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

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).

The Diamond That Does Not Exist

Wilber's Realism versus His Anti-Ontology

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

Ken Wilber has long opposed what he regards as the excesses of postmodernism: the idea that reality is so thoroughly constituted by language, culture, interpretation, or conceptual schemes that there is no meaningful reality independent of those schemes. In The Marriage of Sense and Soul (1998), he offered a particularly memorable counterexample:

“A diamond will cut a piece of glass, no matter what cultural words or concepts we use for 'diamond,' 'cut,' and 'glass.'”

The point seems straightforward. However differently cultures classify, name, interpret, or theorize about diamonds, glass, and cutting, the physical interaction remains. A diamond cuts glass. Reality therefore cannot simply be reduced to linguistic or cultural construction.

Yet eight years later, in Integral Spirituality (2006), Wilber makes a strikingly different claim. In his discussion of worldspaces and perspectives, he argues that ontology does not exist in the traditional sense. A “dog,” for example, does not exist as such; there are only dogs as they appear within particular perspectives or worldspaces.

The question therefore arises: what happened to the diamond?

If the diamond is a useful argument against extreme constructivism in 1998, why does the diamond—or dog, or any other object—lose its independent ontological status in 2006?

The apparent contradiction reveals a deeper instability in Wilber's attempt to combine realism, constructivism, and perspectivism.

The diamond argument

The strength of Wilber's 1998 argument lies in its modesty.

He does not need to claim that human beings possess an absolutely objective description of diamonds. Different cultures may classify minerals differently. They may have different words for diamond. They may embed the stone in radically different symbolic systems. One culture might regard it as sacred, another as a commodity, another as a geological curiosity.

None of this changes the physical fact that a sufficiently hard diamond can scratch or cut glass.

The distinction is important. Our descriptions of an object are not identical with the object and its causal properties.

This is a perfectly respectable form of realism. It does not require naïve realism—the belief that perception gives us reality exactly as it is. Nor does it deny that all human knowledge is mediated by concepts, language, sensory systems, scientific theories, and cultural practices.

It merely insists that our conceptual mediation encounters something that is not entirely produced by the mediation itself.

The diamond therefore functions as an anti-relativist thought experiment. You can call it whatever you like. You can interpret it however you like. But if you place it against glass under the appropriate physical conditions, something happens.

The world pushes back.

That is the philosophical significance of the example.

Then comes the “dog”

In Integral Spirituality, however, Wilber's treatment of the dog appears to move the argument in a very different direction.

The claim is not merely that different cultures conceptualize dogs differently. That would be uncontroversial. Nor is it simply that “dog” is a linguistic category rather than a metaphysical essence. Again, most philosophers and scientists could accept that qualification.

Wilber makes a stronger move. The “dog as such” does not exist independently of the perspectives or worldspaces in which it appears. What exists are dogs as apprehended within particular perspectives.

This is connected to his broader distinction between what he calls perspectives, worldviews, worldspaces, and kosmic addresses. The object is not simply an isolated entity possessing an intrinsic meaning independently of all contexts. What counts as “the dog” is partly constituted by the perspective through which it is encountered.

There is an important insight here.

A veterinarian, a biologist, a child, a Buddhist monk, a molecular geneticist, and a dog owner do not encounter precisely the same meaningful object. The biological organism is one thing; the companion animal is another; the sacred animal is another; the zoological specimen is another.

But this does not necessarily entail that there is no organism there independently of these perspectives.

And that is where Wilber's argument becomes vulnerable.

From epistemology to ontology

The fundamental problem is a familiar one: the epistemological fallacy.

We can distinguish two propositions:

We never encounter an object except through some perspective, conceptual framework, sensory apparatus, language, or cultural context. Therefore, there is no object independently of those perspectives, frameworks, sensory systems, or cultural contexts.

The first proposition is epistemological.

The second is ontological.

The second does not follow automatically from the first.

Indeed, Wilber's 1998 diamond argument depends precisely upon maintaining this distinction. We may have culturally different concepts of diamond, glass, and cutting, but the physical interaction between them constrains those concepts.

The mistake would be to reason:

“We only know diamonds through conceptual and cultural mediation; therefore there is no diamond apart from those mediations.”

That would be exactly the kind of inference Wilber criticized in his attack on extreme postmodernism.

Yet his later “ontology does not exist” formulation appears perilously close to making that very move.

The missing distinction: object versus object-as-known

There is a straightforward way to reconcile the two Wilbers, but it requires weakening the 2006 claim.

Wilber could say:

There is a real diamond, but there is no perspective-free description of the diamond.

That would be entirely coherent.

Or:

There is a real dog, but “dog” as a meaningful object is always encountered within a particular perspective.

Again, no contradiction.

The problem arises when “the object as known” is allowed to swallow “the object itself.”

The fact that we never encounter a completely perspective-free dog does not demonstrate that there is no dog independent of our perspectives.

A dog can bite you regardless of whether you interpret it as:

• Canis lupus familiaris,

• a beloved pet,

• an animal soul,

• a symbol of loyalty,

• a nuisance,

• a commodity,

• or an evolutionary organism.

The interpretations vary. The teeth remain.

And that brings us straight back to the diamond.

