A startling new role for Wilber’s integral model; or how I learned to stop worrying and love perennialism – A response to Abramson

Abstract

Critics of Ken Wilber’s work are unfailingly charged with misunderstanding his views. In a recent paper by John Abramson (2014), published in this journal under the title, ‘The misunderstanding and misinterpretation of key aspects of Ken Wilber’s work in Hartelius and Ferrer’s (2013) assessment,’ Hartelius and Ferrer’s paper, ‘Transpersonal Philosophy: The Participatory Turn,’ appearing as Chapter 10 in The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Transpersonal Psychology, has met with this same charge. This paper argues that what Abramson (2014) has done is (1) to attempt to inflate semantic issues into the appearance of substantive ones, (2) to conflate Wilber’s assertions with the logical arguments that would establish those assertions, (3) to critique the authors for using points made by Wilber himself, (4) to subtly assert the rightful primacy of Wilber’s model by implying that any debate about it should take place on the territory of its assumptions, (5) to lodge complaints that the authors have failed to co-create some compromise between participatory and integral approaches, and (6) to hold out the prospect that a full account of Wilber’s work would ‘comprehensively dispel’ (p.4) the misunderstandings to which Hartelius and Ferrer (2013) are allegedly subject. Through this retort, Abramson (2014) has attempted to create the appearance that Wilber’s work remains a viable framework for enterprises such as transpersonal psychology – something that seems highly unlikely. This paper further argues that Wilber does not offer a grand scholarly theory of everything, but a problematic metaphysical theory that may nevertheless continue to serve a limited popular audience.