The Four Quadrants

Wilber's View

Every holon, Wilber argues, can be looked at from four irreducible angles, which he arranges as a 2x2 grid crossing interior/exterior with individual/collective. The Upper-Right (UR) is a holon's exterior individual form — what behaviorism and the hard sciences study (an organism's physiology, a brain's neurochemistry). The Upper-Left (UL) is its interior individual dimension — subjective experience, thought, feeling; the domain of introspection, phenomenology, psychoanalysis. The Lower-Right (LR) is the exterior form of the collective a holon belongs to — social systems, institutions, modes of production, the things sociology can observe and count. The Lower-Left (LL) is the interior of the collective — shared culture, worldviews, values, the intersubjective background that makes meaning possible at all.

The point isn't just that these four views exist, but that none of them reduces to any other, even though they correlate tightly (a thought correlates with a brain state, but is not identical to it — knowing every neuron firing in your brain still wouldn't tell me what you're actually thinking unless you tell me). Wilber calls the ordinary error of collapsing the interior quadrants into their exterior correlates — treating "mind" as nothing but "brain," culture as nothing but observable social behavior — subtle reductionism, and distinguishes it from the cruder gross reductionism that just reduces everything to atoms. Subtle reductionism is what produces flatland: a seemingly holistic picture that has in fact quietly discarded interiority and value while keeping only the exteriors and their interlocking web. Each quadrant also carries its own validity criterion — objective truth (UR/LR), subjective truthfulness or sincerity (UL), and intersubjective justness or fit (LL) — so that no single method (say, empirical measurement) can adjudicate claims that belong to a different quadrant. The exterior quadrants together are what Wilber calls the [[right-hand-and-left-hand-paths|Right-Hand path]]; the interior ones, the Left-Hand path. Collapsing the Big Three (art/I, morals/we, science/it) onto quadrant terms is one of his recurring moves throughout the book.

In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

Thus we have four major quadrants or four major aspects to each and every holon. The Upper-Right (UR) is the exterior form or structure of an individual holon… Which would be the Upper-Left (UL) quadrant. This quadrant—the interior form of an individual holon—runs from the center to prehension, sensation, impulse, image, symbol, concept… The Lower-Right (LR) quadrant runs… from the Big Bang to superclusters to galaxies to stars to planets… The Lower-Left quadrant is the study of shared interior meanings that constitute the worldview (or common worldspace) of collective or communal holons.

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

There are important truths in both the Left- and Right-Hand approaches, and both are required for a balanced or "all-quadrant" view. My position is that every holon has (at least) these four aspects or four dimensions (or four "quadrants") of its existence, and thus it can (and should) be studied in its intentional, behavioral, cultural, and social settings. No holon simply exists in one of the four quadrants; each holon has four quadrants.

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

What these systems and "holistic" theorists don't seem to understand is that while they have indeed avoided gross reductionism—and for that are to be highly praised—they are nonetheless (and apparently unknown to them) the exemplars of subtle reductionism. They don't reduce everything to atoms; they reduce everything in the Left-Hand to a Right-Hand description in the "system." They reduce a four-quadrant holism (or Kosmic holism) to merely a Right-Hand holism, a flatland holism.

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

For example, I have a thought; a thought occurs to me. That's the given holon, which we will use as an example. … the point of this overall example is simply that my "single" thought, the original holon, is not really a single thought as such, but rather a holon with four inseparable aspects (intentional, behavioral, cultural, and social), each with its own validity claims (subjective truthfulness, objective truth, intersubjective justness, and interobjective functional fit).

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

See Also

• holons / holarchy — the units and structure the quadrants describe
• right-hand-and-left-hand-paths — the exterior/interior split that organizes the quadrants
• big-three — the I/we/it collapse of the four quadrants Wilber uses most often
• flatland — what results when the Left-Hand quadrants get reduced to the Right