Why Ken Wilber Is Wrong About Postmodernism

[Nilsi]

It’s Not a Phase, Mom

“God is dead,” Nietzsche declared - not to abolish meaning, but to diagnose the collapse of its traditional foundations. He was not making a metaphysical claim. He was naming a crisis: the failure of the great legitimating narratives - religion, reason, progress - to ground value and orient life. With that collapse, the burden of meaning shifts radically onto us.

Postmodernism is often misunderstood. Critics from both conservative and integrative camps routinely misread it as nihilistic or immature. Jordan Peterson - whose increasingly erratic culture war crusades place him outside the bounds of serious philosophical discussion - dismisses it as the root of moral collapse. Ken Wilber, by contrast, offers a more systematic and ostensibly integrative critique. But his framework, for all its sophistication, misrepresents the postmodern ethic in subtler and more pervasive ways. It is Wilber’s interpretation that will serve as the primary focus of critique in this essay.

Nietzsche’s Dangerous Freedom and the Birth of Postmodern Ethics

Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God marks a rupture, not a rejection. What dies is not Being itself, but the old architecture of justification. No divine blueprint, no metaphysical scaffold, no teleological arc will save us. But this is not despair. It is the beginning of dangerous freedom: to live without transcendent guarantees.

The Übermensch is not a figure of domination, but one who affirms life by creating values in a world stripped of cosmic authority. The task is not to replace the dead God with new idols - nation, race, system, spirit - but to stand in the open, where meaning must be made, not inherited.

This is the spirit that animates postmodern thought. It is not anti-truth, but acutely aware of truth’s fragility, historicity, and construction. Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze do not mourn the loss of foundations - they begin from it.

Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze on Living Without Guarantees

What unites Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze is not a shared doctrine but a shared orientation. Each takes the death of transcendence seriously and refuses the twin temptations of despair and restoration - neither collapsing into cynicism nor grasping for new absolutes. They begin from the fragility of the human condition - finite, situated, plural - and ask: how shall we live without guarantees?

Foucault reframes ethics as a practice of freedom. In his later work, especially on the care of the self, he moves beyond disciplinary critique to explore how subjects might actively constitute themselves. Ethics, for him, is not obedience to a universal law but the aesthetic and political labor of self-formation. Through genealogy, he reveals how norms are produced - so that they might also be resisted or reconfigured. His is an ethics of lucidity: to understand how one is shaped in order to shape oneself otherwise.

Derrida brings ethics to bear on language itself. His deconstruction is not a demolition of meaning, but an exposure of its structural exclusions. For Derrida, justice always exceeds codified law; the Other always exceeds the concept. His notion of the messianic without messiah refuses the closure of any final horizon, keeping open the space of responsibility and response. His ethics is one of infinite postponement and vigilance - an unending attentiveness to the singular, the unassimilable, the yet-to-come.

Deleuze, by contrast, turns to becoming as the ethical horizon. He rejects both fixed identities and dialectical resolution, proposing instead an immanent ethics rooted in transformation, affect, and connection. His ontology of difference affirms multiplicity, not as fragmentation but as creative potential. The question is no longer “What is the good life?” but “What can a life become?” His ethics is experimental, embodied, and generative - an affirmation of intensity over stability, creation over judgment.

Together, these thinkers do not offer moral blueprints - they offer orientations for navigating a world without metaphysical assurances. Their ethics is not about knowing what is right in advance, but learning how to live well amidst uncertainty, complexity, and difference.

Why Integral Theory Misses the Point

Ken Wilber’s critique of postmodernism does not emerge from careful reading or genuine philosophical engagement. It is not the product of wrestling with Derrida, Foucault, or Deleuze on their own terms and arriving at a reasoned conclusion. Rather, it is a paradigmatic case of epistemic closure: a preconstructed model absorbing foreign material without allowing itself to be altered in the process.

