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Bruce Alderman is the associate director of the Blue Sky Leaders program at CIIS, and an affiliate faculty in the John F Kennedy School of Psychology at National University. He received his master's degree in Integral Psychology, with an emphasis on Transpersonal Counseling Psychology, from JFKU in 2005. He has published essays in the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice and Consciousness journal, as well as in several anthologies on Integral philosophy and spirituality. Recently, he contributed to and co-edited the January 2019 special issue of Integral Review journal on Integral Postmetaphysical Spirituality. Faculty Profile. Email: [email protected]

Kosmic Creativity, Register Integrity, and Modal Fidelity

Whitehead, Wilber, and the Problem of Cross-Modal Speech

Bruce Alderman

Frank Visser has been asking important questions of Integral theory for over two decades now, and the community owes him more genuine engagement than he typically receives. His persistent concern—that terms like Eros or Kosmic Creativity often function as explanatory placeholders rather than rigorous concepts, and that Integral discourse too easily slides from empirical claims to metaphysical ones without marking the transition—names something real. Anyone who has spent time in Integral circles has likely felt the discomfort he's pointing to: the moment when a conversation shifts from careful phenomenology or developmental research into sweeping cosmological assertions, and one isn't quite sure what kind of claim is being made or how one would evaluate it.

Visser's insistence on scientific accountability emerges, I think, from genuine intellectual conscience. If Integral theory aspires to honor and integrate the fruits of modern science—not merely to dismiss or transcend them—then it must be willing to play by science's rules when making scientific claims. The frustration Visser expresses is the frustration of watching a discourse that claims such integration while sometimes helping itself to explanatory gestures that no working scientist would recognize as legitimate. That frustration deserves respect, not dismissal.

And yet.

The frame within which these debates typically unfold may itself be part of the problem. When the question becomes 'Is Wilber's use of Eros scientifically legitimate?'—often because Wilber's own rhetoric invites that question—the conversation can get stuck in a single mode of veridiction: the standards appropriate to third-person empirical inquiry become the de facto test for the claims in question. Visser's point stands if Eros fails scientific muster; Wilber's defenders keep trying to show it doesn't. But this framing, whatever its initial justification, risks obscuring a more fundamental question: whether the discourse should have been operating in that register in the first place, and whether there might be other registers in which something like Eros could succeed on its own terms.

Visser is right that something goes wrong when Eros is smuggled into scientific explanation. The question is what follows from that. One response is to banish Eros from Integral vocabulary, or at least to confine it to clearly marked 'spiritual' contexts that make no claim on explanatory discourse. But another possibility is to ask whether Integral discourse has developed adequate discipline for speaking across multiple registers—each with its own standards of success and failure, its own conditions of intelligibility, its own way of being true or false. On this view, the deeper issue is register integrity: the capacity to speak cosmologically, poetically, experientially, and scientifically without covertly borrowing authority from one mode while operating in another.

This doesn't let Wilber off the hook. If anything, it raises the bar. Most readers of Integral Theory already understand that claims operate in different registers with different conditions of warrant. The challenge is consistency: In what mode is this claim being made? By what discipline is it warranted? Has the speaker maintained fidelity to that mode's own conditions of success? Visser's critiques often land precisely because Integral discourse hasn't maintained such fidelity—because the rhetoric of Eros slides between registers while retaining an aura of explanatory authority it hasn't earned in each domain.

What follows is an attempt to articulate more precisely what register integrity would require, drawing on several philosophical resources that might be unfamiliar to some readers but which, I hope, illuminate what's at stake. I don't expect this will resolve the Wilber-Visser debate once and for all, but my hope is that it offers a frame within which that debate—and Integral discourse more broadly—might proceed with greater clarity and accountability.

Whitehead's Creativity: Categorial Grammar, Not Cosmic Engine

Whitehead is a useful starting point precisely because Wilber draws on him, and because Whitehead himself was quite careful about what "creativity" is doing in Process and Reality.

