This is the map that was introduced in the FB page. It is basically derived from Gebser’s description of the different types of reasoning within the Mental structure of consciousness. They appear chronologically in phases – Oceanic (or latent phase), Pyramidal (or efficient phase) Perspectival (or deficient stage) and then also Paradoxical which is a late-stage variant of Perspectival. Gebser scholars should note that although Gebser saw much of the emerging Integral structure of consciousness in Heidegger, in expanding his map, I have located Heidegger along the paradoxical, not the onto-logical, because of Heidegger’s late philosophy (which violated his earlier process of thinking) and also because how Heidegger’s philosophy has been actually conceived as it has been carried forward into recent times.
Summarily it illustrates a picture of “flows”, whose roots lay in oceanic and then pyramidal thinking. Before I describe what those entail, I would like the reader to get an overall gestalt of the flow pattern that is arising. Oceanic thinking was carried forward into the modern age through east-Asian philosophies such as Ha-Yen Buddhism (and by extension modern Chinese fusion of Daoism and Buddhism which results in the world view of Traditional Chinese Medicine and its philosophical foundations in modern Daoist thought.
In the western world, Plato and Plotinus represent the beginning of what we now recognize as rational thinking. Plotinus’ legacy moves toward the soteriological, while Plato is generally seen to be a point from which the modern intellectual, scientific worldview arose. In the middle we have Kant — who represents a kind of apotheosis to the modern mind. Here we have a dramatic divergence in the wake of Kant. There is a strong scientific/empirical track to a materialist kind of ontology to the right, supported by the dialectic methodology of scientific revolution, and the exchange of scientific paradigms in the way that Kuhn described.
This is counterpoised by the perspectival trajectory, toward the humanistic philosophers of the post-war, post-modern movement, in which the dialectical movement becomes perspectival when the “dialectic” is no longer primarily between self and world, but inside rational discourse within a community of others. When seen from this way, “perspectivalism” is akin to an intersubjective “dialecticism”, of alternatively, “dilaecticalism” is an ontological kind of “perspectivalism”. There are interesting implications to this… but we need to move on to the bigger picture. [Note, however, that Critical Realism represent an attempt to bring the two back into the same "ball park" as it were, whereas Speculative Realism represents more of a complete rejection of perspectivalism.
So we have one major divergence from Kant, on the one hand toward dialectical materialism, and on the other hand toward perspectival humanism.
Now I want to look at the trajectory that goes straight up toward the paradoxical. This is a trajectory that is tending toward post-rational thinking, and bumps up against irrational elements. It is here where the splitting into parts -- the making of distinctions -- reaches an extreme form. The difference here is in a sense all movement between dialectical or perspectival pairs is stopped -- primarily because the fundamental duality that is driving this "movement" (which tends toward complexity) is revealed, and the mind turns to trying to understand this basic underlying duality, rather than moving toward continuous reconciliation of prior polarities into new, more complex forms.
In other words, there is a sense that of claiming "the jig is up" -- that the mind intends to find the "root cause" of things. Nargarjuna's tetrallema represents the earliest and perhaps severest example of this -- which of course was succeeded by a thousand years of Buddhist scholastics on the implications of his thinking. In the west, Derrida's pursuit of the ontological singularity that resists deconstruction, beneath everything else that peels away under analysis -- parallels Nargarjuna's efforts.
Today we see the results of paradoxical thinking in the explosion of mental theories, models and maps that identify what are taken to be "root categories" -- or "primary abstractions" upon which the dualistic world is built.
The pathological aspect of the paradoxical mind is when the categories of mind are considered to be aspects of reality. Basically, this happens when the mental consciousness turns inward on itself, and discovers its own basic dualistic nature, and then projects this a fundamental ontological structures of reality. Nargarjuna, for example, reveals the basic dualistic structure of mental consciousness through his tetrallema argument, and finds subject pole and object pole (for Nargarjuna, the single and multiple poles were derivatives of the subject-object pole) and then suggests that there is an underlying ontological structure to reality, i.e. that of emptiness/form.
