Book reviews

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Notes

See Gibbons, M., et al. The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies, London: Sage, 1994, and Nowotny, H., Scott, P. and Michael G., “‘Mode 2’ Revisited: The New Production of Knowledge”, retrieved on 29 February, 2008, from <http://www.flacso.edu.mx/openseminar/downloads/gibbons.pdf>.

Schaef, A. W. When Society Becomes an Addict. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987.

The term is from Anthony Giddens. See Giddens, A. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

Gilder, E. “A Theoretical Picturing of the 03X (Self, Time, Place) Project and an Initial Bibliography”, in, E. Vald, ed. “ISMs & NESSes”: 2nd Anti‐Conference, Constanta, 18‐21 September, 2003. Constanta: Ovidius University Press, 2004 (pp. 447–454).

The book here reviewed had not then been published, but the insightfully revolutionary essay by American protean thinker/philosopher Sam Keen had (but the reviewer only recently discovered it). In “Education for Serendipity” (in To a Dancing God, New York: Harper & Row, 1970, pp. 38–81) Keen posited a ‘re‐education’ program that anticipates Wilber's. (For more on how this parallel plan of Keen's is still relevant today, see, Gilder, E. “Educating Soldiering Souls into a ‘New’ Old Wisdom in the Technological Knowledge Society”, in, Proceedings of the 13th Scientific Communication Section, Volume 12 “The Knowledge Based Organization”, Sibiu: Land Forces Academy Publishing House, 2007, pp. 9–21). Speaking first of his feeling after completing his PhD Keen remarked:

I emerged from graduate school to discover that I was empty of enthusiasm. I had a profession but nothing to profess, knowledge but no wisdom, ideas but few feelings. Rich in techniques but poor in convictions, I had gotten an education but lost an identity (p. 40).

This was the result, Keen argues, of the limited vision and hierarchy of the questions higher education would allow, at least back in the 1950s and 1960s:

Scarcely ever in my quarter of a century of schooling was I invited to consider the intimate, personal questions which were compelling my attention outside the classroom. While I was taught to hunt down the general, the universal, the abstract, and the public facts of the exterior world, it was tacitly assumed that education had no responsibility for helping me come to terms with the particular, the concrete, the idiosyncratic, the biographical, and the sensuous facts which formed the substance of my private existence. I learned little about the organization, appreciation, management, and care of that unique piece of human real estate which bears the legal name Sam Keen (pp. 39–40).

In remembrance of his combined ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ schooldays, the now “over educated at Harvard and Princeton” Keen calls for a principled rebellion:

On both personal and educational grounds I am convinced that … [the traditional] philosophy of education is dangerously wrong. I take it that education has two primary foci: it must initiate the young into the accumulated wisdom and techniques of culture, and it must prepare the young to create beyond the past, to introduce novelty, to utilize freedom. Creativity always involves an interplay between id and ego, strange and familiar, remote and proximate, universal and particular, abstract and concrete. If education neglects the intimate, the proximate, the sensuous, the autobiographical, the personal, it fails in its creative task and becomes only conservative, or perhaps reactionary. To keep a proper balance between conservation and revolution, education must deal with the intimate roots of the experience of creativity.

…

The repressive, the reactionary function of the educational system is not so much what is done in schools as what is not done. The vacuum rather than the whip is the instrument of preserving the status quo. The whip, sooner or later, creates a rebellion which has the effect of binding the rebel to the value alternatives which are conceivable within the system against which he is rebelling. The true revolution could only be created by asking the central question of the meaning of human existence from a perspective which is alien to both the establishment and those who are locked in rebellion against the establishment. Freedom lies beyond conformity or rebellion (p. 41).

Current information on Keen is available at his “Philosophy for Everyday Life” website (http://www.samkeen.com).

Miller, M. E., and Cook‐Greuter S. R. Transcendence and Mature Thought in Adulthood: The Further Reaches of Adult Development. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994.

In this effort of transforming rationality into reasonableness, Wilber follows in the tracts of the philosophers Stephen Toulmin and Ch. Perelman, as well as literary critic Wayne Booth, among others. See his Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974) for an extensive treatment of ‘reasonableness’ and its application to the prince of ‘scientific achievement’ wave thinking, Bertrand Russell.

Vaihinger, H. The Language of “As if”: A System of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind, trans C. K. Ogden. London: Kegan Paul, 1935.

In the process of predictive, anticipatory psychology Wilber's forerunner was George A. Kelly, father of personal construct psychology. See Kelly, G. A. A Theory of Personality; The Psychology of Personal Constructs. New York: Norton, 1963.

See Kramer, E. M. Consciousness and Culture: An Introduction to the Thought of Jean Gebser, Contributions in Sociology no. 101. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992.

The almost Orwellian reductive/additive use of Piaget's terminology (e.g., formop), is the one use of language that mars the overall understandable writing for the non‐psychology based reader. The extensive charts, drawings and extensive explanatory footnotes used to illustrate the theoretical points in the text are, thereby, more than welcome.

By use of this metaphor Wilber seems to be applying the ‘waves’ of macro social‐cultural change as best articulated by Alvin Toffler in The Third Wave (New York: William Morrow, 1980), but starting from the inner psychological realm moving outward.

Descriptors Wilber gives of the last three waves of thought are revealing, with ‘conformist’ being the Puritan traditional American, William Whyte's ‘organization man’, Singapore's ideal citizen, etc., with ‘scientific achievement’ being the rational, power‐influencing learned ‘leadership class’ of pragmatists, and the ‘sensitive soul’ being the humanistic/spiritual members of Milovan Djilas’ ‘new class’, Paul Fussell's ‘Class X’, and the ‘bobos’ lately lampooned by David Brooks.

Pepper, S. World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1942, reprinted 1970.

The reviewer gathers that Wilber places himself in this realm.

This is not to say that integrative and holistic knowledge is totally lacking in the academy, but that its transmission is largely an individual, implicit, even covert affair.

See Hadjioannou, X., Shelton, N. R., Fu, D. and Jiraporn Dhanarattigannon. “The Road to a Doctoral Degree: Co‐travelers Through a Perilous Passage” (retrieved 2 March, 2008, from http://www.redorbit.com/news/education/885968/the_road_to_a_doctoral_degree_cotravelers_through_a_perilous/index.html) for an overview of relevant research in the growing area of doctoral student retention, and personal experiences by degree candidates (national and international, young and old, mid‐career and academic orientations) in US institutions. For a view on the topic from Australia, see Crawford, L. “PhD Journey: Some Shared Experiences”, retrieved 2 March, 2008, from http://www.ala.asn.au/conf/2003/crawford2.pdf.

Wilber's voluminous writings – over twenty books to date – remind this reviewer of the catalog of that seminal, if slightly mad, synthetic thinker of early modernity seeking redemption, Emanuel Swedenborg. But, as far and this book and the select others he has read demonstrate, Wilber is presently as ‘sane and scientific’ as semanticist Alfred Korzybski's famous book title (Science and Sanity; An Introduction to Non‐Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, Lakeville CT: International Non‐Aristotelian Library, 1958) suggests. (Indeed, I gather Wilber will become the perplexing, yet clarifying visionary of the twenty‐first century as Swedenborg was of the eighteen century and Korzybski was of the twentieth.)