The Four Quadrants: A Map of All Knowledge and Human Experience

ken wilbur's model of the four quadrants is the centerpiece of the integral philosophy and it is one of the most useful tools you'll ever come across for conceptualizing the different dimensions of the human experience and the different domains of knowledge with relevance to what we've been talking about recently on the channel it's a way of understanding the voice of jordan peterson in contrast to that of michel foucault and the social justice movement it's also a good way of situating a lot of the material we have looked at in the past from the fault line between

materialist atheists and traditional buddhists to the perspective that humanity isn't a cancer but more relatable to the behavior of bacteria we see where marx and freud's work fits in where nietzsche is operating from and where schools like semiotics empiricism and phenomenology fit on the map in wilbur's work this four quadrants model is a map of the entirety of reality it's the central point of his attempt to integrate all human knowledge and experience together so that we can find ourselves in a unified holistic cosmos again rather than having to choose which school of thought we align

with it's a really interesting theory that maps everything from the internal experience of bacteria to the gaia hypothesis the big bang language and power dynamics there's a lot of moving parts and some parts of it i'm not a hundred percent sold on but in this episode we're going to focus in on the human element and look at why this model is such a useful way to frame the domains of human existence and knowledge this tickles your mind and you want to dive deeper i'd highly recommend wilbur's book a theory of everything and if you really

want to give it a deeper dive then i would highly recommend his book sex ecology spirituality with that out of the way let's talk about the four quadrant map so the first thing to note is that these quadrants are mapped out over two axes the x-axis separates the individual quadrants on the top from the collective quadrants on the bottom while the y-axis separates the internal quadrants on the left-hand side from the external quadrant on the right-hand side this leaves us with four different quadrants the first quadrant q1 in the upper left is the quadrant of

the internal and individual the second quadrant q2 in the upper right is the space of the external and individual the bottom left quadrant q3 is the internal and collective and finally the bottom right q4 is the external and collective another way of talking about them is the i the it the we and the its now we have them divided up let's explore what each of these quadrants actually contain in the first quadrant we have the internal individual aspect of our lives here you'll find our thoughts our feelings our moods as well as our logic all

the wonderful things that happen in your little noggin happen right up here in q1 so you can think of the work of freud here who's focused on the individual's internal life or of the stoics or buddhists who are focused on our relationship to our internal world but the purest example i think of q1 is searle's phenomenology which seeks to understand human experience without any reference to anything outside of the mind it's about pure personal experience and everything that happens in this first quadrant has a correlate in q2 the quadrant of the external individual dimension of

our being whenever you have one of your hair-brained thoughts it doesn't happen in some disentangled mental sphere if we shove you in an fmri machine having juice you up with dye we'll be able to see your brain light up when you have this thought and when we call it a stupid thought we see your amygdala light up in defensive anger but then as you tell yourself you're better than that you remember to breathe we'll see your prefrontal cortex light up as it tries to get your little tantrum under control and of course it's not just

about what's going on in the brain there's the release of hormones the depth or shallowness of your breathing your heart rate all of all these things mirror the psychological experience that you're having everything that happens internally happens externally every thought has a physical side and a mental side same goes for your emotions so that's q1 and q2 this is the nature of your individual mind body system but the individual element is only one half of the human experience none of this makes sense without understanding what grounds it and contextualizes it and for that we need

to look at q3 and q4 the collective sides of the human experience q3 is the most intangible of the quadrants the internal and individual is easy to grasp because it's the thoughts and ideas you're having in your own head but q3 is a little trickier to point out at first but it's everywhere as ever nietzsche hits the nail on the head in the third aphorism of beyond good and evil he writes that most of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly guided and forced into certain channels by his instincts behind all logic and its

seeming sovereignty of movement too there stand valuations or more clearly physiological demands for the preservation of a certain type of life q3 is the internal ocean that we swim in this is the quadrant of language culture value systems and world views the personal q1 experience is completely shaped by the q3 ocean in the episode on cesura semiotics we talked about the difference between long and prol which you can think of in terms of a game of chess so you have the long chess which is the hidden rules of the game and then you have the

parole which is the million and one instantiations of those rules it's the individual games of chess that happen within the context of that set of rules language has a similar hidden structure that gives meaning to every instance of speech and writing linguists have unearthed the structure of language nouns tenses articles word order but the structure pre-existed the archaeological work of the linguist the same goes for culture and for value systems they are intangibles that we don't directly touch but would shape our experience of the world there the riverbanks that unbeknownst to the river are guiding

and steering its course this is a good analogy because the billion drops of water in the river shaped the riverbank which in turn redirects the river there's an active relationship between the bank which steers the river and the movement of the water through this guided path changing the path to give a concrete example you can think of the experience of hunger the q1 q2 experience of hunger is very different for hunter-gatherer and western middle class individual there's a similar physiological experience but the meaning that this experience is given and the actions it inspires are completely

