The Morality of Growth To Goodness

From Live and Evolve:

“In the contemporary ideological climate it has become imperative that we perceive all the terrible things that happen to us as ultimately something positive—say as a precious experience that will bear fruit in our future life. Negativity, lack, dissatisfaction, unhappiness, are perceived more and more as moral faults— worse, as a corruption at the level of our very being or bare life. There is a spectacular rise of what we might call a bio-morality (as well as morality of feelings and emotions), which promotes the following fundamental axiom: a person who feels good (and is happy) is a good person; a person who feels bad is a bad person. It is this short circuit between the immediate feelings/sensations and the moral value that gives its specific color to the contemporary ideological rhetoric of happiness. This is very efficient, for who dares to raise her voice and say that as a matter of fact, she is not happy, and that she can’t manage to—or, worse, doesn’t even care to—transform all the disappointments of her life into a positive experience to be invested in the future? There is an important difference between this and the classical entrepreneur formula according to which we are always broadly responsible for our failures and misfortunes. This classical formula still implies a certain interval between what we are and the symbolic value of our success. It implies that, at least in principle, we could have acted otherwise, but didn’t (and are hence responsible for our failures or lack of happiness). The bio-morality mentioned above is replacing the classical notion of responsibility with the notion of a damaged, corrupt being: the unhappy and the unsuccessful are somehow corrupt already on the level of their bare life, and all their erroneous actions or nonactions follow from there with an inexorable necessity.”

—Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In: On Comedy

Ah, how the metaphorical journey of growth from here to the place where I can be a good person rankles my spirits. I'll take "different metaphors" for $500, Alex.
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Post-metaphysical Metaphysics

This article, over at Open Integral, mirrors a lot of what I've been saying recently -- here, in person, at Integral Life, at the Integral Post-metaphysical Spirituality pod at Gaia, and so on. It sums up a lot of what I've been noticing about presuppositions in integral theory quite well. A highly encouraged read.
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What Constitutes A Perspective?

At the very least, these all seem to be linked to the idea of individual perspectives:

• Embodiment
• Unconscious Junk, Shadow
• Emotions
• Language
• Past History and Memories
• Personality
• Conscious Thoughts, Beliefs, Narratives, Conceptualizations, Theories

How much of that can we change? Some of it, I think.
How much of that are we stuck with? Some of it, I think.

Given that we are stuck with some of it, to what extent is it meaningful to think about generating, considering, or enacting other perspectives? It seems that any perspective we attempt to take on can only be taken on partially, and always within a context constrained by whichever parts of our perspective we can't willfully change.
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Transparency Is The New Objectivity

I found this blog piece quite interesting, since the argument it makes concerning the shift from "telling how things are" to "telling how they appear to me and why I see them that way" parallels the shift from metaphors about objects and their actual properties and relationships to metaphors about perspectives and the effects they have on what is perceived.
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The Structures of Integral Theory

When blue's polar, dichotomous, either/or thinking proves insufficient, there are two primary approaches to providing additional flexibility.

First, you can blur the boundaries between pairs of opposites, creating a gradual trade-off between the two. This results in a spectrum, usually conceptualized as a line between two points. From here, it's a short leap to spectra that extend infinitely away from a single end-point, or infinitely in both directions without any end-points.

Second, you can keep sharp boundaries, but extend the number choices beyond two. This results in clearly defined categories, usually conceptualized as containers that particular things go "in." From here, it's a short leap to categories of categories and so on, which are thought of as nested containers.

These two extensions of blue thinking are orange's primary conceptual tools.

Wilber's AQAL model makes heavy use of categories and spectra -- every major element of the theory is structured in one of these two ways. Quadrants, levels, states, and most types use the category structure, while masculine/feminine, transcendence/immanence, and lines of development use the spectrum structure.

This is somewhat surprising, when you consider the relatively scarce inclusion of green perspectival and contextual elements. The primary examples are the lower quadrants, which in a fashion consider the context of the individuals in the upper quadrants. Still, the perspectival and contextual observations are placed into quadrant categories, subordinating them to the orange conceptual structure of the quadrants.

Does integral theory really represent a step forward from green thought? I'm starting to question. While it is certainly non-materialist, and therefore solves some of the problems of "flatland" rationality, I don't see much that convinces me that it "transcends and includes" post-modern green. The more I recognize the same structures I see in materialist science popping up in integral theory, the more integral theory looks like a very comprehensive incarnation of the orange meme, stretching up to green for a few bits here and there.
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Trans-rationality As Empiricism

Trans-rationality is sometimes understood as a special kind of vision which allows one to see what is really there. This is the conception that underlies the idea of the Witness, for example.

This understanding supposes that there is a spiritual subject, capable of accurately seeing real spiritual objects and their actual spiritual properties, just the way they are in themselves.

In other words, this is orange empiricism dressed up with spirituality.

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The Myth Of Perspectival Freedom

While there are an infinite number of perspectives humans can take, we cannot take an infinite variety of perspectives.

By way of analogy, consider that there are infinitely many real numbers between 1 and 10, and yet this set of numbers still has edges, boundaries, limits.

Similarly, our physical embodiment constrains the potential variety of human perspectives. We are not observers separate from the world, who happen to have vehicles called bodies to walk around in. Our bodies and our thinking are not separate and autonomous. We can only think in certain ways, which bear the indelible stamp of immanence and physicality.

In that sense, the post-modern deconstruction of all meaning through endless re-contextualization is as much a fool's errand as the endless search for objective truth -- which is to say, half-way.

Sure, we can re-contextualize something as many times as we want, but we can only recontextualize it in certain ways.

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Art of Hosting Murals

Colleen Stephenson created a created a fantastic set of Art of Hosting murals from the work done at the "Hosting Artful Collaborations Across Communities and Agencies" module at ALIA West, hosted by Chris Corrigan and Jennifer Charlesworth.


[Images below]

(Click on the images to enlarge.)








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Spirit, Essence, Kosmos

Spirit is the essence of the Kosmos.

This common sense proposition is sometimes taken as a literal truth that describes the actual nature of reality. Is this simple statement really as straightforward as it seems? What else must one accept for this statement to make sense? Where does it lead?

On closer inspection, the idea that Spirit is the essence of the Kosmos is quite complex, highly metaphysical, and heavily reliant on metaphor. In Philosophy In The Flesh, Lakoff and Johnson point out that there are several assumptions that must be made to arrive at such a concept.

[Read the rest on IL]

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More, Greater, Higher

Meyerhoff beat me to it:

I've always been struck by the great valuation in Wilber's model of the concepts of more, greater and higher. More complexity, more emergent phenomena, greater transcendence and inclusion, greater embrace, more perspectives included, higher altitude. The whole model has an ever onward and upward quality. For a theory of everything there is so little said about the other half of existence: decay, deterioration, diminishment, death, extinction and loss. The sense you get from Wilber's writing is that we never lose anything essential, yet the amount of loss over the course of life on earth is so tremendous it's incomprehensible. I think it's The Tibetan Book of the Dead that says that the greatest mystery is how all around us there is death and dying, and yet no one really believes that it will happen to them.

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