Wilber does not approach postmodern thinkers as interlocutors capable of challenging or reshaping his framework. He already has a developmental system in place - Integral Theory - built to encompass all perspectives from the outset. When he encounters postmodernism, he does not ask what it reveals about knowledge, power, or subjectivity. Instead, he asks: where does it fit on my chart?

And so it gets filed under the “green meme,” a stage of pluralism and relativism to be transcended. This is not engagement- it is assimilation. It is not critique - it is categorization. The gesture is not philosophical, but managerial: interpret the other only insofar as it reinforces the structure of the system. This is the epistemic equivalent of mapping unknown lands only to paint them in the colors of one’s empire.

The model Wilber uses - derived from Spiral Dynamics and the work of Don Beck and Clare Graves - has found popularity in coaching and New Age circles, but lacks robust empirical support and is widely seen by researchers as overly schematic and culturally reductive. In contrast, Suzanne Cook-Greuter’s ego development theory offers a more nuanced view of post-conventional consciousness. Her “construct-aware” stage captures the reflexivity, paradox-tolerance, and ethical subtlety that define postmodern thought. Far from representing a regression, these thinkers exemplify the most mature forms of cognition she describes.

To caricature Foucault, Derrida, or Deleuze as immature pluralists is not only philosophically lazy - it is epistemically perverse. These are not voices of collapse, but of lucidity. They resist finality not to celebrate confusion, but to preserve the dignity of difference. They practice a form of thought that does not claim mastery, but dwells in complexity.

Wilber’s error, then, is not simply theoretical - it is structural. His system cannot be disturbed. It absorbs critique only by labeling it and moving on. He rehearses the very gesture postmodernism exposes: the totalizing logic that cannot tolerate singularity, ambiguity, or epistemic vulnerability. His integration is not a transformation of consciousness - it is a refusal of it.

The Courage to Live Without Guarantees

The point of postmodernism is not to deny the Absolute. It is to recognize that the Absolute is silent where it matters most. It offers no guidance on how to live, how to love, how to respond to the suffering of others, or how to act with integrity in a fractured world. These are not metaphysical questions - they are ethical ones. And far from evading them, postmodernism confronts them with unprecedented seriousness.

To live without final answers is not regression - it is maturity. To acknowledge that meaning is constructed, not received from on high, is not confusion - it is clarity. And to act without the safety net of transcendent guarantees is not nihilism - it is courage in its purest form.

This is the ethic postmodernism calls us to: not submission to truth, but fidelity to difference; not mastery over meaning, but responsibility in its making. It is an ethic grounded not in certainty, but in sensitivity - to the other, to the moment, to the irreducible complexity of lived life. It resists the closure of systems and the comfort of universals. It stays open where others rush to conclude.

Such a stance cannot be slotted into a developmental sequence or subordinated to a higher tier. It is not a stage. It is not a meme. It is a way of being. And it does not seek integration - it demands embodiment. Not a theory to be mapped, but a life to be lived.

Edited Monday at 12:43 PM by Nilsi

[The Crocodile]

I think we just don't know, neither you nor Leo actually knows what the "will" of the Absolute is or the full context of what's going on iff you honestly admit it, you just have orientations you lean to based on what seems likeliest to be the case.

Edited Monday at 02:21 PM by The Crocodile

[Nilsi]

1 hour ago, The Crocodile said:

I think we just don't know, neither you nor Leo actually knows what the "will" of the Absolute is or the full context of what's going on iff you honestly admit it, you just have orientations you lean to based on what seems likeliest to be the case.

There is no discussion to be had about the Absolute. The Absolute wills itself - absolutely. It does not discriminate.

But you do. You must.

As a subject in the world, you are condemned to decision. That’s why we’re having this conversation.

[The Crocodile]

Just now, Nilsi said:

There is no discussion to be had about the Absolute. The Absolute wills itself - absolutely. It does not discriminate.