For Whitehead, creativity functions as the "Category of the Ultimate"—but this doesn't mean it names a privileged metaphysical entity or a force that pushes things along. Rather, it names the abstract character of becoming as such: the fact that novel unities continually arise from disjunctive multiplicity. His famous formula—"the many become one, and are increased by one"—describes the ontological grammar of actual occasions, not a causal mechanism operating behind them. Creativity isn't an agent that does creating; it's the general character of what it means for anything to happen at all.

This matters because when Wilber takes up the term—as Kosmic Creativity or Eros—something often subtly shifts. The concept becomes rhetorically adjacent to a directional impetus: a telos or lure that moves evolution toward greater depth, complexity, or consciousness. Even when Wilber's intended meaning remains closer to "generativity" than to "mechanism," the discourse can drift toward something that looks more like Bergson's élan vital or Schelling's Naturphilosophie—an immanent push in nature toward self-transcendence.

Visser's critique is strongest precisely here. The problem isn't that Wilber speaks of Eros—it's that he often speaks as if Eros were simply part of the explanatory machinery of evolutionary science, importing a directional metaphysics while retaining the rhetoric of empirical adequacy. When Eros appears in sentences that seem to be explaining why evolution produces greater complexity, it's being asked to do scientific work. And it's not clear it can bear that weight.

But to stop at this critique is to accept an implicit constraint: that scientific explanation is the sole arbiter of legitimate reality-talk. And that constraint is itself a philosophical position, one that a genuinely integral orientation should be able to question. The issue isn't whether Eros fails as science; it's whether there might be other modes of discourse in which something like Eros could succeed on its own terms, and whether Integral thought has the resources to hold these modes in productive relation without collapsing them.

Validity Claims and the Differentiation of Discourse

Jürgen Habermas offers one way into this problem, as many readers here will be familiar. His theory of communicative action distinguishes between different validity claims implicit in any speech act: claims to truth (about the objective world), claims to rightness (about normative expectations), and claims to truthfulness or sincerity (about subjective disclosure). Each type of claim has different conditions of "redemption"—different ways it can be defended, challenged, or vindicated.

In a Habermasian key, statements about Eros can be seen oscillating among at least three functions:

• Empirical truth-claims: Eros as an explanatory principle operating in nature or evolution.

• Normative claims: Eros as what we ought to align with, value, or enact—an ethical or spiritual imperative.

• Expressive or disclosive claims: Eros as how reality shows up under transformed perception, what becomes available through contemplative practice or developmental maturation.

The issue isn't that these functions can't coexist in a single discourse. It's that they become indiscernible—so that an expressive disclosure is presented as if it were an empirical finding, or an empirical story is moralized as if it carried normative authority by virtue of its factual status.

Habermas's postmetaphysical sensibility is useful here precisely because it doesn't require narrowing all discourse to scientific reason. What it requires is a discipline of differentiation and accountability: learning to mark what kind of claim one is making, and being prepared to defend it according to the standards appropriate to that kind of claim. We don't banish mythic or metaphysical language; we learn to speak it as what it is, without laundering it through scientific authority.

This resonates with what I'd call an integral postmetaphysical orientation, which makes ongoing space for spiritual or cosmological speech and practice through the cultivation of discursive hygiene and enactive pluralism: knowing which register one is operating in, and not covertly switching registers while claiming continuity.

Register Collapse and Constraint Preservation

A complementary diagnostic comes from work by Christopher Padgett Hunnicutt on what he calls the "Operator Theorem" framework. I won't rehearse the technical details here, but the core insight is relevant: coherence across transformations of articulation isn't about preserving identical wording or even identical "content" in the everyday sense. It's about preserving constraint-structures—the underlying pattern of relations and commitments that make a claim the kind of claim it is.

This helps distinguish two very different phenomena:

Legitimate translation: A term changes its expressive register—from scientific to poetic, say, or from philosophical to contemplative—while preserving an intelligible constraint-structure. The "same" insight gets re-articulated in a different mode, but the core commitments travel.

Register collapse: A term shifts its constraint-structure and mode of warrant while tacitly claiming continuity. It borrows authority from its original home while operating under different (often less demanding) conditions of accountability.

