tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1438289051411770399.post7175279059197035494..comments2024-03-25T08:59:38.714-06:00Comments on ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE: “I love whales and I don't want them to die”: Integral Ecology Chapter 9Timothy Mortonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05067377804366363020noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1438289051411770399.post-63936616357209156172011-08-03T01:44:52.179-05:002011-08-03T01:44:52.179-05:00Ken Wilber's famous "integral methodologi...Ken Wilber's famous "integral methodological pluralism" is more amenable to mangling and contortion than most epistemological hodgepodges are.<br /><br />I once attended one of their Integral Life Practice events, on scholarship. They asked what I was there for, and I responded from what I thought was the highest level I cared about: "I want to identify the origin of the AQAL map."<br /><br />You know the AQAL map with the four quadrants, it's probably all over Zimmerman's book. <br /><br />You are so right on to target level 1 of the whale-care hierarchy as the most desirable and highest! In the developmental system Zimmerman is working with, higher 'altitudes' of evaluation exhibit an individuality that transcends and includes the familiar destructive egoic sense that pervades early adolescent formal-operational thinking. Zimmerman doesn't get this, apparently. For Zimmerman, an integrated highly functional compassionate thinker can have no sense of humor, no idiosyncratic preferences. Zimmerman can't understand how an enlightened environmentalist can say "I don't like the way that whale just looked at me, but I don't want it to die...not just yet, anyway."<br /><br />The sobriety of most "integral" theory these days is disgusting. You will notice that Ken Wilber, one of the key actants of the movement, makes lots of jokes that strike his critics as low-altitude arrogance. Ken can be a very opinionated boyish centaur, willing to cut through layers of paper mache compassion en route to a higher view of a situation. Typically the strong indivuality of the resulting view is more robust for holding the flavor of its spontaneous framer. <br /><br />So, you are absolutely right that Zimmerman misses the boat, big time, in his whale discourse analysis. The fact is that higher altitudes are not less egoic. <br /><br />When Guatama reaches enlightenment, the story goes, he shows up to his disciples carrying a seed in his hand. Haphazardly he plants the seed in some soil, looks up, and says something like "I really have no idea where best to plant the seed!" The idea, as I see it, is that higher stages are characterized by individuated presence, by awareness of maximal possibility, and by profound idiosyncratic actions that result from radical uncertainty.<br /><br />The integral theorists are way to focused on rational coordination and discursive segmentation to handle an earth with lots of awakened worlds inside it.cameron.keyshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16256061757665279972noreply@blogger.com