Transcription
Ken Wilbur's model of the four quadrants is the centerpiece of the integral philosophy, and it is one of the most useful tools you'll ever come across for conceptualizing the different dimensions of the human experience and the different domains of knowledge. With relevance to what we've been talking about recently on the channel, it's a way of understanding the voice of Jordan Peterson in contrast to that of Michel Foucault and the social justice movement. It's also a good way of situating a lot of the material we have looked at in the past, from the fault line between materialist atheists and traditional Buddhists to the perspective that humanity isn't a cancer but more relatable to the behavior of bacteria. We see where Marx and Freud's work fits in, where Nietzsche is operating from, and where schools like semiotics, empiricism, and phenomenology fit on the map.
In Wilbur's work, this four quadrants model is a map of the entirety of reality. It's the central point of his attempt to integrate all human knowledge and experience together so that we can find ourselves in a unified, holistic cosmos again, rather than having to choose which school of thought we align with. It's a really interesting theory that maps everything from the internal experience of bacteria to the Gaia hypothesis, the Big Bang, language, and power dynamics. There's a lot of moving parts, and some parts of it I'm not a hundred percent sold on, but in this episode, we're going to focus in on the human element and look at why this model is such a useful way to frame the domains of human existence and knowledge.
If this tickles your mind and you want to dive deeper, I'd highly recommend Wilbur's book *A Theory of Everything*. And if you really want to give it a deeper dive, then I would highly recommend his book *Sex, Ecology, Spirituality*. With that out of the way, let's talk about the four quadrant map.
So, the first thing to note is that these quadrants are mapped out over two axes. The x-axis separates the individual quadrants on the top from the collective quadrants on the bottom, while the y-axis separates the internal quadrants on the left-hand side from the external quadrants on the right-hand side. This leaves us with four different quadrants. The first quadrant, Q1, in the upper left, is the quadrant of the internal and individual. The second quadrant, Q2, in the upper right, is the space of the external and individual. The bottom left quadrant, Q3, is the internal and collective, and finally, the bottom right, Q4, is the external and collective. Another way of talking about them is the "I," the "It," the "We," and the "Its."
Now we have them divided up, let's explore what each of these quadrants actually contain. In the first quadrant, we have the internal, individual aspect of our lives. Here you'll find our thoughts, our feelings, our moods, as well as our logic. All the wonderful things that happen in your little noggin happen right up here in Q1. So, you can think of the work of Freud here, who's focused on the individual's internal life, or of the Stoics or Buddhists, who are focused on our relationship to our internal world. But the purest example, I think, of Q1 is Searle's phenomenology, which seeks to understand human experience without any reference to anything outside of the mind. It's about pure personal experience.
And everything that happens in this first quadrant has a correlate in Q2, the quadrant of the external, individual dimension of our being. Whenever you have one of your hair-brained thoughts, it doesn't happen in some disentangled mental sphere. If we shove you in an FMRI machine, having juiced you up with dye, we'll be able to see your brain light up when you have this thought. And when we call it a stupid thought, we see your amygdala light up in defensive anger. But then, as you tell yourself you're better than that, you remember to breathe, we'll see your prefrontal cortex light up as it tries to get your little tantrum under control. And of course, it's not just about what's going on in the brain; there's the release of hormones, the depth or shallowness of your breathing, your heart rate. All of all these things mirror the psychological experience that you're having. Everything that happens internally happens externally. Every thought has a physical side and a mental side. Same goes for your emotions. So that's Q1 and Q2. This is the nature of your individual mind-body system.
But the individual element is only one half of the human experience. None of this makes sense without understanding what grounds it and contextualizes it, and for that, we need to look at Q3 and Q4, the collective sides of the human experience. Q3 is the most intangible of the quadrants. The internal and individual is easy to grasp because it's the thoughts and ideas you're having in your own head. But Q3 is a little trickier to point out at first, but it's everywhere. As ever, Nietzsche hits the nail on the head in the third aphorism of *Beyond Good and Evil*. He writes that "most of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly guided and forced into certain channels by his instincts; behind all logic and its seeming sovereignty of movement too there stand valuations or more clearly physiological demands for the preservation of a certain type of life." Q3 is the internal ocean that we swim in. This is the quadrant of language, culture, value systems, and worldviews. The personal Q1 experience is completely shaped by the Q3 ocean.
In the episode on Saussurean Semiotics, we talked about the difference between *langue* and *parole*, which you can think of in terms of a game of chess. So you have the *langue* chess, which is the hidden rules of the game, and then you have the *parole*, which is the million and one instantiations of those rules. It's the individual games of chess that happen within the context of that set of rules. Language has a similar hidden structure that gives meaning to every instance of speech and writing. Linguists have unearthed the structure of language: nouns, tenses, articles, word order. But the structure pre-existed the archaeological work of the linguist. The same goes for culture and for value systems. They are intangibles that we don't directly touch, but would shape our experience of the world. They're the riverbanks that, unbeknownst to the river, are guiding and steering its course. This is a good analogy because the billion drops of water in the river shape the riverbank, which in turn redirects the river. There's an active relationship between the bank, which steers the river, and the movement of the water through this guided path, changing the path.
To give a concrete example, you can think of the experience of hunger. The Q1, Q2 experience of hunger is very different for a hunter-gatherer and a Western middle-class individual. There's a similar physiological experience, but the meaning that this experience is given and the actions it inspires are completely different, and that is because of the different Q3 oceans that these individuals are swimming in. The hunter-gatherer will reach for the bow and arrow, where the Westerner grabs their wallet or their phone. The individual experience is, in some senses, very similar: "I am hungry. I want not to be hungry. I'm going to go do something about that." But the reality couldn't be more different. One thinks about going out to hunt; the other thinks about going to the shop or opening an app on their phone. This reaction to the personal experience of hunger is shaped by the cultural Q3 backdrop. As Wittgenstein once wrote, "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."
