Sex, Ecology, & Spirituality
By Ken Wilber

Introduction
BOOK  ONE
1
The Web of Life
2
The Pattern That Connects
3
Individual and Social
4
A View from Within
5
The Emergence of Human Nature
6
Magic, Mythic, and Beyond
7
The Further Reaches of Human Nature
8
The Depths of the Divine
BOOK  TWO
9
The Way Up Is the Way Down
10
This-Worldly, Otherworldly
11
Brave New World
12
The Collapse of the Kosmos
13
The Dominance of the Descenders
14
The Unpacking of God
References
Credits

Introduction

it is flat-out strange that something—that anything—is happening at all. There was nothing, then a Big Bang, then here we all are. This is extremely weird.
To Schelling's burning question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?," there have always been two general answers. The first might be called the philosophy of "oops." The universe just occurs, there is nothing behind it, it's all ultimately accidental or random, it just is, it just happens—oops! The philosophy of oops, no matter how sophisticated and adult it may on occasion appear—its modern names and numbers are legion, from positivism to scientific materialism, from linguistic analysis to historical materialism, from naturalism to empiricism—always comes down to the same basic answer, namely, "Don't ask."
The question itself (Why is anything at all happening? Why am I here?)—the question itself is said to be confused, pathological, nonsensical, or infantile. To stop asking such silly or confused questions is, they all maintain, the mark of maturity, the sign of growing up in this cosmos.
I don't think so. I think the "answer" these "modern and mature" disciplines give—namely, oops! (and therefore, "Don't ask!")—is about as infantile a response as the human condition could possibly offer.
The other broad answer that has been tendered is that something else is going on: behind the happenstance drama is a deeper or higher or wider pattern, or order, or intelligence. There are, of course, many varieties of this "Deeper Order": the Tao, God, Geist, Maat, Archetypal Forms, Reason, Li, Mahamaya, Brahman, Rigpa. And although these different varieties of the Deeper Order certainly disagree with each other at many points, they all agree on this: the universe is not what it appears. Something else is going on, something quite other than oops. . . .
This book is about all of that "something other than oops." It is about a possible Deeper Order. It is about evolution, and about religion, and, in a sense, about everything in between. It is a brief history of cosmos, bios, psyche, theos—a tale told by an idiot, it goes without saying, but a tale that, precisely in signifying Nothing, signifies the All, and there is the sound and the fury.
This is a book about holons—about wholes that are parts of other wholes, indefinitely. Whole atoms are parts of molecules; whole molecules are parts of cells; whole cells are parts of organisms, and so on. Each whole is simultaneously a part, a whole/part, a holon. And reality is composed, not of things nor processes nor wholes nor parts, but of whole/ parts, of holons. We will be looking at holons in the cosmos, in the bios, in the psyche, and in theos; and at the evolutionary thread that connects them all, unfolds them all, embraces them all, endlessly.
The first chapters deal with holons in the physical cosmos (matter) and in the biosphere (life). This is the general area of the natural and ecological sciences, the life sciences, the systems sciences, and we will explore each of them carefully. This is particularly important, given not only the ecological crisis now descending on this planet with a vengeance, but also the large number of movements, from deep ecology to ecofeminism, that have arisen in an attempt to find spirituality and ecology connected, not divorced; and we will look at the meaning of all of that.
The middle chapters explore the emergence of the mind or the psyche or the noosphere, and at the holons that compose the psyche itself (the mind is composed of units that have meaning only in contexts: wholes that are parts of other wholes, endlessly). These psychic holons, like all holons, emerged and evolved—in time and history—and we will look briefly at the historical evolution of the mind and consciousness, and at how these psychic holons relate to the holons in the cosmos and in the bios.
The last chapters deal with theos, with the Divine Domain, with a Deeper Order, and how it might indeed be related to the cosmos, the biosphere, and the noosphere. And here, I think, some surprises await us.
This book is the first of three volumes (the series itself is simply called Kosmos, or The Kosmos Trilogy; brief summaries of the other two volumes are given throughout this book). Many of the questions raised in this volume are more carefully examined in the other two; and, in any event, this volume stands more as a broad overview and introduction, rather than a finished conclusion.
As such, the book is built upon what I would call orienting generalizations. For example, in the sphere of moral development, not everybody agrees with the details of Lawrence Kohlberg's seven moral stages, nor with the details of Carol Gilligan's reworking of Kohlberg's scheme. But there is general and ample agreement that human moral development goes through at least three broad stages: the human at birth is not yet socialized into any sort of moral system (it is "preconventional"); the human then learns, from itself and from others, a general moral scheme that represents the basic values of the society it is raised in (it becomes "conventional"); and with even further growth, the individual may come to reflect on its society and thus gain some modest distance from it and gain a capacity to criticize or reform it (the individual is to some degree ' 'postconventional").
Thus, although the actual details and the precise meanings of that developmental sequence are still hotly debated, everybody pretty much agrees that something like those three broad stages do indeed occur, and occur universally. These are orienting generalizations: they show us, with a great deal of agreement, where the important forests are located, even if we can't agree on how many trees they contain.
My point is that if we take these types of largely-agreed-upon orienting generalizations from the various branches of knowledge (from physics to biology to psychology to theology), and if we string these orienting generalizations together, we will arrive at some astonishing and often profound conclusions, conclusions that, as extraordinary as they might be, nonetheless embody nothing more than our already-agreed-upon knowledge. The beads of knowledge are already accepted: it is only necessary to provide the thread to string them together into a necklace.
These three volumes are one attempt to string together such a necklace; whether it succeeds or not remains to be seen. But if nothing else, I think it is at least a good example of how this type of work can be done in today's postmodern world. In working with broad orienting generalizations, the trilogy delivers up a broad orienting map of the place of men and women in relation to Universe, Life, and Spirit, the details of which we can all fill in as we like, but the broad outlines of which really have an awful lot of supporting evidence, culled from the orienting generalizations, simple but sturdy, from the various branches of human knowledge.
Nonetheless, this broad orienting map is nowhere near fixed and final. In addition to being composed of broad orienting generalizations, I would say this is a book of a thousand hypotheses. I will be telling the story as if it were simply the case (because telling it that way makes for much better reading), but not a sentence that follows is not open to confirmation or rejection by a community of the adequate. I suppose many readers will insist on calling what I am doing "metaphysics," but if "metaphysics" means thought without evidence, there is not a metaphysical sentence in this entire book.
Because this book (or this trilogy) offers a broad orienting map of men and women's place in the larger Kosmos (of matter, life, mind, and spirit), it naturally touches on a great number of topics that have recently become "hot," from the ecological crisis to feminism, from the meaning of modernity and postmodernity to the nature of "liberation" in relation to sex, gender, race, class, creed; to the nature of techno-economic developments and their relation to various worldviews; to the various spiritual and wisdom traditions the world over that have offered telling suggestions as to our place in a larger scheme of things.
How can we become more fully human and at the same time be saved from the fate of being merely human? Where is Spirit in this God-forsaken, Goddess-forsaken world of modernity? Why are we destroying Gaia in the very attempt to improve our own condition? Why are so many attempts at salvation suicidal? How do we actually fit into this larger Kosmos? How are we whole individuals who are also parts of something Larger?
In other words, since human beings, like absolutely everything else in the Kosmos, are holons, what does that mean? How do we fit into that which is forever moving beyond us? Does liberation mean being whole ourselves, or being a part of something Larger—or something else altogether? If history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken, then what exactly is it that I am supposed to awaken to?
And, most important, can we not stare into that vast and stunning Kosmos and respond with something more mature than oops?

