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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).

The Tension of the Cosmos, or the Tension of the Argument?

A Critical Review of Jan Krikke's Defense of qi and Ken Wilber's Eros

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

Introduction: A Bridge Built on Ambiguity

In “The Tension of the Cosmos: Reuniting Physics and Metaphysics Through China's qi and Ken Wilber's Eros,” Jan Krikke, writing with the assistance of Qwen, attempts to accomplish something ambitious: to reunite physics and metaphysics by recovering an ancient Chinese understanding of reality as a dynamic interplay of opposing forces. His central proposal is that qi, the Chinese concept commonly associated with vital breath, energy, or the animating processes of the cosmos, and Ken Wilber's conception of Eros, understood as a universal drive toward greater complexity and spiritual realization, express essentially the same underlying principle.

The argument is attractive at first sight. Both concepts appear to resist a picture of reality as a collection of disconnected, inert objects. Both emphasize relationships, processes, and the emergence of organized forms. And both offer a vocabulary in which the world can be experienced as dynamic rather than dead, meaningful rather than merely mechanical.

But there is a fundamental problem with this attempted reconciliation. Showing that two traditions employ similar metaphors does not establish that they have discovered the same underlying reality. Nor does showing that a concept has been culturally influential establish that it accurately describes the physical world. Krikke repeatedly moves between poetic interpretation, historical observation, physical explanation, biological claims, and metaphysical speculation as though these were different expressions of one continuous insight. The transitions are rhetorically smooth but epistemically unearned.

The result is less a reunion of physics and metaphysics than a demonstration of how easily the language of one can be used to lend authority to the other.

The Many Meanings of qi

Krikke begins by presenting qi as the “breath and energy of the universe,” a principle that supposedly bridges physical processes and metaphysical depths. He subsequently identifies it with tension, electromagnetic fields, vital breath, sexual attraction, psychological anticipation, artistic vitality, and social momentum. In traditional Chinese medicine, it is associated with the body's vital processes; in Chinese painting, it describes a quality of animation or expressive vitality; in his account of physics, it becomes an invisible force governing the behavior of particles.

This breadth is intended to demonstrate the concept's universality. Yet it raises an obvious question: what, precisely, does qi mean?

There is nothing inherently wrong with a concept having several related meanings. Many useful concepts have both technical and metaphorical applications. The difficulty arises when those meanings are treated as evidence for one another. If qi means the movement of air in one context, the vitality of a painting in another, and a supposed fundamental energy in a third, the fact that all three can be described using the same word does not establish that they share a common physical mechanism.

The concept may be valuable as a historical category, a philosophical interpretation, or a vocabulary for embodied experience. None of these possibilities automatically makes it a scientific theory of the universe.

Krikke's account therefore risks confusing semantic unity with ontological unity. Because diverse phenomena can be interpreted through a common vocabulary of flow, tension, balance, and vitality, he infers that they manifest a common underlying principle. But the unity may reside in the human interpretive framework rather than in the structure of nature itself.

A painter's sense of movement, the attraction of magnets, and the formation of biological organisms can all be described in terms of relationships. That does not mean they are manifestations of one universal energy. It means that relational descriptions can be useful across very different domains.

Magnetism: Historical Inspiration Is Not Scientific Validation

The article's discussion of magnetism is particularly revealing. Krikke argues that the Chinese recognition of lodestone attraction provided an empirical foundation for qi. He refers to the evocative expression “loving stone,” associates magnetic polarity with yin and yang, and describes the compass as an instrument for aligning human habitats with invisible cosmic forces.

There is a legitimate historical subject here. Chinese civilizations developed sophisticated practices involving magnetism, divination, navigation, cosmology, and the interpretation of natural patterns. These developments deserve to be understood in their own intellectual and cultural contexts.

But Krikke makes a further move: he treats the recognition of magnetism as evidence that the Chinese worldview anticipated a unified account of physics and metaphysics. That conclusion does not follow.

Recognizing that a lodestone attracts iron is an empirical discovery. Interpreting attraction as a manifestation of yin-yang polarity is a conceptual interpretation. Claiming that the same principle governs biological vitality, human destiny, and spiritual evolution is a much broader theoretical commitment. Each step requires additional justification.

