Plato, Plotinus and Sri Aurobindo

Methodologyand Philosophy Bald Ambition: Chapter 8 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Jeff Meyerhoff

Instead of the orienting generalizations of knowledge, the reader is often told what famous writers say. Wilber makes statements of fact and validates them by attributing them to a few great thinkers. The assumption is that if a great and influential thinker asserts something, then it should carry authority. For example, Wilber uses Ferdinand de Saussure's distinction between the signifier and the signified without any mention of Derrida's critique of the distinction, nor other approaches to the sign which followed Saussure's. The assumption appears to be that if a great thinker like Saussure says it, that's validation enough.

In another example, he spends an entire page convincing us of the precocity, brilliance and great influence of the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling, as if these traits have some bearing on whether what he said was true or false. The same is done with Jurgen Habermas, A. O. Lovejoy and Charles Taylor. It's a curious pre-Enlightenment way of validating statements by reference to authority and is contrary to Wilber's post-Enlightenment desire to rely on science as the arbiter of truth. Reputation replaces orienting generalizations because the method is unworkable...

Another way Wilber tries to validate his system is based on a distinction between thinking and being...Wilber is a mystic and a thinker and so inhabits both worlds. The bulk of his written work uses the criteria of the thinker: arguments and evidence...This is a problematic conflation of intellectual and spiritual insight. Wilber uses Spiral Dynamics and his own developmental scheme to merge intellectual and spiritual attainment.

• But what of thinkers like Habermas, Max Weber, Foucault and Piaget? Did they have any distinctive spiritual attainment? Not that I know of.
• And what of contemporary spiritual adepts like Ramana Maharshi, Ramesh Balsekar or Poonjaji? Did they create great social analyses?

No. Profound spiritual adepts do not necessarily have superior social scientific theories. This assumption of a confluence between superior thinking and spiritual attainment is the reason Wilber advances Plato, Plotinus and Aurobindo as individuals and scholars. He implies that the validity of their philosophical work is connected to their spiritual attainments, but there is no necessary correlation between the two. philosophyautobiography.blogspot.com. Email at jefriv@comcast.net