From those who have already read this book in manuscript come two suggestions for the reader:
First, skip the endnotes on the first reading, and save them for (and if) a second look. This book was intentionally written on two levels: the main text, which makes every attempt to be as accessible as possible, and the notes (a small book in themselves), meant for serious students. But in both cases, the notes are, for the most part, best reserved for a second
reading, as they greatly disrupt the narrative flow. (Alternatively, some have simply read the notes by themselves, as a type of appendix, just for the information, which is fine.)
Second, read the book a sentence at a time. People who try to skip around get competely lost. But pretty much everybody reports that if you simply read each sentence, the text will carry you along nicely, and any problems encountered are usually cleared up down the road. This is a long book, obviously, but apparently it comes in nice, small, bite-sized chunks, and its readers all seem to have a great good time—a bite at a time.
It is often said that in today's modern and postmodern world, the forces of darkness are upon us. But I think not; in the Dark and the Deep there are truths that can always heal. It is not the forces of darkness but of shallowness that everywhere threaten the true, and the good, and the beautiful, and that ironically announce themselves as deep and profound. It is an exuberant and fearless shallowness that everywhere is the modern danger, the modern threat, and that everywhere nonetheless calls to us as savior.
We might have lost the Light and the Height; but more frightening, we have lost the Mystery and the Deep, the Emptiness and the Abyss, and lost it in a world dedicated to surfaces and shadows, exteriors and shells, whose prophets lovingly exhort us to dive into the shallow end of the pool head first.
"History," said Emerson, "is an impertinence and an injury if it be anything more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming." What follows, then, is a cheerful parable of your being and your becoming, an apologue of that Emptiness which forever issues forth, unfolding and enfolding, evolving and involving, creating worlds and dissolving them, with each and every breath you take. This is a chronicle of what you have done, a tale of what you have seen, a measure of what we all might yet become.

BOOK  ONE

What is it that has called you so suddenly out of nothingness to enjoy for a brief while a spectacle which remains quite indifferent to you? The conditions for your existence are as old as the rocks. For thousands of years men have striven and suffered and begotten and women have brought forth in pain. A hundred years ago, perhaps, another man—or woman—sat on this spot; like you he gazed with awe and yearning in his heart at the dying of the glaciers. Like you he was begotten of man and born of woman. He felt pain and brief joy as you do. Was he someone else? Was it not you yourself? What is this Self of yours?
— ERWIN  SCHRÖDINGER