Wilber's "Eros" can be read charitably as attempting the first: trying to preserve something like the intelligibility of emergent novelty and depth across multiple registers—scientific, philosophical, spiritual. The trouble arises when the term becomes a quasi-causal ingredient in the evolutionary story without ever having been validated as such. At that point, it has ceased to preserve the same constraint-structure; it has become a different kind of claim with different redeemability conditions, while still borrowing the aura of the original.

That's the "creep" Visser detects, and he's right to challenge it.

The Operator Theorem framework also clarifies a risk that runs in the other direction. If the response to Wilber's overreach is to insist that claims are only coherent when they satisfy third-person scientific constraints, we've performed our own register collapse—treating one particular constraint-structure as the universal admissibility criterion for all discourse. That would be scientism, not science, and it would foreclose in advance the possibility that there might be legitimate modes of knowing and speaking that operate by different rules. I don't take this to be Visser's position; his challenge, as I understand it, is more precisely targeted at the mismatch between Wilber's rhetoric and his warrant. But the risk is real in how these debates can unfold, and it's worth naming.

Modes of Givenness: How Reality Becomes Available

An integral postmetaphysical orientation can recast this entire debate in terms of modes of givenness rather than "science vs. metaphysics." The claim is not that reality is fragmented into incommensurable spheres, but that there are irreducibly different ways in which aspects of reality become available to us—each requiring distinct disciplines of inquiry and validation.

Following Wilber's three eyes of knowing, or his four-quadrant model, we can start with three broad modes of givenness:

Third-person inquiry discloses patterns through public instrumentation, formal modeling, replicable methods, and explanatory adequacy. This is the domain of natural science, and its achievements are extraordinary. But it is not the only way reality shows itself.

First-person practice discloses depths through transformations of attention, affect, and the structure of experience. Contemplative traditions have developed sophisticated methodologies here—ways of training perception that reveal aspects of reality not accessible to untrained awareness. What shows up through twenty years of meditation practice isn't merely "subjective"; it's an enacted disclosure that requires discipline to access.

Second-person encounter discloses meaning through dialogical recognition, mutual attunement, and the co-constitution of intelligibility. The reality of a relationship, of trust, of ethical demand—these emerge between persons in ways that neither third-person observation nor solitary first-person practice can capture.

Under these constraints, it becomes perfectly coherent to say that a term like "Creativity" or "Eros" might name something that shows up across multiple modes—but only if the term is not forced to function as a single explanatory token doing the same work everywhere. What transforms perception in contemplative practice, what orients ethical aspiration, and what explains the emergence of biological complexity may all be gesturing toward something real—but they are not identical claims, and they cannot be validated by identical methods. (This shouldn't be something we need to say; but somehow, we still do…)

The integral ethic, then, is ultimately rooted in fidelity to irreducible perspectives. There is no single master narrative. And this is precisely where Wilber's own methodological pluralism—especially in the appendices to Integral Spirituality—provides helpful resources. Wilber at his best articulates a framework for coordinating multiple methodologies without collapsing them. The persistent difficulty is rhetorical: despite the methodological apparatus, the discourse often slides back into cosmological assertion that sounds like straightforward description of "what is" in the scientific register.

Latour and Modes of Existence: Felicity Conditions for Reality-Claims

Bruno Latour's An Inquiry into Modes of Existence offers perhaps the most powerful framework for thinking through these issues, because it moves beyond validity claims to a more fully ontological pluralism. Latour doesn't just distinguish different types of claims; he distinguishes different modes of existence—different ways beings come to be, persist, and pass—each with its own felicity conditions, its own criteria for success or failure.

This is especially useful for diagnosing both sides of the Wilber-Visser impasse.

When Eros is introduced as if it belongs to what Latour calls [REF]—the mode of reference, where truth depends on chains of traceable transformations from world to word—it's being asked to pass conditions like reproducibility, explanatory specificity, and publicly verifiable connection to empirical phenomena. In many cases it will fail those tests, or at least remain radically underdetermined by them.

When Eros is offered as if it belonged to [REF], then dismissing it on [REF] grounds is appropriate. But the inverse error arises if one concludes from that failure that no other mode could bear the term truthfully. Beings pass differently in different modes.

