A Complex Integral Realist Perspective: Towards A New Axial Vision by Marshall Paul

Author:Marshall, Paul [Marshall, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-317-62123-2
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2016-07-01T04:00:00+00:00

Remedying the exterior bias

First, a brief recap of the story of interiority seen so far. In the Axial Age as a whole there was a marked interiority, a ‘looking within and beyond’, that accompanied its ‘standing back’. This looking within and beyond, this ‘deep interiority’, continued in later expressions of axiality – e.g. in Plotinus, Augustine, and the transrational/contemplative core of all the axial religions. But with the advent of modernity and the second expression of the mental/rational structure of consciousness, this deep interiority was reduced to a mere looking within, a truncated interiority that stopped at the small ‘I’, the rational Enlightenment ego, beginning with Descartes’ cogito . Facilitated by the heightened dualism and ego hypertrophy that accompanied this second expression of the mental/rational structure, it led to a subjectivist philosophy and objectivist science in which the disconnected atomistic rational mind/ego imposes its epistemology on the world and stands back with an exclusive focus on the exterior. There were significant attempts to reclaim the interior and subjectivity in the twentieth century, for example by introspection in psychology and phenomenology in philosophy, but the rise of positivism and the entrenched exterior bias of scientific materialism led to a ban on subjectivity in psychology (via behaviourism) and, later, a reduction of the mind to the brain (via neuroscience). And both introspection and phenomenology faced the onslaught of structuralism, linguistics and post-structuralism, which rightly condemned their ignorance of intersubjective networks but then overzealously reduced the subject to them. There have been later moves towards interiority in psychology (e.g. humanistic psychology, mindfulness meditation) and even collaboration between depth phenomenologists (e.g. Buddhists) and neuroscientists, but the exterior bias in science and its reduction of interiors to exteriors (including by the systems and complexity sciences), the reduction of the subject and its agency in philosophy and the marginalization of the deep interiority of the axial religions is still firmly in place. This section will examine some of the ways in which the three integrative metatheories have begun to remedy this bias: in science, which is the main focus of complex thought; in philosophy, the main focus of critical realism; and in (the contemplative core of) religion, the main focus of integral theory. Their frameworks enable an integration of interiors (including deep interiority) and exteriors, subjectivity, intersubjectivity and objectivity, and the physiosphere, biosphere and noosphere.

With respect to science, complex thought highlights not only the intrinsic creative and generative, and in this sense re-enchanted, nature of the universe – through its interpretation of the systems and complexity sciences and highlighting of a physis embedded in a tetragram of order, organization, disorder and interactions – but also crafts a biological theory of the subject that emerges out of, and remains rooted in, physis . Morin describes an evolution of physis (active organization) from physical organization and self-production in the physiosphere to ‘auto’-production in the biosphere to ego/self-consciousness in the noosphere. And the active organization involved at every level possesses ‘internal generative and regenerative virtues: they are self-producing, self-organising,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.