1

The Web of Life

So the world, grounded in a timeless movement by the Soul which suffuses it with intelligence, becomes a living and blessed being.
—plotinus

it's a strange world. It seems that around fifteen billion years ago there was, precisely, absolute nothingness, and then within less than a nanosecond the material universe blew into existence.
Stranger still, the physical matter so produced was not merely a random and chaotic mess, but seemed to organize itself into ever more complex and intricate forms. So complex were these forms that, many billions of years later, some of them found ways to reproduce themselves, and thus out of matter arose life.
Even stranger, these life forms were apparently not content to merely reproduce themselves, but instead began a long evolution that would eventually allow them to represent themselves, to produce signs and symbols and concepts, and thus out of life arose mind.
Whatever this process of evolution was, it seems to have been incredibly driven—from matter to life to mind.
But stranger still, a mere few hundred years ago, on a small and indifferent planet around an insignificant star, evolution became conscious of itself.
And at precisely the same time, the very mechanisms that allowed evolution to become conscious of itself were simultaneously working to engineer its own extinction.
And that was the strangest of all.

the ecological crisis

I will not belabor the point by bringing out all the ghastly statistics, from the fact that we are at present exterminating approximately one hundred species a day to the fact that we are destroying the world's tropical forests at the rate of one football field per second. The planet, indeed, is headed for disaster, and it is now possible, for the first time in human history, that owing entirely to manmade circumstances, not one of us will survive to tell the tale. If the Earth is indeed our body and blood, then in destroying it we are committing a slow and gruesome suicide.
Arising in response to the alarming dimensions of this ecological catastrophe (the nature and extent of which I will simply assume is evident to every intelligent person) have been a variety of popularly based responses generally referred to as the environmental movement (usually dated from the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring). Starting in part within the environmental movement, but going quite beyond it, are two "ecophilosophies" that will particularly interest us: ecofeminism and deep ecology (and we will see that they almost perfectly embody, respectively, the female and male value sphere approaches to the same topic).
Central to these ecological approaches is the notion that our present environmental crisis is due primarily to a fractured worldview, a world-view that drastically separates mind and body, subject and object, culture and nature, thoughts and things, values and facts, spirit and matter, human and nonhuman; a worldview that is dualistic, mechanistic, atomistic, anthropocentric, and pathologically hierarchical—a worldview that, in short, erroneously separates humans from, and often unnecessarily elevates humans above, the rest of the fabric of reality, a broken worldview that alienates men and women from the intricate web of patterns and relationships that constitute the very nature of life and Earth and cosmos.
These approaches further maintain that the only way we can heal the planet, and heal ourselves, is by replacing this fractured worldview with a worldview that is more holistic, more relational, more integrative, more Earth-honoring, and less arrogantly human-centered. A worldview, in short, that honors the entire web of life, a web that has intrinsic value in and of itself, but a web that, not incidentally, is the bone and marrow of our own existence as well.
Fritjof Capra, for example, has argued that the world's present social, economic, and environmental crises all stem from the same fractured worldview:

Our society as a whole finds itself in an [unprecedented] crisis. We can read about its numerous manifestations every day in the newspapers. We have high unemployment, we have an energy crisis, a crisis in health care, pollution and other environmental disasters, a rising wave of violence and crime, and so on. The basic thesis of this book [The Turning Point] is that these are all different facets of one and the same crisis, and that this crisis is essentially a crisis of perception. It derives from the fact that we are trying to apply the concepts of an outdated worldview—the mechanistic worldview . . . —to a reality that can no longer be understood in terms of those concepts. We live today in a globally interconnected world, in which biological, psychological, social, and environmental phenomena are all interdependent. To describe this world appropriately we need an ecological perspective....

As many scholars have pointed out, because of the perceived closeness of "woman" and "nature," the despoliation of the Earth and the subjugation of women have historically gone hand in hand. Ecofeminism is a powerful response to the denigration of both of these "others." As Judith Plant explains:

Historically, women have had no real power in the outside world, no place in decision making and intellectual life. Today, however, ecology speaks for the Earth, for the "other" in human/environmental relationships; and feminism speaks for the "other" in female/male relations. And ecofeminism, by speaking for both the original others, seeks to understand the interconnected roots of all domination as well as ways to resist and change. The ecofeminist's task is one of developing the ability to take the place of the other when considering the consequences of possible actions, and ensuring that we do not forget that we are all part of one another ... , as we mend our relations with each other and with the Earth.

Bill Devall and George Sessions, representing the movement known as deep ecology, point out that "this is the work we call cultivating ecological consciousness, the insight that everything is connected," which Jack Forbes explains as perceiving ourselves as "being deeply bound together with other people and with the surrounding nonhuman forms of life in a complex interconnected web of life, that is to say, a true community. All creatures and things [are] brothers and sisters. From this idea comes the basic principle of non-exploitation, of respect and reverence for all creatures."
The extraordinary thing about all these quotes is that, although they might sound rather romantic and poetic and, some would say, even mushy-minded, they are in fact rooted in the hardest of scientific evidence. After all, holistic theories of the "web of life" are as old as civilization itself, forming the very core of the world's great religions and wisdom traditions (as we will see). But it is one thing to merely have God on your side; quite another to have science on your side.
And the ecological sciences are just that: hard sciences. What I would like to do, then, is briefly review the systems (holistic or ecological) sciences, and demonstrate just exactly what they mean when they refer to the interconnectedness or "weblike" nature of all life. This will give us some necessary background information, and also serve as a platform for our discussion of ecofeminism and deep ecology.
Finally, as important as the ecological or holistic systems approach is, we will have to make a few very important revisions in it (for reasons that will become obvious), and, most important, we will have to set it in its own larger context, a context almost always ignored (with rather dire consequences). And we will find that the same strengths—and the same weaknesses—beset ecofeminism and deep ecology as well.
We will find, in other words, that those who talk of the "web of life" are basically half right and half wrong (or seriously incomplete), and the "half-wrong" part has caused almost more problems than the "half-right" part has solved.
But first, the half that seems definitely right.

