Ken Wilber on the Four Quadrants: The Objective 'It' and the Subjective 'I'
Look at a person from the outside, through the lens that science prefers, and you get the upper-right picture: two lungs, two kidneys, a single heart, a limbic system, a neocortex firing with dopamine, serotonin, acetylcholine, and the rest. Don't dismiss this quadrant as a tangle of lines on a chart. It carries real weight. The whole scientific project rests here, and psychology does too whenever it narrows itself to the purely objective and the purely measurable, which is exactly what behaviorism and positivism chose to do.
Since the later modern period, the Western mind has handed this one quadrant a strange privilege. It alone gets treated as absolute. Scientific materialism says that what shows up in the upper right is the only thing genuinely real, and everything else is secondary or illusory.
Now turn the same organism around and look at it from the inside. The interior holds no dopamine, no serotonin, no adrenaline. Search for those and you come up empty. Try it on yourself right now: glance into your own inner 'I' and you won't stumble across anything stamped serotonin or adrenaline. What you find instead are feelings, images, emotions, flashes of insight, passing thoughts, plain awareness. This is not the objective 'it' of the upper right. It is a subjective 'I,' the upper-left domain.
Whatever lives in this quadrant has grown and evolved, the same as in every other quadrant. That means we can map out the developmental stages it has moved through, and keeps moving through today. Maslow's hierarchy of needs is one example already mentioned. The upper left in figure two carries others, including the self and the way it reads its world. Across several developmental models, that self travels through levels that get named things like the instinctual self, the magic self, the mythic or conformist self, the achiever self, the integral self, and onward from there.
There are dozens of competing maps of these stages. They don't agree on labels, but they do agree on two points: the stages are real, and they have to be brought together rather than left scattered. And it isn't only the self. Every quadrant, the upper left included, holds many such developmental lines running at once.
Figure two doesn't try to catalog all of this. It only sketches a handful of what turns up in each quadrant, enough to suggest why none of them can be left out. Think of it the way you'd think about the various schools of business management: each one is carrying something the others can't.