So where might Kosmic Creativity belong, in Latourian terms? The answer is unlikely to be exclusive, but some placements are more disciplined than others:

[MET] Metamorphosis: Truth here is tied to transformation—what becomes available through psychic alteration, conversion of attention, developmental reorganization. "Eros" as lived lure, as invitation to deepen, as the pull toward greater participation in reality, finds a natural home here. It's not an explanation of evolution; it's a name for what practitioners encounter in processes of genuine transformation.

[FIC] Fiction: Not falsehood, but truth-bearing imaginative form—cosmological narrative that renders reality inhabitable and affectively coherent. Brian Swimme's appeals to "Grandmother Star" or “the powers of the universe” operate in this register: they're not claiming to be astrophysics, but neither are they mere entertainment. They're examples of marked mythic speech, cosmological poetry that shapes how we might dwell in a universe we also study scientifically.

[REL] Religion: Insofar as Eros functions as a call to renewal, a demand for re-beginning, it may operate in this mode—where truth is about what saves, what transforms, what reopens life when it has closed down.

[PRE] Prepositions: As a kind of meta-ontological grammar—how beings come to be in relation, the prepositional structure of passage and connection. This might be closest to Whitehead's original intent: creativity not as a thing or force but as a mode of transition.

If Kosmic Creativity is genuinely cross-modal—appearing differently but legitimately across multiple modes—then the responsibility increases rather than diminishes. Cross-modal terms require what Latour calls diplomacy: careful translation and re-specification as they move between modes, explicit acknowledgment of which felicity conditions are in play, resistance to the temptation to let a term remain rhetorically identical while silently switching the criteria by which it's to be judged.

A Note on Our Present Moment

There's a reason these issues feel particularly urgent now, and it's not just the longevity of the Wilber-Visser debate!

Digital mediation—the algorithmic undertow that shapes more and more of our discourse—tends to produce a lived ontology in which only certain felicity conditions are visible or culturally rewarded. What circulates well on platforms optimized for engagement are claims that feel immediate, decisive, shareable. The modes that require initiation, duration, conversion of attention, or ethical transformation—[MET], [REL], slow and careful forms of [REF]—are systematically disadvantaged. They don't compress well. They don't go viral.

In such an environment, there's systemic pressure toward exactly the register collapse we've been diagnosing. Spiritual or cosmological terms are incentivized to present themselves as quick explanatory tokens, because that's the shape discourse takes when it wants to circulate. Simultaneously, the guardians of scientific rigor are incentivized to treat their mode as a total epistemic jurisdiction, because acknowledging irreducible plurality feels like opening the door to "anything goes."

The Wilber-Visser conflict, in this light, is a local instance of a much broader flattening: a cultural difficulty in maintaining the kind of discursive differentiation that both scientific integrity and spiritual depth require. Visser's insistence on scientific accountability and Wilber's reach toward cosmological meaning are both, in their own ways, attempts to resist the undertow—but when they fight each other rather than the flattening, they may be missing the deeper current.

What Would Integrity Look Like?

Let me try to say positively what I've been circling around.

Register integrity in Integral discourse would mean:

Marking transitions. When moving from scientific explanation to cosmological vision to contemplative disclosure, saying so—not as a defensive disclaimer, but as an act of intellectual honesty that invites the listener into the appropriate mode of reception.

Accepting distinct accountabilities. If a claim is made in the register of [REF], it should be defended by [REF] standards. If it's made in [MET] or [FIC] or [REL], it should be defended—and it can be defended—by the standards appropriate to those modes. Rigor isn't exclusive to science; each mode has its own discipline.

Resisting borrowed authority. The temptation to let a poetic or transformational claim bask in the reflected legitimacy of scientific discourse—or vice versa—needs to be noticed and refused. This is perhaps the hardest discipline, because it often happens without conscious intention.

Cultivating multi-modal fluency. Not everyone needs to be a scientist, a contemplative, a poet, and a philosopher. But a discourse community that aspires to integration needs members who can translate across modes, who can recognize when a term is operating in one register versus another, who can hold the plurality without collapsing it or fragmenting into incommensurable silos.

