The Many Ways We Touch

NOTES

¹ More technically, theories and paradigms tetra-enact. Even a mental theory is, in itself, a mental injunction or paradigm. When paradigm is used to mean “social practice,” it is simply highlighting the overall occasion that includes exterior (social) dimensions as well as interior (mental and cultural) dimensions. It is the “social practice” side of paradigms that is most often overlooked, and thus the side that is being most emphasized here. But no quadrant exists or acts on its own.

² To say an integral social practice would in fact include and exercise all of the important practices, injunctions, and methodologies of the first-tier waves, but now subsumed in an integral framework that included their enduring contributions but transcended their partialities and absolutisms, is to say: insofar as they represent enduring, not merely transitional, structures. See Integral Psychology.

³ See note 1. Even theories themselves are another set of injunctions, namely, mental injunctions, in that all enactments generally follow the three strands of injunction/paradigm, disclosure/data/phenomena, and confirmation/rejection. The “three strands of knowing” have caused confusion among a few critics, who imagined that the three strands themselves are evidence of scientism. But the three strands—injunction, paradigm, or enactment; bringing forth of the enacted phenomena; and knowledge-community validation—refer only to the general features of enactment in any domain—artistic, moral, scientific, etc.—and not to the forms that the scientific modes of enactment involve. What probably confused these critics is that I used the term “deep science” to cover the higher forms of science that follow those three strands but are not confined to the sensory data of “narrow science.” They therefore equated the three strands themselves with deep science and accused the whole show of positivism.

Not so. In music, for example, if you want to hear a version of Beethoven’s “Fifth Symphony,” then perhaps you might get a piano, learn to play it by studying with a teacher, then play the Fifth, then see if the teacher (representing the music knowledge-community) agrees that what you played was, more or less, Beethoven’s Fifth. Those are the three strands of phenomenological enactment applied to the performing arts, and there is nothing positivistic about that at all. The three strands are simply a summary of the types of enacting activity that we usually find when any phenomenological world is brought forth. Within those worlds, however, there are then the quite different and specific methodologies of science, morals, art, and so forth, each of which follows different types of methods with different validity criteria (e.g., truth, truthfulness, justness, functional fit). All of this explained in endnote 15 for chap. 4, A Theory of Everything.

⁴ Incidentally, when we say that theories map or reflect territories brought forth or enacted by a social practice or paradigm, this is NOT a reflection theory of truth—it is not the representation theory, not the fundamental Enlightenment paradigm, not the Mirror of Nature view. The reflection or representation model leaves out the enaction part (which is only the most important part). That is, the reflection model imagines that there is only one territory (or one Nature that all theories are supposed to map, reflect, or represent accurately), and fails to notice that different paradigms bring forth different worlds in the first place.

In short, there is not one world over which different theories compete for supremacy, but many worlds brought forth by many different paradigms, within which different theories then rightly compete according to the rules of engagement of the knowledge community grounded in a particular paradigm or social practice. The representation model is not wrong in its claim that accurately mapping a territory is important, but wrong in its claim that there is only one territory (a claim that secretly absolutized its own paradigm). Paradigms present or create worlds; theories map or represent them. Both are crucial in any integral epistemological model.

⁵ What does not continue to function or exist, however, in a junior wave (nor in an atoms or molecules in a cell) is its claim to be the whole truth: it is now a whole truth that is part of a larger whole truth. Hegel famously stated that “to transform is both to negate and to preserve”—which is simply his version of transcend and include. What is negated or transcended or gone beyond is the exclusiveness of the particular holon, or its claim to be the whole truth. What is preserved and included are the enduring partial truths and components of the junior holon, which are taken up and incorporated into the senior holon as relatively autonomous subholons, still functioning and contributing their truths to the unfolding of further truths.

⁶ See note 4. It is not necessary that the horizons of different paradigms are reproduced identically in all subjects undergoing the discipline, only that the subjects themselves can agree on certain broad similarities, a topic that is central to Excerpt C, subheading “A History of We’s.”

⁷ Ever wondered why the tribal consciousness itself surrendered its original state and moved on? According to the tribal/nondissociated ranking system, the very first and most fundamental state of humans everywhere was the nondissociated or nature-harmonious state. Since that state is no longer widespread, that means that at some point the tribes themselves had to abandon their own state of harmony. Why would anybody abandon Eden? We can’t say that they were conquered by warlike “ranking” tribes, because if so, then those tribes themselves must have abandoned the original paradisical state—again, why would they do that? The conclusion seems to be that either the judgment capacity possessed by the original nondissociated state itself was intrinsically unwise, or else the original state was perhaps not that paradisical to begin with. The tribal view ends up not only condemning the modern state, but retroactively condemning the original tribes who themselves abandoned that paradisical state. The unfoldment principle, on the other hand, simply sees healthy growth and development as the essential features of this overall movement. In the entire sequence from tribal to modern, there is not a step that, in itself, is a disease. That some very important aspects of the tribal state could have been forgotten, repressed, or denied by subsequent development is fully accepted and accounted for by a developmental perspective, but it does not see the development itself as diseased.

⁸ Technically, following the Basic Moral Intuition, enfoldment inflicts the least amount of pain on the least (span x depth) of souls.

⁹ “IOS” was first used by Bob Richards, a pioneer in subtle energy research and cofounder of Clarus, Inc.