Martin Heidegger

Wilber's View

Heidegger shows up in SES wearing several different hats, almost all of them approving. He's cited as a co-founder, with Dilthey and Weber, of the hermeneutic tradition Wilber leans on for interpreting culture "from within" — the idea that meaning is never simply read off a text or a ritual but always excavated against a background of unstated, pre-articulate understanding, "contexts within contexts within contexts." He's credited as a genuine "pioneer" of poststructuralism, in the specific sense that his Destruktion of rationalist ontology is the philosophical ancestor of what Derrida would later call deconstruction. And in one of the book's more personal passages, Wilber invokes Heidegger directly on mortality: dread, as Heidegger said, is the authentic response of the centauric (existential, vision-logic-capable) being — not fear of this or that, but the totality of one's being-in-the-world becoming present to itself as finite. Wilber also singles out Heidegger's notion of being-in-the-world as one of the postmodern era's real attempts at integration — an effort, alongside Gebser's integral-aperspectivism and Habermas's communicative action, to reweave what modernity had differentiated. The one place Wilber pulls back from unqualified endorsement is when Heidegger gets folded into the general list of Enlightenment critics (with Hegel, Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida) whose assault on modernity's "repressive side," in Wilber's view, too often ignores modernity's genuine accomplishments — the same "good news, bad news" charge he levels at the whole postmodern lineage.

In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

"Dread, as Heidegger said, is the authentic response of the existential (centauric) being"

As vision-logic adds up all the possibilities given to the mind's eye, it eventually reaches a dismal conclusion: personal life is a brief spark in the cosmic void… dread, as Heidegger said, is the authentic response of the existential (centauric) being, a dread that calls us back from self-forgetting to self-presence, a dread that seizes not this or that part of me (body or persona or ego or mind), but rather the totality of my being-in-the-world.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 7, "The Farther Reaches of Human Nature"

"The critique by Heidegger, Gebser" — the pre-articulate worldview beneath language

Linguistic structures aren't really that autonomous, because they exist only in the context of pre-articulate worldviews that use language without language ever registering that fact (the critique by Heidegger, Gebser).

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 2, "The Pattern That Connects"

"The last-named is also a 'pioneer' of poststructuralism"

He particularly focuses on Bergson, Husserl, and Heidegger, although he had some sharp criticisms of them as well (the last-named is also a "pioneer" of poststructuralism, and his notion of the Destruktion of rationalist ontology appears in Derrida as deconstruction).

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 5, "The Emergence of Human Nature"

"Heidegger's centauric being-in-the-world (also an attempt to reweave the fragments)"

This is the postmodern integrative vision we have mentioned often before, in connection with Gebser ("integral-aperspectival"), Habermas (whose theory of communicative action is specifically designed to integrate the Big Three), and Heidegger's centauric being-in-the-world (also an attempt to reweave the fragments).

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

See Also

• derrida — the deconstructionist Wilber credits Heidegger's Destruktion with anticipating
• postmodernism — the wider critique Heidegger gets folded into as an "antimodernist"
• flatland — the disenchanted, instrumental-rationality world Heidegger is cited (with Habermas, Horkheimer, Marcuse) as diagnosing
• vision-logic — the cognitive stage Wilber locates Heidegger's "authentic" being-toward-death within