The distinction matters because a successful observation can coexist with an unsuccessful explanation. People can accurately identify a natural phenomenon while misunderstanding its underlying mechanism. The history of science is full of such cases.

The compass did not validate every cosmological interpretation associated with it. Nor does the practical usefulness of feng shui establish that geomantic arrangements manipulate an objectively existing cosmic energy. These propositions require separate evidence.

Krikke's argument would be stronger if it distinguished the genuine empirical achievements of Chinese civilization from the metaphysical interpretations historically attached to them. Instead, it allows the former to confer an aura of scientific credibility on the latter.

The Misrepresentation of James Legge

Krikke presents the nineteenth-century sinologist James Legge as an example of Western intellectual blindness. Legge criticized Chinese scholars who claimed that the I Ching already contained the discoveries of Western physics. Krikke quotes his dismissal of such claims and concludes that Legge failed to appreciate the relational worldview represented by qi.

Yet Legge's central objection, as quoted in the article, is considerably more defensible than Krikke acknowledges. If Chinese interpreters claim that an ancient text contains the truths of electricity, heat, and light, one can reasonably ask why those truths had to be learned from modern scientific sources before they could supposedly be recognized in the text.

That is not necessarily an expression of cultural prejudice. It is a legitimate demand for clarity about what a text actually predicts or explains.

An ancient system can provide fertile metaphors for interpreting scientific discoveries after the fact. But retrospective interpretation is not equivalent to anticipating those discoveries. To establish genuine anticipation, one would need to identify specific claims that were independently formulated, sufficiently precise, and capable of distinguishing the correct account from plausible alternatives.

Krikke responds by changing the standard of evaluation. He argues that the I Ching was not attempting to construct a telegraph or formulate mathematical equations, but rather to describe the relational fabric of reality. That is a reasonable defense of the text as a philosophical or symbolic work. It is not, however, a demonstration that it contains a superior understanding of electromagnetism.

The article even asserts that the I Ching “perfectly captures the behavior of electromagnetism” through the interplay of attraction and repulsion. This is an extraordinary claim supported by no corresponding analysis of the text, no precise mapping between its symbols and physical phenomena, and no account of what it explains that electromagnetic theory does not.

A conceptual resemblance is not a scientific correspondence. Almost any system that emphasizes duality, polarity, balance, or opposition can be retrospectively connected to selected features of physics. The important question is whether the connection yields explanatory or predictive results that could not be obtained without it.

Legge may have been limited by the assumptions of his time, as any historical thinker was. But Krikke does not establish that Legge was wrong about the particular methodological point at issue. He largely substitutes a more sympathetic cultural interpretation for the empirical question Legge raised.

Is qi Really Electromagnetism?

The article's most consequential claim appears when Krikke identifies the tension between yin and yang with electromagnetic fields. He describes qi as the invisible tension between magnetic poles and then extends this interpretation to the movement of particles, the flow of blood, sexual attraction, and psychological anticipation.

But the analogy breaks down precisely where scientific explanation begins.

An electromagnetic field is not simply a region of tension between opposites. It is a physically defined field characterized by measurable quantities, governed by mathematical laws, and capable of making precise predictions. Its interactions with charged particles can be calculated and experimentally tested. Magnetic polarity is one aspect of a quantitatively specified physical theory.

By contrast, Krikke's qi is not assigned a consistent operational definition. No measurement procedure is proposed for determining its magnitude, no equations describe its dynamics, and no distinctive predictions are derived from it. The word tension is doing most of the conceptual work.

Consider the example of a needle suspended between magnetic poles. The needle's orientation can be explained through the magnetic field and the torques acting on its magnetic moment. We do not need to introduce a second entity called qi to explain its behavior. If qi is merely another name for the relevant physical relationships, it adds no explanatory content. If it is something beyond those relationships, Krikke must explain what that something is and how it affects the outcome.

This produces a dilemma. If qi is equivalent to known physical processes, its independent explanatory contribution remains unclear. If it is a distinct underlying energy, its existence and effects require evidence.

Calling it a bridge between physics and metaphysics does not resolve this dilemma. It merely gives the unresolved question a more ambitious name.

From Magnetic Attraction to the Vitality of Life

The same problem becomes more serious when Krikke moves from magnetism to biology. He describes qi as the vital breath that animates the body and is manipulated through acupuncture. He also presents illness as a blockage or imbalance in the flow of this vital tension.

