Frank Visser and Integral Secularism

I couldn’t agree more with Visser when he argues that Integral Theory needs to be grounded in Secularism first and foremost. I’ll link his Integral World essay below but explain the gist of it here as far as I understand it. 

But first one has to have a brief overview of Wilber’s oeuvre. Wilber, from a western philosophical position is a Neo-Hegelian and see’s the universe as having directed purpose and telos which he calls eros which drives evolution. There is so much wrong with this view that I won’t get into it in a brief blogpost but Visser has spend a great deal of his life correctly deconstructing Wilber’s views on science and correcting them. Wilber, is also an advocate for eastern theories of enlightenment and the most prominent advocate of neo-vedanta non-dual philosophy. 

I’ll briefly note here that as an advocate for Neo-Schopenhauerian thinking, I, too, take issue with Wilber and Hegel, but I fuse the Nag Hammadi, Gnosticism, and modern computer simulation theory into Schopenhauer’s model and have come up with my own idiosyncratic belief system which is consistent with a Kantian view of enlightenment--I can think for my bloody self damnit! 

At any rate, Visser, in his essay argues correctly that there is a great deal that Wilber gets right, and his model and map are exceedingly useful and beneficial as a way forward in organizing a complex and sophisticated world. I, too, once again, couldn’t agree more. BUT, the special privileging of certain schools of spiritual thinking has to go! My spiritual views are every bit as likely as Wilber’s to be true but there is simply no way to verify and demonstrate these kind of metaphysics. I’m far more modest and honest though in that all my philosophies when it comes to spirituality are framed as speculative and that goes to what? INTEGRITY!!! Who needs that, eh? 

Visser’s essay:

http://www.integralworld.net/visser125.html

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