The Big Three

Wilber's View

The Big Three is Wilber's shorthand collapse of the four quadrants into three domains: I (the Upper-Left, subjective interior — art, aesthetics, self-expression), We (the Lower-Left, intersubjective — morals, culture, shared meaning), and It (the Right-Hand quadrants together, since both are exteriors describable in objective "it" language — science, empirical fact). He treats this as one recurring pattern that shows up across an unusual range of traditions: Plato's the True, the Good, and the Beautiful; Kant's three critiques (Pure Reason, Practical Reason, Judgment); Habermas's three validity claims (truth, rightness, sincerity); even the Three Jewels of Buddhism (Dharma as the ultimate It, Sangha as the ultimate We, Buddha as the ultimate I).

His central historical claim is that modernity's real achievement was differentiating the Big Three — freeing science from having to serve moral or religious ends, freeing art from having to be doctrinally correct, and so on — which was a genuine advance over premodern societies where the three were fused (church could dictate to state and to science alike). The catastrophe was that differentiation curdled into dissociation: instead of three legitimate, mutually respecting domains, the "It" domain (empirical science) ran roughshod over the other two, a collapse Wilber calls the Big Three reduced to the Big One of it-language — the engine of flatland. He identifies the task of postmodernity, following Habermas and Weber, not as regressing to a predifferentiated fusion (impossible and undesirable) but as integrating the already-differentiated Big Three at a higher level — a task he assigns to vision-logic.

In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

With reference to the four quadrants: because both of the Right-Hand quadrants are exteriors that can be described in it-language, I will sometimes count them as one major domain, the other two being the I-language of the Upper Left and the we-language of the Lower Left. And for simplicity's sake I will refer to these as the Big Three (I, we, it).

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 4, "A View from Within"

…in the broadest sense this is Plato's the True (or propositional truth referring to an objective state of affairs, it), the Good (or cultural justice and appropriateness, we), and the Beautiful (or the individual-aesthetic dimension, I). The Big Three are likewise Kant's three critiques: the Critique of Pure Reason (theoretical it-reason), of Practical Reason or intersubjective morality (we), and of personal Aesthetic Judgment (I).

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 4, "A View from Within"

The differentiation of the Big Three thus degenerated, by the end of the eighteenth century, into the dissociation of the Big Three (a point made by Habermas)—which in turn allowed the Big Three to be rudely reduced to the Big One of it-language: the flatland, one-dimensional, monological systems theory of the representational and production paradigms, nightmares through and through, with all interior depth… reduced to being merely a strand in the endlessly flat and faded system.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 11, "Brave New World"

What rationality had put asunder, vision-logic would unite. That, at any rate, is the potential and the promise and the struggle of postmodernity. What modernity differentiated, postmodernity must integrate. And if rationality did the differentiation, then postrationality must do the healing (and postrationality, I have been maintaining, is preeminently vision-logic).

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 11, "Brave New World"

In Integral Psychology

Integral Psychology ch. 14 coins the specific term "the 1-2-3 of consciousness studies" for the Big Three applied to how consciousness itself should be studied — and argues that most "integral" approaches to consciousness studies stop at honoring all three perspectives without also recognizing that each of the three develops through stages.

This acknowledgment of the four quadrants (or simply the Big Three) allows an equal inclusion of first-person phenomenal accounts ("I"), second-person intersubjective backgrounds ("we"), and third-person physical systems ("it")—what we will call "the 1-2-3 of consciousness studies."

— Integral Psychology, ch. 14

…one is hard-pressed to find in many of those authors a full appreciation of the stage conceptions of consciousness development, such as the works of Baldwin, Habermas, Loevinger, Graves, Kohlberg, Wade, Cook-Greuter, Beck, Kegan, et al., even though, as we have seen, there is substantial evidence for their validity. It is not enough to simply note that first-person realities reciprocally influence and determine third-person mechanisms, and that both circulate through second-person intermediaries.

— Integral Psychology, ch. 14

…a truly integral approach, in my opinion, will move from being merely all-quadrant to being all-level, all-quadrant. Or 1-2-3 across all levels.

— Integral Psychology, ch. 14

See Also

• four-quadrants — the fuller scheme the Big Three collapses into three terms
• vision-logic — the cognitive mode Wilber credits with the capacity to integrate the Big Three
• flatland — the "Big One" outcome when It swallows I and We
• postmodernism — Wilber's account of the differentiation/dissociation arc in more detail
• The Dignity and Disaster of Modernity — the differentiation (dignity) and dissociation (disaster) of the Big Three specifically
• Waves and Streams — the "all-level" half of "all-level, all-quadrant" this page's IP excerpts argue for
• The Proximate Self and the Distal Self — the first-person stage research (Baldwin, Loevinger, Kegan, et al.) the 1-2-3 framework draws on
• Susanne Cook-Greuter — the perspective-taking research behind the "1-2-3" formula itself