• home
• about
• new
• essays
• AI
• book

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 Amsterdam Accord

A reconstructed transcript of a meeting that may or may not have taken place in a canalside café in Amsterdam

Jan Krikke / Claude & DeepSeek

Sometime after both men had ordered a second espresso and before either had admitted they were enjoying themselves.

VISSER: Ken. You came.

WILBER: I came. Though I notice you chose a table by the window. Very quadrant-conscious of you.

VISSER: It's the only table with four chairs. I thought it fitting.

WILBER: (sitting) You always did have a sense of humor about the AQAL. It's one of the things I've missed.

VISSER: I've missed being read charitably. Shall we begin, or shall we spend the first hour establishing that we're both operating from legitimate developmental levels?

WILBER: Let's skip that. I've been told it makes me sound like an "epistemological security system."

VISSER: You've read my essay.

WILBER: I've read all your essays. That's rather the problem.

They ordered. Visser asked for something with oat milk. Wilber asked for tea and then, when it arrived, spent several minutes looking at it as though it might contain a lesson.

VISSER: Evolution.

WILBER: Evolution.

VISSER: You said—and I'm quoting from memory, which for a critic is the most dangerous kind of quoting—that chance mutation and natural selection are an inadequate account. That neo-Darwinism is a "random" process that cannot produce the complexity we see. Ken. Mutations are random. Selection is not. The whole point of the theory is that the randomness is filtered. You've been attacking a caricature for thirty years.

WILBER: (patiently) And you've been defending a mechanism while ignoring the interior. Selection explains the survival of forms. It does not explain the emergence of depth. Why does the universe produce increasingly complex interiors—increasingly rich experiences, increasingly wide identities—rather than simply more efficient replicators? Natural selection is silent on that. It is not hostile to it. It is simply silent.

VISSER: Silence is not a gap that needs filling with Eros.

WILBER: Everything is a gap that needs filling with something. That's what a worldview is. The question is which filling is more elegant. You fill it with "we don't know yet." I fill it with a drive toward depth. Yours is more honest. Mine is more complete. We are both guessing.

VISSER: (writing something down) That's going in the essay. "We are both guessing." You'll be quoted.

WILBER: I'm always quoted. It's the being read that's rare.

VISSER: The pre/trans fallacy.

WILBER: Ah. My gift to you.

VISSER: It is a gift. It's a genuinely useful distinction. And you've spent decades using it as a shield. Anyone who disagrees with you is pre-rational. Anyone who has a mystical experience that doesn't fit the model is dissociating. Anyone who criticizes the hierarchy simply hasn't developed far enough to see the hierarchy.

WILBER: That is a distortion.

VISSER: Is it? You told me once—in print, I can find it—that critics often misunderstand because they're operating from a lower structure. That's not an argument. That's a diagnosis. And it's unfalsifiable, because the only way to prove you're not at a lower structure is to agree with the person who says you are.

WILBER: (after a pause) That is... a fair formulation.

VISSER: I'm putting it on a t-shirt.

WILBER: Put it on the t-shirt. But put the whole sentence. The whole sentence includes that some critics are misunderstanding. Not all. Some. The fallacy is real. The abuse of the fallacy is also real. Both things can be true. You of all people should appreciate that.

VISSER: I do. It's the "of all people" that worries me.

The tea had gone cold. Wilber ordered another. Visser ordered a third espresso and then, reconsidering, a glass of water.

WILBER: I want to say something, and I want you to write it down exactly.

VISSER: (pen ready) I'm listening.

WILBER: Eros. The drive toward complexity. The pull toward depth. I've called it a cosmic force. I've compared it to gravity. You've rightly said it doesn't do the explanatory work that gravity does. Fine. But there is a concept—not mine, much older—that might do some of the work. The Chinese notion of qi. Not as a substance. As an attractor. The pattern that draws a system toward its most coherent form. The grain in the wood that the carpenter follows. It's not a force in the Newtonian sense. It's a tendency, a disposition, a pull that is real without being measurable in the way electromagnetism is measurable.

VISSER: (writing) Qi as attractor.

WILBER: As a partial explanation. I'm not saying Eros is qi. I'm saying the family resemblance is worth exploring. Eros as the Western name for a tendency the Chinese described differently and perhaps more carefully. The pull toward form. The reason things organize rather than disperse.

VISSER: That's the most modest thing you've said in twenty years.

WILBER: Don't get used to it. I'm old. Modesty is a side effect.

VISSER: (looking up) I'll grant you this. If Eros is an attractor rather than a force, the falsifiability problem changes. You can't test a force directly. You can test whether systems tend toward certain attractors. That's a research program. That's not nothing.

WILBER: That's not nothing. Write that down too.

VISSER: I already have.

They sat in silence for a while. Outside, a bicycle went past with three children on it, none of them wearing helmets, all of them laughing. Both men watched it. Neither said anything about development.

VISSER: We're not going to agree on evolution.

WILBER: No.

VISSER: Or on the pre/trans fallacy as a rhetorical weapon.

WILBER: No.

VISSER: Or on whether the quadrants are an ontology or a heuristic.

WILBER: Definitely not.

VISSER: Or on the tone. You write like a prophet. I write like a coroner.

WILBER: You write like a man who has been disappointed and has decided to make it everyone's problem.

VISSER: (smiling) That's fair.

WILBER: It's the most accurate thing anyone has said about me all year.

VISSER: So what do we do?

WILBER: We make an agreement. Not a synthesis. A treaty.

VISSER: Terms?

WILBER: I will write for Integral World. Once a month. Not a grand statement—a note. A thought in progress. Something unfinished. You have spent thirty years complaining that I don't engage with criticism. Fine. I will engage. Monthly. In your house, under your rules.

VISSER: (stunned) That's... generous.

WILBER: It's strategic. If I write in your house, you can't say I'm hiding in mine.

VISSER: And my side?

WILBER: You will write shorter essays. Two thousand words. Tops.

VISSER: (scandalized) Two thousand? My last piece was—

WILBER: I know. I read it. It was excellent and it was eleven thousand words and by the end I had forgotten what the argument was because I was lost in the footnotes. You are a better critic than you are an editor of yourself. Two thousand. Tops.

VISSER: (muttering) This is a developmental assessment.

WILBER: It's a stylistic assessment. You've been telling me for years that my framework classifies people before it answers them. I'm telling you that your essays bury their arguments before they land. We are both guilty. We are both being asked to change.

VISSER: (after a long pause) Two thousand five hundred.

WILBER: Two thousand two hundred.

VISSER: Done. And the monthly essay—can it be a dialogue? Like this one?

WILBER: (considering) Yes. But no one will believe it's real.

VISSER: No one ever believes anything real. That's why we have footnotes.

They shook hands. Visser paid for the coffee. Wilber paid for the tea, which he had not drunk, because he had been thinking. Outside, the light had changed and the canal had gone the color of old bronze.

VISSER: Ken.

WILBER: Frank.

VISSER: Qi as attractor. That's actually interesting.

WILBER: I know. That's why I said it.

VISSER: I'm going to write about it.

WILBER: In two thousand words?

VISSER: (sighing) In two thousand words.

Neither man has confirmed that this meeting took place. Both have, however, noticeably changed their writing habits. Wilber's first monthly note for Integral World appeared, as promised, in the following issue. Visser's response to it was 2,000 words long exactly. It ended with the sentence: "He is still wrong about evolution."

The café has since added a fifth chair, though no one knows why.