Two arrows of time

The new systems sciences are, in a sense, the sciences of wholeness and connectedness. If we now add the notion of development or evolution— the idea that wholes grow and evolve—we have the essence of the modern systems sciences. As Ervin Laszlo puts it, "A new system, scientific in origin and philosophic in depth and scope, is now on the rise. It encompasses the great realms of the material universe, of the world of the living, and of the world of history. This is the evolutionary paradigm. . . ." As he explains it:

The old adage "everything is connected with everything else" describes a true state of affairs. The results achieved [by the evolutionary sciences] furnish adequate proof that the physical, the biological, and the social realms in which evolution unfolds are by no means disconnected. At the very least, one kind of evolution prepares the ground for the next. Out of the conditions created by evolution in the physical realm emerge the conditions that permit biological evolution to take off. And out of the conditions created by biological evolution come the conditions that allow human beings—and many other species—to evolve certain social forms of organization.

Laszlo then offers this important conclusion:

Scientific evidence of the patterns traced by evolution in the physical universe, in the living world, and even in the world of history is growing rapidly. It is coalescing into the image of basic regularities that repeat and recur. It is now possible to search out these regularities and obtain a glimpse of the fundamental nature of evolution—of the evolution of the cosmos as a whole, including the living world and the world of human social history.
To search out and systematically state these regularities is to engage in the creation of the "grand synthesis" that unites physical, biological, and social evolution into a consistent framework with its own laws and logic.

