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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

Critics Do. Critics Don't

Christian de Quincey Refuses to Back Down

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

Christian de Quincey's “Critics Do. Critics Don't: A Response to Ken Wilber” is the third and final installment in a remarkable early exchange about the strengths and weaknesses of Ken Wilber's Integral Theory. It follows de Quincey's 2000 review of Integral Psychology, Wilber's lengthy response, “Do Critics Misrepresent My Position?”, and now de Quincey's attempt to answer Wilber's answer.

Read in isolation, the title might suggest another skirmish in the increasingly familiar battle between Wilber and his critics. Read in full, however, the essay is more interesting than that. De Quincey is not simply defending himself. He is trying to establish a distinction that becomes crucial to the entire debate: a critic can misunderstand part of Wilber's position without thereby misrepresenting it, and a clarification by Wilber does not necessarily constitute a rebuttal of the criticism.

That distinction is the real heart of the exchange.

And having the complete text available makes it possible to see that de Quincey's counter-response is considerably more careful—and considerably more generous—than the polemical title and some of its sharper passages might suggest.

The accusation of “misrepresentation”

Wilber's principal defense had been that de Quincey had repeatedly taken a partial aspect of his position and presented it as the whole. De Quincey immediately attacks this formulation. If he had focused on what Wilber calls a “partial aspect,” he argues, that was because it was precisely what Wilber himself had repeatedly written in Integral Psychology and A Theory of Everything, the two most recent books on which his review concentrated. He adds that he had read Wilber's Collected Works and therefore knew that the larger position existed. That did not make the narrower formulations in the books under review disappear.

This is a surprisingly strong argument.

A reviewer is not necessarily obliged to reconstruct an author's entire intellectual corpus before criticizing a particular book. If an author makes a definite claim in the work being reviewed, the reviewer is entitled to examine that claim. If the author later says, “Yes, but I meant something more sophisticated,” that may be an important clarification, but it does not retroactively change what the original text said.

De Quincey therefore draws a distinction that Wilber's response tends to blur:

“A difference in interpretation is not the same as misrepresentation.”

That is probably the most important sentence in the entire response.

Philosophical texts inevitably require interpretation. Authors frequently use shorthand, make distinctions in one place that they fail to repeat elsewhere, or assume that readers will connect statements made many chapters apart. A critic may therefore construct a position somewhat differently from how the author would describe it. That is not necessarily dishonest or even mistaken.

“Misrepresentation” is a much stronger charge.

It implies that the critic has distorted the author's position, through inaccurate quotation, selective quotation, or some other procedure that produces a materially false impression. De Quincey insists that this is not what he did. He quoted Wilber “in context” and repeatedly directed readers to the relevant pages so that they could judge for themselves.

This is where Wilber's defense begins to look less decisive. Showing that one's critic has not captured the entirety of one's philosophical position is not the same as showing that the criticism is false.

Intersubjectivity: the first test case

The debate over intersubjectivity provides the clearest example.

Wilber had complained that de Quincey attributed to him the view that intersubjectivity consisted solely of linguistic exchange. He regarded this as almost the opposite of his actual position. De Quincey responds that he is delighted to hear this, because it is precisely what he would have expected from Wilber's broader nondual philosophy. His problem was that this broader conception did not seem to be the one actually emphasized in Integral Psychology.

De Quincey then goes back to the text.

Wilber says that subjects attempt to understand one another by talking and interpreting. He says that “the interior of a holon can only be accessed by interpretation.” In Eye of Spirit, he says that the only way we can get at each other's interiors is by dialogue and interpretation. In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, he goes further, saying that if he wants to know what another person's lived interior is like, “I must talk to you.”

These quotations matter because they show that de Quincey was not inventing the issue.

His criticism was not that Wilber had never mentioned deeper forms of intersubjectivity. It was that Wilber repeatedly gave linguistic interpretation a privileged—and sometimes apparently exclusive—role. De Quincey calls this the “weak” version of intersubjectivity, contrasting it with a stronger conception involving what he calls “engaged presence,” in which subjects mutually condition or even co-create one another's sense of self.

