Frank Visser has been asking important questions of Integral theory for over two decades now, and the community owes him more genuine engagement than he typically receives. His persistent concern—that terms like Eros or Kosmic Creativity often function as explanatory placeholders rather than rigorous concepts, and that Integral discourse too easily slides from empirical claims to metaphysical ones without marking the transition—names something real. Anyone who has spent time in Integral circles has likely felt the discomfort he’s pointing to: the moment when a conversation shifts from careful phenomenology or developmental research into sweeping cosmological assertions, and one isn’t quite sure what kind of claim is being made or how one would evaluate it.

Visser’s insistence on scientific accountability emerges, I think, from genuine intellectual conscience. If Integral theory aspires to honor and integrate the fruits of modern science—not merely to dismiss or transcend them—then it must be willing to play by science’s rules when making scientific claims. The frustration Visser expresses is the frustration of watching a discourse that claims such integration while sometimes helping itself to explanatory gestures that no working scientist would recognize as legitimate. That frustration deserves respect, not dismissal.

And yet.