Exactly what those laws and logic are, we will explore later in this and the next chapter. For the moment, notice that Laszlo refers to the three "great realms" of evolution: material, biological, and historical. Erich Jantsch refers to them as cosmic, biosocial, and sociocultural. Michael Murphy summarizes them as physical, biological, and psychological. In popular terms: matter, life, and mind. I will refer to these three general domains as the physiosphere (matter), the biosphere (life), and the noosphere (mind).
The central claim made by the evolutionary systems sciences is that, whatever the actual nature of these three great domains, they are all united, not necessarily by similar contents, but because they all express the same general laws or dynamic patterns. As Ludwig von Bertalanffy, founder of General System Theory, put it, the "Unity of Science is granted, not by a Utopian reduction of all sciences to physics and chemistry, but by the structural uniformities [regularities of dynamic patterns] of the different levels of reality."
Now historically it had been maintained, from the time of Plato and Aristotle until around the end of the nineteenth century, that all of these great domains—physiosphere, biosphere, noosphere—were one continuous and interrelated manifestation of Spirit, one Great Chain of Being, that reached in a perfectly unbroken or uninterrupted fashion from matter to life to mind to soul to spirit.
As Arthur Lovejoy demonstrated, the various Great Chain theorists maintained three essential points: (1) all phenomena—all things and events, people, animals, minerals, plants—are manifestations of the superabundance and plenitude of Spirit, so that Spirit is woven intrinsically into each and all, and thus even the entire material and natural world was, as Plato put it, "a visible, sensible God"; (2) therefore, there are "no gaps" in nature, no missing links, no unbridgeable dualisms, for each and every thing is interwoven with each and every other (the "continuum of being"); and (3) the continuum of being nonetheless shows gradation, for various emergents appear in some dimensions that do not appear in others (e.g., wolves can run, rocks can't, so there are "gaps" in the special sense of emergents).
Now whatever we moderns might think of the Great Chain as a theory, it nonetheless "has been the official philosophy of the larger part of civilized humankind through most of its history"; and further, it was the worldview that "the greater number of the subtler speculative minds and of the great religious teachers [both East and West], in their various fashions, have been engaged in."
Thus, whether or not we accept some version of the Great Chain (and we will be examining this in later chapters), scholars agree that its world-view saw matter and bodies and minds as a vast network of mutually interlocking orders subsisting in Spirit, with each node in the continuum of being, each link in the chain, being absolutely necessary and intrinsically valuable. To give only one example now, Plotinus would soon explain that since each link was a manifestation of the goodness of Spirit, each had intrinsic value—it was valuable in and of itself—and no link whatsoever, no matter how "lowly," existed merely or even primarily for the instrumental use of others: destroy any precious strand and the whole fabric would come unravelled.
But with the rise of modern science—associated particularly with the names of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Newton, Kelvin, Clausius— this great unified and holistic worldview began to fall apart, and fall apart in ways, it is clear, that none of these pioneering scientists themselves either foresaw or intended.
And it fell apart in a very peculiar way. These early scientists began their experimental studies in that realm which is apparently the least complicated: the physiosphere, the material universe, the world of inanimate matter. Kepler focused on planetary motion and Galileo on terrestrial mechanics; Newton synthesized their results in his universal law of gravitation and laws of motion; and Descartes worked all the results into a most influential philosophy. In all of these endeavors, the physiosphere began to look like a vast mechanism, a universal machine governed by strict causality. And worse, a machine that was running down.
Here was the problem: in the material world, science soon discovered, there are at least two very different types of phenomena, one described by the laws of classical mechanics and the other by the laws of thermodynamics. In the former, in classical Newtonian mechanics, time plays no fundamental role, because the processes described are reversible. For example, if a planet is going one way around the sun or the reverse way around the sun, the laws describing the motion are the same, because in these types of "classical mechanics" time changes nothing essential; you can as easily turn your watch forward as you can turn it backward—the mechanism and its laws don't care which way you turn it.
But in thermodynamic processes, "time's arrow" is absolutely central. If you put a drop of ink in a glass of water, in a day or so the ink will have evenly dispersed throughout the water. But you will never see the reverse process happen—you will never see the dispersed ink gather itself together into a small drop. Hence, time's arrow is a crucial part of these types of physical processes, because these processes always proceed in one direction only. They are irreversible.
And the infamous Second Law of Thermodynamics added a dismal conclusion: the direction of time's arrow is downward. Physical processes, like the inkdrop, always go from more ordered (the inkdrop) to less ordered (dispersed throughout the water). The universe may be a giant clockwork, but the clock is winding down . . . and will eventually run out.
The problem was not that these early conceptions were simply wrong. Aspects of the physiosphere do indeed act in a deterministic and mechanistic-like fashion, and some of them are definitely running down. Rather, it was that these conceptions were partial. They covered some of the most obvious aspects of the physiosphere, but because of the primitive means and instruments available at the time, the subtler (and more significant) aspects of the physiosphere were overlooked.
And yet, as we will see, it was precisely in these subtler aspects that the physiosphere's connection to the biosphere could be established. At the time, however, lacking these connections, the physiosphere and the biosphere simply fell apart—in the sciences, in religion, and in philosophy. Thus, it was the partialness of the early natural sciences, and not any glaring errors, that would inadvertently contribute to the subsequent and rather horrendous fracturing of the Western worldview.
Against this early (and partial) scientific understanding of the physiosphere, which was now seen as a reversible mechanism irreversibly running down, came the work of Alfred Wallace and Charles Darwin on evolution through natural selection in the biosphere. Although the notion of evolution, or irreversible development through time, had an old and honorable history (from the Ionian philosophers to Heraclitus to Aristotle to Schelling), it was of course Wallace and Darwin who set it in a scientific framework backed by meticulous empirical observations, and it was Darwin especially who lit the world's imagination with his ideas on the evolutionary nature of the various species, including humans.
Apart from the specifics of natural selection itself (which most theorists now agree can account for microchanges in evolution but not macro-changes), there were two things that jumped out in the Darwinian worldview, one of which was not novel at all, and one of which was very novel. The first was the continuity of life; the second, speciation by natural selection.
The idea of the continuity of life—the web of life, the tree of life, the "no gaps in nature" view—was at least as old as Plato and Aristotle, and, as I briefly mentioned, it formed an essential ingredient in the notion of the Great Chain of Being. Spirit manifests itself in the world in such a complete and full fashion that it leaves no gaps in nature, no missing links in the Great Chain. And, as Lovejoy noted, it was the philosophical belief that there are no gaps in creation that directly led to the scientific attempts to find not only the missing links in nature (which is where that phrase originated) but also evidence of life on other planets. All of these "gaps" needed to be filled in, in order to round out the Great Chain, and there was precisely nothing new or unusual in Darwin's presentation of the continuous tree of life.
What was rather novel was his thesis that the various links in the Great Chain, the various species themselves, had in fact unfolded or evolved over vast stretches of geological time and were not simply put there, all at once, at the creation. There were precedents for this thesis, particularly in Aristotle's version of the Great Chain, which, he maintained, showed a progressive and unbroken development of nature through what he called metamorphosis, from inorganic (matter) to nutritive (plant) to sensorimotor (animal) to symbol-utilizing animals (humans), all displaying progressive organization and increasing complexity of form. Leibniz had taken profound steps to "temporalize" the Great Chain, and with Schelling and Hegel we see the full-blown conception of a process or developmental philosophy applied to literally all aspects and all spheres of existence.
But it was Darwin's meticulous descriptions of natural species and his unusual clarity of presentation, combined with his hypothesis of natural selection, that propelled the concept of development or evolution to the scientific forefront. Of the biosphere.
And in the biosphere Darwin (and many others) noticed that there is also a crucial time's arrow. Evolution is irreversible. We may see amoebas eventually evolve into apes, but we never see apes turn into amoebas. That is, evolution proceeds irreversibly in the direction of increasing differentiation/integration, increasing structural organization, and increasing complexity. It goes from less ordered to more ordered. But obviously, the direction of this time's arrow was diametrically opposed to time's arrow in the (known) physiosphere: the former is winding up, the latter is winding down.
It was at this point, historically, that the physiosphere and the biosphere fell apart. It was an extremely difficult situation. For one thing, both physics and biology were supposed to be part of the new natural sciences, relying on empirical observation, measurement, theory formation, and rigorous testing (this overall procedure was indeed novel, dating from 1605 with Kepler and Galileo). But although the methods of physics and biology were similar, their results were fundamentally incompatible, saddled, as Laszlo put it, with "the persistent contradiction between a mechanistic world slated to run down and an organic world seeming to wind up."
A further complication was the relation of physics and biology to the noosphere itself, to mind and values and history. In the earlier conception of the Great Chain of Being, matter and body and mind were seen as perfectly continuous aspects of the superabundant overflowing of Spirit. They were all organically related as manifestations or emanations of the Divine, with no gaps and no holes (we find this from Plato to Plotinus to Pascal). But with the separation of the physiosphere and the biosphere (due to their two different arrows of time), the links in the entire Chain began to fall into alienated and seemingly unrelated spheres—dead matter versus vital body versus disembodied mind.
There were immediate and rather desperate attempts to repair the damage, to return the universe to a unified conception. The first and by far the most influential attempt to resurrect a coherent worldview was material reductionism, the attempt to reduce all mind and all body to various combinations of matter and mechanism (Hobbes, La Mettrie, Holbach). Equally alluring was the reverse agenda: elevate all matter and bodies to the status of mental events (as in the phenomenalism of Mach or Berkeley). In between the two extremes of reductionism and elevationism were a whole host of uneasy compromises: the dualism of Descartes, a noble and, at the time, wholly understandable attempt to salvage the status of the mind from its reduction to mere material mechanism, by unfortunately throwing the whole biosphere over to the mechanists and snatching only the noosphere from the jaws of the sharks; the pantheism of Spinoza (who regarded himself as a good Cartesian), seeing mind and matter as two parallel attributes of God that never interacted (which he assumed took care of that problem); the epiphenomenalism of T. H. Huxley, who saw the mind as an "epiphenomenon," real enough in itself, but purely the byproduct of physiological causes and having no causal power itself— the "ghost in the machine."
All of these attempts were sabotaged from the beginning, not so much by the split between mind and body (which was at least as old as civilization and had never bothered anybody before), but by the more primitive and radical split between body and matter—that is, life and matter (the particular form of which was indeed very new and very disturbing). As Henri Bergson put it, the universe shows two tendencies, a "reality which is making itself in a reality which is unmaking itself."
The upshot of all this was that, precisely because the physiosphere and the biosphere had parted ways, the world was, indeed, fractured. The immediate effect was that physics and biology went their separate ways. Much more disturbing, natural philosophy was split from moral philosophy, and the natural sciences were split from the human sciences. The physiosphere was seen as the realm of facts unaffected by history, and the noosphere as the realm of values and morals created primarily by history, and this gap was felt to be absolutely unbridgeable. And poor biology, caught in the middle between the "hard sciences" of the physiosphere and "soft sciences" of the noosphere, became positively schizophrenic, trying now to ape physics and reduce all life to mechanism, now to ape the noosphere and see all life as fundamentally embodying elan vital and values and history.
As several researchers have noted, "not until the puzzle of the two and opposing arrows of time was resolved in the late twentieth century was there a sound basis for bridging the gap between matter and mind, the natural world and the human world, and thus between the 'two cultures' of modern Western civilization." And, as I said, it was not so much the gap between mind and body as the gap between body and matter that needed to be closed.

