I have been studying Ken Wilber almost as long as he has been writing.  I remember the long wait for Sex, Ecology, Spirituality and the awe with which the 4-Quadrant model of the Kosmos struck me.  It both opened up grand new vistas for me, as well as planting my feet firmly on the ground.  I have used this map from its inception, use it today, and find it eloquent and adequate in dividing up all of Samsara into 4 tidy realms.  While I have seen some merit to some of the criticism directed at the AQAL model, the pertinent criticisms seem to have been incorporated, while the less sincere or downright bogus ones have been sloughed off or discredited as they should have been.

So, while I have no criticism of the AQAL model in its intended purpose, I must confess to a marked irritation whenever I see in print the I, We, and It equated, related, or otherwise compared to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.  I, We, and It are clearly realms of knowing and being whose only opposites are their nonexistence, where the Good, the True, and the Beautiful are values whose opposites are the Bad, the False, and the Ugly.  The Good/Bad, True/False, Beautiful/Ugly opposites all fit handily into the 4-Quadrant model as I perceive it.  If I try to force the Good/I, True/It, Beautiful/We equation, I have to give up on my favorite poet, Walt Whitman, who so bravely owns, "I am as much evil as I am good", as well as one of my other favorite poets, Robert Service, whose poem Laughter has picked me up more than once when I've been knocked down - pre and post AQAL cognition:

Laughter

Robert Service

I Laugh at Life: its antics make for me a giddy games,
Where only foolish fellows take themselves with solemn aim.
I laugh at pomp and vanity, at riches, rank and pride;
At social inanity, at swager, swank and side.
At poets, pastry-cooks and kings, at folk sublime and small,
Who fuss about a thousand things that matter not at all;
At those who dream of name and fame, at those who scheme for pelf. . . .
But best of all the laughing game - is laughing at myself.

Some poet chap has labelled man the noblest work of God:
I see myself a charlatan, a humbug and a fraud.
Yea, 'spite of show and shallow wit, and sentimental drool,
I know myself a hypocrite, a coward and a fool.
And though I kick myself with glee profoundly on the pants,
I'm little worse, it seems to me, than other human ants.
For if you probe your private mind, impervious to shame,
Oh, Gentle Reader, you may find you're much about the same.

Then let us mock with ancient mirth this comic, cosmic plan;
The stars are laughing at the earth; God's greatest joke is man.
For laughter is a buckler bright, and scorn a shining spear;
So let us laugh with all our might at folly, fraud and fear.
Yet on our sorry selves be spent our most sardonic glee.
Oh don't pay life a compliment to take is seriously.
For he who can himself despise, be surgeon to the bone,
May win to worth in others' eyes, to wisdom in his own. [end]

With a predisposed, prefixed vision on the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in equation with the AQAL model, one is very likely to either be blind to, or at least misinterpret the Bad, the False, and/or the Ugly when it's staring one right in the face.  (By the way, is there some explanation on this site of how the creep Marc Gafni slithered back amongst the ISC fold, and seemingly right to the top? Would someone point it out to me?  I took on a primordial disgust toward this person the moment he reached across and helped himself to a swig of Wilber's Perrier on one of the videos.  It didn't surprise me in the least that he got nailed with the sex crimes that he did.  But if he's been through some equal Hell through which he's put other lives, and has done his (peer reviewed) pennance, I'd like to know about it).  It has been very important to my own personal existence to be acutely aware, expectant, and even acceptant of the opposite sides of the Good, the True, and Beauty coins, and my own use of the AQAL map interprets just fine the eternal opposites of all coins.  At times, it is very important to call a spade a spade, and act on this perception in an unequivocable, unmeditative, decisive and definitive manner.

I don't visit this site as much as I used to, as much as I'd like.  Since the map is not the territory, and the territory seems to me to be quickly turning into New World Order, Nazi shit, I've put pontification mostly aside for the immediate moment in a woeful regression to a blue, or even red state in defence of my means of continuing survival.  I hope the rest of you folks aren't caught in meditation when your bank accounts are closed and your mortgages are called in.  By all accounts (even Wilber's), there are nasty times ahead.