This is where de Quincey's response becomes especially fair-minded. He does not demand that Wilber abandon his broader model. On the contrary, he says that if the criticism prompted Wilber to become more explicit and careful about the fuller meaning of intersubjectivity, then the exchange has been worthwhile. He even says that it was his longstanding hope to put intersubjectivity more firmly “on the consciousness studies map.”

That is hardly the posture of someone merely trying to score points.

The curious distinction between explicit and implicit Wilber

The most revealing part of the argument concerns Wilber's claim that de Quincey had taken his statements out of context.

De Quincey points out that he cited seventeen examples from Integral Psychology, not merely the two examples Wilber claimed he had used. He also gave page references precisely so readers could inspect the context themselves. Wilber's later clarification—that when he spoke of “only” linguistic interpretation he meant interpretation of linguistic signifiers—is welcomed by de Quincey. But he then points out the obvious problem: that clarification is not actually what Wilber made clear in Integral Psychology.

This is an important methodological point.

If Wilber's intended position was more sophisticated than his repeated wording suggested, then the criticism did exactly what criticism is supposed to do: it exposed an ambiguity or inconsistency between the author's explicit formulations and the implications of his broader system.

De Quincey calls this “self-misrepresentation,” though his underlying point is simpler. Wilber cannot reasonably blame the critic for failing to reconstruct an implicit qualification that the author did not adequately communicate.

The exchange thus produces an interesting reversal. Wilber complains that de Quincey has taken his explicit statements and ignored his implicit position. De Quincey replies that he deliberately examined the tension between Wilber's explicit statements and his implicit theoretical commitments.

That is not a mistake. It is a legitimate form of criticism.

The “Wilber Police”

At this point the debate becomes more personal.

Wilber had criticized de Quincey for not sending him the paper before publication so that he could correct possible misrepresentations. De Quincey explains why he did not. He had previously sent Wilber papers raising theoretical objections and had received no response. He therefore saw little reason to seek advance approval this time. More importantly, Wilber had been preparing his own article for the same issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies. De Quincey did not want to give him an opportunity to adapt that article in response to criticisms Wilber would otherwise have encountered only after publication.

Then comes the extraordinary part.

Wilber had complained that de Quincey's article was particularly embarrassing because another article he had written for the same issue clearly stated his “actual position,” contradicting de Quincey's account. De Quincey's response is devastatingly simple: the two articles were being written simultaneously. He could not have responded to an article whose contents he had not yet seen.

This is more than a minor chronological correction. It exposes a fundamental problem in Wilber's argument. He was using a subsequently published text to demonstrate that de Quincey had misunderstood a position that de Quincey had already criticized in a manuscript written before he could have seen that text.

The later clarification may be relevant to the evolution of Wilber's position. It cannot prove that de Quincey's earlier criticism was a misrepresentation of what Wilber had written earlier.

That distinction should have been obvious.

A disturbing episode involving Keith Thompson

De Quincey then introduces a much more serious allegation concerning the circulation of his unpublished manuscript. He says that Keith Thompson, whom he had included among his prepublication reviewers, shared confidential email exchanges with Wilber and subsequently wrote a critique of de Quincey's critique for submission to the Journal of Consciousness Studies. De Quincey describes this as a breach of confidentiality and places it within what he calls the “Wilber Police” mentality.

This section deserves some caution. We have de Quincey's account here, and the document itself does not independently establish all the details of the episode. So it would be inappropriate to treat every allegation as independently proven fact.

But as an element of de Quincey's argument, it is important. He believes that his substantive criticism was being displaced by an effort to control how Wilber was interpreted. He sees a pattern in which critics are accused of “distortion” rather than having their arguments addressed directly.

Whether one accepts his characterization of the people involved or not, the underlying scholarly issue is legitimate. Intellectual communities become unhealthy when criticism is answered primarily through social policing rather than argument.

