Ken Wilber on the Four Quadrants (Interview Archive)
So which of those positions is the right one? The integral framework answers in a way that sounds strange at first: all of them. Rather than lining up the four views and sorting winners from losers, integral thinking turns the question around. It asks what sort of reality would have to be true for each of them to hold a genuine piece of the larger picture, the fuller truth about how businesses are run.
That reframing came out of a long survey of theory, hundreds of accounts drawn from pre-modern, modern, and postmodern thought. The business cases above point toward the same conclusion the survey reached. Any phenomenon can be approached from at least four basic perspectives, or dimensions. I call them the four quadrants: the interior and the exterior of the individual, and the interior and the exterior of the collective.
The claim is stronger than a tidy diagram. These perspectives appear to be built into the cosmos itself, present at every level from the smallest to the largest. Pick anything you like and it carries an inside and an outside, and it shows up in both singular and plural form, as an individual and as part of a group.
Figure one lays this out as the familiar four-quadrant grid, with a handful of elements sketched into each box. A warning before you look too closely: each quadrant holds thousands of elements. What appears there is a tiny sample, nothing more.
Each quadrant maps onto a different kind of space, which the pronouns I, we, and it track nicely. Upper left is the subjective I, a first-person interior. Lower left is the inter-subjective we. Then there is the objective it, which itself splits in two. Singular it, the individual, sits upper right. Plural its, the collective, sits lower right.
You find I, we, and it in cultures everywhere, across pre-modern, modern, and postmodern eras alike. They sit underneath the old triad of the good, the true, and the beautiful. The good lives in how we treat one another, the we dimension. The true is the objective factual matter, the it dimension. And beauty, famously in the eye of the beholder, belongs to the I.
The same three show up as the grammatical persons that every major human language carries. First person is the one speaking, the I, upper left. Second person is the one spoken to, the you; and a you joined to an I makes a we, lower left. Third person is whoever or whatever is being spoken about, him or her or it. That is the objective it dimension: singular it in the upper right, collective its in the lower right.