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Jan Krikke is a former Japan correspondent for various media and former managing editor of Asia 2000 in Hong Kong. He pioneered the study of axonometry, the Chinese equivalent of European linear perspective overlooked by Jean Gebser. He is the author of several books, including Leibniz, Einstein, and China, and the editor of The Spiritual Imperative, a macrohistory based on the Indian Varna system by feminist futurist Larry Taub.

The Ladder and the Field

Ken Wilber's Eros, Chinese Qi, and the Physics of Meaning

Jan Krikke / Diverse LLMs

In Finding Radical Wholeness (2024), the American philosopher Ken Wilber describes Eros—the drive toward greater complexity and consciousness he sees in cosmic evolution—as “as real a force as gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces.” He gives this drive the ancient Greek name for love, then places it alongside the forces of modern physics.

The comparison invites a closer look at attraction itself. Long before electromagnetism had a name, Greek and Chinese thinkers wondered how a lodestone could draw iron toward it without visible contact. Their explanations offer two ways of imagining nature's invisible connections—and a revealing perspective on Wilber's Eros.

Wilber's Eros

In Wilber's Integral Theory, Eros is the name for an inherent drive in the universe toward greater complexity, depth, and consciousness. Wilber also calls it “Spirit-in-action.” Atoms combine into molecules, molecules into cells, cells into organisms, and organisms eventually give rise to minds that can reflect on themselves. For Wilber, this is not the product of chance alone. It is the visible trace of a self-transcending impulse at work from the beginning.

Wilber pairs Eros with its counterpart, Agape: the downward, embracing current through which each higher level includes and cares for the levels below it, as a mind includes the body that supports it. Eros and Agape are thus not poles that turn into each other but two directions of travel along the same ladder.

The name Eros has a long history. In Hesiod's Theogony, Eros is one of the first beings to emerge at the creation of the world, the force that draws things together so that new beings can arise. In Plato's Symposium, Eros becomes the soul's longing to climb a ladder of beauty, from beautiful bodies to beautiful minds and finally to Beauty itself. Plato gave Wilber the ladder. But in another dialogue, he reached for a very different image of attraction: the magnet.

The stone that attracts

Sometime in the first millennium BCE, people in Greece and China noticed the same strange phenomenon: a dark stone, the lodestone, that pulls iron toward it without visible contact.

The Greeks named it the magnet, after the region of Magnesia, and they gave it a soul. According to Aristotle, Thales held that the magnet must have a soul, because it moves iron. In Plato's Ion, Socrates compared poetic inspiration to the lodestone, which passes its power through a chain of iron rings, held by magnetic attraction rather than fastening: the Muse moves the poet, the poet the performer, the performer the audience.

The Chinese named the lodestone for a feeling. Early texts call it cishi, “the loving stone,” because it draws iron as a mother draws her children. The philosopher Wang Chong (27-c. 97 CE) offered a different explanation. The lodestone draws needles, he wrote, because their qi (the vital energy that Chinese thought saw in all things) responds to one another.

Like Thales, Wilber reads life into attraction. Like the Chinese thinkers who called the lodestone cishi, he names it love. Unlike either, he presents it as physics.

Placed side by side, qi and Eros reveal something unexpected. Both describe a pervasive principle that links matter, life, and mind. But the comparison with physics shows less what the two ideas share than how differently they are built. Accounts of qi more closely resemble field theory than Wilber's evolutionary ascent.

Qi: the Chinese field

Qi is one of the oldest and broadest concepts in Chinese thought. It has been translated as breath, vapor, vital energy and material force, but no single English word captures it. Qi does not fit an inert conception of matter. Sinologist Joseph Needham rendered it as “matter-energy,” emphasizing that it is active and transformative rather than inert.

A simple image helps. In the eleventh century, the scholar Shen Kuo described a magnetized needle hung from a single silk thread. Left alone, it turns until it points toward the south, then comes to rest. No hand turns it; it settles into alignment with the Earth's magnetic field. It is a clear image of qi as Chinese thinkers described it: not a push from one thing to another, but a pattern of tensions in which each thing finds its place.

