Participatory Spirituality for the 21st Century
I decided to move this post over to its own thread to work on this. I'll also move other related past posts over from other threads to riff on later.
The last post reminded me of something I've been working on using Bergson via Bryant. It's not completely thought through yet, with gaps still, but I thought I'd get it down here and then work on it further.
Now where Bryant might be akin to something like the MHC is in his endo-relational organizational structure. Recall in TDOO his distinction between exo- and endo-relations, and its correlation with intensional and extensional relations in a set (212). Endo-relations reside in the structural organization of its elements, the elements themselves not being autonomous entities. Hence the elements of this set cannot be otherwise; they must be in a relatively fixed pattern to maintain an entity's autonomy (214).
Bryant uses Bergson's diagram on memory to show how endo-relations are maintained (232).
It is similar to hierarchical nests but not quite. ABCD shows the unfoldment of an entity over time. A'B'C'D' show the memory of the entity, which feeds back into its unfoldment and also allows for future anticipation. But what is unfolded and remembered-anticipated is how an entity selectively organizes its structural elements in relation to its environment. This can and does change in response to these relations, but even when it changes it maintains a relatively stable endo-relational structure to maintain autonomy.
Where Bryant didn't go with this, and I do, is in relating this to the Wilber-Combs lattice. As I've laid out in different posts and threads, we might loosely correlate A'B'C'D' with our early development using MHC's stages with Gebser's, from pre-operational/archaic (D') to primary/magic (C') to concrete/mythic (B') to abstract-rational (A'). Formal rationality begins at A, which can be then trained to retrieve through focus and memory to integrate the previous levels throuch meditative or contemplative methods.
But here is where it diverges with the MHC and uses a twist or fold in the W-C lattice. I've claimed that the MHC continues to get more complicated with it's postformal stages, not fully remembering and then integrating the previous stages by not taking into account how the meditative process works. When integrated via meditation there is a fold or twist in both the W-C lattice and in Bergson's diagram above. Hence we get something more akin to Levin's bodies as the integrative process unfolds in reverse order, the prior magic and mythic becoming the transpersonal and the prior archaic becoming the ontological.
This relates to the W-C lattice in that the higher stages are the meditative integration of earlier state-stages in reverse order: gross-abstract, subtle-magic/mythic, causal-archaic. These are the third tier in the lattice. But whereas the lattice continues to differentiate states from stages in postformal levels a la the MHC, the states and stages undergo a transformation in the fulcrum of formal operations with meditation. i.e., they are heretofore more fully integrated and that differentiation is now replaced a la Gebserian IA awaring and the prior analysis-synthesis (de-re) above.
Relating this back to Bryant's endo-relational structure, the endo-relational elements are structurally organized in a specific and nested way akin to transcend and include. Wilber senses that there is a difference between enduring and transitional structures akin to Bryant's endo- and exo-relations. Wilber even uses Luhmann in ways similar to Bryant but not in this way, since Wilber's enduring structures are cogntive like pre-formal to concrete to rational. These would be more akin to Luhmann's independent and autonomous exo-relations.
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Also recall this thread which never took off on Mickey's article regarding cosmological postmodernism, using Whitehead, Deleuze, Derrida and Keller. Of note here is this quote:
"The rhizome is a system that 'connects any point with any other points....A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo....the concept of the rhizome implies that roots and rhizomes are intimately intertwined....what seem to be mutually exclusive opposites for arborescent thinking seem mutually implicative for rhizomatic thinking'" (36).
An apt image:
Recent posts above also reminded me of this one:
Bonnie linked to chapter 6, Hearkening, in Levin's The Listening Self. Therein I read:
"When our listening self is deeply rooted in the body's felt sense of being, it belongs to what Merleau-Ponty called the 'intertwining,' the essential co-origination and interdependence of subject and object, self and other: it belongs to a dimension of our being which is not restricted to...the ego-logical structuring...but lays out, rather, between subject and object...the resonating, co-responsive interdependence of a 'differential interplay.' (Derrida's concept of the 'arch-trace' is, I think, remarkably close to Merleau-Ponty's concept of the 'intertwining'...the 'arch-trace' is the 'constituting possibility' of a 'differential interplay,' and as such, it is the necessary condition of the possibility of all relationships)" (220).
