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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).

Beyond 'Universal Method'?

A Rejoinder to Mark Rost

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

Mark Rost's thoughtful defense of Integral Theory proposes that science is not the final arbiter of truth but merely one subset of a “universal method” of inquiry, following the engineer-philosopher Billy Koen. By this logic, Integral is not evading scientific discipline but expanding it into a more inclusive, four-quadrant methodology. It is an elegant move, but it does not resolve the central problem: Integral Theory appropriates scientific authority without submitting to scientific constraints.

1. Koen's Universal Method: Too General to Help

Koen's heuristic—“do the best you can with what you have to get what you want”—is undeniably useful as a way of seeing continuity between science, engineering, and everyday problem-solving. But as a foundation for Integral's claims, it collapses distinctions rather than clarifies them.

If all inquiry is reducible to “rules of thumb,” then the difference between tested scientific theory, private mystical vision, and imaginative speculation is erased. To say that Integral is “trans-scientific” by appealing to Koen is to grant itself immunity from science's only true strength: its capacity to check, falsify, and correct its own claims.

2. Integration or Inflation?

Rost insists that Integral “honors” science in the Right-Hand quadrants and merely “adds” phenomenology and hermeneutics for the Left-Hand quadrants. But this charitable framing does not match Integral's actual practice. Wilber does not merely correlate disciplines; he inflates them. Kauffman's “order for free” becomes evidence of Spirit. Varela's “enaction” is conscripted as a proto-quadrant theory. Bohm's implicate order is spiritualized into cosmic depth.

This is not neutral cartography but interpretive colonization. And here the “universal method” defense does not help—it simply lowers the bar of accountability until anything goes.

3. The Trouble with Eros

Rost argues that Eros should be seen as a Left-Hand “postulate,” the interior correlate of evolution's exterior mechanisms. This preserves its role as more than metaphor while shielding it from scientific critique. But this move creates incoherence:

• If Eros corresponds to naturalistic processes, then its plausibility depends on those processes being correctly described by science.
• If Eros transcends naturalistic processes, then it is not a correlate but an intrusion.

Either way, Integral cannot claim to be “enfolding” science without accepting the corrective feedback of science itself. Declaring Eros to be immune because it belongs to another quadrant is simply special pleading.

4. Accountability Cannot Be Quadrant-Relative

Rost warns that to demand Integral be judged by scientific standards alone is “flatland reductionism.” But accountability is not a quadrant-relative concept. If Wilber cites biology, his claims are accountable to biology. If he cites physics, they are accountable to physics. If he cites mysticism, they are accountable to the standards of contemplative practice.

Integral collapses this basic rule of intellectual honesty by pretending that accountability is “squared” across quadrants, when in fact it is often displaced. Failures in science are rebranded as triumphs in spirituality. Contradictions are hidden in a meta-framework so vast that no single domain is allowed to correct it.

Conclusion: Still a Map Without a Compass

Mark Rost reframes Integral as “universal method” cartography rather than scientific overreach. But the problem remains: maps must be checked against the territory they claim to represent. Science has tools for doing that; Integral does not. To dismiss such checking as “flatland” is to abdicate accountability altogether.

If Integral truly wants dialogue with science, it must accept correction on scientific terms. Until then, it will remain not a universal method but a universal metaphor—expansive, ambitious, and ultimately unmoored.