Wilber re-presents this map, by expanding it into a matrix across two dualities, subject-object and singular-plural, and likewise, suggests that this is not a map of the Mental structure of consciousness, but rather a map of some deep structures in the ontological territory. His latest influence/collaboration with Clint Fuchs and Core Integral actually offers an argument that the 4 quadrants are primoridal givens!
There has been an explosion of this kind of thinking across the Wilber-centric integral community. There is an explosion of maps that reiterate the fundamental components of the dualistic mind. Wilber's map is a "theory of everything" because it reveals the fundamental criteria through which "everything" arises within the Mental consciousness -- within a dualistic framework of interior/exterior and whole/part. "Everything" can be shown to be derived from these dualistic pairs, not because "everything" is derived from deep dualistic dynamics in the cosmos -- but because "everything" is derived by the Mental structure.
Not a few individuals have attempted to map ever more complicated versions of the matrices that complexify from the root dualisms in the Mental consciousness. It is common to illustrate a flow chart of transtions, from one category or state to another. This is a false process theory, because process or onto-logics as we are describing it, prescribes a processural field that is whole, and remains whole, through transformations in genertive order. In other words, it would not be possible to "reverse engineer" a true, onto-logically- reasoned process exegesis, into a matrix of one or more opposites. The relations in an onto-logically reasoned process are not dualistic, but onto-genetic.
Although it may be harsh to say so, at the end of the day, paradoxical thinking has nothing to say about "the world", and in a sense it rejects the world in lieu of a type of infinite recursivity of mind-looking at mind-looking at mind. This is not to trivialize the real suffering that this usually brings to the individual, so locked into this prison. The suffering comes from the case that existential being-in-the-world is vast and infinite, and cannot be fit into any container, much less one that is merely an iterative process stemming from one or two, or four, or a dozen categorical abstractions.
So lets go on.. Both modern, secular Buddhist Dialectics (as it veers away from Nargarjuna's deconstruction) and Process Metaphysics in a sense by-pass all these streams, and represent different streams evolving from the earlier, oceanic way of thinking. These are the two streams we are most interested in, with respect to an emergent structure of consciousness, and the new kinds of reasoning that it may bring.
So here is Gebser's example of oceanic thinking (if you have a copy of Ever-Present Origin you can read more in chapter 7, and see where I have altered some of the detail to make easier distinctions for this course):
For souls it is death to become water; for water it is death to become earth. But from earth comes water and from water, soul.
You can immediately see that the terms are not related in a dualistic way. In fact Oceanic thinking allows for logics such as A>B>C>A<B .. because the sequence, or "onto-genetically related series" transforms the terms by the time they re-appear or cycle in the thinking. The "B" that is less than "A" is not the "same B" that by then end of the cycle, is greater than "A" (but neither is this the "same" "A"). Those of you familiar with Daoist 5-element theory and/or the organ system of TCM on which it is based will immediately see how oceanic thinking is the foundation of these systems of thought and forms the basic "science" of acupuncture, Medical Qigong, among other practices.
Of course, the entire system of Traditional Chinese Medicine, is derived from complex iterations of these fundamental relationships between elements. [Note: naive westerners tend to interpret and emphasize Daoist philosophy in terms of discrete polarities, i.e. yin, yang -- but this is antithetical to the Daoist mentality.]
Christopher Alexander’s pattern language is a modern attempt to create a taxonomy of pattern from which the naturally ordering processes are generated. Unlike what has come before, Alexander begins with a very large constellation of patterns in his pattern language — and never seems to fall into a metal construction of dualistic pairs. In his later work, he attempts to whittle them down to some more fundamental elements.
