The Marriage of Sense and Soul

In our frag­mented post­mod­ern world, we com­monly hold that sci­ence and reli­gion are in oppo­si­tion: sci­ence reveals truth; reli­gion cre­ates mean­ing. In The Mar­riage of Sense and Soul, Ken Wilber points to a deeper spir­i­tual state that rec­on­ciles sci­ence and reli­gion prac­tices under a sin­gle world­view. Wilber’s work elic­its extreme reac­tions, but it is easy to admire the spec­tac­u­lar sweep of his goal, which is no less then a com­plete clas­si­fi­ca­tion of all human knowl­edge and arrival at a new “Inte­gral” world­view. Even more remark­able, he offers a method­ol­ogy for this inte­gra­tion. The essence of his approach is to accept that all the­o­ries and peo­ple have some­thing valid to offer.

In his for­ward to Wilber’s Eye of the Spirit, Jack Crit­ten­den expertly describes Wilber’s three-step method, which begins by sim­ply retreat­ing to a level of gen­er­al­iza­tion at which the var­i­ous con­flict­ing approaches actu­ally agree with one another:

Take, for exam­ple, the world’s great reli­gious tra­di­tions: Do they all agree that Jesus is God? No. So we must jet­ti­son that. Do they all agree that there is a God? That depends on the mean­ing of “God.” Do they all agree on God, if by “God” we mean a Spirit that is in many ways unqual­i­fi­able, from the Bud­dhists’ Empti­ness to the Jew­ish mys­tery of the Divine to the Chris­t­ian Cloud of Unknow­ing? Yes, that works as a generalization-what Wilber calls an “ori­ent­ing gen­er­al­iza­tion” or “sturdy conclusion.”

In the sec­ond step, Wilber then sys­tem­at­i­cally arranges these eclec­tic, often rival sys­tems of truths (e.g. empir­i­cal sci­ence and reli­gion), into chains or net­works of inter­lock­ing con­clu­sions. He ask, What coher­ent sys­tem would in fact incor­po­rate the great­est num­ber of these truths? The answer is the “inte­gral sys­tem,” an inclu­sive world­view that Wilber has elab­o­rated in his many books.

In the final, third step, Wilber uses that inclu­sive world­view to crit­i­cize the nar­row view of each of the con­tribut­ing approaches. He crit­i­cizes not their truths, which are part of the broad inte­gral sys­tem, merely their par­tial nature.

As Crit­ten­den points out, it is the com­pre­hen­sive approach of Wilber’s world­view that elic­its such extreme reac­tions to his work. In his inte­gral vision of sci­ence and reli­gion, Wilber con­cludes that while sci­ence legit­i­mately con­cerns itself with exte­ri­ors and reli­gion legit­i­mately with inte­ri­ors, both must be sub­ject to the same epis­te­mol­ogy and accept the legit­i­macy of each other’s domain. Not only must we accept the real­ity of inte­ri­ors on an equal foot­ing with exte­ri­ors, and we must also give up beliefs that stretch beyond a sci­en­tific epis­te­mol­ogy. Wilber may be a lit­tle opti­mistic about what fol­low­ers of sci­ence and reli­gion are will­ing to do, but his abil­ity to syn­the­size seem­ingly irrec­on­cil­able views offers much relief to those of us exhausted by an increas­ingly frag­mented and over­spe­cial­ized world.