Ken Wilber’s Pre/Trans Fallacy

One of Integral philosopher, Ken Wilber’s, most important contributions to philosophy is his concept of the Pre/Trans Fallacy. Before this fallacy, mystical states of oneness were dismissed by modern rational people as a pre-rational or pre-modern state of mind.

In our modern rational worldview, any view that challenged reason was dismissed as emanating from a pre-modern culture. So, for example, the views of those who took it on faith that the Bible is the literal word of God, were in the same company as the mystical states of oneness attained by the likes of Jesus, Buddha, Lao-Tzu, Ramana Maharshi and others.

These two states of mind are not close to being equivalent, however equating them, allowed rationally minded people to easily dismiss anything that challenged their mindset.

Developmental Psychological States

What the purely rational worldview leaves out, and what Wilber’s pre/trans fallacy includes, are developmental psychological states.

We can see this in the Garden of Eden story. In the paradise of the garden, Adam and Eve are one with their environment. There is no separation or differentiation between them, the garden, and its creatures. They aren’t aware they exist as separate beings. This is the pre-rational stage.

Then comes the bite of the fruit and the resulting sin and suffering. Adam and Eve cover themselves because they are aware, for the first time, that they are naked. They are no longer one with their environment, thus are kicked out of the garden bodily. However, their real separation is spiritual. They no longer feel a part of this paradise. They have sinned, thus have to go.

Adam, cut off from his deeper self, must toil and work, while Eve has to suffer the pain of childbirth. But as they, or us, because now we can relate to them, toil through life, they/we gain knowledge and understanding, and some of us can even attain mystical states of oneness. This unitive experience is of a completely different order than the unitive, yet unconscious experience of Adam and Eve in the garden.

Undifferentiated and Trans-Differentiated

In the garden, Adam and Eve were one with everything. They were part and parcel of it. When they bit the fruit, that all changed. They became aware of their separateness.

This is very much like Enkidu in the Epic of Gilgamesh. He is the man of nature who lives with the wild beasts as one of them. He belongs in their world and they accept him. He is undifferentiated from it and its creatures. They are all one.

Then he has an affair with a courtesan, and when he tries to return to the forest and resume his old life, he can’t. The animals of the forest run away from him. He no longer belongs. He is seen as “other”.

In the Adam and Eve story, when they or we are able, through our struggles in this world, to attain a state of mystical oneness with everything, we are trans-differentiated in our surroundings. We maintain, both, a sense of our individuality and our connectedness. We have a trans-awareness of our connection that Adam and Eve didn’t have when they were living in paradise.

Pre and Trans Rational States

The difference between the pre and trans-rational states allows us to challenge the purely rational worldview without being relegated by modern rationalists to pre-modern states of mind.

The biggest difference between the pre and trans states is that the pre-rational state rejects reason out right. If there are good reasons to reject a pre-rational view, the pre-rational person will reject those reasons and cling to their beliefs.

An example of this is the literal interpretation of the Biblical creation story. Despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that this view is not literally true, people continue to believe it.

The trans-rational view accepts reason as far as it goes, but believes it doesn’t go far enough. Reason is ill-equipped to handle or understand these deeper states of consciousness. It explains them away as either a regression to a pre-modern mindset, or as nothing more than chemical reactions in the brain.

On the other hand, the trans-rational accepts the overwhelming scientific evidence that the universe was created 13.8 billion years ago, but questions the modern view that it was all random and accidental. Instead, the trans-rationalist believes there is a deeper intelligence embedded in the universe and its evolutionary process.

The Trans-Rational is an Evolution over the Rational

In short, the trans-rational is a developmental evolution over our rational state. It is not a return to a pre-rational mindset.

The Swiss-German poet and writer, Herman Hesse once wrote, “The way to innocence, to the uncreated and to God leads on, not back to the wolf or to the child, but ever further into sin, ever deeper into human life.”

The point here being that the way is forward. We can’t go back to our childish innocence, but must march forward into the future, and into greater chaos and misery, if need be. There is a reason that two angels with flaming swords block the return to Eden. Adam and Eve have bitten the fruit and thus have cut themselves off from nature as Enkidu did with his actions. Their way home was not to go back to a childish state of innocence, but forward into deeper aspects of themselves.

The Pre-Rational in Today’s Society Abounds

Currently in our political system we see this longing to go back to pre-modern, pre-rational times. We see it not only with QAnon and the MAGA people, but now see it spreading to the entire Republican Party itself. A growing majority wants to reject science, reason and fact based evidence when it conflicts with their pre-held beliefs.

New York Times columnist and economist, Paul Krugman pointed this out in a recent column.

“The people who will be running the House of Representatives for the next two years — a group that does not, as far as anyone can tell, include Kevin McCarthy, who seems set to be speaker in name only — believe a number of untrue things.”

He then goes on to point out examples.

“Many, perhaps most, believe that the 2020 election was stolen, or at least that Joe Biden is somehow not the legitimate president.

“Many believe that Covid vaccines do more harm than good, a belief that has contributed to thousands of excess deaths among Republican partisans.

“Quite a few either subscribe to or are at least friendly to beliefs of the QAnon cult, which claims that the world is run by a vast conspiracy of pedophiles.

“And just about all of them, again as far as I can tell, believe that the U.S. economy is in terrible shape, with the federal government at great risk of going bankrupt.”

That is just a small sample of all the crazy things people believe these days with no evidence to support them whatsoever.

When the modern worldview reduces our choices to the belief that we live in a meaningless materialistic universe or that we live in a meaningful but irrational universe, it’s not surprising that some people opt for the irrational over the meaningless. To them, these irrational ideas give their lives meaning and purpose, something the modern world can’t provide.

Wilber’s pre/trans fallacy gives us a third choice that combines the sense of meaning and purpose in the pre-rational, with the reason and science of the rational, allowing us to have the best of both worlds, while getting rid of the worst. We desperately need this third alternative.

 

 

To learn more about the magic of the universe: Click this link: The Magical Universe. 

Image by Doreen Sawitza from Pixabay