There are communities that do this reasonably well. In my experience, certain streams of the Bohmian dialogue tradition, certain lineages of contemplative inquiry, manage to speak about transformation and reality without constantly tripping over register confusion. They've developed what we might call discursive disciplines—not rules exactly, but cultivated sensibilities that allow cosmological imagination and empirical humility to coexist.

Whether the Integral community can develop such disciplines at scale is an open question. The very popularity of the AQAL framework—its mappability, its capacity to organize and locate virtually any phenomenon—may work against the kind of epistemological modesty that register integrity requires. The map is so comprehensive that it can become difficult to remember that the territory exceeds any mapping.

What Register Collapse Looks Like in Practice

It may help to see concretely what I've been describing. In a talk on creativity that Visser has elsewhere drawn attention to, Wilber offers a sweeping narrative of cosmic emergence—from the Big Bang through quarks and atoms and molecules to cells and organisms and eventually to human consciousness. It's a compelling story, and much of it tracks broadly with scientific cosmology. A charitable hearing is that the talk is not primarily trying to do science at all, but to offer a kind of cosmological-theological narration—closer to what Latour would call [MET] or [REL] (and at points [FIC])—while drawing on the imagery and sequencing of scientific accounts. The difficulty is that, at certain moments, the discourse borrows the surface grammar of scientific explanation in ways that invite confusion about what kind of claim is being made.

Consider this passage:

Here “creativity” is positioned rhetorically as a fundamental force—implicitly parallel to gravity or electromagnetism. This is causal-explanatory language: it invites the listener to treat “creativity” as part of the universe's explanatory inventory. In Latour's terms, it borrows the posture (and thus the authority-cues) of [REF], where claims are meant to travel through publicly traceable chains. But no mechanism is offered, no operationalization, no pathway by which such a “force” could be specified or tested. The aside “for lack of a better term” gestures toward metaphor, yet the phrase “fundamental force” pulls hard in the opposite direction—leaving the listener unsure what mode of veridiction is being invoked.

A bit later, the talk makes its broader intent more explicit:

In Habermasian terms, the talk's primary force is expressive and orienting, but its surface grammar intermittently cues reception as an objective truth-claim; in OT terms, the constraint-structure is not consistently signaled; and in Latourian terms, the felicity conditions of [MET]/[REL] are periodically overlaid with [REF]-style vocabulary, inviting a category mistake. The phrase “we're allowed to start thinking” is permission-granting and orienting—but it also leaves an important question unaddressed: what kind of thinking are we now doing? Are we still offering an explanation of evolution, or are we moving into theology, contemplative phenomenology, or cosmological poetics? The listener isn't told. The passage flows as though it were a single continuous explanatory movement, even though the conditions of warrant have shifted—or, more precisely, even though the talk's theological intent is now clearer while the scientific-causal cues have not been fully relinquished.

And then, most strikingly:

The word “mechanism” lands hard here. It is explicitly causal-explanatory language—“that's the actual mechanism.” But love and creativity as mechanisms of cosmic manifestation is not a claim any physicist or biologist would recognize as operating within their discipline. Even if the underlying intention is theological or mythopoetic, the diction invites a scientific reception while operating outside the constraints of scientific explanation. This is what I mean by borrowed authority: the rhetoric of mechanism, of “how manifestation comes into being,” carries the weight of causal explanation while the discourse is, in effect, doing something else.

To be clear: I don't think Wilber is being dishonest here, and I don't think this kind of discourse is inherently illegitimate. There is a long tradition of cosmological speech that weaves scientific narrative together with spiritual meaning—Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme himself. At its best, such speech can render the universe inhabitable in ways that bare scientific description cannot. It operates in what Latour would call [FIC]—fiction as the crafting of inhabitable form—or [MET], where truth is tied to transformation and the conversion of sensibility. These are real modes of veridiction with their own felicity conditions, their own ways of succeeding or failing.

