Sexuality and Modernity
Sexuality and Modernity
Wilber's View
Wilber's account of modernity's sexual obsession starts from a claim he borrows from Foucault and then reinterprets: modernity wasn't marked chiefly by sexual repression but by sexual obsession — an explosion of medical, psychiatric, literary, and educational discourse about sex that began roughly a century before Freud. Wilber's own addition is a diagnosis of why, and it follows directly from the collapse of the Kosmos into flatland: once the [[ego-camp-and-eco-camp| Ego and Eco camps]] both come to treat empirical nature as the only reality — the Ego by reflecting on nature as the object of instrumental reason, the Eco by exalting nature into Spirit itself — sexuality becomes the only available candidate for "profundity" left standing, because it's the deepest layer either camp still has access to. His verdict on Freud is characteristically double-edged: psychoanalysis calls itself "depth psychology" but is, on this reading, actually the shallowest layer of the self's "nine-layered onion" (matter, then libido, with seven transpersonal sheaths above it) — it only looks deep by comparison with behaviorism, which didn't even get that far.
The strongest part of the argument is the historical observation that "de-repression" movements (Reich, "free love," Marcuse-inflected student radicalism, Norman O. Brown, Bataille) kept promising a liberation that orgasm after orgasm never delivered — and Wilber's explanation, that the obsession itself is a mark of modernity rather than an escape from it, is a genuinely sharp diagnosis, not just a moralizing dismissal of sexual liberation as such (he's explicit that he isn't denying real repression existed or that some de-repression was warranted). What's more contestable is how much weight the argument puts on a single master narrative — flatland collapse — to explain a historically and culturally specific obsession that plausibly has other, more mundane causes (contraception, urbanization, the medicalization of the body, the sheer novelty of mass-printed discourse) that don't reduce cleanly to a story about the big-three collapsing into one.
In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality
As Foucault ably demonstrates, the rise of modernity was marked, not so much by a repression of sexuality (although he does not deny that happened) as by an obsession with sexuality.
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 13
"Never, it seems, had so much attention been focused on every aspect of the body and every dimension of its sexuality. Sex became the object of a major investment of signification, of power, and of knowledge."
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 13 (Wilber quoting Foucault)
If nature is the fundamental and in many respects the final reality (according to the reflective Ego) and nature is the source of deep, ultimate, and often hidden truths (according to the Eco), then how better to unite them than in the belief that sexuality holds the secret to human personality?
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 13
The Tao reduced to the id: there is only the most notorious example of the collapse of the Kosmos into a flatland mononature, with sexuality the new and virtually sole (or certainly "most important") drive of the flatland world.
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 13
Approaches such as the Freudian were called "depth psychology" precisely as a misnomer: it was actually "shallow psychology."
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 13
…the obsession with sexuality was not an escape from modernity but a mark of modernity.
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 13
In short, when monological thought became God, sex became God's obsession. And when monological thought likewise converted nature into God, sex became the key to human liberation and salvation.
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 13
See Also
- flatland — the collapse this whole diagnosis depends on
- The Ego Camp and the Eco Camp — the two camps whose shared obsession with sexuality is this page's subject
- repression — the differentiation/dissociation vocabulary Wilber says produces both repression and its obsessive flip side
- Sex and Gender: Male and Female Advantage/Liberation — Wilber's separate, developmental (not flatland-collapse) account of sex differences
- Michel Foucault — the source of the repression-vs-obsession reframing this page opens with
- Sigmund Freud — Wilber's central case study, both rationalist and Romantic at once