I think with the neti neti technique the Absolute neither discriminates nor non-discriminates, and with iti iti either discriminates or non-discriminates. And so on.

[Nilsi]

Just now, The Crocodile said:

I think with the neti neti technique the Absolute neither discriminates nor non-discriminates, and with iti iti either discriminates or non-discriminates. And so on.

The Absolute is not playing four-dimensional dialectics with discrimination and non-discrimination. It wills. That’s it. And now you’re here - discriminating.

[The Crocodile]

2 minutes ago, Nilsi said:

The Absolute is not playing four-dimensional dialectics with discrimination and non-discrimination. It wills. That’s it. And now you’re here - discriminating.

I think it'd be playing infinite dialectics.

[Nilsi]

1 minute ago, The Crocodile said:

I think it'd be playing infinite dialectics.

The irony is that most Western metaphysicians and scientists think that’s exactly what the Absolute is doing. Playing infinite dialectics. Spinning contradictions until reality appears in all its glory.

What a disgrace.

[Eskilon]

5 hours ago, Nilsi said:

Wilber does not approach postmodern thinkers as interlocutors capable of challenging or reshaping his framework. He already has a developmental system in place - Integral Theory - built to encompass all perspectives from the outset. When he encounters postmodernism, he does not ask what it reveals about knowledge, power, or subjectivity. Instead, he asks: where does it fit on my chart?

How do you know this? Do you think someone like Wilber didn't consider or study postmodernism deep enough? That seems really unlikely.

 

5 hours ago, Nilsi said:

The point of postmodernism is not to deny the Absolute

To deny something you have to either acknowledge it's existence and then deny it, or to consider the possibility of it existing and still deny it. Both of which postmodernism don't do.

Postmodernism doesn't know what absolute truth is, and not only that but it's not even curious to discover whether or not it is the case. It assumes it doesn't exist.

Postmodernism doesn't see itself as just another perspective in the epistemic anarchy, it doesn't go full circle. It is true that everything is subjective and relative, but if that's the case, then, even the statement of everything being relative is itself relative, and just another perspective. Postmodernism doesn't make this leap, and that's the greatest blind spot of it.

Edited Monday at 05:59 PM by Eskilon

[Carl-Richard]

 

 

[Nilsi]

On 23.4.2025 at 5:08 PM, Carl-Richard said:

 

 

Good one! Seems like we agree (maybe?)!

[Nilsi]

1 hour ago, Nilsi said:

Good one! Seems like we agree (maybe?)!

Quick follow-up:

I think - and that’s just the vibe I’m getting from you, I haven’t deeply read through everything you’ve written - we actually disagree on a very important point.

Jordan Peterson’s disavowal of Nietzsche is just emblematic of it. You know, when he says Nietzsche was a great genius yada yada, but nonetheless, you can't create your own values. He falls back into his usual structuralist psychology, drawing mainly from Freud, Jung, and Piaget, and argues that there’s an implicit value structure - what people today sometimes call the "Religion that is not a Religion" or whatever campy phrase they’re using.

But I think this is precisely what the thinkers I’ve listed are challenging: that there really is no such thing.

And I’d even argue that trying to reduce their ethics to some disguised religious framework dressed up in postmodernist drag completely misses the point. There really is no such structure.

When even the "Self" is put into question, there’s no up, no down - only an ensemble of multiplicities. Contingency. Radical freedom. Style. Deleuze’s rhizome might be the best allegory for this: everything looping into everything else, like a DMT fractal-scape.

There is no master signifier anymore.

God really is dead at this point.

It’s just a trip.
And one hell of a trip.

Edited yesterday at 06:24 PM by Nilsi

[Carl-Richard]

9 hours ago, Nilsi said:

Quick follow-up:

I think - and that’s just the vibe I’m getting from you, I haven’t deeply read through everything you’ve written - we actually disagree on a very important point.

