science. This is the view of the world concerned with what can be known via the exterior aspects of individual holons. The lower right (LR) view is also concerned with the exterior aspects but looks at how holons fit into systems. This is where the systems thinking, cybernetics and ecology movements of the 20th century belong.
The upper left (UL) quadrant is the one we all know intimately since it’s about our immediate sensations and impressions of ourselves and the world. The lower left (LL) is about what we can generally call culture but importantly, at least from my point of view, it includes the Jungian concepts I have been using extensively such as the collective unconscious and the societal unconscious (the specific things pushed out of the collective consciousness). Toynbee and Spengler’s cyclical analysis of history also belongs in the LL quadrant, especially Spengler who was concerned to find the shared meanings that unified a culture.
We can see, then, that the quadrant model is a map and a very useful one at that. Although I didn’t know it at the time since I hadn’t read Wilber, my first book on corona, The Plague Story, was actually an attempt at an integral analysis since it aimed to incorporate perspectives from all four quadrants. Meanwhile, my book on the Devouring Mother belongs firmly in the LL quadrant since it focuses on collective psychology.
Thus, Wilber’s map has taught me something about my own work over the past four years. What about the theme of this series of posts, the archetypal calculus?
I can now see that my archetypal calculus concept is actually the beginnings of the same move that Wilber himself made of searching for a link between the individual and collective axis not just at the psychological level but at all the levels of being. It turns out that I have been inching towards a holistic or integral analysis without knowing what to call it (interestingly, Wilber himself sometimes uses the term integral calculus to refer to his concepts).
All of this would have made me an ardent supporter of the quadrant model but there’s one more brilliant trick that Wilber pulls that adds even more clarity to the situation. To the four quadrants he added an inside/outside property. The argumentation for this gets a little technical but it turns out that the concept of archetype provides an ideal example to explain the importance of this property.
The UL quadrant is all about the perceptions, sensations, emotions and thoughts which we experience directly and immediately throughout our lives. In Wilber’s language, this is the inside view of the interior individual perspective. But there is also an outside view of the interior individual perspective. The outside view attempts to find structure in the ceaseless flow of interior reality. One of the ways to do that is to divide the flow into archetypal phases such as Child, Orphan and Adult. The reason this works is because there are archetypally distinct interior patterns that hold for everybody during those phases of life.
Now, it turns out we can do the exact same thing with the collective interior quadrant (LL). Recall that this quadrant is about culture in the broadest sense of the term and therefore includes language, myths and stories, shared emotional and psychological states and anything involving shared meaning and experience. It was the comparative scholarship of the 19th and 20th centuries which, perhaps for the first time in history, had enough cross-cultural and historical data and enough scholarly rigor to attempt to find the structures that were at play in culture. Thus, there was an explosion of interest in linguistics, anthropology, comparative mythology, comparative theology, comparative history and others. All of these were predicated on the outside perspective of collective interior reality (culture). All looked to find structure in the flow of culture. Both Freud and Jung also worked in this space by extending psychology into the collective domain.
It was the connection between UL and LL that I made in my book The Universal State of America and that’s why I made such heavy use of scholars such as Joseph Campbell, Arnold van Gennep, Freud, Jung, Spengler and Toynbee. My archetypal calculus attempts to connect the outside view of the individual interior with the outside view of the collective interior. As mentioned earlier, this was the same move that Wilber had also made in his career and we’ll talk about his adoption of the concept of spiral dynamics in a future post.
When you posit a theory that is an abstraction of other theories, that’s called a metatheory. Thus, my archetypal calculus is a metatheory, so is Wilber’s integral theory and so is Smuts’ holism. It turns out, however, that metatheories also fit into the quadrant model and the reason is because theories always must take the outside perspective. In my opinion, a big part of the reason that the quadrant model is so valuable is because it reminds us of what we are apt to forget which is that we are always taking a specific perspective on the world.
When creating theories, we are always working on the outside perspective and when the theories come together we get excited and we might even start to believe that the model we have constructed is reality itself. That is an occupational hazard of creating theories. The quadrant model reminds us of that hazard by making clear that no theory, no outside perspective, can ever reduce or eliminate the first person inside perspective.
But things get more meta than that because the integral and holistic model also allows for first person interior perspectives that include theoretical models. A person who has internalised the lessons of integral theory and who incorporates those ideas into their view of the world now has a different first person perspective than they would otherwise have. Such a person reacts differently to phenomena they perceive in the world. The same is true of any other worldview, of course, and so the quadrant model also allows for the phenomena whereby our model of the world actually determines our first person understanding of the world. In short, it makes culture explicit while not losing sight of the fact that culture always takes place in the “real world” denoted by the right hand side of the quadrant diagram.
The quadrant model, therefore, serves as a reminder to all theorists to be very careful of, to put it colloquially, believing your own bullshit. In a more technical sense, what happens is that the theorist loses touch with the other quadrants that seemingly do not affect their theory. The theorist’s UL quadrant, their personal experience of the world, can be completely overwhelmed by their theory. They see everything only through that lens.
One of the seeming side effects of this tendency to believe that one’s model of the world is reality itself is a pessimism that comes from thinking that all questions had been resolved and the machinery of the world discovered once and for all. That was a trap that the scientific materialists fell into. It is also a trap that the theorists who discovered the lower left quadrant in the 19th and 20th centuries fell into. Among the worst culprits was Spengler.
Spengler’s theory of history was very much focused around the outside perspective of the lower left quadrant. Like Toynbee and Vico, he attempted to give structure to this quadrant by identifying repetitive features and cycles that cultures and civilisations go through. Spengler asserted that the structures he had found were eternal and this led him into the pessimism of endlessly repeating cycles. We can find the same pessimistic attitude throughout history and at least as far back as the book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament:
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
This is the shadow side of the outside perspective on interior reality. That perspective can be liberating, as Wilber points out with typical American optimism. But it can also destroy life by denying all becoming, change and novelty. The solution is to get a life, which means to reconnect with the other quadrants and, perhaps most importantly, with the inside aspects of those quadrants.
Curiously enough, we see a similar pessimism today, albeit in a far more sophisticated form, in the theory of postmodernism. As it happens, Wilber’s quadrants provide the perfect way to understand that dynamic. In fact, the quadrant model allows us to see that Spengler and other thinkers of his ilk in the 19th and 20th centuries were, in fact, the precursors to postmodernism. This is a big part of the reason why we have been seeing a kind of neo-fascist authoritarianism rearing its ugly head in recent decades and it is no coincidence that this authoritarianism has been incubating among the scholarly class in the universities. We’ll go into detail about that in the next post.