The Good, the True, and the Beautiful

Self critiquing, I don't think I accurately represented what Ken Wilber is up to in my post from yesterday. Wilber isn't trying to validate spiritual claims through science or engage in an apologetics of religion. It's much more sophisticated than that. According to Wilber, there's several types of truth claims, of which science is only one. These validity claims run a more comprehensive and inclusive spectrum, and narrow or "hard" science can be improved upon by including these other forms of knowledge.

Rather than muck it up again, here's how he puts it:

Science — empirical science — deals with objects, with "its," with empirical patterns. Morals and ethics concern "we" and our intersubjective world of mutual understanding and justness. Art and aesthetics concern the beauty in the eye of the beholder, the "I."

And yes, this is essentially Plato's the Good (morals, the "we"), the True (in the sense of propositional truth, objective truths or "its"), and the Beautiful (the aesthetic dimensions as perceived by each "I").

These three domains are also Sir Karl Popper's rather famous distinction of three worlds — objective (it), subjective (I), and cultural (we). Many people, myself included, consider Jürgen Habermas the world's foremost living philosopher, and these three great domains correspond exactly with Habermas's three validity claims: objective truth, subjective sincerity, and intersubjective justness.

Of enormous historical importance, these three domains showed up in Kant's immensely influential trilogy — The Critique of Pure Reason (objective science), The Critique of Practical Reason (morals), and The Critique of Judgment (aesthetic judgment and art).

Even into the spiritual levels of development, these three domains show up as, to give only one example, the Three Jewels of Buddhism, namely: Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. Buddha is the enlightened mind in each and every sentient being, the I that is no-I, the primordial awareness that shines forth from every interior. Buddha is the "I" or the "eye" of Spirit. Sangha is the community of spiritual truth that is realized, the "It" or "isness" or "thusness" or "suchness" of every phenomenon.

- Ken Wilber, The Eye of Spirit

My mistake is that I characterized Wilber as trying to mash spirituality into the narrow funnel of hard science. That's not the case at all, and I didn't mean it that way. Hard science looks at something like consciousness and sees a bunch of sparks flying around in the brain, reduced to information bits of 1s and 0s. That's a valid claim, but it's only one aspect of what's really going on. We don't actually experience consciousness as 1s and 0s flashing across our mind. We experience something else entirely. Hard science truth is only as complete as it relates to the sensorimotor part of consciousness. What other levels can we explore? Wilber's answer is expand truth seeking to all levels. He doesn't want to mash meditation into science. He wants to expand science to include it. Knowledge, he reasons, isn't just the True. It's the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.