Oceanic thinking recurs in the pre-Buddhist Tibetan Bon systems which, with their verb-based languages and deeply processural understanding of “mind-nature” and probably reaches it highest forms in the more processural schools of Dzogchen which reject the two-truths doctrine and the false dichotomy of epistemic and ontological categories.
In the west, oceanic type tendencies crystallize with Whitehead’s process approach, and the incorporation of this kind of process thinking to re-imagine in process ways various inquiries into psychology, for example, as in the case of Jason Brown.
So I hope this gives you some orienting generalizations about the course, and helps you mine the authors in new ways, that prove to be rich and fertile places for your own genius to explore!
This is so wonderfully rich. It gives me the foothold into the teaching that I was hoping for. Thank you, Bonnie! (Michael Schwartz as raphae1).
One matter. I am intrigued by Gebser’s citation of Heidegger in light of very recent Heideggerian scholarship that is breaking from its Derridean moment, especially the commentaries on his second magnum opus, setting in motion in later thought, Contributions. I am called to go back to that text and read it anew in light of all this, and as I begin to grok all this. Many thanks again.
On FB Michael adds:
Picking up another thread above. In feeling this evolutionary emergent beyond the rational-mental wave, inclusive of the waves of development WITHIN that wave [1st and 2nd tier, in integral terms], what about so-called 3rd tier? Here might we bracket some of the few specifics that Wilber has spoken, which I find important btw, and focus on the notion that more embracing “sheaths” of Intelligence are woven into stage-structures. Or to bracket 3rd tier and say this outside of integral and all the spines that get triggered (still these days),how do subtle and causal dimensions of our being come into play or not in this emergence of a post-rational/mental Logos? (Here I am even thinking of “felt-sense.”) My asking these kinds of questions is the way I am entering into the wider and deeper currents that are already in motion here, my way of seeing how to dive in.
Michael, i hear ya. i often get the impression that wilber is looking toward a post-rational consciousness — but he is locked into this developmental paradigm, where the new (post-rational) has to be built upon the most recent form — and what distinguishes my little story here from his, is that i see there needs to be a sort of “going back to one’s ancestors and making different trajectories” — which is always the way of evolution. it also appeals to me, because this “going back to find novelty for the way forward” is very in line with Gebser’s notion of novelty in the Ever-Present Source, and it is also how novelty sources in process thinking. but i think we are seeing/saying the same expectations — just using different languages. so it would be COMPLETELY APPROPRIATE to bridge with what is already laid down as a map with AQAL-integral. my preference is to burn the bridge
to continue to contextualize some of this with Michael and integral theory – so you see in SES Wilber *seems* to be telling an evolutionary story — but in fact he falls into paradoxical thinking (eros/thanatos) — but the biggest thing he misses is his projection that modern day sentiment around spirituality is divided between descenders and ascenders — this is a big part of the plot in SES, and so he misses that in a very real sense the integration of nature-environmental-indigenous cultures within the “new age” “green” phenomenon is not *merely* a descent to “pre” forms of consciousness, but is a return to ancestral roots, in order for the new consciousness to evolve.
and so we see that this is not an intellectual “thing” — but truly something deeper that is evolving through us — through phenomenon like “the re-enchantment (to use Bhaskar’s term) of the world, or as Einsenstein says we are falling in love again, with nature — these are not “regressions” at all! but the important prior stems to the new.
this is how evolution always proceeds. and that is why we find punctuated evolution — not a continuum as in development.
“he misses that in a very real sense the integration of nature-environmental-indigenous cultures within the “new age” “green” phenomenon is not *merely* a descent to “pre” forms of consciousness, but is a return to ancestral roots, in order for the new consciousness to evolve. ”
I agree, Bonnie, that it is not always a pre- / regressive movement. (In this regard and vein, I have always liked Michael Washburn, Embodied Spirituality, and idid, .essay in Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 35/1 2003, pp1-19, where he holds space for both his and Wilber’s notions of development, if not evolution).
