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Scott F. Parker is a writer and editor whose books include Coffee - Philosophy for Everyone: Grounds for Debate and Running After Prefontaine: A Memoir. He has contributed chapters to Ultimate Lost and Philosophy, Football and Philosophy, Alice in Wonderland and Philosophy, Golf and Philosophy, and iPod and Philosophy. He is a regular contributor to Rain Taxi Review of Books. His writing has also appeared in Philosophy Now, Sport Literate, Fiction Writers Review, Epiphany, The Ink-Filled Page, and Oregon Humanities. In 2010 he published the print edition of Jeff Meyerhoff's Bald Ambition: A Critique of Ken Wilber's Theory of Everything. For more information, visit https://www.scottfparker.com.

Awaiting the Kosmos

Scott F. Parker

I remember when Mike Murphy declared Ken Wilber's Sex, Ecology, Spirituality to be—along with Aurobindo's The Life Divine, Heidegger's Being and Time, and Whitehead's Process and Reality)—one of the four most important books of the twentieth century. Diligent student that I aspired to be, I read from each, though Wilber's is the only book of the four that I finished.

As long and footnoted as Sex, Ecology, Spirituality is, it was over too soon for my enthusiasm. Fortunately—this would have been 2003—I had the second and third volumes of the Kosmos Trilogy to look forward to. In the meantime, excerpts from the two sequels were showing up on Shambhala.com, excerpts that I printed and collected in a binder of whatever Wilber miscellanea I could find online.

Already in these excerpts, Wilber was critiquing his recently mature thought in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality as “Wilber-IV,” a step toward the emerging “Wilber-V.” Among the things I admired about Wilber, I admired most his willingness for self-criticism and self-overcoming. His project was always a work in progress. But how, then, to anticipate the books that would, whatever else they did, surely go beyond their conception?

Of course, the prospect of Wilber-V should have announced the failure of the trilogy. Insofar as Wilber was undergoing a process of reinventing himself as a thinker, the Kosmos Trilogy was the ambition of a thinker already departed. The Kosmos Trilogy was a rosebush that produced a single flower before being turned into compost for a future rosebush's blossoming.

It was easy enough, when I wasn't feeling sentimental, to think of the Kosmos Trilogy as I thought of Nietzsche's Will to Power: a tantalizing reminder of what might have been. But history is history, and history lives on. Perhaps we await some new Elisabeth to craft from Wilber's notes the Kosmos of her own imagining. Short of such fiction, we have only life's inherent poignancy.

But what was it that could have been? The sympathetic reader climbed the ladder of Wilber's scholarship to take in the view from Wilber's loft. Where was there left to go? Once Wilber had arrived at the end of evolution, what remained except elaboration? There was nothing left to say that wouldn't turn the map into the territory.

Wilber's critics sometimes dismiss him as a New Age guru, but between that extreme and his devoted followers' opposing extreme view of him as the final philosopher lies a synthetic thinker whose idiosyncratic systematizing constitutes a profound work of creative expression. This is perhaps Wilber's fundamental achievement: he offered a vision of a world that hangs together in the space of human thought—a world that, seen correctly, could make sense. At a certain time in my life, that vision sustained me.

Eventually, I would replace Wilber's systematizing with Nietzsche's perspectivism, which can better accommodate Niels Bohr's insight that “the opposite of a profound truth is usually another profound truth.” Still, though, I appreciate the possibilities Wilber's efforts created for me and his many other readers.

For that reason alone, as the years passed, as the Kosmos Trilogy remained perpetually forthcoming, and as I drifted in and out of contact with Wilber's world, I continued to check back every so often for word of his once-promised books. It's an idle curiosity now. If volumes two and three were ever published, I like to think I'd have the self-restraint not to read them and sit instead in my unknowing. Deep down I know myself well enough to know I'd eventually give in to my curiosity.

Until that unfortunate day when the trilogy is released in whatever form, the best thing it has going for it is its unwrittenness. The Kosmos Trilogy, like the Kosmos itself, can never be realized, only continually overcome in its own ongoing self-creation. The proposed title for volume two of the trilogy—Sex, Karma, Creativity—gives me all the freedom I want to imagine that the future that will never come is always worth waiting for.