the modern evolutionary synthesis

The closing of the gap between the physiosphere and the biosphere came precisely in the rather recent discovery of those subtler and originally hidden aspects of the material realm that, under certain circumstances, propel themselves into states of higher order, higher complexity, and higher organization. In other words, under certain circumstances matter will "wind itself up" into states of higher order, as when the water running down a drain suddenly ceases to be chaotic and forms a perfect funnel or whirlpool. Whenever material processes become very chaotic and "far from equilibrium," they tend under their own power to escape chaos by transforming it into a higher and more structured order— commonly called "order out of chaos."
Notice that these types of purely material systems also have an arrow of time, but this arrow is pointed in the same direction as the arrow of time in living systems, namely, to higher order and higher structural organization. In other words, aspects of the physiosphere are headed in the same direction as the biosphere, and that, put roughly, closes the gap between them. The material world is perfectly capable of winding itself up, long before the appearance of life, and thus the "self-winding" nature of matter itself sets the stage, or prepares the conditions, for the complex self-organization known as life. The two arrows have joined forces.
The nature of these chaotic transitions and transformations are still being explored. But the point is that, where there once appeared a single and absolutely unbridgeable gap between the world of matter and the world of life—a gap that posed a completely unsolvable problem—there now appeared only a series of minigaps. And whatever the exact nature of these minigaps, they looked unavoidably like a series of bridges inherently relating matter to life, and not like a moat forever separating them. Thus the old continuity between the physiosphere and the biosphere—a continuity that was a hallmark of the Great Chain of Being—was once again established.
As I said, there are still certain types of very important gaps or "leaps" in nature (expressed in emergents), but these now make sense, and seem somehow inevitable, in ways that early science found incomprehensible.
The new sciences dealing with these "self-winding" or "self-organizing" systems are known collectively as the sciences of complexity— including General System Theory (Bertalanffy, Weiss), cybernetics (Wiener), nonequilibrium thermodynamics (Prigogine), cellular automata theory (von Neumann), catastrophe theory (Thorn), autopoietic system theory (Maturana and Varela), dynamic systems theory (Shaw, Abraham), and chaos theories, among others.
I do not mean to minimize the very real differences between these various sciences, or the great advances that the more recent sciences of complexity (especially self-organizing systems and chaos theories) have made over their predecessors. But since my aim is very general, I will refer to them collectively as systems theory, dynamic systems theory, or evolutionary systems theory. For the general claim, remember, of evolutionary systems theory is that there have now been discovered basic regularities, patterns, or laws that apply in a broad fashion to all three great realms of evolution, the physiosphere and the biosphere and the noosphere, and that a "unity of science"—a coherent and unified worldview—is now possible. They claim, in other words, that "everything is connected to everything else"—the web of life as a scientific and not just religious conclusion.