Transformation, and the emergence of novel capacities, is in SES always ascent [btw - later Thanatos seen as the pathological version of Agape]. Using IT here, I like to speak of a complementary agapic descent that can bring forth novel capacities, and this I call transfiguring. And too as you say, there is a way where it is not a choice between ascent-transformation / descent-transfiguring, but they ARE the evolutionary moment that is emergent, if I understand or anticipate the post-binary way you are moving. I look forward to how process thought moves past such binaries and how this helps account for punctuation, if I am catching the wave. Gratefully…
This was my realisation at the ISE 3 put you put it in more skilled words. I basically saw that when you hear all the stories about existence told, from Ken Wilber to Barbara Marx Hubbard, from Michael Dowd to Andrew Cohen and more, you are introduced to a reality that is vastly different to Ken’s model in particular but also all the others. It’s evo-invo-lutionary, sacred ascending descenting, radient expansive, intensifying incarnational totality and much much more…
Barbara’s version was, however, the most complete. Not the story she told but where she told it from. That’s why everybody, at heart, was willing to coordinate around her supraordinate campaign, inspite of their brushing it off as silly for all their personal reasons, but not all would want to create the integral culture a la Ken Wilber. Ken shared his creative aspirations with us and this showed why his vision did not bring them all together into a dance. Whether it is Barbara’s campaign or not, or perhaps it’s the Magellan destination, it’s neither here nor there, what is penetrating me is that there is a way to dance, sing, and live, that co-ordains all the citizens of existence into one “campain” that enhances all genius on board. It’s just like the way an NBA championship campaign will coordinate individual talent into more flowing beauty only the campaign that unites existence as one musical orchestration has yet to be explored, formulated and lived.
Sagan again “The beauty of the universe is not in the atoms themselves but in the way they are put together”. The WAY of beautification by coordinated collective dance or music or….
The WAY is ground of my koan.
Bonnie, in evolution as you have discussed before with me, the next big leap starts from the worm, not the most advanced life-form. With duality hard-wired into our brains (or is it brain-minds?) can this physical container be suitable for the next evolutionary push or do we need to discard it?
Coincidentally one of my projects at the moment is working with a psychologist whose research is on error traps that fire fighters fall into – that are the result of the hard-wiring of our brains (which have memory, thinking, relating biasis) being mismatched to emergency management situations (which are complex, changing, time, space elements, high stakes – etc). It has come from her empirically driven studies and explained by Psych 101. A big contrast to JB.
The error trap that comes strongly to mind – our reluctance to change plans. When we have a plan or view which we have invested a lot of time into, we are reluctant to move to another. Hmmmmm. There is a point in there somewhere.
Hey there,
Nothing is ever hard-wired. Everything arises, moment to moment, perishes and arises anew. In that limnal space, onto-genetically prior to the next moment, everything is fluid and shit happens that has never happened before.
So maybe we have a chance.
If not, maybe the next life-form.
Bonnie
Wow. This helps enormously. I can see how poetic thought really does get at this. Right now, my complexity function is speechless and integrating it all, so I’ll have to say more later. I guess what I want to know is whether love is relevant in these models.
I’m intrigued by the seeming return of the primitive here (pre/trans has been one of my biggest beefs with Integral even in my simple understanding of it, and I went around ISE 1 when I was new to all of this, saying “where are all the shamans at?”). I have noticed that there are some people working from a shamanic orientation with the poetic/subtle roots of these arisings (shaman-artists), and it strikes me that these theories can create space in the world for that work. I don’t know if I’m really far off in feeling my way into that. But, this points out some good directions… I’ve got some work to do!
Bovina sancta, Bonnitta! I can’t believe you situated Heidegger in Paradoxical! I suppose next you’ll be situating Jesus in the Humanist tradition and wanting to sacrifice my firstborn!
lol. (Seriously, I believe there’s not cause to categorize Heidegger this way.)