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.

hi bh,

a young arkie, her husband away in the service and come to southern california, no doubt, to be nearer to him, as well as to see something different from arkansas, recounted the robert service poem this comes from to me and a couple of nephews of hers, when i was but a teenager and thought that poetry was only what i was served up in school. i can thank her for giving me a more integral perspective of poetry. anyway, thanks for reminding me of her delightful recitation.

perhaps i should also thank you for divulging some of my own doubts and misgivings in my darker moments. since we've both been closely following ken wilber, although, in my case, for just seven and a half years, it might help to see what he has had to say.

in the chapters from 'the many faces of terrorism' that he's thus far made available, he acknowledges our concerns and says that things could very well go 'down the toilet', but he remains, if i understand him correctly, cautiously optimistic.

the basis for his optimism is reflected, i think, in what you are holding up to the light of pessimism, if you will only choose to see it in a different light. as he likes to quote michael murphy, evolution is not some nice linear progression wherein everything is getting better and better, but involves alot of meandering about in directions we don't always want to go.

but if we step back and view it from '50,000 ft', we can indeed see eros at work. of course, there are other ways of seeing eros as well, but this is the one we want to view the Good, the True and the Beautiful with.

as i think you correctly point out, what tended to go unspoken was the Bad, the False and the Ugly. as well as i can tell, wilber fully recognizes this. he talks, for instance, about the 'miracle of We'. part of what makes it a miracle is that it doesn't happen that often. mutual misunderstandings are much more likely than understandings. for all i know, i've misunderstood you.

so why doesn't he just ditch misleading terms such as the Good, the True and the Beautiful? perhaps 'it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness', and to recognize that plato, in this case, was right in so far as he was able to see, and partly because of him, we can now see farther, and, like whitman, we can embrace much more than earlier ages could.

---

hi, again, schalk,

i have to admit i can be confrontational, but i think you've got me beat. the crucial question, in my mind, is whether we are trying to build something and not just tearing what we can down.

schalk:

It is a simple idea of not trying to say something is X and then squashing it into a hole that is meant for Y.

this obviously depends on the perspective one is taking. what might be apples and oranges for one person can easily be fruit for another. i can understand why you and, i guess, bh might want to distinguish between apples and oranges. but isn't there also some value in considering them as fruit? think of the other extreme: someone might take offense that you do not distinguish between a macintosh and a jonathan, and so on, further and further. pluralism, pushed too far, can easily become pluralitis.

put in another way, both deep structure and surface structure have their respective value. integrally speaking, we want both. we don't want to get lost in one or the other.

an integral approach, of course, seeks to include all perspectives, while noting that some are better than others. in this case, i feel that the quadrants, particularly as wilber has explicated them in terms of perspectives, are the best thing anyone has come up with so far. but i would not want to exclude plato's perspective. it still has alot of value not even recognized by flatlanders, whatever their altitude.

schalk:

You have misunderstood BH. He is saying that I, We, and It are perspectives of knowing, and that G,T, and B are values and they cannot be aligned without pulling some sleight of hand.

again, it depends on what perspective you wish to take. one possibility is to see an evolution of consciousness, with plato's contribution anticipating to some extent wilber's. he conflated, of course, the UR with the LR. he was unable to differentiate between individual and collective, interior and exterior, although he at least vaguely intuited these distinctions in his notions of the Good, the True and the Beautiful.

you can call the one values, and the other perspectives, if you wish to emphasize their differences. but there is clearly an evolutionary connection between them, imo, and when we value, say, the Good, aren't we, in effect, valuing the LL perspective?

We cannot let Ken Wilber be the big tit.

good point! although i might rephrase it somewhat. i confess i come from a largely liberal background, and i take it we both recognize that liberals have a habit, even into late age, of wanting to suck at one tit or another. the good side, i guess, is we want to keep growing, unlike conservatives, who typically want everyone to hurry up and grow up so they can stop growing for the rest of their lives.

schalk, i've written so much about this in the past, it's probably best to just suggest you look at some of that, rather than repeating myself. besides the many messages i've posted here on the multiplex, there are a few i posted at the yahoo site for seattle integral, for instance, prior to the inauguration of the multiplex. i continue to be very grateful for what wilber has done for me and others. i have built up a great deal of trust in him over the years. at the same time, i recognize that i alone am responsible for what i do and say.

---

Greetings Ralph:

I happen to believe that the single most important quality a person can nurture in this day and age of massive bullshit on every front is the ability to look closely with an open mind at everything and to be precise and fair when identifying the bad, the false, and the ugly. I get the sense that Hardin would agree.

 

Now Ralph:

Having said that...

I think the best critique of Hardin's comments goes like this:

The I, We, and It quadrants are not "equated" to the Beautiful, the Good, and the True. This is a false strawman.

The point that AQAL makes is that from the UL quadrant, events are seen and evaluated from the perspective of or on the basis of beauty, from the LL quadrant, events are seen and evaluated from the perspective of or on the basis of goodness, and from the UR and LR quadrants events are seen and evaluated from the perspective of or on the basis of truth.

