Wilber on Postmodernism

Wilber's View

Wilber's reading of postmodernism is deliberately two-handed — a real achievement with a real derailment, not a simple verdict either way. The achievement: postmodernism at its best is an expression of early vision-logic, and its core claims — constructivism (the world is interpreted, not just perceived), contextualism (truths are context-dependent), and integral-aperspectivism (no single context is finally privileged, so a plurality of views is appropriate) — are genuine truths, not relativist noise. Historically, he frames postmodernity's task as completing what modernity started: modernity's real achievement was differentiating the Big Three (art, morals, science) so each could develop on its own terms; postmodernity's task is to integrate what modernity differentiated, without regressing to the premodern fusion where one domain (usually religion) dictated to the others.

The derailment, on his account, is that pluralistic relativism is a stage of vision-logic's development, not its endpoint — and much of academic postmodernism got stuck there. Having rightly attacked rigid universal claims, deconstructive postmodernism turned the same corrosive suspicion on any claim to a wider, more integrative truth, including genuinely higher, postpluralistic ones — attacking not just what came before pluralism but what should come after it too. Wilber's diagnosis of where that leads is blunt: not liberation but nihilism (no view can be trusted, so none is worth building) and narcissism (with no shared truth left to orient by, the isolated self becomes the only remaining reference point) — the same dissociation he elsewhere calls collapsing the Big Three into the "Big One" of it-language, just from the opposite ideological direction.

In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

"The truths of postmodernism include constructivism… contextualism… and integral-aperspectivism."

As I suggested in those publications, the truths of postmodernism include constructivism (the world is not just a perception but an interpretation); contextualism (all truths are context-dependent, and contexts are boundless); and integral-aperspectivism (no context is finally privileged, so an integral view should include multiple perspectives; pluralism; multi-culturalism). All of those important truths can be derived from the beginning stages of postformal vision-logic, and postmodernism at its best is an elucidation of their profound importance.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, Preface to the Second Edition

"Postmodernism often degenerated into the nihilism and narcissism for which it is now so well known…"

Having heroically developed beyond a rigid universal formalism, it became suspicious of any universals at all, and thus it tended to fight the emergence of universal integralism with the same ferocity that it deconstructed all previous systems. It turned its critical guns not just on pre-pluralistic stages (which was appropriate), but also on post-pluralistic stages (which was disastrous)… Postmodernism often degenerated into the nihilism and narcissism for which it is now so well known.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, Preface to the Second Edition

"What is required… is not a retreat to a predifferentiated state… what is required is the integration of the Big Three."

What is required, of course, is not a retreat to a predifferentiated state (that's not even possible, although retro-Romantics often make the recommendation); what is required is the integration of the Big Three. And that, indeed, is what might be called the central problem of postmodernity: now that science, art, and morality have been irreversibly differentiated, how does one integrate them?

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 11, "Brave New World"

"Deconstruction… lands it squarely in nihilism, whereas the study of nested truths leads not to nihilism but to Emptiness…"

The study of holarchy, in short, is the study of nested truths. Deconstruction in its American form simply takes the photographic negative of that and declares any approach (other than its own) to be the study of nested lies, which is precisely why that attitude lands it squarely in nihilism, whereas the study of nested truths leads not to nihilism but to Emptiness, the creative plenum of the Kosmos.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 14, "The Unpacking of God"

See Also

• vision-logic — the cognitive stage Wilber credits postmodernism's real insights to
• big-three — the differentiation/dissociation framing his critique of postmodernism relies on
• pre-trans-fallacy — a related confusion he finds among Eco-Romantic critics of modernity
• flatland — the outcome he thinks deconstructive postmodernism shares with scientific materialism, from the opposite direction