“X” versus “Y”

De Quincey now articulates the deepest methodological point of his response.

He says, in effect: Wilber's explicit position is X, while his broader model implicitly suggests Y. De Quincey's criticism concerns the inconsistency between the two.

Wilber's defense, however, treats the criticism as though de Quincey had ignored Y altogether. That is precisely backwards. De Quincey says that he was perfectly aware of Y; he emphasized X because that was what Wilber had actually stated explicitly in Integral Psychology.

This distinction is crucial for evaluating Wilber's entire intellectual style.

A sophisticated philosophical system can contain implications that exceed its author's explicit formulations. Critics may legitimately identify those tensions. An author cannot automatically defeat the criticism by saying that the critic should have noticed the implicit implication.

Indeed, identifying the discrepancy between explicit and implicit commitments is often exactly what philosophical criticism is supposed to do.

The mind-body problem: where de Quincey is strongest

The second major section is the strongest philosophical portion of de Quincey's response.

Wilber had distinguished several meanings of the mind-body problem: the ordinary psychological distinction between mind and bodily feelings, the neuroscientific relationship between brain and organism, and the philosophical relationship between interior/subject and exterior/object. He then divided the latter into relative and absolute dimensions.

De Quincey responds that this is precisely the confusion he had criticized.

He is not denying the importance of developmental psychology or neuroscience. He explicitly says that these fields are important and that he values Wilber's contributions to developmental psychology. But they do not address what philosophers such as Chalmers, Levine and others mean by the hard problem: how subjective consciousness can exist in an apparently objective physical universe and how subjective and objective domains are related.

This distinction is intellectually important even if one ultimately disagrees with de Quincey's philosophical solution.

Wilber's three meanings may all be legitimate uses of “mind-body.” The problem is that they are not the same problem. A developmental question, a neuroscientific question and an ontological question require different kinds of answers.

De Quincey therefore accuses Wilber of moving too easily between them.

His formulation is particularly sharp: Wilber's developmental and neuroscientific problems may be difficult, but they are not the philosophical “hard problem.” Bringing them into the same discussion risks making the conceptual problem appear to have been addressed when it has merely been surrounded by other problems.

That criticism remains relevant today.

Whitehead enters the picture

The disagreement becomes especially revealing when Whitehead is introduced.

Wilber had argued that because he had incorporated Whitehead's concept of prehension into his own model, whatever solution Whitehead offered to the mind-body problem could legitimately count as part of Wilber's integral solution. De Quincey refuses this reasoning.

His original wording, he emphasizes, was that “prehension-enriched quadrants” might offer a solution. That was deliberate. The potentially explanatory element was Whitehead's process philosophy, not Wilber's quadrant model itself.

This is an excellent example of the difference between borrowing an explanatory mechanism and creating an explanatory theory.

If Wilber's quadrants become philosophically useful because Whitehead's process ontology has been imported into them, then the explanatory achievement belongs substantially to Whitehead. Adding the quadrants may make the framework more comprehensive, but comprehensiveness is not the same as causal or ontological explanation.

De Quincey therefore insists that Wilber's static, spatial quadrant model does not itself explain the relation between interior and exterior. Whitehead's dynamic, temporal process philosophy potentially does.

This is perhaps the strongest philosophical point in the entire three-way exchange.

The “body is in the mind” problem

De Quincey also returns to one of Wilber's characteristic formulations: “the body is in the mind.”

He argues that this can only be literally true from an idealist standpoint. What Wilber actually means, he suggests, is that the felt body is in the mind. That is trivially true, because feelings and sensations are experiences. But the physical body itself is not thereby located inside consciousness.

This is a deceptively simple distinction, but it exposes an ambiguity that runs throughout Wilber's writing.

Wilber frequently shifts between phenomenological language and ontological language. What appears within consciousness can be described as “in the mind,” but that does not establish that the physical reality corresponding to that experience is ontologically reducible to consciousness.