Re-reading this post today on Hampson's work reminded me that I've included a lot of his suggestions in this thread (and predecessor threads).
I was re-reading this post today that fits in with the recent theme:
I found a relevant passage in Levin's Sites of Vision (MIT Press, 1999), the chapter on Derrida and Foucault. The entire chapter up to this point was Derrida's refutation of the metaphor of light and vision, equating it with the metaphysics of presence. But when the metaphor extends to how blinding light diffuses any distinctive presencing Levin notes:
“Without disputing the heliocentrism and ocularcentrism of metaphysics, Derrida will argue, however, that, contrary to first appearances, the logic of this sun-and-light-centered discourse does not in fact entail, or necessitate, a metaphysics of presence—on the contrary, the more one thinks about the matter, the more one will be compelled to acknowledge that the logic of this metaphorics actually resists, and even subverts, the possibility of presence. Thus he asks us to reflect on the phenomenology actually implicit in the logic of this metaphorics: 'Presence disappearing in its own radiance, the hidden source of light, of truth, and of meaning, the erasure of the visage of Being—such must be the insistent return of that which subjects metaphysics to metaphor.' Here we can see Derrida's deconstructive strategy at work—that is, at play: he uses the metaphorics of light to deconstruct the metaphysics of presence, that very presence that the visual generation of metaphyics has been thought to support. If this is a Hegelian Aufhebung, it is a sublation with a mischievous, chiasmic twist.
And more from Levin in this post:
I enjoyed the sample chapter, raising many of the themes I explored in the above referenced thread, particularly the means of using language to establish relations with what was pre-language, i.e., nature. And how such attunement is achieved via a bastard reasoning or hyper-dialectic in MP's turn of phrase, which is not merely a return to what was but an an intertwing with the yet to come:
“The attunement...having originally preceded the ego-logical consciousness, is not realized, and does not actually take place, until the belated moment of its reflected recuperation. The 'always already' that memory strives to retrieve is inseparable from a 'not yet,' a future conjectured in hope” (61).
In the following passage I found much akin to my own rhetoric against the totalizing hegemony of "nested hierarchies" posited by allegedly purely quantitative, mathematical models of hierarchical complexity and much exploited in kennilinguist altitude sickness:
"What I want to argue here...is...the voices of the non-identical: what cannot be subsumed and contained...by the 'sober,' tone-deaf concepts produced by our strictly 'rational' understanding—a hearing in excess of, or say beyond, our concepts for grasping and comprehending them; a hearing impossible within the ontologies codified by both rationalism and empiricism, both of which enshrine in reification the structure that positions a subjective interior opposite an objective exterior” (65-6).
Do you recall the essay I discussed here last year, comparing the physics of light to Levinas and Derrida? I do not recall the author's name, but I will look for it on my home computer this evening.
From an older L&J article (1992), reminiscent of the Rift at/in/between boundaries:
"Basic level concepts [...] cannot be characterized either purely objectively or subjectively, but can only be characterized interactively: That is, they are neither objective features of the world nor purely subjective constructions of our minds" (3).
"Since image schema are not in the objective world, but arise from properties of our brains, they do not have a purely objective character. But since they are determined in part by our biology, and by the world as we experience it, they are not purely subjective either" (4).
"These aspects of [prototype] category structure are obviously not objective features of the external world. Nor are the purely subjective projections, since they arise from the way we function with objects in the world" (4-5).
Did you remember this article? Link?
Balder said:
Do you recall the essay I discussed here last year, comparing the physics of light to Levinas and Derrida? I do not recall the author's name, but I will look for it on my home computer this evening.
Ah, yes, I actually remembered it yesterday while in the shower! The Otherness of Light.
Yes, you introduced it in the OOO thread and we discussed it for a few pages.
Reading parts of that OOO thread I came upon this post of relevance:
Perhaps Bryant's blog post today [11/1/11] might add some clarity, called "Differance." A snip:
"All I have really wished to say, I think, when evoking the term 'object' or 'thing,' is that beings are differance. This is the sense of the distinction between virtual proper being and local manifestation.... Differance is the simultaneous coming-to-presence of beings and their withdrawal.... And this differance has no need of God or a subject to take place.... Nor is there any eschatology, teleology, or final point where being coincides with itself, exhausting withdrawal."
"Levi is using Derrida but it's roughly the same as what in Realist Magic I'm calling the rift."
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