Ken Wilber - Integral Art and Literary Theory - excerpt from The Eye of Spirit, chapters 4 and 5 - - (48p).pdf

Integral Art and Literary Theory
Excerpt From: The Eye of Spirit
Chapters Four and Five

Ken Wilber


PART 1


In the process of understanding and interpretation, part and whole are
related in a circular way: in order to understand the whole, it is necessary
to understand the parts, while to understand the parts it is necessary to
have prehension of the whole.
-David Couzens Hoy

Thus the movement of understanding is constantly from the whole to the
part and back to the whole. Our task is to extend in concentric circles the
unity of the understood meaning. The harmony of all the details with the
whole is the criterion of correct understanding. The failure to achieve this
harmony means that understanding has failed.
- Hans- Gadamer
© 2003 – 2004 Integral Naked. All rights reserved.

Introduction

WITH THE DEATH of the avant-garde and the triumph of irony, art seems
to have nothing sincere to say. Narcissism and nihilism battle for a
center stage that isn't even there; kitsch and camp crawl all over each
other in a fight for a representation that no longer matters anyway; there
seems to arise only the egoic inclination of artist and critic alike, caught in
halls of self-reflecting mirrors, admiring their image in a world that once
cared.
The aim of this essay is to step out of the narcissistic and nihilistic
endgame that has so thoroughly overtaken the world of postmodern art and
literature, and to introduce instead the essentials of a genuinely integral art
and literary theory - what might be called integral hermeneutics.
I will cover both art and literature, but with an emphasis on visual art,
which is actually a "trickier" and in some ways more difficult case, since it
usually lacks narrative structure to help guide the interpretation. (A
subsequent essay focuses specifically on an "all-level, all-quadrant" analysis
of literary signification and semiotics in general.)
It i