“Although it may be harsh to say so, at the end of the day, paradoxical thinking has nothing to say about “the world”, and in a sense it rejects the world in lieu of a type of infinite recursivity of mind-looking at mind-looking at mind. This is not to trivialize the real suffering that this usually brings to the individual, so locked into this prison. The suffering comes from the case that existential being-in-the-world is vast and infinite, and cannot be fit into any container, much less one that is merely an iterative process stemming from one or two, or four, or a dozen categorical abstractions.”
AMEN (provided we understand that there can be semantic issues with “paradox”). I wonder here if you are obliquely referring to Michael Kosok’s matrix, because, if so, I am at a total loss (provided you read his presentation carefully and were transparent to your own selective attending) as to how you could possibly understand his work this way (unless of course you infer the meaning of many of his terms and frames as referring to established philosophical “givens” without attuning to his very specific qualifications and reconstructions). Kosok has a tremendous amount to say about the “world” (of which Buber and Levinas would approve),
very specifically goes after and dismantles the “mind-looking at mind-looking at mind” stance, totally rejects the idea of primordial pre-givens and categorical abstractions (Ken and Clint are really rolling that way?), and is CRYSTAL CLEAR that the processural field is whole and remains whole through transformations and in generative order.
Just sayin’.
Goddammit, I have got to get caught up on the SEM reading and y’all are making it very difficult. =D
Emmanuel Kant was a real pissed ant
Who was very rarely stable.
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozey beggar
Who could think you under the table.
David Hume could out-consume
Wilhelm Friederich Hegel, (Wilhelm Friederich Hegel?)
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as sloshed as Schlegel.
There’s nothing Nietzche couldn’t teach ya
‘Bout the raising of the wrist
Socrates himself was permanently pissed.
Brandy,
This is my moo:
I did say that any one map like this – static as it is – doesn’t do any philosopher justice. I am surprised there is not more debate around Wilber. Wilber in No Boundary would definitely by on the soteriological stream, most of his spiritual passages are prose-poems reminiscent of oceanic thinking, his empiricism puts him closer to Kant, his dialectics, right on top of Hegel, and he has a significant Whiteheadian current to his notions of prehension. On the other hand, that perspectival thing that goes all the way up and all the way down, harkens back to Hume, and lands inside the paradoxical groove. Yet I place him on none of these paths—but rather, where I see his legacy, his mainstream contribution will be, closer to Habermas than Whitehead , Kant or Hume.
The question of Heidegger is a good one – as I already noted. Although Gebser highlights Heidegger’s gems in relationship to time, gestalts, and openness – Gebser also already had some misgivings about other portions of Heidegger’s work. Acutally, I consider myself a much bigger fan of Heidegger than his main detractors, but the map I drew represents a hypothesis of the evolution of consciousness, and the streams of thinking that are in play – and so I put Heidegger where I think his main legacy is today – with those that are attracted to paradoxical thinking.
Heidegger’s major flaw, in my opinion, is that he tried to use the intellect to “capture being”, and in the process inadvertently reified it. I want to say to him “just keep pointing to it, soteriologically, don’t try to capture it!” and he keeps going on thinking he’s got half a chance. Wittgenstein did much better with his “language” project – starting out as a logical positivist, and then, deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole — eventually throwing the thing down the toilet.
Heidegger seems to have done the opposite—starting with the openness of Being, (which of course he merely resurrected from the Greeks’ oceanic thinking style) and ending up qualifying it into everyday things, and in the process completely eliminating most of the world “sub species homo sapiens” . If the map represents the future evolution of consciousness and thinking, I don’t believe that a philosopher who so exclusively identifies being with man’s existential condition, will play a significant role. That’s not the way the world is turning right now. There is a turn toward a process ontology.
