Limiting the Applicability of the Four Quadrants

As I said some time ago, in a post titled "The Problem With AQAL (In 200 Words)":

Wilber's four quadrants work well for examining matters near human scale. The quadrants are very useful for sorting out issues in politics, religion, business, education, and spirituality -- all of which are basically focused on humans, as individuals or groups.

But when we move toward either end of the grand holarchy -- toward either atoms or countries -- the four quadrants cease to be so helpful. Why is that?

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Well, we run into all kinds of strange problems with interiors and which things have consciousness. Does a country have consciousness, and if so, what's it like? What does the intersubjective world of atoms look like? Why haven't theories of atoms ever required subjectivity to explain how atoms behave?

In Wilber's Excerpt B, he makes this excellent point:

Put simply, a theory is a map of a territory, while a paradigm is a practice that brings forth a territory in the first place. The paradigm or social practice itself is called an "exemplar" or "injunction," and the theory is called, well, the theory. The point is that knowledge revolutions are generally combinations of new paradigm-practices that bring forth a new phenomenological territory plus new theories and maps that attempt to offer some sort of abstract or contoured guidance to the new territories thus disclosed and brought forth. But a new theory without a new practice is simply a new map with no real territory, or what is generally called "ideology."

To put it simply, there is no practice, exemplar, or injunction that calls forth the phenomenological territory of the interior dimension of atoms or countries. The theory that they have interiority is, as Wilber says, what is generally called ideology.

The introduction of categories such as individual and social holons, artifacts, and heaps was supposed to resolve this, and reassure us that most things we think of as not having consciousness do not in fact have consciousness. But the cure was worse than the disease. They're arbitrary, and designed ex post facto to tell us what we already thought we knew. They also overlap! And, in an effort, to make sure that we can still use the four quadrants for everything, even if some things don't actually have four quadrants, Wilber introduced quadrivia -- the idea that we can still take each perspective on these things, even if the things themselves don't have those dimensions. It creates a big mess.

I long suspected that this problem with interiors was due to some deeper and earlier flaw upon which a lot had been built, magnifying the flaw with each successive layer. I told you what I believe it is in my previous post: Having identified meditative states of pure awareness with the underlying substance of the Kosmos (i.e. Spirit), a short chain of reasonable logic leads one to deduce that consciousness/awareness/subjectivity must be in everything. On that basis, saying that the four quadrants "go all the way up and all the way down" is perfectly reasonable, since we've already given everything an interior, and we can see the exteriors. It's not that Wilber's logic is flawed -- it's his premise.

How can we fix this and restore appropriate simplicity? First, decouple awareness from the ultimate nature of the universe. Then, figure out what phenomenological territories are revealed by the paradigms, injunctions, and practices we have. Then, limit applications of the four quadrants to those things which we can demonstrate have awareness.

In other words, put the practice first and the theory second, as Wilber so wisely suggested.