Interiority (the "Within" of holons)

Wilber's View

Wilber ends his survey of systems theory's evolutionary diagrams with an objection that sets up the whole rest of the book: every one of those diagrams, however "holistic" it claims to be, shows only how evolution looks from the outside. A cell, a brain, a social system — all can be drawn, measured, described. But none of those diagrams shows how it feels to be that holon: the interior side of sensation, perception, impulse, image, concept. His argument for taking this seriously is the "compound individuality" move he also uses for holons: since earlier holons (cells, organs) are literally part of us, we already have direct, felt access to something like their interiority — we don't need to solve the philosophical "hard problem" from scratch, because we already know it from the inside in our own case, and can reason by careful analogy (guarding against "retrotension," reading higher feelings into lower forms) to how far down interiority plausibly extends.

The payoff is his distinction between gross reductionism (denying interiors exist at all, reducing everything to atoms) and the more insidious subtle reductionism: systems theory and structural/functionalism don't deny interiors outright, but they quietly translate every Left-Hand phenomenon (meaning, value, experience) into a Right-Hand description (a system, a process, a network) and call the result holistic. Wilber's target here is sharp and well-aimed — a seemingly holistic theory can in fact have "just devastated half of reality" while congratulating itself on having overcome reductionism. This directly sets up four-quadrants. Where the argument is more strained is the reliance on an introspective analogy ("I know my own interior, so I can reason to a cell's") to do real evidentiary work — it's suggestive rather than demonstrative, and Wilber himself concedes as much when he flags the danger of projecting human interiority onto radically different kinds of holons.

In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

All of these diagrams represent things that can be seen with the physical senses or their extensions (microscopes, telescopes). They are all, all of them, how the universe looks from the outside. They are all the outward forms of evolution, and not one of them represents how evolution looks from the inside, how the individual holons feel and perceive and cognize the world at various stages.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 3, "Individual and Social" (section "Interiority")

The brain is the outside, the mind is the inside—and, as we will see, a similar type of exterior/interior holds for every holon in evolution. And the empirical systems sciences or ecological sciences, even though they claim to be holistic, in fact cover exactly and only one half of the Kosmos.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 3, "Individual and Social" (section "Interiority")

…it is through an interior feeling of the shades of myself that I might reasonably know the shades of other holons—which is how they know me, too; for we are all ultimately in each other, in various degrees, and right now.

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

Which brings us to the subject of gross reductionism versus subtle reductionism. Gross reductionists, first of all, do not believe any interiors exist anywhere, so the issues of meaning, value, consciousness, depth, culture, and intentionality—these never come up for them.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 4, "A View from Within" (section "Subtle Reductionism")

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."

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 4, "A View from Within" (section "Subtle Reductionism")

In short, the Left was reduced to the Right, and thus interiors tended to get lost and flattened into mere exteriors… Interpretation, consciousness, and interior depth were converted (reduced) to exterior, objective, systems interaction—"I" and "we" were reduced to holistic "its"—the precise essence of subtle reductionism.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 4, "A View from Within" (section "Subtle Reductionism")

See Also

• four-quadrants — the direct payoff of this argument: every holon has an interior as well as an exterior, individually and collectively
• holons — the compound-individuality argument Wilber uses to claim access to other holons' interiors
• flatland — what results when subtle reductionism wins and interiors are lost entirely from the picture
• systems-theory — the specific target of the gross/subtle reductionism distinction
• right-hand-and-left-hand-paths — the exterior/interior split this page is the argument for
• Pierre Teilhard de Chardin — quoted as an epigraph for insisting the "within of things" needs its own science