Ken Wilber  

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Kenneth Earl Wilber Jr. (b. January 31, 1949, Oklahoma City, USA), is an American integral thinker and author. Working outside the academic mainstream, he has drawn on a variety of disciplines including psychology, sociology, philosophy, mysticism, postmodernism, science and systems theory to form what he calls an integral theory of consciousness. He is a leading proponent of the integral movement and founded the Integral Institute in 1998.

Wilber's conception of spiritual evolution and psychological development draws on Aurobindo, Adi Da, Andrew Cohen, Jean Gebser, the great chain of being, German idealism, Erich Jantsch, Jean Piaget, Abraham Maslow, Erik Erikson, Lawrence Kohlberg, James Mark Baldwin, Jürgen Habermas, Howard Gardner, Clare W. Graves, Robert Kegan and Spiral Dynamics.

Wilber's four quadrants

Each holon, or unit of reality that is both a whole and a part of a larger whole, has an interior and an exterior. It also exists as an individual and (assuming more than one of these entities exists) as a collective. Observing the holon from the outside constitutes an exterior perspective on that holon. Observing it from the inside is the interior perspective, and so forth. If you map these four perspectives into quadrants, you have four quadrants, or dimensions (these are unrelated to the three spatial dimensions).

To give an example of how this works, consider four schools of social science. Freudian psychoanalysis, which interprets people's interior experiences, is an account of the interior individual (or, in the diagram, the upper-left) quadrant. B. F. Skinner's behaviorism, which limits itself to the observation of the behavior of organisms, is an exterior individual (upper-right) account. Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics interprets the collective consciousness of a society, and is thus an interior plural (lower-left) perspective. Capitalism economic theory examines the external behavior of a society (lower-right).

The right sides of the quadrants are concerned with empiric observation — what does it do? The left sides of the quadrants focus on interpretation — what does it mean? Wilber contends that modern times evidence a pathological separation from healthy evolution due to a near-complete focus on the right sides, with the denial of the left sides as having no meaning being a fundamental cause of society's malaise.

All four pursuits – psychoanalysis, behaviorism, philosophical hermeneutics and Marxism – offer complementary, rather than contradictory, perspectives. It is possible for all to be correct and necessary for a complete account of human existence. Wilber has integrated these four areas of knowledge through an acknowledgement of the four fundamental dimensions of existence. Further, these four perspectives are equally valid at all levels of existence.