Escalas de la variabilidad climática

As we have seen, the quadrants can be collapsed into a simplified version that Wilber calls the Big Three: I, We and It; the Beautiful, the Good, and the True; or arts, morals and science. This is a useful summary, as both of the Right-Hand quadrants represent objective exteriors, either individual (“it”) or collective (“its”).220 These realms have always been present throughout the ages, evolving and arising together. However each dominant worldview, or as I will label it, 'age of discourse', has its own special relationship to

218

Jack H Buchanan and Douglas J Reinemann, ‘Critical Realist Integral Methodological Pluralism’, Journal of Integral theory and Practice, 2013, 8(3&4), pp. 317-325.

219

Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, p. x. 220

49 the quadrants, both in terms of if or how they were differentiated and in terms of which quadrants were privileged or dominant. In premodern times, the dominant view was a type of merging or amalgam between the subjective and objective realms, “where arts and science and religious morals were all indiscriminately fused.”221 During the development of the modern era and the Enlightenment paradigm these realms became fully differentiated, and objective approaches to understanding the world were privileged. This dominance, however, engendered a move towards a postmodern world, where the subjective realms were rescued. It is on the modern and postmodern that I will focus, and particularly how these different ages of discourse relate to the development of Wilber’s theory.

Wilber points out how the Big Three “are Sir Karl Popper’s three worlds – objective (it), subjective (I), and cultural (we).222 The Big three are also Jürgen Habermas’s three validity claims or areas of objective knowledge (it), subjective "aesthetic judgment" or sincerity (I), and "moral-practical insight" or intersubjective justness (we).223 _{The three are also present in Kant’s immensely influential trilogy – the}

Critique of Pure Reason (objective science- it), the Critique of Practical Reason (morals - we), and the Critique of Judgment (aesthetic judgment and art - I).224 The basic Enlightenment paradigm, or the general thrust of modernity, was about reducing the subjective or intersubjective into objective maps or descriptions of reality; in effect thinking that “all of reality could be captured in it-language, which alone was supposed to be ‘really real’” and reducing “all the Left-Hand dimensions to their Right-Hand correlates”.225 The dialectic of progress means that every new level or stage brings both good news and bad news, so this reductionism had drawbacks. In this case the bad news is the so-called ‘disaster of modernity’, which was the impetus for the development of postmodernism and a swathe of environmental critiques. The development of modernity also meant that the Big Three were for the first time fully differentiated; there was no longer a fusion of or confusion between these domains.226 Wilber exemplifies how, before the maturing of the modern era, differentiation between the subjective and intersubjective or cultural domains was absent: “if you disagreed with Church religion, with the cultural background, then you were not just a heretic, you were also a political criminal – you could be tried by the Church for heresy and by the State for treason, because these had not yet been differentiated.”227 Modernity also meant that practitioners in the I, We and It domains could develop further knowledge and understanding in these realms without repercussions. Hence the “extraordinary differentiation of the Big Three - the differentiation of arts, morals and science - has been called, by Weber and Habermas, the dignity of modernity…You could look through

221

Ibid., p. 165. 222

Karl Popper, 1978, ‘Three Worlds’, The Tanner Lecture on Human Values, Delivered at The University of Michigan, April 7, 1978, tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/p/popper80.pdf, accessed 8 May 2017.

223

Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, p.4. 224

Wilber, A Brief History of Everything, p. 164. 225

Ibid., p. 165. 226

Ibid. 227

50 Galileo’s telescope without being burned at the stake. And all of that was good news indeed.”228 This is not to say that this dignity came all at once and stayed in place or that this good news aspect has taken root in all corners of the earth even today. In many ways, the project of modernity is not complete, even though we can recognize its dignities, its limitations and the bad news it engendered.

Wilber points out that evolution occurs through differentiation followed by integration. Modernity differentiated the Big Three, but it did not integrate them. 229 It wasn’t just differentiation that occurred, but also disassociation. The interior realms of the individual and society (the I and the we, or self and culture), despite being granted a small part in the play, were generally sidelined to the wings while science took most of the curtain calls:

The great and undeniable advances in the empirical sciences from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment made it appear that all of reality could be approached and described in… objective scientific terms… The Big Three were reduced to the ‘Big One’ of scientific materialism, scientific exteriors and objects and systems. And so the it-approaches began to colonize the I and the we domains… so all of reality began to look like a bunch of its, with no subjects, no consciousness, no selves, no morals, no virtues, no values, no interiors, no depths.230

The mapping of the objective “it” domains is a reasonable enough approach. After all, every holon has a Right-hand domain, and interior events in the Left-hand domains often have a Right-hand aspect that can be measured. The mapping of the objective world, as complex as it can be, is also frequently much more straightforward compared to the interpretation of the often murky interior world of self and culture.231 But this mapping or mirroring of a pre-given world left out “the mapmaker and the interiors altogether.”232 Such reductionism is critiqued by “new paradigm” theorists and environmental philosophers, who note that atomism, or what Wilber calls gross reductionism, was key to the Enlightenment, and that this can be remedied by a holistic or systems theory approach.233 However, Wilber contends that the dominant theme of the Enlightenment was not atomism or gross reductionism, but an interobjective systems approach, which he describes as subtle reductionism, or a great “’web of life’ conception.”234 This contention is debatable, but it is accurate to say that the Enlightenment was in the main about the mapping and representation of the Right-hand holarchies. It ignored the Left-hand holarchies as domains in their own right, collapsing them and all the other realms or quadrants into what Wilber calls the Big One, or flatland.235If we are to rescue the dignity of modernity then, we need to look beyond systems theory, as the overemphasis on this Right-hand holism or flatland is part of the problem.236 Indeed, it is just another form of reductionism: subtle reductionism.237 It might elegantly describe the physical and objective universe, but removes the value, the depth, the consciousness; or, if it recognizes that they exist at all, treats them at 228 Ibid. 229 Ibid., p. 167. 230

Ibid., p. 168, emphasis in original. 231 Ibid. 232 Ibid., p. 168. 233 Ibid. 234 Ibid., p. 169-170. 235 Ibid., p. 170. 236 Ibid. 237 Ibid., p. 171.

51 best as “merely subjective.” To move past the “disaster of modernity”, the disassociation of the quadrants, something is needed to integrate them. Wilber posits that this is the task of post-postmodernity (or reconstructive postmodernism): to try and get "some balance back into the picture, largely by trying to honor science and morals and aesthetics equally, and not simply reduce one to the other in an orgy of theoretical violence.238 Integral theory therefore builds on the postmodern project by emphasising the importance of the inner world of you and I, and the subjective rules and shared reasoning that creates culture. But it also preserves all that is best about modernity. Integral theory honours the advances in the understanding of our world brought about through the creation of objective and scientific maps of reality. And it also recognises that the differentiation between the subjective and objective worlds and the various disciplines, methodologies and practices in each realm that developed during modern times was a key point in human evolution.