Jean Piaget

Wilber's View

Piaget is the structural backbone of Sex, Ecology, Spirituality — cited almost entirely non-polemically, as established developmental fact, and reused more than any other single framework in the book. His stage sequence (sensorimotor → preoperational/"magic" → concrete operational/"mythic" → formal operational) is the mechanism Wilber uses to build his own developmental holarchy of consciousness, and it does real argumentative work beyond just providing stages: Piaget's account of egocentrism is what lets Wilber overturn the Romantic assumption that "primitive" or childlike consciousness is somehow closer to cosmic unity. Piaget's finding is the opposite — egocentrism is at its maximum in the earliest, least-differentiated stages, precisely because the self hasn't yet separated out from the world enough to notice a boundary between them, and it steadily decreases as a strong, differentiated ego (and eventually a properly rational, worldcentric one) emerges. Development is a progressive decentering, not a fall from grace.

Piaget also supplies the shared premise underneath the book's Freud/Jung/Campbell discussion: he "sides with Freud" on the function of mythic archetypes (they're byproducts of childhood cognitive structure, not directly inherited spiritual content), while reframing the mechanism as structural rather than phylogenetic — and it's Campbell's own explicit acceptance of the Piagetian account of myth that Wilber later turns against Campbell's conclusions.

In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

Piaget: "The first stage is magical: we make the clouds move by walking. The clouds obey us at a distance. The average age of this stage is 5. The second stage [magic-mythic] is both artificialist and animistic. Clouds move because God or [other] men make them move. The average age of this stage is 6."

— Piaget, quoted in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 6

In the broadest sense, ego means "self" or "subject," and thus when Piaget speaks of the earliest stages being "egocentric," he does not mean that there is a clearly differentiated self or ego set apart from the world. He means just the opposite: the self is not differentiated from the world… Only with the emergence of a strong and differentiated ego… does egocentrism die down! The "pre-egoic" stages are the most egocentric!

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 6

The maximum of egocentrism, as Piaget demonstrated, occurs in the primary or physical indissociation (the first fulcrum, where self-identity is physiocentric), because the entire material world is absorbed in the self-sense and cannot even be considered apart from the self-sense.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 6

Formal operational awareness transcends but includes concrete operational thought… Where concrete operational uses rules of thought to transcend and operate on the concrete world, formal operational uses a new interiority to transcend and operate on the rules of thought themselves.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 6

In a set of experiments, a snail moves along a board, which itself is moving along a table. Only children at the formal operations stage can understand the distance which the snail travels relative to the board and to the table. Here we find the intellectual equipment necessary for conceptions of relativity.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 6

The question then centers… on the nature and function of these mythic motifs, these archetypes. Are they merely infantile and regressive (Freud), or do they also contain a rich source of spiritual wisdom (Jung)? Piaget, needless to say, sided with Freud on this particular issue.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 6

In Integral Psychology

Integral Psychology is more explicit than SES about both Piaget's stature and his limits, and adds a genealogy SES doesn't mention: that Piaget's own foundational concepts (assimilation, accommodation, egocentricity) were themselves derived from James Mark Baldwin's earlier work — Wilber quotes Kohlberg making this point.

Piaget's studies are pivotal, of course. Even with all of their shortcomings, Piaget's contributions remain a stunning accomplishment; certainly one of the most significant psychological investigations of this century. — Integral Psychology, ch. 7

The major inadequacy of Piaget's system, most scholars now agree, is that Piaget generally maintained that cognitive development (conceived as logico-mathematical competence) is the only major line of development, whereas there is now abundant evidence that numerous different developmental lines (such as ego, moral, affective, interpersonal, artistic, etc.) can unfold in a relatively independent manner. — Integral Psychology, ch. 7

…after almost three decades of intense cross-cultural research, the evidence is virtually unanimous: Piaget's stages up to formal operational are universal and cross-cultural. — Integral Psychology, ch. 7

As I read more deeply into Baldwin, I realized that Piaget had derived all the basic ideas with which he started in the twenties from Baldwin: assimilation, accommodation, schema, and adualism, 'egocentricity,' or undifferentiated character of the child's mind. — Kohlberg, quoted in Integral Psychology, ch. 8

At the beginning of F-1, on the shallowest surface of Spirit, the self is still largely undifferentiated from the material world (as Piaget put it, "The self is here material, so to speak"). — Integral Psychology, ch. 8

See Also

• campbell — accepts Piaget's developmental account of myth, but (on Wilber's reading) misapplies it, committing the pre/trans fallacy
• freud — Piaget "sides with Freud" on the function of mythic archetypes
• jung — the dissenting view Piaget and Freud are set against
• James Mark Baldwin — the source, per Kohlberg, of Piaget's foundational concepts