Participatory Spirituality for the 21st Century
The symposium was intense and I think caused a shift in integral thinking. There were integral theorists in one group, Roy Bhaskar and his students of Critical Realism in another group, and Gary Hampson and I played the role of meta-theoretical referees of sorts. I had the benefit of having read just about all of Bhaskar’s work before I went, so the discourse was very rich and meaningful for me, where others seemed to be struggling with basic concepts (on both sides ) I will try to outline some of the main ideas that I took away from it.
Bhaskar talks about philosophy as “under-laboring” different disciplines or fields. Critical Realism’s focus is to under-labor science (physics, biology, sociology)… which means that it can point out the hidden assumptions or embedded frameworks which “under-lay” the science, thereby pointing to inconsistencies or falsities of theories that are created from within that discipline. To this effect, Critical Realism (CR) has a broad criticism of empiricism, which says that within any given empirically-driven theory, there are a set of assumptions outside of which the theory doesn’t work. In other words, all the truths that arise from empirical science is constrained by the framework from which the science is conducted, and therefore the “truths” are relative, not universal. One easy example of this is if you go to an Indian reservation and do “empirical science” you can “prove” that Indians are more lazy, less intelligent, more prone to alcoholism and crime, more degenerate, etc… than the general white population. It is easy to see that these “facts” appear only because an Indian reservation has a history that explains why these are contingencies of that history, not “facts” about native Americans. CR says all empirical science has this kind of blind spot, and that the role of philosophy is to contextualize what is “outside” the purview of the science, and the role of science Is then to advance its theory to include what was previously outside. This is a never-ending process, and puts philosophy right at the side of science (which is very cool I think.)
The method that CR uses is a dialectical method that has 3 major “steps” (there are several more steps in his system, I am generalizing). First there is what he terms “immanent critique”. This is where you critique the system from within the system’s own understanding. An important part of immanent critique is pointing out what is absent from the system/theory. The second step is “explanatory critique” which explains the system’s inconsistencies by pointing to what is left out and explains why the “truths” that arise within the system are merely “apparent truths” when the greater view is taken into account. The third step is an emancipatory “leap” -- which is an axiological step, or relates to values. The emancipatory leap asks what has to be “absented” from this line of reasoning to redress oppression or to transform the system toward greater liberation. This last step relies on principles Bhaskar calls “co-presencing” or “transcendental identification.”
When we applied this type of analysis to Integral Theory (IT) , we got the following key problem areas:
[An interesting aside is that Wilber writes from a spiritual wisdom of the abosolute unity of consciousness, and then goes on to fashion of theory that emphasizes the discordance of the world; whereas Bhaskar tells us how he began with this notion of critical naturalism, and ended up with the philosophy of meta-reality and its spiritual notions of transcendental co-presence. Many of the core constituents of Critical Realism denounce Bhaskar’s spiritual turn, and ridiculed him about attending a symposium with IT.]
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hey there. your welcome. i agree that IT can substantially improve its theory in lieu of the work done at the symposium. in fact, this brought on a fabulous opportunity to do just that! looking forward to your ideas.
bests,
bonnie
Hey there,
I don't know what the form of your exegesis would take, but Sean Hargens and I had a brief discussion around this. He has written in JITP a theory of ontological pluralism in which multiple subjects at multiple altitudes enact multiple methodologies to produce multiple worlds. He is correct to say, however, that the sequence is bi-directional (that the world also enacts multiple subjects somehow. This somehow is the key to getting out from under the epistemic fallacy. We used the phrase "the world worlds" meaning the one world is generating multiple world views through its capacity for pluralism. This world-ing is a unitary generative process that creates multiple orders (structures, sub-processes).... Now it is interesting to think of this in terms of something like the process theology of Charles Hartshorne. On the one hand we always have a unique subject enacting a unique world(view)... together all subjects enact the plurality of world(s)views.... But on the other side, we have only one real world. So there is this interesting asymmetry between subject (always plural) and object (always ultimately singular)... This then brings in the necessity of god -- in terms of that god is the subject for whom the world, as a singular is fully known. Anyway,,, this is all very interesting stuff.
Balder said:
Bonnie -- thank you! What a gift. This is fabulous and quite exciting. I was just thinking this morning about Integral Theory's vulnerability to the charge of "epistemic fallacy," and will comment on that in a subsequent post. (I think IT teeters close but doesn't quite fall fully into it; or, if and where it has fallen in, I believe it has the resources to help also pull it out.) I'll respond more fully soon. Thanks, again, for these delicious morsels.
But on the other side, we have only one real world.
And that is where the likes of Bryant and perhaps Morton (OOO thread) might disagree with Bhaskar.
great post and report. all interesting to get back to! I get to stray from my thinking zone over the weekend....
maybe there was a confusion. Bhaskar DEFINTELY says there is only one real world.
he *might* warn the OOO that "their world" is the actual world (which is an incomplete description of the real) and CR would be happy to "underlabor" them for that reason (supply either an immanent critque pointing out the internal inconsistency, or explanatory crituqe pointing to the incompleteness -- which of course is how good science proceeds, anyway)
b
theurj said:
But on the other side, we have only one real world.
And that is where the likes of Bryant and perhaps Morton (OOO thread) might disagree with Bhaskar.