different and that is because of the different q3 oceans that these individuals are swimming in the hunter-gatherer will reach for the bow and arrow where the westerner grabs their wallet or their phone the individual experience is in some senses very similar i am hungry i want not to be hungry i'm going to go do something about that but the reality couldn't be more different one thinks about going out to hunt the other things about going to the shop or opening an app on their phone this reaction to the personal experience of hunger is shaped by

the cultural q3 backdrop as wickenstein once wrote the limits of my language mean the limits of my world q4 is the outside of this collective experience it is the empirical side of the collective equation in q3 we have the internal experience of collectivity there's language and culture there's our values and worldviews and just as the individual thoughts feelings and ideas have their empirical correlates in the brain and body so these components of the internal collectivity have their own empirical correlates in sex ecology spirituality wilbur summarizes the contents of q4 as follows this quadrant includes the

exterior of any of the social aspects of human interaction including forms of production and techno-economic modes bow and arrow horticultural tools agrarian implements industrial machinery computers and so on architectural structures transportation systems physical infrastructure even written material forms of books legal codes linguistic structures verbal signifiers and so forth one great way of explaining the difference between the q3 culture and the q4 society is wilbur's example of going to a foreign country so let's say you go to a country where you don't speak the language and that it's completely different to your culture when you first

arrive you are in the q4 society but you're not in the q3 culture you can observe the architecture the population density the relative wealth and poverty the demographics you can see what technologies they have and how their society is structured this is all q4 you are surrounded by this q4 society but until you learn the language and learn to talk to the people you don't have access to the q3 culture you don't know what the world view of the people is you don't know what they value or why they do what they do you don't

know the power structures you're seeing the outside of their collectivity you're seeing the q4 but you haven't looked into the inside of the collectivity you haven't seen into their collective value system without language and interaction this isn't possible so these are the four quadrants then of the human experience we exist in four domains all at once it's not just our personal thoughts but our physical bodies that are the outside of these thoughts and feelings there's the collective value system that contextualizes and makes parts of this individual experience more salient than others finally there's the outside

of this collectivity everything from the architecture of your local shop to the supply chain of trucks to keep it stocked and all the technologies that make this supply chain work and the construct this architecture our lives at any moment can be viewed from these four angles which give very different insights so now that we have briefly sketched out these four dimensions of the human experience let's play around with it a little bit as an intellectual map so as you've already seen in q1 we have thinkers like freud the stokes and the spiritual thinkers like buddha

jesus anthony demello jed mckenna all these thinkers are focused on the internal individual dimension of existence moving over to q2 we'll find thinkers like john locke and b.f skinner this is the realm of the hard sciences like physics chemistry and biology is the quadrant of empiricism and of studying individual things through observation and measurement you isolate the individual being to be studied and you experiment to understand its qualities and its nature coming down to q3 we find nietzsche's work on the revaluation of all values on the dionysian versus the apollonian and on the distinction between

master and slave morality we have kuhn's work on paradigms as being the grounding culture that the science exists in at any moment in time we have the structuralists and their search for the underlying structures of human life we have foucault's work on power and scissors work on semiotics we also have adam smith's invisible hand of the market and finally then we have q4 where we have the study of the external collective down here we have fields like ecology and chaos theory we have marx's economic theories and statistical studies of human societies jordan peterson has published

a lot of papers on the q4 findings of the ocean personality model and how for example it is more common for people with high politeness to be right leaning while those with higher compassion are more likely to be left leaning this is also where a lot of steven pinker's work with the better angels of our nature is focused this is the philosophy of utilitarianism august counts theories of social evolution and the science of climate change all of these theories and systems are directed at studying the outsides of the collective experience the four quadrants model is

also a great way of understanding the different arguments that are going on in the culture at any one point in time a recent exploration of jordan peterson and the social justice movement can be understood as a conflict between peterson's q1 vision of personal responsibility and creating change in the individual realm coming into conflict with the social justice movement's belief that change lies in the collective sphere by tackling oppression bigotry and bias in the culture peterson says be the change you wish to see in the world well the social justice movement says let's make the world

fair for everyone they both want to make the world a better place but get frustrated with each other over how to do that when you look at richard dawkins's attacks on religion as a delusion or as a virus you're seeing a q2 conflict with q1 dawkins is a rationalist materialist matter is the fundamental thing the externals are the fundamental thing this religious stuff doesn't fit the mold of empirical science and so it belongs in the trashy we can see how each quadrant can reduce the world to their little section of reality it's not just the

material is saying that matter is all there is and reducing all internal phenomena to firearms in the brain there's plenty of spiritual folk out there who say that the mind is all that there is there's the claim associated with darada that everything is interpretation or the idea associated with foucault that power is all that there is all of these are distinct forms of reductionism coming from the different corners of the map everyone has their way of seeing things and they have to explain why that way is the most important way the four quadrants model allows

us to take a step back and to give a more balanced appraisal of the situation gives us a way of looking at each silo with a little more distance and objectivity like any model it's imperfect but it's extremely useful as a way of diffusing intellectual conflicts and unpacking what is actually going on beneath the surface that's everything for this episode of the living philosophy if you've enjoyed it please give the video a thumbs up down below and as ever i'd like to thank shane and all the other patrons of the channel for their support in

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