Book Review
Jeff Meyerhoff. Bald Ambition: A Critique of Ken Wilber’s Theory of Everything. LaVerne, Tennessee: Inside the Curtain Press. 2010.
Russ Volckmann
This book has been out only a year or so and I already feel like I am behind the curve. While Meyerhoff notes that there has been something of a wall, albeit one with gaps, of silence regarding this book, in an interview with Frank Visser (who wrote the forward and is author of Ken Wilber: Thought as passion, the book that outlined the stages of Wilber’s thought for the first time in my reading) Meyerhoff does outline several reviews/responses to his writing. Some of this may be related to the fact that much of this book was laid out on Frank Visser’s invaluable website, www.integralworld.net in the early part of the last decade. There, Meyerhoff has a chance to respond to criticisms, as well as share his own reflections since the book was published. I highly recommend the interview: http://www.integralworld.net/visser42.html. So there has been an ongoing dialogue about much of what has been written in the book, a dialogue that most notably has not truly engaged Wilber’s attention.
Straight off, I find I wanted to join those who have criticized the book for one chapter, in particular, “Psychological Analysis of Wilber’s Beliefs,” as an amateurish psychological intrusion, but Meyerhoff himself seems to have backed off from his interpretations in the interview with Visser. He calls it a psychology of belief in which he places loss at the heart of Wilber’s psychology: “The case for loss in Wilber is strong, but intuitively I just don’t feel it captures what’s central.” At this point I am not sure what is central. In any case, unless you want a quasi-Eriksonian analysis as an example of what not to do, this chapter can comfortably be ignored.
Having said that, however, this is the kind of book I wish I could write, particularly in the depth of research and clarity of critique. Clearly Meyerhoff invested a great deal in the scholarship of examining Wilber’s writing, particularly Sex, Ecology and Spirituality (SES). In the interview he admitted to reading “most of” Integral Spirituality and finds that Wilber has made some adjustments to earlier approaches that Meyerhoff critques very effectively from an “academic” point of view. His attention to primary and secondary sources in questioning Wilber’s academic credentials and theoretical positions, particularly around the notion of orienting generalizations, is quite effective. Wilber’s response to this criticism has been to shift to integral methodological pluralism and its eight methods. Meyerhoff sees this as sidestepping the issue, albeit he does appreciate in Wilber “a more radically perspectival understanding in which the arising developmental edge actually creates (enacts), in some way, a new reality.”
He does find Wilber’s approach to be a creative synthesis that offers a compelling life philosophy. But chapters on consciousness, vision-logic, mysticism, social evolution, western history, poststructuralism and postmodernism, methodology and philosophy provides example after example of the dialogical nature of learning and theory building that is a far cry from the weight of opinion suggested in Wilber’s writing in SES. A question this raises for those interested in the integral approach that has developed through the years is, “So What?” As Meyerhoff himself acknowledges the attraction of Wilber’s work is more in the application in one’s life and action than as a contribution to academic discourse.
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