In my opinion he opened the role of philosophy in the west to look directly at being. This is good. Herbert Guenther appropriated much of Heidegger’s language into a thoroughly process-based exegesis on pre-Buddhist Tibetan Bon thinking. This is where I see Heidegger shine – through the eyes of Guenther. There is a sense brought out in Guenther’s work, that Heidegger belongs with the soteriological stream. David Michael Levin illuminates Heidegger this way, and so do I in my writing.
Gebser talks about Heidegger in the following ways (excerpted from pages 402 -412 in the section on Philosophy)
**The weighty objections that that can mounted against all existential efforts, be they the existence-illumination of Jaspers, the existential-analytic fundamental ontology of Heidegger, or the psychoanalysis-infected existentialism of Satre, must not deter us from an appraisal of existentialism. Aside from the spiritual impoverishment and the anthropocentric reductionism evident from the treatment of human existence by prominent thinkers today as their exclusive concern, there is also a certain ambiguity best illustrated by Heidegger, an ambiguity even conceded to Heidegger by one of his best friends. By this very ambivalence Heidegger’s thought demonstrates this Janus-faced aspect [read: paradoxical thinking] of our epoch, most acutely manifest in the German world. …
**In Being and Time Heidegger has exhausted and driven to it limits the assertions of speculative, private philosophy , and by hyperformulation and hyperdifferentiation, has placed its very value into question.[Note: this sentence fully captures what is paradoxical thinking.] Heidegger no longer basks in the light of previous philosophies, but stands in the twilight of transition. The question as to the “meaning of being” and the previous reply that it is a “being toward death”, a psychic mood transposed into an ontic position, has be succeeded by a new ambiguity.
** It is symptomatic that although the straight and directed has formed the bases of western thought since at least 500 BC, Heidegger recognizes them as being inadequate. It is only regrettable that while rejecting the mental-rational, Heidegger regresses to the irrational and is only able to intimate the illumination of the arational via occasional opalescent “luminescences.”
So my question to you, Brandy – is where would you put Heidegger on this map of multiple streams of thought? I have placed him on the paradoxical stream where his closest neighbors are Nargarjuna and Derrida. This seems to make sense. They have all declared a kind of “end to thought” – and also have projected this situation (which I argue is merely conditioned aspect of mind) onto a deeper existential or ontologically real reality. I want to say no! The map they have made does point to the exhaustion of the kind of thinking that has been with us since it evolved from the mythical structure. Therefore it has, for a long long time, over-determined both our existential reality, and what arises for us “as the real”. In a very literal way, theirs is the dead end they are proclaiming.
I want to return to being, *qua being* and not the idea of *it* to reengage the open aspect (which is a kind of re-enchantment) and start anew. We and the world, we as the world, we in-dwelling –the world, are charged to begin again, a new epoch. The new always arises in being, because she is always in-becoming, and we, too are *that*. If you want to be in that stream, you have to catch the wave, instead of trying, as Heidegger, Nargarjuna, or Derrida did – to turn around and look at it.
So yes, you figured it out, your matrix, as far as I can see, fits firmly within the paradoxical stream (also known as the paralogical in some circles) and yes, it seems to me that it has a lot to say about the situation of the dualistic mind looking at itself in wonder and bewilderment – but it does not seem to me to have anything to say about the world. But what if I am right, but what if I am wrong? Then you have lost nothing, and gained nothing. It’s the map that doesn’t matter. Can a map really explain the enormous suffering in the world, each fractal piece burning in your own heart. We are all always already suffering – its a Noble Truth for Godsake! What is there to lose? What is anyone asking you to give up?