Here the article crosses from historical interpretation into claims about health and biological function. These claims cannot be established simply by showing that traditional Chinese medicine has a coherent vocabulary for describing the body.

Living organisms certainly depend on flows and gradients: electrical potentials across cell membranes, chemical concentration differences, metabolic energy, circulation, neural signaling, and countless other interacting processes. These are real, measurable phenomena. They help explain how organisms maintain themselves and respond to their environments.

But the existence of such processes does not establish a single additional vital energy that governs them all. The historical appeal of vitalistic explanations has often rested on precisely this move: life displays distinctive organization, therefore a special life principle must account for it. Modern biology has instead developed detailed explanations of many of the processes once attributed to mysterious vital forces.

This does not mean every traditional practice is ineffective, nor does it settle every question about acupuncture. Particular treatments must be assessed on their own evidence. But evidence that a treatment can help with a particular condition would not, by itself, establish the existence of qi as an independently acting energy. Therapeutic effects can have explanations that differ from the traditional theory offered to account for them.

Krikke provides no evidence that qi can be detected as a distinct biological energy, that its alleged blockages can be reliably measured, or that its manipulation produces effects that cannot be explained through established physiological mechanisms or other factors.

The article thus moves from the undeniable complexity of living systems to an unsubstantiated explanation of that complexity. It takes a legitimate question—how living organisms sustain their organization—and treats a traditional answer as though it had already been scientifically vindicated.

The Tennis Match and the Elasticity of Metaphor

Krikke's example of the psychological tension surrounding a tennis match illustrates another difficulty. He suggests that qi is present in the anticipation of a match point, when the air seems thick with potential energy.

This is an intelligible metaphor. Anyone familiar with competitive sport understands that tension can build, momentum can shift, and a crowd can become absorbed in a decisive moment. Such experiences are real features of human psychology and social interaction.

But psychological tension is not thereby demonstrated to be the same kind of entity as a magnetic field. In ordinary language, we use energy to describe a lively person, a compelling performance, a political movement, or an emotionally charged encounter. These usages need not imply a common physical substance.

The problem is not that metaphor is illegitimate. Metaphor is indispensable to human thought. The problem is that Krikke uses the metaphorical continuity of the word tension to support an ontological conclusion about the unity of the phenomena described.

If qi is simply a name for the felt intensity of a situation, it can serve as an evocative descriptive concept. If it is meant to identify the same underlying principle that governs magnetic attraction, however, the analogy needs to be demonstrated rather than assumed.

Otherwise, the theory can accommodate virtually anything. Magnetism is qi because it involves attraction; illness is qi because it involves bodily imbalance; art is qi because it conveys vitality; and a tennis match is qi because it generates suspense. A concept that fits every situation through a different interpretation may possess considerable expressive flexibility while offering little discriminating explanatory power.

Universality is not established by the ability to redescribe many things in the same language.

Wilber's Eros: Evolution Recast as Cosmic Intention

Krikke's defense of qi culminates in its proposed equivalence with Ken Wilber's Eros. Wilber employs the term not merely for sexual desire or interpersonal attraction but for a cosmic drive toward greater complexity, organization, consciousness, and spiritual unity. Atoms form molecules, molecules participate in the emergence of cells, cells form organisms, and organisms develop increasingly complex forms of awareness. Eros is presented as the principle underlying this unfolding.

Krikke sees a striking parallel between this evolutionary drive and the tension between yin and yang. Both are taken to reveal a universe animated by relational forces rather than composed of isolated objects. He consequently concludes that the physical drive toward complexity and the metaphysical drive toward unity are the same force viewed from different levels of existence.

This is where the argument becomes circular in a specifically evolutionary sense. The emergence of complex structures is observed, and a cosmic drive toward complexity is then proposed to explain why they emerge. But what independent evidence establishes the existence of that drive?

Evolutionary theory explains biological adaptation through mechanisms including heritable variation, natural selection, genetic drift, and other population-level processes. Self-organization, chemical kinetics, thermodynamics, and physical constraints help explain the formation of structures in other domains. These processes do not imply that the universe as a whole is pursuing a predetermined spiritual destination.