the problem with hierarchy

Before we discuss some of the finer points and conclusions of the evolutionary systems sciences, the first thing that we can't help noticing is that these sciences are shot through with the notion of hierarchy—a word that has fallen on very hard times. All sorts of theorists, from deep ecologists to social critics, from ecofeminists to postmodern poststructuralists, have found the notion of hierarchy not only undesirable but a bona fide cause of much social domination, oppression, and injustice.
And yet here are the actual system sciences talking openly and glowingly of hierarchy. I will present the evidence for this later, but we find it everywhere: from the founder of General System Theory, Ludwig von Bertalanffy ("Reality, in the modern conception, appears as a tremendous hierarchical order of organized entities") to Rupert Sheldrake and his "nested hierarchy of morphogenetic fields"; from the great systems linguist Roman Jakobson ("Hierarchy, then, is the fundamental structural principle of language") to Charles Birch and John Cobb's ecological model of reality based on "hierarchical value"; from Francisco Varela's groundbreaking work on autopoietic systems ("It seems to be a general reflection of the richness of natural systems ... to produce a hierarchy of levels") to the brain research of Roger Sperry and Sir John Eccles and Wilder Penfield ("a hierarchy of nonreducible emergents"), and even the social critical theory of Jurgen Habermas ("a hierarchy of communicative competence")—hierarchy seems to be everywhere.
Now, the opponents of hierarchy—their names are legion—basically maintain that all hierarchies involve a ranking or dominating judgment that oppresses other values and the individuals who hold them (hierarchies are a "hegemonic domination that marginalizes differential values"), and that a linking or nonranking model of reality is not only more accurate but, we might say, kinder and gentler and more just.
So they propose instead, in their various fashions, the notion of heterarchy. In a heterarchy, rule or governance is established by a pluralistic and egalitarian interplay of all parties; in a hierarchy, rule or governance is established by a set of priorities that establish those things that are more important and those that are less.
Nowhere in the literature of modern social theory is there more acrimony expressed than over the topic of hierarchy/heterarchy. On the one side we have the champions of egalitarian and "equalitarian" views (heterarchy), who see all creatures as equal nodes in the web of life, and who, with good reasons, inveigh against harsh social ranking and domination, arguing instead for a pluralistic wholeness that intrinsically values each strand in the web, with "higher" and "lower" being forms not of organization but domination and exploitation. Even the notions of "higher" and "lower" are said to be part of "old-paradigm" thinking, and not part of the "new-paradigm" or "network" or "web-of-life" thinking.
And yet, when it comes to the actual sciences of this web of life, the sciences of wholeness and connectedness, we find them speaking unmistakably of hierarchy as the basic organizing principle of wholeness. They maintain that you cannot have wholeness without hierarchy, because unless you organize the parts into a larger whole whose glue is a principle higher or deeper than the parts possess alone—unless you do that, then you have heaps, not wholes. You have strands, but never a web. Even if the whole is a mutual interaction of parts, the wholeness cannot be on the same level as the partness or it would itself be merely another part, not a whole capable of embracing and integrating each and every part. "Hierarchy" and "wholeness," in other words, are two names for the same thing, and if you destroy one, you completely destroy the other.
It is ironic, to say the least, that the social champions of the web of life deny hierarchy in any form while the sciences of the web of life insist upon it. And it is doubly ironic that the former often point to the latter for support (e.g., "The new physics supports the equalitarian web of life").
What's going on here? In part, I will try to show, this is a colossal semantic confusion—the two parties are actually much closer than either supposes. The real world does indeed contain some natural or normal hierarchies (as we'll see), and it definitely contains some pathological or dominator hierarchies. And just as important, it contains some normal heterarchies and some pathological heterarchies (I'll give some examples of all four in a moment). The semantic confusions surrounding these topics are an absolute nightmare, confusions that have bred an inordinate amount of ideological fury on both sides, and unless we attempt to clear up some of this confusion, the discussion simply cannot go forward. So let us try. . . .