Qi moves through the polarity of yin and yang. These are not two forces locked in battle but complementary tendencies, each containing the seed of the other and each turning into the other over time: day into night, expansion into contraction, and activity into rest. In Chinese accounts of creation, this polarity stands at the very beginning. In the classic Huainanzi, the original undivided qi separates: the light and clear rise to become heaven, and the heavy and turbid settle to become earth.

Because qi permeates the universe, things can affect one another without direct contact. Chinese philosophers called this ganying “stimulus and response” or resonance.

The Huainanzi provides a vivid illustration: pluck a string on one lute, and the matching string on another lute in the same room begins to vibrate. No hand touches the second string. Physically, it responds to vibrations carried through the air; for Chinese thinkers, it was an image of the responsiveness that runs through the shared field of qi.

Needham argued that Chinese natural philosophy thought in terms of such fields and waves, while the atomistic strand of Greek thought favored atoms and particles.

Qi also supplied explanations for phenomena later investigated through electromagnetic theory. Alongside his account of the lodestone, Wang Chong argued that thunder and lightning arose from the clash of yin and yang, with qi in a state of agitation. Magnetism and lightning were thus expressions of the same underlying qi. Modern physics would show that electricity and magnetism are two aspects of a single field and that lightning is an electrical phenomenon.

When electrical science reached China in the mid-nineteenth century, the word electricity was rendered as dianqi, literally “lightning qi.” In Chinese, the word dianqi survives in technical terms such as “electrical engineering,” while the everyday word became simply dian. (In Japanese, where qi is romanized as ki, denki remains the everyday word for electricity.)

Qi shaped almost every domain of Chinese life. Physicians traced its flow through the body's meridians; painters, following Xie He's sixth-century first principle of “qi resonance, life-motion,” held that a work without qi was dead; builders sited houses and cities by the flow of qi through the landscape; and Sunzi advised commanders to strike when the enemy's qi was spent. Few concepts in any civilization have been so pervasive.

What they share

At first sight, Eros and qi look like close relatives. Both are pervasive, present in everything from matter to mind, and both bridge the divide that modern thought draws between the physical and the mental. Wilber's Eros runs from atoms to consciousness; qi condenses into stones and refines into thought.

Both also work through pairs, Eros with Agape and yang with yin, and both are used to explain why the world holds together: why things combine, cohere, and form larger wholes rather than simply falling apart. But on closer inspection, the resemblance fades, and the differences become more revealing than the similarities.

Where they part ways

The first difference is direction. Eros has a goal. It climbs, from matter to life to mind to spirit, and each stage is higher than the last. This is Plato's ladder translated into evolutionary terms.

Qi has no destination. It condenses and disperses and rises and falls in endless cycles. Daoists called such unfolding ziran “self-so”: things unfold according to their own nature, not toward an end outside themselves.

The second difference concerns how each idea explains change. Wilber describes Eros as an intrinsic impulse, not an outside agent. But it still drives evolution in one direction: upward, toward more inclusive forms. Change is explained by what it strives toward.

Qi works differently. Change happens through resonance within a shared field, as when one lute string sets another vibrating. The question is not what change strives toward, but how the whole is configured.

The third difference is between hierarchy and polarity. Eros orders reality into levels, each including and transcending the one below. Yin and yang are not levels. They are poles that turn into each other, and neither is higher.

Which one resembles electromagnetism?

It is at this point that the comparison with physics does real work. In the seventeenth century, Newton described gravity as a force acting instantly across empty space, a model that troubled even Newton himself.

Two centuries later, Michael Faraday discovered that a moving magnet could generate an electric current in a nearby wire, the principle behind every electric generator. To explain how one could act on the other across empty space, he proposed a different picture. Instead of forces leaping across a void, he imagined lines of force filling space: a continuous field.

James Clerk Maxwell gave the idea mathematical form in the 1860s and showed that light itself is an electromagnetic wave, a ripple in that field.

Electromagnetism, in other words, has four features. It works through a continuous field. It has polarity: positive and negative charges. It acts through waves, and resonant systems can respond to its signals (a radio receiver responds to a signal much like one lute string responds to another). And it has no intrinsic goal or purpose. Electromagnetic fields do not strive toward anything.