Q4 is the outside of this collective experience. It is the empirical side of the collective equation. In Q3, we have the internal experience of collectivity: there's language and culture, there's our values and worldviews. And just as the individual thoughts, feelings, and ideas have their empirical correlates in the brain and body, so these components of the internal collectivity have their own empirical correlates. In *Sex, Ecology, Spirituality*, Wilbur summarizes the contents of Q4 as follows: "This quadrant includes the exterior of any of the social aspects of human interaction, including forms of production and techno-economic modes, bow and arrow, horticultural tools, agrarian implements, industrial machinery, computers, and so on, architectural structures, transportation systems, physical infrastructure, even written material forms of books, legal codes, linguistic structures, verbal signifiers, and so forth."
One great way of explaining the difference between Q3 culture and Q4 society is Wilbur's example of going to a foreign country. So, let's say you go to a country where you don't speak the language and that it's completely different to your culture. When you first arrive, you are in the Q4 society, but you're not in the Q3 culture. You can observe the architecture, the population density, the relative wealth and poverty, the demographics. You can see what technologies they have and how their society is structured. This is all Q4. You are surrounded by this Q4 society, but until you learn the language and learn to talk to the people, you don't have access to the Q3 culture. You don't know what the worldview of the people is, you don't know what they value or why they do what they do, you don't know the power structures. You're seeing the outside of their collectivity; you're seeing the Q4, but you haven't looked into the inside of the collectivity. You haven't seen into their collective value system. Without language and interaction, this isn't possible.
So, these are the four quadrants, then, of the human experience. We exist in four domains all at once. It's not just our personal thoughts, but our physical bodies that are the outside of these thoughts and feelings. There's the collective value system that contextualizes and makes parts of this individual experience more salient than others. Finally, there's the outside of this collectivity: everything from the architecture of your local shop to the supply chain of trucks to keep it stocked and all the technologies that make this supply chain work and construct this architecture. Our lives at any moment can be viewed from these four angles, which give very different insights.
So, now that we have briefly sketched out these four dimensions of the human experience, let's play around with it a little bit as an intellectual map. So, as you've already seen, in Q1, we have thinkers like Freud, the Stoics, and the spiritual thinkers like Buddha, Jesus, Anthony de Mello, Jed McKenna. All these thinkers are focused on the internal, individual dimension of existence. Moving over to Q2, we'll find thinkers like John Locke and B.F. Skinner. This is the realm of the hard sciences like physics, chemistry, and biology. It is the quadrant of empiricism and of studying individual things through observation and measurement. You isolate the individual being to be studied and you experiment to understand its qualities and its nature.
Coming down to Q3, we find Nietzsche's work on the revaluation of all values, on the Dionysian versus the Apollonian, and on the distinction between master and slave morality. We have Kuhn's work on paradigms as being the grounding culture that the science exists in at any moment in time. We have the structuralists and their search for the underlying structures of human life. We have Foucault's work on power and Saussure's work on semiotics. We also have Adam Smith's invisible hand of the market. And finally, then, we have Q4, where we have the study of the external collective. Down here, we have fields like ecology and chaos theory. We have Marx's economic theories and statistical studies of human societies. Jordan Peterson has published a lot of papers on the Q4 findings of the Ocean Personality Model and how, for example, it is more common for people with high politeness to be right-leaning, while those with higher compassion are more likely to be left-leaning. This is also where a lot of Steven Pinker's work with *The Better Angels of Our Nature* is focused. This is the philosophy of utilitarianism, Auguste Comte's theories of social evolution, and the science of climate change. All of these theories and systems are directed at studying the outsides of the collective experience.
The four quadrants model is also a great way of understanding the different arguments that are going on in the culture at any one point in time. A recent exploration of Jordan Peterson and the social justice movement can be understood as a conflict between Peterson's Q1 vision of personal responsibility and creating change in the individual realm, coming into conflict with the social justice movement's belief that change lies in the collective sphere by tackling oppression, bigotry, and bias in the culture. Peterson says, "Be the change you wish to see in the world." Well, the social justice movement says, "Let's make the world fair for everyone." They both want to make the world a better place, but get frustrated with each other over how to do that.
When you look at Richard Dawkins's attacks on religion as a delusion or as a virus, you're seeing a Q2 conflict with Q1. Dawkins is a rationalist, materialist. Matter is the fundamental thing, the externals are the fundamental thing. This religious stuff doesn't fit the mold of empirical science, and so it belongs in the trash. We can see how each quadrant can reduce the world to their little section of reality. It's not just the materialist saying that matter is all there is and reducing all internal phenomena to firings in the brain. There's plenty of spiritual folk out there who say that the mind is all that there is. There's the claim associated with Derrida that everything is interpretation, or the idea associated with Foucault that power is all that there is. All of these are distinct forms of reductionism coming from the different corners of the map. Everyone has their way of seeing things, and they have to explain why that way is the most important way.
The four quadrants model allows us to take a step back and to give a more balanced appraisal of the situation. It gives us a way of looking at each silo with a little more distance and objectivity. Like any model, it's imperfect, but it's extremely useful as a way of diffusing intellectual conflicts and unpacking what is actually going on beneath the surface.
That's everything for this episode of The Living Philosophy. If you've enjoyed it, please give the video a thumbs up down below. And as ever, I'd like to thank Shane and all the other patrons of the channel for their support in keeping this thing going. If you want to support the channel, you can head over to Patreon. You can get your name in the credits, as well as early access to scripts, videos, and a few other things as well. If you have any thoughts, insights, or feedback, I would love to hear from you down in the comments. Otherwise, I shall see you next time. Thank you for watching.