De Quincey's objection is therefore not that Wilber's phenomenology is meaningless. It is that the phenomenological statement should not be mistaken for an ontological solution.

Again, the recurring theme is the same: description is not explanation.

The promissory solution

The deepest disagreement concerns what would count as a solution to the hard problem.

Wilber appeals to a transrational or nondual realization. De Quincey accepts that such experiences may be real and potentially relevant. But he refuses to call the promise of such an experience a philosophical solution.

This is one of the most nuanced passages in the response. De Quincey says that both he and Wilber may agree that rationality alone cannot necessarily resolve the deepest mind-body problem and that some form of somatic or transrational disclosure might be required. But from the standpoint of reason, both remain “promissory.”

His analogy is wonderfully apt: a symbolic placeholder for an extrarational experience is not the experience itself. The map is not the territory; the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.

This is where de Quincey makes perhaps his most important philosophical criticism of Integral Theory.

Wilber's model can point toward mystical realization.

It can name it.

It can place it at the top of a developmental architecture.

It can describe the relation between relative and absolute perspectives.

But none of this means that the model itself contains the realization.

This distinction is devastating if Wilber's claim is that AQAL provides a rationally adequate solution to the philosophical problem.

The model may point beyond itself, but pointing beyond itself is not the same as solving the problem from within the model.

Panpsychism: a semantic escape?

The panpsychism section provides another excellent case study.

Wilber distinguishes his “paninteriorism” from panpsychism and rejects the idea that feelings exist all the way down. De Quincey argues that this distinction becomes largely verbal once Wilber accepts Whiteheadian prehension throughout the Kosmos.

For Whitehead, de Quincey argues, prehension is intimately connected with feeling. If Wilber accepts prehension all the way down while simultaneously insisting that feeling does not go all the way down, there is a conceptual tension that cannot be resolved simply by choosing the term “paninteriorism” instead of “panpsychism.”

The interesting thing is that Wilber himself apparently conceded that calling himself a paninteriorist rather than a panpsychist was partly “word quibbling.” De Quincey therefore sees this not as a retreat from his criticism but as confirmation of it.

There is a broader lesson here. Terminological distinctions are useful when they mark genuine conceptual distinctions. But when two positions have the same ontological commitments and differ mainly in vocabulary, changing the label does not solve the underlying problem.

A surprising moment of generosity

The panpsychism section also contains one of the most attractive moments in the entire response.

Wilber explains that he avoids characterizing the ultimate nature of interiority because the interiors of holons ultimately open onto “radical, absolute, unqualifiable Spirit or pure Emptiness.” De Quincey responds:

“Well this sounds far more reasonable.”

He goes further. He says he is genuinely impressed by Wilber's ability to use language to gesture toward the ineffable and says that this is something he has admired in Wilber's writings for years.

That concession matters.

It demonstrates that de Quincey is not committed to attacking everything Wilber says. When he finds an improvement or clarification, he says so.

But he immediately asks why “interior” is any less a characterization of Spirit than “feeling.” If interiority implies subjectivity, and subjectivity implies some form of felt experience, then Wilber cannot simply exempt “interior” from the problem while rejecting “feeling.”

This is a good example of what makes de Quincey's criticism valuable. He is willing to grant the metaphysical insight while continuing to examine its conceptual implications.

Style and tone: the dangerous territory

The fourth section moves from philosophy into psychology.

Wilber had strongly objected to de Quincey's comments about his style and tone, treating them as attacks on his personality. De Quincey explains that he included the discussion because Wilber's writing style was itself relevant to his intellectual project. He describes Wilber's “edifice complex” as a drive to construct an “impregnable rational fortress,” while simultaneously acknowledging the impressive achievement of synthesizing an extraordinary range of thinkers and traditions.

This is where I think de Quincey becomes less secure.

There is a legitimate subject for criticism here: Wilber's prose can indeed be combative, dismissive and excessively certain, and the relationship between rhetorical style and theoretical method can be worth examining.