Bonnie: 1. ...The ramifications of this critique is huge for IT. It suggests that all the developmental theories – which derive their validity from empirical research – are lacking a key explanatory critique. This is also true for Wilber’s state theories since, being based on the injunctions of science are also empirically-bound. So, for example, development theory says that the ego goes through certain stages from simple to more complex, in various ways, as part of development. People like Zak Stein and Suzanne Cook-Greuter differ about their taxonomy, but the basic process of diversification, complexification, integration is true throughout. The same is valid for Lovenger and Kegan’s moral stages. CR says : but you are lacking an explanatory critique about *why* the stages are the way they are. The empiricist in you says only “that they are” and posits that this is a deep truth about the universe. The CR “underlabors” and says, but these stages *are the way they are* because of *structures* that are contingent and are operating outside the field that you are studying. What are these structures? They are structures like the dominant geo-social-political economy that constrains development in just these ways, such that to *survive* the ego must constantly become more and more complexified along just these lines. The CR say, indigenous cultures are not “lower in the developmental scale” *because the developmental process is what you say it is* but they appear to be “lower” because they exist outside the geo-socio-political economy that constrains your system. In other words- without the explanatory critique, the broad empiricism is like a self-fulfilling hall of mirrors.
This is interesting. This sounds similar to a criticism of Integral's use of Spiral Dynamics that I've offered in my classes for the past several years -- that the description of 'stages' appear to be conflated to some degree with contingent geo-socio-cultural factors. To the degree that they are, then "Integral" descriptions of (and expectations about and exhortations for) the "way forward" for other cultures that are beginning to move beyond, say, a traditionalist orientation amounts to a form of cultural hegemony and the perpetuation of present (and, in some ways, problematic) Western sociocultural forms. I use the film, "Ancient Futures," to illustrate this (while also critiquing the somewhat Romantic/idealized "reading" of ancient cultures present in the film). The "next stage" for a traditionalist culture, and for individuals in such a culture, will not necessarily reflect the taken-for-granted values and orientation of "Orange" (though the dominant cultures do tend to put a lot of pressure on these other cultures, implicitly and explicitly, to replicate their LL and LR forms).
If my analysis is right, I think this is something that can be revealed just by applying AQAL to itself, self-critically. But I also like the idea of other similar-stage meta-theories, such as CR, Integral Theory, Transdisciplinarity, etc, serving this role for each other.
Right on! ANother piece of the pie, is the distinction between developmental narrative and an evolutionary one. IN development, the later stages build on the previous stages. This is consistent with IT. But in the punctuated dynamics of evolution, over deeper evolutionary epochs, the later forms almost always descend from earlier forms (once their close cousins are all extinct) -- for example, we did not descend from the fabulous fishes of the pre-Cambrian explosion, but from the lowly worms after the great Cambrian extinctions. Therefore, from an evolutionary point of view, diversity and novelty of form is the evolutionary imperative, not some convergence theory like developmental transcend and include. You might also be interested in my process ontology that distinguishes the 5 generative processes in the human narrative (of alternately in the phenomenal world )
Balder said:
Bonnie: 1. ...The ramifications of this critique is huge for IT. It suggests that all the developmental theories – which derive their validity from empirical research – are lacking a key explanatory critique. This is also true for Wilber’s state theories since, being based on the injunctions of science are also empirically-bound. So, for example, development theory says that the ego goes through certain stages from simple to more complex, in various ways, as part of development. People like Zak Stein and Suzanne Cook-Greuter differ about their taxonomy, but the basic process of diversification, complexification, integration is true throughout. The same is valid for Lovenger and Kegan’s moral stages. CR says : but you are lacking an explanatory critique about *why* the stages are the way they are. The empiricist in you says only “that they are” and posits that this is a deep truth about the universe. The CR “underlabors” and says, but these stages *are the way they are* because of *structures* that are contingent and are operating outside the field that you are studying. What are these structures? They are structures like the dominant geo-social-political economy that constrains development in just these ways, such that to *survive* the ego must constantly become more and more complexified along just these lines. The CR say, indigenous cultures are not “lower in the developmental scale” *because the developmental process is what you say it is* but they appear to be “lower” because they exist outside the geo-socio-political economy that constrains your system. In other words- without the explanatory critique, the broad empiricism is like a self-fulfilling hall of mirrors.
This is interesting. This sounds similar to a criticism of Integral's use of Spiral Dynamics that I've offered in my classes for the past several years -- that the description of 'stages' appear to be conflated to some degree with contingent geo-socio-cultural factors. To the degree that they are, then "Integral" descriptions of (and expectations about and exhortations for) the "way forward" for other cultures that are beginning to move beyond, say, a traditionalist orientation amounts to a form of cultural hegemony and the perpetuation of present (and, in some ways, problematic) Western sociocultural forms. I use the film, "Ancient Futures," to illustrate this (while also critiquing the somewhat Romantic/idealist "reading" of ancient cultures present in the film). The "next stage" for a traditionalist culture will not necessarily reflect the taken-for-granted values and orientation of "Orange" (though the dominant cultures do tend to put a lot of pressure on these other cultures, implicitly and explicitly, to replicate their LL and LR forms).
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