Jordan Peterson’s disavowal of Nietzsche is just emblematic of it. You know, when he says Nietzsche was a great genius yada yada, but nonetheless, you can't create your own values. He falls back into his usual structuralist psychology, drawing mainly from Freud, Jung, and Piaget, and argues that there’s an implicit value structure - what people today sometimes call the "Religion that is not a Religion" or whatever campy phrase they’re using.

But I think this is precisely what the thinkers I’ve listed are challenging: that there really is no such thing.

And I’d even argue that trying to reduce their ethics to some disguised religious framework dressed up in postmodernist drag completely misses the point. There really is no such structure.

When even the "Self" is put into question, there’s no up, no down - only an ensemble of multiplicities. Contingency. Radical freedom. Style. Deleuze’s rhizome might be the best allegory for this: everything looping into everything else, like a DMT fractal-scape.

There is no master signifier anymore.

God really is dead at this point.

It’s just a trip.
And one hell of a trip.

There is structure and hierarchy as far as we can construct them and act them out. The tendency is that you largely become what you believe. If you believe the world and your potential within it is flat and devoid of any serious topology, you will likely remain that way and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The value in thinking hierarchically is not as much about capturing what is as what you allow yourself to become (not just in a personal development sense, but epistemically, the very way you apprehend reality). Nevertheless, the attitude "pull yourself up by your bootstraps, don't be afraid to dream" vs "be realistic, cut the crap" produces very different outcomes. It just applies epistemically as well. You in a big way create the world you live in.

[Nilsi]

2 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

There is structure and hierarchy as far as we can construct them and act them out. The tendency is that you largely become what you believe. If you believe the world and your potential within it is flat and devoid of any serious topology, you will likely remain that way and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The value in thinking hierarchically is not as much about capturing what is as what you allow yourself to become (not just in a personal development sense, but epistemically, the very way you apprehend reality). Nevertheless, the attitude "pull yourself up by your bootstraps, don't be afraid to dream" vs "be realistic, cut the crap" produces very different outcomes. It just applies epistemically as well. You in a big way create the world you live in.

I get where you’re coming from - but the core of my argument is a bit different.

The structure you’re enacting, even when it appears coherent and hierarchical, doesn’t come from some stable source. That’s exactly what I’m pushing against - this Petersonian idea of a “religion that is not a religion,” where reality is framed as pathological unless you align yourself with a certain implicit structure.

Sure, actions have consequences. Sure, some behaviors statistically align better with desirable outcomes. But that’s not the same as saying there is an underlying metaphysical hierarchy you can - or must - latch onto. It’s just that certain flows, certain configurations, are rewarded under current conditions. That doesn’t make them ontologically stable or ultimately meaningful.

My point is that there is no stable self enacting these structures. Even when you act “as if” they were real, you’re still improvising, still suspended in radical contingency.

Yes, people act hierarchically. Yes, reality responds to actions. But the point Nietzsche, Deleuze, and others make is that the absence of a stable structure or master signifier doesn’t flatten reality into meaninglessness. It intensifies it. Without pre-given order, life becomes a pure affirmation of forces, of intensities, of styles.

There is still striving, willing, becoming - but it’s not about organizing these into a hierarchy, or subordinating them to some goal or structure. Even action itself doesn’t imply a hidden order. It doesn’t create hierarchy by default. It’s closer to an act that affirms itself - not because it serves an overarching aim, but because it is the expression of force in its purest form.

Like an unmoved mover, not in isolation, but in the way life entangles itself through intensities - each gesture affirming itself without needing justification, without needing to slot into a system. Not a means to an end, but an end in itself, in the pure unfolding of becoming.

Edited 16 hours ago by Nilsi

[zurew]

7 hours ago, Nilsi said:

Sure, actions have consequences. Sure, some behaviors statistically align better with desirable outcomes. But that’s not the same as saying there is an underlying metaphysical hierarchy you can - or must - latch onto. It’s just that certain flows, certain configurations, are rewarded under current conditions. That doesn’t make them ontologically stable or ultimately meaningful.

