A (Partial) Defense of AQAL Contingency

A (Partial) Defense of AQAL Contingency
by Chris Dierkes

According to Wilber, when Western Europe entered into the rational-modern stage, what we term The Enlightenment (itself a contingent enterprise), The West (contingently) chose to deny Spirit as a truth procedure, thereby repressing Spirit and sending Spirit underground, only to have it re-surface in the truth procedure of Science, creating a spiritually-charged Science (now scientism as an ideology). According to Wilber, this modern spiritually- supercharged Science proceeded to take over (“colonize”) the realms of Arts and Morals, leaving what Wilber terms flatland (or really scientistic-land). The world became dominated by the ideology of the market (“The Science of Economics”).

Now that account undoubtedly has a heavy idealistic flair (again recalling idealism does not mean optimism here but causality via consciousness). As per Daniel Anderson's writings, one can reject idealism wholesale in favor of materialism. As such, one would therefore (like Daniel has) criticize Wilber's narrative philosophical reconstruction on historical materialist grounds against Wilber's more idealistic position. I'm not a historical materialist, but I appreciate the consistency of that criticism nonetheless.

In contrast I find the notion of Michael's critique of Wilber's view as having a teleological necessity to be ultimately unfair to Wilber's actual work, as shown above. Again one may not accept his presuppositions of levels, the quadrants (especially including consciousness as a fundamental dimension of existence), but contingency is radically built into his philosophy. Most especially so in his (so-called Wilber-5), post-metaphysical work.

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