Ken Wilber (Interview Archive)
These dimensions show up everywhere. They are so constant in human experience that every major language on earth has words for them. And yet people have fought over them, insisting that one of the four quadrants is the only one that counts, denying any genuine reality to the rest. Most management theories do exactly this, and so do plenty of other fields. You get Theory X living in the upper right, Theory Y in the upper left, inter-subjective culture management staking a claim in the lower left, inter-objective systems management in the lower right. Each quadrant also tends to breed its own psychology, and those psychologies quarrel with each other too. The integral framework exists to fix that fragmentation, in psychology and in any discipline where one slice gets treated as the whole.
Figure two gives another four-quadrant diagram, this time zeroing in on a handful of aspects of being human. It also lays out some of the developmental levels I'll come back to shortly. In the lower right you can trace the stages of techno-economic development: foraging, horticultural, agrarian, industrial, informational. Those lower-right occasions line up with lower-left worldviews, running from pre-modern through modern and post-modern to integral. You can spot both sequences marked on the diagram.
Something in the lower right, agrarian or industrial for instance, is the collective group seen from the outside, an objective or exterior view. Looked at from the inside, from the lower left, that same society is held together by shared values, mutual understanding, common meanings. That inner view is a "we" space. From the outside it reads as nothing more than a gathering of objective, material, physical systems and structures, an "it" space. Both of these matter a great deal, and you cannot collapse one into the other.
The collective interiors, the "we" spaces, appear in the lower left: the group examined from within. Here you find a culture's overall worldviews, with labels moving from archaic to animistic to magical to mythic to scientific-rational to pluralistic to integral. Trace them back far enough and they turn out to carry real weight, another piece that has to be brought into the whole.
The upper quadrants set the individual apart from groups and collectives. An individual organism viewed from the outside, the exterior objective angle, sits in the upper-right quadrant of both this figure and the one before it.