The problem arises when the mode isn't marked clearly—when the listener is given no stable signal about the felicity conditions in play, and when the authority-cues of scientific explanation (“fundamental force,” “actual mechanism” ) continue to be invoked. That's when critics like Visser reasonably object. They're not wrong to hear an ID-adjacent cadence here—teleology spoken in the grammar of mechanism—especially when the discourse does not clearly announce that it is not doing [REF]. If a cosmological-theological narration repeatedly adopts the idiom of scientific mechanism, it can hardly complain when it is evaluated by scientific criteria.

What might a more disciplined articulation sound like? Consider a possible revision:

This says something similar to what Wilber was reaching for, but it:

1. Marks the register: “from a contemplative standpoint”

2. Disclaims false competition: “without intending to 'do physics'”

3. Names the mode: “a way of inhabiting,” “cosmological poetry,” “a mode of dwelling”

4. Avoids borrowing authority: no “mechanism,” no “fundamental force”

The listener now knows how to receive the claim. They're not being asked to accept it as a scientific hypothesis, nor are they being invited to dismiss it as mere hand-waving. They're being shown a different door—one that opens onto legitimate questions about meaning, orientation, and how we might live in the universe that science describes. That's a worthy inquiry. It simply isn't physics.

The discipline I'm describing isn't about policing language or hedging every sentence with qualifications. It's about hospitality—giving the listener what they need to know which mode of discourse they're being invited into, so they can engage appropriately rather than stumbling over unmarked thresholds.

Why Hasn't This Exercised the Integral Community More?

Visser has asked me why committed integralists aren't more concerned about Wilber's loose use of Eros, and the impact that that has had on Integral Theory's overall credibility. It's a fair question, and it deserves an honest answer.

Speaking for myself: I do notice the creep, the overreach, the moments when cosmological rhetoric borrows authority from scientific discourse without earning it. The talk we just looked at is a good example of this. But I'll admit the issue hasn't exercised me the way it exercises Visser—and I think I now understand why. The sensibilities I've been articulating in this essay are already operative in how I receive Wilber's work. When I encounter Eros in his writing, I don't assume it's intended to function as a scientific hypothesis. I read it as operating in a different register—mythopoetic, contemplative, perhaps [MET] or [FIC] in Latour's terms—and I evaluate it accordingly.

But there's admittedly a problem here: that adjustment is largely tacit. It's a private hermeneutic habit, and it doesn't often enter into the public grammar of Integral discourse. And, as we just saw, it's frequently a necessary adjustment, because—while Wilber has pointed in this direction, formally, with his Kosmic Addressing system—he doesn't often articulate or clarify his modal framing, or consistently distinguish the theological/mythopoetic key from the [REF]-coded diction he sometimes borrows. The result then is predictable: newcomers and outside observers encounter what looks like scientific claims about evolution being driven by spiritual forces, and they respond as one should respond to bad science—with criticism.

Visser is no newcomer to Integral Theory, of course, but I think he's often speaking on behalf of those who are. And, in this light, he is performing a valuable service. He's articulating what the discourse sounds like from outside the tacit adjustments. And if Integral theory aspires to wider cultural relevance—if it wants to engage scientists, academics, and thoughtful skeptics who haven't already internalized its interpretive conventions—then this is a problem that needs addressing. The risk is that Integral cosmology becomes indistinguishable, to educated outsiders, from the kind of Creationist or Intelligent Design arguments that claim scientific legitimacy while operating by entirely different rules.

So while I'm not prepared to say Wilber's use of Eros is simply a mistake, I am prepared to say this: the Integral community has been too comfortable assuming that sophisticated readers will make the right adjustments. We haven't done the work of articulating, publicly and explicitly, the register discipline that allows cosmological imagination and scientific integrity to coexist. That's a failure—not necessarily of the vision, but of its communication.

The question I take from the regular challenges Visser poses, then, isn't whether Eros is real. It's whether Integral discourse can learn to speak in a way that marks its registers, honors its distinct accountabilities, and invites critical engagement rather than requiring initiatory immersion just to know what kind of claim is being made—explanation, orientation, or disclosure.

I'm wagering it can. But the wager requires work we haven't yet done.