But moving from style to psychological diagnosis is inherently hazardous.

De Quincey says he has personal experience of Wilber and has spoken with people who knew him closely. He therefore considers his psychological assessment better grounded than Wilber's assessment of Whitehead's spiritual development, which was based on Whitehead's writings.

That is a clever counterattack, but it does not entirely solve the problem.

Knowing someone personally does not necessarily make one qualified to diagnose their psychological development. And an author's prose can reflect a rhetorical strategy without being a transparent window into the author's psyche.

De Quincey's strongest argument is therefore not that Wilber is psychologically deficient. It is that Wilber's theoretical presentation can feel strangely disconnected from the affective, paradoxical and mysterious realities that his own transrational philosophy claims to honor.

That is a much more defensible criticism.

The CIIS controversy

The final substantive section concerns the California Institute of Integral Studies, or CIIS, where de Quincey received his doctorate.

Wilber had apparently suggested that CIIS functioned as an “epicenter” spreading negative claims about him and had questioned de Quincey's motives in light of his institutional connection to the school. De Quincey responds that the CIIS community was much more heterogeneous than Wilber imagined. It included supporters, critics and people who were simply interested in debating his ideas.

His strongest response concerns the suggestion that he had concealed his CIIS doctorate in his biography.

De Quincey explains that the biography printed by the Journal of Consciousness Studies was simply an old biography accidentally reused by the journal. He insists that he had nothing to hide and was proud of his education at CIIS. He also points out that his article was his own work and that people from many different institutional backgrounds had read the manuscript.

This is an unnecessarily personal episode, but it reveals something significant about the relationship between Wilber and his critics.

Once institutional affiliation becomes evidence of intellectual bias, criticism becomes almost impossible to evaluate on its merits.

If a critic belongs to an institution that contains Wilber critics, that affiliation can be used to explain the criticism.

But the same logic would allow almost any criticism to be dismissed through sociology rather than argument.

The proper question remains: Is the criticism correct?

Where de Quincey himself overreaches

It would be unfair to treat de Quincey's response as flawless.

His language is sometimes excessive. “Rhetorical nonsense,” “Wilber-wriggle,” “disingenuous,” “persecution complex” and “paranoia” are strong accusations. They occasionally reproduce the very adversarial tone that he criticizes in Wilber.

His psychological interpretations of Wilber are also more speculative than his textual criticisms. The argument that Wilber's writing “reveals” an underlying discomfort with feeling is intriguing, but it cannot be established simply by analyzing his prose.

And his claim that Wilber may have obtained his manuscript in advance and revised his JCS article in response is presented as a possibility rather than demonstrated fact. De Quincey himself acknowledges that he is asking the reader to judge the circumstances.

These are important qualifications.

But they do not undermine his strongest arguments, because those arguments do not depend upon psychological speculation or the manuscript controversy.

The textual problems are sufficient.

The remarkable final olive branch

And then comes the surprise.

After twenty pages of increasingly fierce argument, de Quincey ends by offering Wilber an olive branch.

He predicts that Wilber will probably interpret even this response as further evidence that critics misunderstand him. But instead of demanding agreement, de Quincey proposes genuine dialogue in the sense associated with David Bohm: mutual respect, open listening and an effort to discover what is right in the other person's position.

His final paragraph is almost disarmingly conciliatory. He says he wants to move beyond the philosophical “cage match,” emphasizing listening, learning and honest and compassionate self-expression. He explicitly says that disagreement need not lead to attempts to shut one another down.

Then he writes:

“If this sounds like an olive branch . . . it is.”

That ending casts the entire essay in a different light.

De Quincey clearly did not regard himself as merely another enemy of Wilber. He admired substantial parts of Wilber's work, thought his synthesis was impressive, accepted some of his clarifications, and apparently wanted the relationship to become genuinely dialogical.

The tragedy is that the exchange had by then become so defensive that dialogue was increasingly difficult.