I merely offer someone like JB to help disambiguate the deep affective layer of feeling, from the paltry excuses we employ to reify existence by re-presenting *it* in a compartment of categories. Isn’t this merely a reiteration of the way ego comes to reifiy itself as the unit of being that stands in for its becoming– as JB would show us? Why go to such great lengths to debate such complexity, when we hardly know where our feelings are, how they are situated with respect to mind, how they articulate to become re-presentations of self, other, world. And I’m not talking about a psychological map in the conventional sense — that is already too far along in the far direction. Isn’t the incessant argument through the years merely a hypercomplexification of these very important questions, coupled with an inadequate interest in examining them in their root form? I don’t want to know *that the world is such and such a place as described by a complex map* much less so *that* I am such and such a result of some kind of theory of mind– rather I want to know what the world feels like – what it tastes like, what parts give me more of the feeling of life, and which parts not so much. I want to stay close to the experience and my language to carry *that* forward. I want to practice living from there, from the start, to be able to feel into where the world arises inside me, impregnated with the values that shape and color and illuminate my world. I want to start at square one. And to do that, I must step back into the becoming that arises onto-genetically to my being. I want to start there – not at the end of a thousand year trajectory of confusion. This is where CA and JB are start. That is what makes them valuable mentors of the process.
So here is my “back-atcha” question – what do you make of this:
Between the pillars of spirit and matter the mind has put up a swing.
There swings the bound soul and all the worlds with not even the slightest rest.
The sun and moon also swing, and there is no end to it.
The soul swing through millions of births like the endless circling of sun and moon.
Billions of ages have passed with no sigh of relief.
The earth and sky swing.
Wind and water swing.
Taking a body, God Himself swings.
~ Kabir
Critical Realism/meta-Reality see the map:
I am sharing a comment from Mervyn Hartwig in response to my invitation to comment on the map. The original thread can be viewed in the meta-Reality group on yahoo.
“Thanks for calling attention to the map. It’s interesting in some ways (the commentary too), but unfortunately reflects Bonnie’s and IT’s obsession with being in the vanguard of the process of evolution of human consciousness. She has Onto-Logics (having swept up metaRealism!!) powering away far bigger and stronger than all the other ‘flows’, and critical realism going off on a little side-show. Looks like one of those World War II maps showing e.g. the Nazi advance into Belgium. The front-line position assigned to Onto-Logics is very misleading both in relation to the main trends in philosophy and social theory over the last few hundred years and to how the arguments stack up. What will deflate the big spearhead and balloon of her Onto-Logics is its absurd position in regard of our relation to the universe, whereby, as Bonnie puts it, glossing Gebser, “space and time [are] no longer a priori or external features of the universe, rather they … arise within a generative process of thinking”. I agree that they are not external, because humans are part of the universe, but they are a priori in that they’re a condition of possibility of human praxis, and as we know existed long before it did. In the epoch of crisis and transition we’re now entering, the notion that humans somehow generate or co-generate the categories of the world in their thinking, a world that is now recoiling against their hubristic ways, will increasingly be seen as a luxury we can’t afford, a dangerous illusion – as bad as what it’s trying to replace. We do ‘co-enact’ geo-history and have an impact on our tiny ecosystem, but we don’t co-enact the laws by which the ecosystem and the wider multiverse operate (e.g. gravity, entropy)! Even within the sociosphere there are many things that are pretty intransitive to our enactments, e.g. if a way of using nuclear fusion on a much-more-energy-out-than-in basis were to be discovered tomorrow, it wouldn’t avert the energy crisis we’re facing because it would take a generation to work its way through the system. Everything in the sociosphere, let alone the universe, is not just process and flow, though that is an important part of the story; there are many pretty recalcitrant structures too, many enabling, many not. The structures are structures-in-process, true, but they are still structures and process is not to be equated with the process of human thought. Mervyn”
The fundamental criticism is in the last sentence, …”process is not to be equated with the process of human thought.” Does JB equate process with the process of human thought? According to JB, Page 26: “The same process that creates a brain brings a particle into existence.” My interpretation would be that human thought is a realization of an underlying process which cannot be equated with the process itself. Just as many realizations in evolutionary history are ‘pruned’ so can human thought and humans per se and there is nothing special about us except for the fact that we are here now. Using Marvin’s example the same microgenetic process that enacts gravity and entropy also generates humans and human thought. JB is not saying that humans co-create gravity and entropy since they existed before we did. Instead it is the same process that generates gravity and entropy also generates humans and human thought. I would of course look forward to reading what the group has to say on this topic.