Wilber's four quadrants do not solve the problem

Wilber's AQAL framework was designed precisely to accommodate multiple dimensions of reality. The Upper-Right quadrant describes exterior individual phenomena; the Upper-Left concerns interior experience; the Lower-Right concerns social systems; and the Lower-Left concerns cultural meanings.

From this perspective, there is nothing wrong with saying that “the dog” can be investigated in several irreducible ways.

The biologist studies its organismic characteristics.

The psychologist studies its behavior and subjective interaction with humans.

The anthropologist studies the cultural meanings attached to dogs.

The sociologist studies the institutions and practices surrounding domestication, breeding, ownership, and veterinary medicine.

These are not necessarily competing descriptions. They can be complementary perspectives on the same physical organism.

Indeed, this is arguably the strongest case for an integral approach.

But complementarity does not require ontological dissolution.

There is a difference between saying:

“The dog has many valid descriptions”

and saying:

“There is no dog apart from the descriptions.”

The first is perspectival realism.

The second moves toward constructivism.

The strange disappearance of the diamond

This is why the chronological contrast between 1998 and 2006 is so revealing.

In 1998, Wilber needs the diamond to possess enough reality to resist cultural construction.

In 2006, Wilber needs the dog to lack precisely that kind of perspective-independent ontological status.

The rhetorical functions are almost mirror images.

The 1998 diamond says:

Interpretation cannot manufacture physical causality.

The 2006 dog seems to say:

Physical objects do not exist independently of interpretation.

Those statements can be reconciled only if “exist” is being used in two different senses.

And that is probably the charitable interpretation.

Wilber's later argument can be understood as an attack on naïve ontology rather than ontology itself. There is no culturally neutral, conceptually unmediated meaningful object. “The dog” is always already situated within a worldspace.

Fine.

But then the statement “ontology does not exist” is unnecessarily sweeping and philosophically misleading.

It would be much more defensible to say:

No ontology is completely perspective-free.

That is a very different claim.

The Kantian escape route

There is actually a respectable philosophical tradition behind this position.

Kant famously distinguished the thing-in-itself from the object as it appears to us. Later phenomenologists and constructivists developed increasingly sophisticated accounts of how objects are constituted within structures of perception, cognition, language, and social practice.

But none of this requires denying an external reality.

Contemporary scientific realism routinely makes the same distinction. Scientific theories are historically situated and conceptually mediated, yet they can nevertheless successfully track structures of an independently existing world.

The electron does not cease to exist because physicists revise their theories about electrons.

The virus does not disappear because different cultures have different concepts of disease.

And the diamond does not stop cutting glass because nobody has yet invented the word “diamond.”

Indeed, the spectacular success of the natural sciences would be difficult to explain if reality were constituted entirely by our conceptual schemes.

Wilber's own evolutionary and scientific arguments depend heavily upon precisely such mind-independent constraints.

The performative problem

There is also a performative difficulty in saying that “ontology does not exist.”

To make the claim is already to distinguish between a proposition and the reality to which that proposition refers.

Wilber is not merely saying:

“I prefer not to use ontological language.”

He is making a claim about the status of ontology itself.

But that immediately raises the question: what kind of claim is this?

If it is merely a statement about how human beings construct descriptions, then it is epistemological and relatively uncontroversial.

If it is a claim about reality—that there simply are no objects existing independently of perspectives—then it is itself an ontological claim.

In other words, the declaration that ontology does not exist risks becoming an ontology of anti-ontology.

That is the familiar paradox of strong constructivism.

What survives the criticism?

The strongest version of Wilber's insight should therefore be preserved.

There is no such thing as a completely uninterpreted humanly meaningful object.

Every object of knowledge arrives through some apparatus of access: perception, language, conceptualization, scientific instrumentation, cultural practice, historical context, and so forth.

That is an important corrective to naïve realism.

But the conclusion should stop there.

From the fact that our knowledge of diamonds is mediated, it does not follow that diamonds are culturally constructed.

From the fact that “dog” is a culturally meaningful category, it does not follow that dogs have no existence outside cultural worldspaces.

From the fact that we encounter reality perspectivally, it does not follow that reality is perspectival all the way down.

The world can be both independently constraining and multiply interpretable.

That is a much more defensible form of integral realism.

The integral irony

There is an irony here.

Wilber's original diamond example was intended to rescue integral theory from the excesses of postmodern relativism. He correctly recognized that cultural interpretation cannot simply erase physical reality.

But his later perspectival language risks undermining the very realism that gave the earlier argument its force.

The diamond is therefore more philosophically troublesome than Wilber may have realized.

If it exists only as a “diamond” within a particular worldspace, what exactly cuts the glass?

A cultural construct?

A perspective?

A worldspace?

Or an actual physical structure possessing causal properties independently of our descriptions?

If the answer is the last one, then Wilber has retained ontology after all.

And if the answer is the first three, he has a much harder time explaining why the glass breaks.

The most coherent position is consequently neither naïve realism nor radical constructivism. It is perspectival realism: there is a mind-independent world, but every human access to that world is situated, mediated, selective, and theory-laden.

That position preserves the genuine insight of Wilber's postmodern critique without sacrificing the realism of his diamond.

The diamond cuts the glass.

It does so before we have a word for either of them.

And that stubborn fact may be one of the best arguments against the claim that ontology simply “does not exist.”