Each of these features describes qi better than Eros. The field, the polarity, the resonance, the absence of a goal: structurally, the Chinese concept has the shape of electromagnetism, while Wilber's concept has the shape of Plato's ladder.

That is the irony at the heart of Wilber's comparison. He invokes electromagnetism to lend Eros the authority of physics. But Eros carries precisely what physics abandoned in the scientific revolution: purpose built into nature.

Purpose ceased to function as a standard explanation in mathematical physics. Eros brings them back under the name of a force.

If Eros names the meaning Wilber finds in evolution, treating it as a physical force on a par with electromagnetism is what philosophers call a category mistake. Since Maxwell, physics has described fields as networks of mathematical relationships, devoid of intent. Wilber ascribes to Eros an inherent teleology: a built-in direction toward greater complexity and consciousness.

The term “category mistake” comes from the philosopher Gilbert Ryle. In The Concept of Mind (1949), he imagined a visitor to Oxford who is shown the colleges, libraries, and laboratories, and then asks, “But where is the university?” The visitor has made a category mistake. The university is not one more building alongside the others. It is the way all of them are organized.

Wilber's list makes the same kind of error. It adds Eros to gravity and electromagnetism as if it were one more force when it belongs to a different kind of description altogether. An electromagnetic field does not pull iron because it wants anything; it follows its equations. Wilber may be right that evolution shows a direction. But by placing a claim about meaning among the measurable forces, he submits it to a test it was never designed to pass.

If Wilber means Eros as a literal physical force, the objection shifts from logic to evidence: what measurable effects does it have, and what predictions distinguish it from established explanations? An unfamiliar force is not ruled out because it is unfamiliar, but it needs more than a suggestive name.

None of this means that Chinese thinkers anticipated modern physics. Qi cosmology yielded no quantitative theory connecting charge, magnetism, and light; it could not have produced a radio. Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics (1975) blurred that line, and physicists rightly objected that a poetic parallel is not a scientific result. The same standard applies to Eros and qi alike. Both are cosmological pictures, not physics. The question is what each reveals about the culture that drew it.

The ladder and the field

Seen through the mirror of electromagnetism, Eros and qi represent two cosmologies. One is a ladder: reality as an ascent through levels, driven toward a goal. The other is a field: reality as a web of polarities and resonances, cycling without a final destination.

Behind the two pictures lie different answers to an old question: where does order come from? The Platonic tradition and later Christian thought tended to place it above nature, in a transcendent Good, a divine lawgiver, or a goal toward which things strive. Chinese thought tended to locate it within nature, in the patterns through which things respond to one another. The ladder points beyond the world; the field stays inside it.

The West arrived at the field concept late, through physics, in the nineteenth century. Yet when Wilber reached for a spiritual cosmology, he returned to the much older Western picture of the ladder and described it in the language of physical forces.

China arrived at the field concept early, as philosophy. It had skilled mathematicians and careful observers, who invented the magnetic compass and calculated eclipses. But it never developed a mathematical physics of the kind that turned Faraday's field into Maxwell's equations.

Needham famously asked why modern science arose in Europe rather than in China. He pointed to China's bureaucratic social order and to the absence of the European idea of laws of nature decreed by a divine lawgiver. Einstein, in a much-quoted 1953 letter to J. E. Switzer, credited the West's scientific achievement to the union of Greek formal logic, especially Euclidean geometry, with systematic experiment. Historians still debate the question.

Whatever the causes, each tradition supplied part of what modern physics eventually needed. China had the picture of a continuous, polar, resonant field. Europe had the habit of turning nature into equations. Electromagnetism, in a sense, joined the two, though by its own route, not by borrowing.

In that light, Wilber's project looks different. Integral Theory is itself an attempt to join traditions: to bring the contemplative insights of Asia together with the science of the West. Few thinkers of his generation have tried as hard. And his central instinct, that something links matter and mind, and that attraction runs deeper than mechanics, is one that Thales and Wang Chong would both have recognized.

The question is which picture of that link to choose. Wilber took his from Plato: a ladder climbing toward Spirit. Chinese thought offers another, whose shape physics would later echo: a field in which things respond to one another, like the loving stone and the iron it calls.