Hey there! Thanks Ravi for being the messenger.
Some minor points about the map. Yes, he is right that onto-logics has not swept anything, much less the body of work that is CR and MR. This is a hypothetical projection into the future! Only time will tell.
Also, yes, what I have in common with IT, is that my hypothesis is based on looking at consciousness in an evolutionary context, and really only supported by the work of Gebser — which is not scientific, nor empirical in any sense of the word. It might be, tho “onto-logical” in some sense of the word.
I consider “onto-logics” like all theories to be creative imaginaries, which can be guaged as more or less useful, more or less relevant, more or less “life-giving”, more or less free. That judgement, tho, would be aesthetic, and come from a place of “feeling” (deep affect) that I would argue is conjoined in the world. One might say that “feeling” is the co-presencing of embodied person with “the real.”
My map elicits so much emotion. Nazi’s? Really, is this a blitzkrieg?
This is a key component to our current incommensurability
“I agree that they are not external, because humans are part of the universe, but they are a priori in that they’re a condition of possibility of human praxis, and as we know existed long before it did.”
which certainly justifies my putting CR closer to Kant than they might want to admit (as meta-realists).
You are correct, I think in pointing to a nuanced layer in JB that Mervyn doesn’t see. They argue against a crisp cut between the real world and the human-o-sphere, but beneath their argument is just such a crisp cut. Your own reading of JB is more nuanced, more integrative, I think.
The concept of a priori (or more problematically the synthetic a priori) is resolved when considering the layering of onto-genetic duration over ontological time. The deep ontological structures “in the real” arise only through their onto-genetic recapitulation in time — but even *that process* is part of “the real” not of human in(ter)vention in it.
More thoughts?
Bonnie
(PS. I hope the door to discussion stays open here. I fully respect and appreciate the work that Mervyn and the CR/meta-Realists are doing, as I hope they can come to see something of value in this notion of onto-logics.
I want to end with a quote from the Anarchist David Graeber (Possibilities):
quote:
“Where Marx saw our dilemma in the fact that we create our physical worlds, but are unaware of, and hence not in control of the process by which we do so (this is why our own deeds seem to come back at us as alien powers), for Castoriadis, the problem was that “all societies are sintituted by temselves,” but are blind to their own creativity. …
This does seem a unique point of tension within radical thought. It is probably no coincidence that Roy Bhaskar, founder of Critical Realim, found this exactly the point where he had to break with the Western philosophical tradition entirely. After arguing for the necessity of a dialectical approach to social problems, he found himself asking, when contradictory elements are subsumed in a higher level of integration which are more than the sum of their parts, when apparent intractable problems are resolved by some brilliant new synthesis which takes things to a whole new level, where does that newness actually come from? If the
whole is more than the sum of its parts, what is the sources of that “more” that transcendent element?
In his case he ended up turning to Indian and Chinese philosophical traditions and arguing that the main reason actually existing Marxism has produced such disappointing results has been its refusal to take on such issues, owing to its hostility to anything resembling “spiritual”questions.’
end of quote
This description seems to be consistent with my mapping, and my suggestion that the new will entail a covergence with the soteriological stream.
It is my feeling that process-thinking has much to offer in addressing this tension.
What do you think?
Just re-read you last comment here Bonnitta,
Three weeks ago, I would have understood what you were talking about at all!
Today it makes sense in a very obvious way.
I couldn’t say it like you do at all. I don’t know most of these philosophical schools or their protagonists but I can read it in some way as if I was recognising the coherence of you thought pattern. The beauty in the WAY you think. The very thing that compelled me to dive into this course!
Mega cool! IMO:-)