Yeah I personally think that Peterson is confused about morality.

I dont see how him and Jonathan Pageau talking extensively about all the archetypes and perennial patterns would be reflective of an objective morality, to me its just a description of our collective unconscious and our conscience at best - but its nothing more than a description and there is no 'ought' embedded there.

There is a big difference between making an analysis of what kind of values most people have and how we act and behave and what the outcome of that vs making moral statements that are true independent from what any particular person or what any particular group of people think about it.

They haven't made any argument (I am aware of) , that wouldn't be compatible with subjective morality. 

Edited 9 hours ago by zurew

[Nilsi]

7 minutes ago, zurew said:

They haven't made any argument (I am aware of) , that wouldn't be compatible with subjective morality. 

“Well, you see, it’s like the story of Cain and Abel, right? It’s the first representation of objective morality in the human psyche — because it’s not just ‘what you feel,’ it’s ‘what works’ across time, across being itself, right? It’s encoded into the narrative structure of reality! And if you ignore that, you invite chaos, suffering, and resentment into your soul, and into the broader fabric of society.”

[Nilsi]

1 minute ago, Nilsi said:

“Well, you see, it’s like the story of Cain and Abel, right? It’s the first representation of objective morality in the human psyche — because it’s not just ‘what you feel,’ it’s ‘what works’ across time, across being itself, right? It’s encoded into the narrative structure of reality! And if you ignore that, you invite chaos, suffering, and resentment into your soul, and into the broader fabric of society.”

Also, how ironic that this is a thing:

[zurew]

4 minutes ago, Nilsi said:

“Well, you see, it’s like the story of Cain and Abel, right? It’s the first representation of objective morality in the human psyche — because it’s not just ‘what you feel,’ it’s ‘what works’ across time, across being itself, right? It’s encoded into the narrative structure of reality! And if you ignore that, you invite chaos, suffering, and resentment into your soul, and into the broader fabric of society.”

Well mr Peterson that just seems to be a descriptive claim about what set of values and what set of behaviors would be most aligned with human flourishing - but its nothing more than a descriptive claim, there is no ought embedded there.

Its not just that its not an objective moral claim, its that its not even a moral claim at all.

Its similar to giving a very precise physics equation about how the rock will behave once you interact with it in a certain way and then saying that it ought to be that way and that objective morality is established by that. 

 

[Nilsi]

14 minutes ago, zurew said:

Well mr Peterson that just seems to be a descriptive claim about what set of values and what set of behaviors would be most aligned with human flourishing - but its nothing more than a descriptive claim, there is no ought embedded there.

Its not just that its not an objective moral claim, its that its not even a moral claim at all.

Its similar to giving a very precise physics equation about how the rock will behave once you interact with it in a certain way and then saying that it ought to be that way and that objective morality is established by that. 

 

To be fair, I don’t think Peterson is even trying to be rigorous in the Anglo-American analytic sense - which seems to be the standard you’re dismissing him by.

His thought is actually much closer to European existentialism, which I obviously align with.

I just think his ethics are ridiculous and totalitarian.

Existentialism doesn’t need to be logically rigorous - human life isn’t logically rigorous at all, so why would philosophizing it be?

[zurew]

1 hour ago, Nilsi said:

To be fair, I don’t think Peterson is even trying to be rigorous in the Anglo-American analytic sense - which seems to be the standard you’re dismissing him by.

His thought is actually much closer to European existentialism, which I obviously align with.

I just think his ethics are ridiculous and totalitarian.

Existentialism doesn’t need to be logically rigorous - human life isn’t logically rigorous at all, so why would philosophizing it be?

I dont think thats the issue, the issue is that (as almost always) there is an equivocation going on.

I dont want him to make a syllogism , I want him to be honest and not confused about what argument he is actually making.