Evolution can produce greater complexity in particular lineages and environments, but it does not universally maximize complexity. Organisms simplify as well as elaborate; lineages become extinct; parasitic species lose structures; and evolution has no general obligation to move toward greater consciousness. The appearance of increasingly complex forms in some parts of the history of life does not establish a universal cosmic trajectory.

Wilber's Eros therefore raises a question that Krikke does not address: is Eros a metaphorical summary of the fact that novel forms sometimes emerge, or is it an additional causal principle that makes them emerge?

If it is a metaphor, one may find it philosophically suggestive, but it does not supply an independent explanation of evolution. If it is a causal force, one needs to identify how it operates, what it predicts, and how its effects can be distinguished from those of already established processes.

Krikke does neither. He simply declares that the drive toward physical complexity and the drive toward metaphysical unity are one and the same force. This is the conclusion the article needs to establish, not a premise it is entitled to assume.

Are Physics and Metaphysics Really Two Sides of One Coin?

Krikke presents the scientific revolution as the origin of a fractured worldview in which physics studies dead, mechanistic matter while metaphysics is relegated to subjective religion and philosophy. He then celebrates qi and Eros as bridges that overcome this division.

There is a genuine philosophical issue here. Scientific explanations do not automatically settle every question about meaning, value, consciousness, or human experience. Nor does the success of physics require us to regard human beings as nothing more than objects of impersonal description. The relationship between first-person experience and third-person explanation remains a substantial subject of philosophical debate.

But it is misleading to suggest that physics itself has simply reduced the universe to dead objects. Modern physics describes fields, interactions, dynamic systems, and changing structures. Contemporary biology investigates self-organization, emergence, feedback, and the conditions under which complex organization develops. The scientific picture is considerably richer than the mechanistic caricature invoked in the article.

More importantly, acknowledging that different disciplines investigate different aspects of reality does not require us to postulate a universal principle connecting them. A psychological description and a physical description may concern different explanatory levels without being expressions of one hidden energy. Aesthetic experience can be understood through art history, perception, and cultural interpretation without requiring a cosmic aesthetic force. Human love can be profoundly meaningful without being identified with gravity.

The distinction between physical and metaphysical questions is not necessarily a wall that needs to be torn down. Sometimes it is a distinction that needs to be clarified. We can ask what physical processes make a phenomenon possible, what it means to the people involved, and what philosophical conclusions follow from it without pretending that all three questions have a single answer.

Krikke's bridge risks obscuring these distinctions rather than integrating them. By assigning the same underlying significance to phenomena that require very different kinds of explanation, he produces a unified vocabulary at the expense of explanatory precision.

The Difference Between an Integrative Worldview and a Scientific Theory

One can defend the value of both qi and Eros without claiming that either is an established physical force. Both may function as organizing metaphors for understanding relationships, processes, and the emergence of meaningful patterns. Both can encourage people to resist overly static or atomistic conceptions of reality.

There is nothing wrong with such philosophical ambitions. The difficulty lies in presenting an integrative worldview as though its breadth were evidence of its truth.

A scientific theory earns its authority through more than its ability to accommodate familiar observations. It must specify what it claims, connect those claims to evidence, distinguish itself from alternatives, and expose itself to the possibility of being wrong. When a proposed principle is invoked to explain magnetism, biological vitality, artistic expression, sexual attraction, and spiritual evolution, it should be especially clear what unites these phenomena beyond the metaphor used to describe them.

Krikke offers no common measurement, mechanism, or set of distinctive predictions. Nor does he show that introducing qi or Eros improves upon the explanations already available in the relevant disciplines. The article instead proceeds by association: polarity resembles tension, tension resembles relationality, relationality resembles emergence, and emergence resembles spiritual development. The resemblance is then treated as evidence of a common cosmic principle.

This is a recognizable strategy in perennialist and integrative thought. Diverse traditions are interpreted as expressing the same fundamental truth, while differences between their concepts are treated as differences of vocabulary or cultural perspective. The approach can produce illuminating comparisons, but it can also make the conclusion inevitable by defining the concepts broadly enough to fit one another.

A genuinely critical comparison would also investigate where the concepts fail to correspond. Does qi imply an evolutionary tendency toward increasing complexity? Does Wilber's Eros imply the balancing of yin and yang? Do the two concepts make the same causal claims, or do they belong to different historical and philosophical frameworks? If they diverge, those differences matter as much as their similarities.