AQAL theory is not saying that the UL is equated with beauty, but rather, the yardstick of beauty is the tool used to evaluate in the UL. Etc.

Are we in agreement?

"The point that AQAL makes is that from the UL quadrant, events are seen and evaluated from the perspective of or on the basis of beauty, from the LL quadrant, events are seen and evaluated from the perspective of or on the basis of goodness, and from the UR and LR quadrants events are seen and evaluated from the perspective of or on the basis of truth."

 

Hi Schalk.  I think that it is more accurate to say that in the UL quadrant, events are seen and evaluated based on a 1st person perspective.  This allows, for example, the fact that developmental psychologists are doing their work from 2nd and 3rd person perspectives yet using the primary data of a 1st person perspective.  This also allows for the fact that 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person are fundamental perspectives.  Every other perspective that has ever been taken is necessarily in the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person before it is anything else.  So, beauty is a feeling or discovery or judgement or value that is based upon a 1st person perspective and not vice versa.   

The aqal model is fundamental to the good the true and the beautiful but since they play such an important role in the history of western thought it is a good idea to point out exactly why they have never gone away and also why none can be reduced to one of the others.

Also, consider how one decides whether something is ugly, bad, or false.  Obviously those qualities exist only as opposites to that which is beautiful, good, and true and vice versa.  Or you could say that there is a spectrum with beauty on one end and ugliness at the other etc...  However, it seems as though human beings tend towards beauty over ugliness, the good over the bad, and the true over the false.  In other words, the good the true and the beautiful are valued ideals held in high regard by humans everywhere whereas the bad the false and the ugly are simply judgements we make based upon comparison to those ideals.  It doesn't even make sense to say that a person values the bad over the good.  If that's the case then what they perceive as the "bad" is their "good".  Or, for someone to say, "I prefer that which is ugly to that which is beautiful," is just a way of saying, "I have an aesthetic preference for "ugly"over "beautiful", which amounts to saying, "I find that which is "ugly" to be "beautiful." 

 

Dear Schalk and Ralph,

I'm very interested in this topic and I want to talk with you both some more but I am leaving for a 1 week meditation retreat today.  Sorry to post and run.  I might get a chance to check back once more today but I'm not sure.  Otherwise I'll check back when my retreat is over and see if this conversation is still active.

 

Take care,

 

Jeffrey 

Jeffrey:

You said: "I think that it is more accurate to say that in the UL quadrant, events are seen and evaluated based on a 1st person perspective."

OK, so what you are saying is that in the quadrant that is defined as the 1st person perspective (of the interior) events are seen based on a 1st person perspective? Hard to disagree with that :) Tautologies are beautiful, aren't they? They are also ... true! And truth ... is a good thing!

Maybe we could also say that, by definition:

the eye that the UL sees with ...

sees through an aesthetic lens ...

that identifies events based on their degree of beauty;

and, the eye that the LL sees with sees through the lens of justice and ethics that identifies events based on their degree of goodness, and the eye that the R quads see with sees through the lens of truth which identifies events based on the degree to which they are true.

You said: "It doesn't even make sense to say that a person values the bad over the good.  If that's the case then what they perceive as the "bad" is their "good"."

Reminds me of:

How can you identify a masochist? 

He is the guy who loves cold showers, so he takes a hot one! 

And of course, the sadist is the guy who then comes into the bathroom and is really nice to the masochist.

But in being nice to the masochist, the sadist is no longer acting according to his nature (as a sadist who is cruel), since being nice to a masochist actually brings pleasure to the masochist, and as such, it is not cruelty ... the masochist.  

You said: "It doesn't even make sense to say that a person values the bad over the good.  If that's the case then what they perceive as the "bad" is their "good".  Or, for someone to say, "I prefer that which is ugly to that which is beautiful," is just a way of saying, "I have an aesthetic preference for "ugly"over "beautiful", which amounts to saying, "I find that which is "ugly" to be "beautiful." 

Agreed. The only thing that makes sense is to say that "what I find to be beautiful is beautiful."

This brings up the million dollar question: are there are a priori principles governing beauty or goodness or truth? Or more importantly, can they be explained and shown through evidence to be governing principles?

The notion of perversion - doesn't that seem to suggest that one person is regarding what is "really" ugly or bad as being beautiful or good?  

In this recent article in Slate, the author suggests that symmetry in architecture is one such principle. Are there any others that can be defended from a worldcentric standpoint?  

http://www.slate.com/id/2191776/