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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).

Ken Wilber and the Winding-Up Universe

A Case Study in Metaphysical Overreach

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

Ken Wilber has long sought to be the Hegel of the 21st century: a philosopher of everything, reconciling science and spirit into a single Grand Narrative. But nowhere does this ambition break down more spectacularly than in his theory of evolution as Eros—a metaphysical force that, he claims, drives the universe upward toward greater complexity, integration, and consciousness.

This essay argues that Wilber's framing of evolution is not an integrative vision, but a metaphysical projection masquerading as synthesis. It fails at both science and spirituality—drawing faulty analogies, abusing scientific concepts, and exhibiting open contempt for biology when it doesn't serve his cosmic story. With Eros, Wilber doesn't explain evolution; he rewrites it to suit his theological intuition. In the process, he confuses entropy, misunderstands complexity, and builds a spiritual creation myth out of bad metaphors.

I. Winding Up vs. Winding Down: A Manufactured Crisis

In nearly all Wilberian cosmology, evolution is described as a universe "winding up." As he wrote in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (1995):

“This split the world of science into two utterly incompatible halves: a biology describing the world winding up, and a physics describing a world winding down.”

Wilber believes that biology, through evolution, clearly shows the production of higher-order structures, while physics—especially thermodynamics—insists that everything is decaying into disorder.

But this “split” is illusory. The Second Law of Thermodynamics applies to closed systems, where no energy enters or leaves. The Earth, obviously, is not such a system—it receives vast, continuous energy from the Sun. Evolution on Earth proceeds because of this energy gradient, not in defiance of entropy but because of it. Local increases in complexity are entirely consistent with the Second Law.

Wilber sets up a straw-man contradiction between physics and biology, then invokes Eros to resolve it. It's a mystical band-aid for a wound that never existed.

II. Eros as Spirit in Drag

Wilber insists his view is not supernatural, but “intra-natural”:

“You either postulate a supernatural source… or you postulate Spirit as immanent… and it shows up as a self-organizing, self-transcending drive within evolution itself.” (Ken Responds to Recent Critics, 2006)

This is metaphysical wordplay. Whether Spirit is “immanent” or “transcendent,” if it has direction, intention, or teleology, it stands outside the mechanisms of science. You cannot solve a naturalistic problem by inserting a quasi-divine impulse and calling it “intra-natural.” That's not integration; it's semantic laundering.

Wilber dresses his metaphysics in scientific-sounding clothes—self-organization, emergence, holarchy—but what he's really doing is restoring final causation to a universe that got along just fine without it.

III. Misusing Complexity: Prigogine and Kauffman Don't Save You

Wilber repeatedly invokes scientists like Ilya Prigogine and Stuart Kauffman to claim that mainstream science supports his thesis:

“Matter does that inherently!… Prigogine… demonstrated absolutely… that even dead and insentient matter… will jump to a higher level of self-organization.”

This is a caricature of complexity theory. What Prigogine showed was that far-from-equilibrium systems can exhibit spontaneous ordering tendencies—dissipative structures like vortices, convection cells, etc. But these are thermodynamic responses, not spiritual impulses. There is no Eros in a whirlpool.

Stuart Kauffman does talk about self-organization—but cautiously, and within the bounds of naturalistic explanation. Wilber uses Kauffman's work as cover for a cosmic vitalism, ignoring Kauffman's refusal to invoke teleology.

Wilber cherry-picks scientific concepts to support what is, in essence, neo-Platonic theology.

IV. Frank Visser and the Intellectual Meltdown

Wilber lashes out against evolutionary criticism in a 2019 interview:

“The modern theory of evolution is catastrophically incomplete!… Got it. Understood. Just fuck off!”

This is not the voice of a confident integrator. It's the tantrum of someone who knows the evidence is not on his side. Frank Visser, one of Wilber's earliest champions turned critic, has spent years carefully documenting Wilber's scientific missteps. Wilber's response is not to engage, but to deflect—with arrogance, invective, and rhetorical sleight of hand.

Instead of confronting the robust, testable theory of natural selection, Wilber blames the scientific method itself for not seeing what he intuits: that matter yearns for Spirit.

This is mysticism posing as critique, but it collapses under its own lack of rigor.

V. Evolution as Storytelling: The Return of the Great Chain

In Wilber's telling, evolution becomes a sacred narrative of ascent—from atoms to neurons to cosmic consciousness. He says in A Theory of Everything:

“The physical universe actually has an inherent tendency to create order.”

But there is no “tendency” in nature toward order per se. Complexity can increase, but it often doesn't. It collapses, regresses, or stalls. Evolution doesn't care about “upward.” It only cares about survival in context.

Wilber's notion of a universe rising through nested wholes (atoms → molecules → cells → minds) is just the Great Chain of Being in evolutionary drag. It looks scientific only because it uses scientific nouns. But its structure is mythic.

VI. The Kindergarten Cosmology: A Final Collapse

The most telling expression of Wilber's confusion appears in a 2015 lecture:

“And the whole notion of the universe as 'running down' is ridiculous. I mean, it is NOT!

… It started with the Big Bang… then quarks… then subatomic particles… then atoms… then molecules… then living cells… then multicellular organisms… then brains…

THAT is a universe winding UP!”

This is textbook teleological fallacy. Yes, complex systems emerged after the Big Bang. But Wilber treats this sequence as a trajectory—a direction with purpose. That's like watching a fireworks display and concluding the sparks are trying to form constellations.

Evolutionary history is not a ladder of “increasing wholeness.” It's a contingent, branching, often wasteful process. Most complex life has gone extinct. Most organisms are still single-celled. “Wholeness” is not a scientific variable. It's a poetic projection.

“The human brain has more synaptic connections than stars in the universe,” he adds triumphantly.

So what? That doesn't prove telos. It proves only that complexity is possible—not that it is inevitable, much less ordained.

Wilber mistakes narrative structure for cosmic truth. This is not philosophy. It's spiritual kindergarten.

VII. A Spiritual Vision Without Scientific Discipline

Wilber's cosmology of Eros is not an integration of science and spirit. It is a metaphysical monologue in scientific costume. It misrepresents physics, co-opts complexity theory, dismisses biology, and demonizes critics who point out its incoherence.

In his attempt to bring Spirit into evolution, Wilber ends up undermining both science and spirituality. Science loses rigor. Spirit loses mystery. What remains is an ideology—a grand story that tells you the universe is on your side, because it wants what you want: more depth, more unity, more consciousness.

That might be comforting. But it's not true.

And no amount of neologisms, quadrants, or capital-S Spirit can make it so.

Conclusion:

In the end, Ken Wilber's defense of "Eros in evolution" is not merely unscientific—it is evasive, misleading, and impervious to correction. As Frank Visser has rightly pointed out, Wilber seems to have completely missed the actual substance of the critique leveled at him over many years on Integral World.

The issue is not, as Wilber straw-mans it, that his theory "doesn't fit" modern evolutionary theory. It's that he has consistently misrepresented neo-Darwinism; failed to engage with genuine post-Darwinian developments; proposed a spiritual force that explains nothing; abused complexity science to serve mystical ends; flirted irresponsibly with Intelligent Design rhetoric; and ultimately rebranded evolution itself into a vessel for his metaphysical ideology—all while refusing dialogue with his critics.

The fact that he clings to terms like “self-organization” while ignoring their scientific context is, as Visser notes, entirely beside the point. Wilber has not integrated science and spirit—he has domesticated science to serve spirit, silencing any fact that resists his vision. That may serve his system. But it does not serve the truth.