Krikke's article offers a synthesis, but it does not sufficiently test the terms being synthesized.

The Cosmos Does Not Need a Cosmic Urge

What Jan Krikke calls the “tension of the cosmos” can be approached more productively through thermodynamics. The early universe began in a remarkably special, low-entropy state, and its subsequent evolution has involved the development and dissipation of physical gradients. Gravity gathered matter into stars and galaxies; stars converted nuclear energy into radiation; and the energy flowing through planetary environments made possible increasingly complex chemical and biological processes. None of this requires us to postulate a universal energy called qi or a metaphysical drive called Eros.

The crucial distinction is between a universe that produces complexity and a universe that strives toward complexity. The first is a scientific observation requiring explanations at different levels. The second is a metaphysical interpretation of those observations. Entropy and nonequilibrium processes help us understand how local organization can emerge while total entropy increases. They do not establish that the cosmos possesses an intention, that evolution has a predetermined direction, or that matter is secretly reaching toward Spirit.

Krikke's synthesis of qi and Eros turns a broad metaphor of relational tension into a purported cosmic principle. Thermodynamics offers a more disciplined alternative: specify the physical conditions, identify the mechanisms, and investigate the consequences. Where the mechanisms are understood, no additional cosmic force is needed. Where they are not understood, the honest answer is that the explanation remains incomplete.

The universe may be astonishingly creative in its outcomes without being creative in the sense of pursuing a goal. Its history can generate stars, life, and consciousness without the universe itself wanting any of them. The wonder is not diminished by this possibility. If anything, it becomes more remarkable: extraordinary complexity can emerge from physical processes without requiring a metaphysical architect or an invisible urge toward fulfillment.

Conclusion: A Poetic Unity, Not an Established Cosmic Force

“The Tension of the Cosmos” is most persuasive when read as an essay about the appeal of relational thinking. It reminds us that phenomena do not exist in isolation, that processes matter as much as static structures, and that different civilizations have developed rich conceptual vocabularies for interpreting the dynamics of the world. The Chinese tradition of qi deserves serious historical and philosophical attention, and Wilber's Eros can be examined as an attempt to give evolutionary emergence a broader metaphysical significance.

But the article's central claim—that qi and Eros reunite physics and metaphysics by expressing the same universal force—is not established. Historical observations of magnetism do not validate a cosmic energy. The metaphor of tension does not unify electromagnetic fields, biological processes, psychological anticipation, and artistic vitality into one scientific entity. And the emergence of complexity does not demonstrate that the universe is driven toward spiritual realization.

The more productive alternative is not to replace qi with Eros, or Eros with another universal principle, but to investigate the specific physical, chemical, biological, and psychological processes through which the universe develops. Thermodynamics and nonequilibrium processes already help explain how gradients drive change, how energy flows sustain local organization, and how complex structures can emerge without violating the second law. These explanations do not resolve every question about cosmic evolution, but their limitations are identifiable, and their claims can be tested. We need not fill the gaps in our knowledge with an all-encompassing metaphysical force.

The most important distinction is between seeing relationships everywhere and proving that one force explains them all. The first is a philosophical orientation; the second is an explanatory claim that requires evidence.

Krikke repeatedly moves from the former to the latter without supplying the missing argument. His synthesis therefore illustrates the very problem it seeks to overcome: when physics and metaphysics are united through a sufficiently elastic vocabulary, their differences can disappear linguistically while remaining unresolved intellectually.

The universe may indeed be understood through multiple levels of description, and there is much to learn from comparing Chinese cosmology with contemporary evolutionary philosophy. But neither qi nor Eros becomes more credible merely because the two are placed side by side. Nor does the undeniable capacity of the cosmos to generate complexity establish that it possesses a hidden urge toward spiritual fulfillment.

The decisive question is not whether the universe can be described as dynamic, relational, and creative. It plainly can. The question is whether positing a universal cosmic tension explains anything that the independently established processes of physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology do not already explain.

Until Krikke can answer that question, his proposed bridge between physics and metaphysics remains a compelling metaphor rather than a demonstrated account of reality. The cosmos may be wondrous without being purposeful, and its capacity to generate complexity may be remarkable without requiring a cosmic urge to do so. We lose nothing of that wonder by distinguishing what nature demonstrably does from what we would like it to mean.