 

It has to do with what is meant by the term objective morality - if Peterson uses that term as something like "there are perennial patterns and acting those out will lead to certain outcomes" sure, I can grant that - but that doesn't really respond to the issue of subjective morality (the position where the truthvalue of moral statements are dependent on a subject or a group of subjects - where if they change their stance about a particular value , the truthvalue of those moral statements change as well).

Peterson's "critique" is not a reponse to subjective morality, its just a completely separate claim that can be denied or affirmed completely independent from what position you have on subjective morality.

 

What I would look for is an argument that establish that there are moral statements (statements that actually use terms like good , bad ) that are meaningful and that can be true or false completely independent from what any individual or what any group of agents think about them.

So under this definition of objective morality, for example  the truthvalue of this moral statement 'rape is bad' could be true even if all people on Earth would think otherwise. Making an analysis that ends with a conclusion that has a set of objectively true descriptive statements in it (like rape will lead to x,y,z outcome) has nothing to do with morality. subjectivists can agree with all of that even if some of them think that rape is good.

 

And to be clear, I dont care about the definition game, what I care about is this - if Peterson wants to critique objective morality (under the definition how most people use it), then he should index his criticism to that, but using the exact same term with different semantics doesn't really do the job , the only thing he esablish with that is that he makes a completely separate claim ( and thats all fine as long as he isn't confused about it and as long as he doesn't pretend that he established objective morality in a different sense).

Edited 7 hours ago by zurew

[Nilsi]

28 minutes ago, zurew said:

I dont think thats the issue, the issue is that (as almost always) there is an equivocation going on.

I dont want him to make a syllogism , I want him to be honest and not confused about what argument he is actually making.

 

It has to do with what is meant by the term objective morality - if Peterson uses that term as something like "there are perennial patterns and acting those out will lead to certain outcomes" sure, I can grant that - but that doesn't really respond to the issue of subjective morality (the position where the truthvalue of moral statements are dependent on a subject or a group of subjects - where if they change their stance about a particular value , the truthvalue of those moral statements change as well).

Peterson's "critique" is not a reponse to subjective morality, its just a completely separate claim that can be denied or affirmed completely independent from what position you have on subjective morality.

 

What I would look for is an argument that establish that there are moral statements that are meaningful and that can be true or false completely independent from what any individual or what any group of people think about them.

So under this definition of objective morality, for example  the truthvalue of this moral statement 'rape is bad' could be true even if all people on Earth would think otherwise.

 

And to be clear, I dont care about the definition game, what I care about is this - if Peterson wants to critique objective morality (under the definition how most people use it), then he should index his criticism to that, but using the exact same term with different semantics doesn't really do the job , the only thing he esablish with that is that he makes a completely separate claim.

He’s not trying to prove that moral statements are objective in the rigorous analytic sense. But I don’t think that’s a confusion on his part - it’s just that he’s operating in a completely different discourse.

When Peterson talks about morality, he’s responding to Nietzsche’s death of God - the collapse of any stable master signifier - and trying to rebuild meaning from the structure of lived human existence, not from transcendental, mind-independent facts.

He’s much closer to Heideggerian existentialism than to analytic moral realism. He explicitly draws on Heidegger’s distinction between the ontic and the ontological: humans are the beings who both exist contingently and are aware of Being itself. So for Peterson, morality is rooted in the primary structures of human Being - not in some detached logical realm. His claim to “objective” morality is Heideggerian in that sense: it is objective within the clearing of human existence, but still ultimately contingent on human primacy. It’s not objectivity in the sense of truth existing independently of all life - it’s objectivity that emerges within Being, because of Being.

Honestly, I thought analytic philosophy had already caught up to this after Dreyfus…

You, on the other hand, seem to be asking for a form of objective morality that’s external to human life altogether - morality as truth independent of all subjects. Which is fine, I guess - but it’s simply not the project Peterson is engaged in.