Who won?

It would be tempting to declare de Quincey the winner of this exchange. I would resist doing so.

Wilber had a legitimate complaint: his theoretical system was more nuanced than some of de Quincey's formulations suggested. The complete response confirms that Wilber had substantive discussions of intersubjectivity, multiple meanings of the mind-body problem, developmental psychology, transrational consciousness and Whiteheadian ideas. De Quincey sometimes compressed these complexities rather aggressively.

But de Quincey succeeded in establishing something more important.

Showing that Wilber's complete position is more sophisticated than his critics sometimes suggest does not establish that the criticisms of his explicit formulations are mistaken.

That is the central lesson of the entire exchange.

Wilber's response repeatedly demonstrates that there is a more comprehensive Wilber behind the particular Wilber criticized by de Quincey. De Quincey replies that this is precisely the problem: if the more comprehensive position is not clearly articulated in the work being reviewed, the critic is entitled to examine what is actually on the page.

And when Wilber subsequently clarifies the position, that clarification should be welcomed rather than treated as proof that the original criticism was illegitimate.

What this exchange reveals about Integral Theory

The larger significance of this early dispute reaches beyond de Quincey and Wilber.

It exposes a persistent tension within Integral Theory between integration and explanation.

Wilber's great strength is his extraordinary capacity to integrate. He can accommodate phenomenology, developmental psychology, neuroscience, systems theory, Whitehead, Eastern spirituality, mysticism and many other traditions within one conceptual architecture.

But integration raises a question that de Quincey repeatedly presses:

When does including another perspective become explaining the problem that perspective was intended to address?

A quadrant can accommodate subjective and objective dimensions. It does not necessarily explain their relationship.

A model can include intersubjectivity. It does not necessarily explain how subjects constitute one another.

A developmental map can include transrational states. It does not thereby produce the experience those states refer to.

A theory can incorporate Whitehead. It does not thereby become Whiteheadian process philosophy.

And a conceptual system can point toward nondual realization without itself constituting that realization.

This distinction between mapping, integrating and explaining is, in my view, the enduring philosophical value of the de Quincey-Wilber exchange.

The final irony

There is a final irony in the title “Critics Do. Critics Don't.”

De Quincey is prepared to concede that critics sometimes do misunderstand Wilber. He also concedes that Wilber occasionally says things that deserve clarification rather than condemnation. He even acknowledges that Wilber has considerable skill in expressing difficult spiritual ideas.

But he refuses to accept a much stronger proposition: that disagreement with Wilber is itself evidence of misunderstanding Wilber.

That is the point at which criticism becomes circular.

If Wilber says X and the critic says X is problematic, Wilber can reply that his real position is Y.

If the critic points out that Y was not what the book actually said, Wilber can reply that the critic should have read the larger corpus.

If the critic has read the larger corpus and points out a contradiction between X and Y, Wilber can say the critic has focused too narrowly on X.

The theory then becomes increasingly difficult to challenge—not necessarily because it is false, but because the terms of criticism keep moving.

De Quincey identifies this problem with considerable precision.

His strongest contribution is therefore methodological rather than doctrinal. He asks us to distinguish between what Wilber says, what Wilber may mean, what Wilber's larger system implies, and what Wilber later clarifies.

Those are four different things.

And once they are separated, the accusation of “misrepresentation” loses much of its force.

The Wilber-de Quincey exchange ultimately did not establish that Integral Theory was right or wrong. What it established was something more modest and, in retrospect, more valuable: a comprehensive theory must be judged not only by how much it can include, but by how well it can withstand a critic who has understood its strongest version and still says no.

That is where de Quincey leaves Wilber.

Not defeated, but challenged.

And, fittingly, with an olive branch extended across the battlefield.

NOTES

[1] Frank Visser, "What's It Like to Be a Super-Nova? Ken Wilber's Cosmic Approach to the Mind-Body Problem". www.integralworld.net, May 2017.