holons

Hiero- means sacred or holy, and -arch means governance or rule. Introduced by the great sixth-century Christian mystic Saint Dionysius the Areopagite, the "Hierarchies" referred to nine celestial orders, with Seraphim and Cherubim at the top and archangels and angels at the bottom. Among other things, these celestial orders represented higher knowledge and virtue and illuminations that were made more accessible in contemplative awareness. These orders were ranked because each successive order was more inclusive and more encompassing and in that sense "higher." "Hierarchy" thus meant, in the final analysis, "sacred governance," or "governing one's life by spiritual powers."
In the course of Catholic Church history, however, these celestial orders of contemplative awareness were translated into political orders of power, with the Hierarchies supposedly being represented in the pope, then archbishops, then bishops (and then priests and deacons). As Martineau put it in 1851, "A scheme of a hierarchy which might easily become a despotism." And already we can start to see how a normal developmental sequence of increasing wholes might pathologically degenerate into a system of oppression and repression.
As used in modern psychology, evolutionary theory, and systems theory, a hierarchy is simply a ranking of orders of events according to their holistic capacity. In any developmental sequence, what is whole at one stage becomes a part of a larger whole at the next stage. A letter is part of a whole word, which is part of a whole sentence, which is part of a whole paragraph, and so on. As Howard Gardner explains it for biology, "Any change in an organism will affect all the parts; no aspect of a structure can be altered without affecting the entire structure; each whole contains parts and is itself part of a larger whole." Or Roman Jakobson for language: "The phoneme is a combination of distinctive features; it is composed of diverse primitive signaling units and can itself be incorporated into larger units such as syllables and words. It is simultaneously a whole composed of parts and is itself a part that is included in larger wholes."
Arthur Koestler coined the term holon to refer to that which, being a whole in one context, is simultaneously a part in another. With reference to the phrase "the bark of a dog," for example, the word bark is a whole with reference to its individual letters, but a part with reference to the phrase itself. And the whole (or the context) can determine the meaning and function of a part—the meaning of bark is different in the phrases "the bark of a dog" and "the bark of a tree." The whole, in other words, is more than the sum of its parts, and that whole can influence and determine, in many cases, the function of its parts (and that whole itself is, of course, simultaneously a part of some other whole; I will return to this in a moment).
Normal hierarchy, then, is simply an order of increasing holons, representing an increase in wholeness and integrative capacity—atoms to molecules to cells, for example. This is why hierarchy is indeed so central to systems theory, the theory of wholeness or holism ("wholism"). To be a part of a larger whole means that the whole supplies a principle (or some sort of glue) not found in the isolated parts alone, and this principle allows the parts to join, to link together, to have something in common, to be connected, in ways that they simply could not be on their own.
Hierarchy, then, converts heaps into wholes, disjointed fragments into networks of mutual interaction. When it is said that "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts," the "greater" means "hierarchy." It doesn't mean fascist domination; it means a higher (or deeper) commonality that joins isolated strands into an actual web, that joins molecules into a cell, or cells into an organism.
This is why "hierarchy" and "wholeness" are often uttered in the same sentence, as when Gardner says that "a biological organism is viewed as a totality whose parts are integrated into a hierarchical whole." Or why, as soon as Jakobson explains language as "simultaneously a whole composed of parts and itself a part included in a larger whole," he concludes, "Hierarchy, then, is the fundamental structural principle." This is also why normal hierarchies are often drawn as a series of concentric circles or spheres or "nests within nests." As Goudge explains:

The general scheme of levels is not to be envisaged as akin to a succession of geological strata or to a series of rungs in a ladder. Such images fail to do justice to the complex interrelations that exist in the real world. These interrelations are much more like the ones found in a nest of Chinese boxes or in a set of concentric spheres, for according to emergent evolutionists, a given level can contain other levels within it [i.e., holons].

Thus, the common charge that all hierarchies are "linear" completely misses the point. Stages of growth in any system can, of course, be written down in a "linear" order, just as we can write down: acorn, seedling, oak; but to accuse the oak of therefore being linear is silly. As we will see, the stages of growth are not haphazard or random, but occur in some sort of pattern, but to call this pattern "linear" does not at all imply that the processes themselves are a rigidly one-way street; they are interdependent and complexly interactive. So we can use the metaphors of "levels" or "ladders" or "strata" only if we exercise a little imagination in understanding the complexity that is actually involved.
And finally, hierarchy is asymmetrical (or a "higher"-archy) because the process does not occur in the reverse. Acorns grow into oaks, but not vice versa. There are first letters, then words, then sentences, then paragraphs, but not vice versa. Atoms join into molecules, but not vice versa. And that "not vice versa" constitutes an unavoidable hierarchy or ranking or asymmetrical order of increasing wholeness.
All developmental and evolutionary sequences that we are aware of proceed by hierarchization, or by orders of increasing holism—molecules to cells to organs to organ systems to organisms to societies of organisms, for example. In cognitive development, we find awareness expanding from simple images, which represent only one thing or event, to symbols and concepts which represent whole groups or classes of things and events, to rules which organize and integrate numerous classes and groups into entire networks. In moral development (male or female), we find a reasoning that moves from the isolated subject to a group or tribe of related subjects, to an entire network of groups beyond any isolated element. And so on.
(It is sometimes said that Carol Gilligan denied, not just the specific nature of the stages of Kohlberg's scheme, but his entire hierarchical approach. This is simply not true. Gilligan, in fact, accepts entirely Kohlberg's general three-stage or three-tiered hierarchical scheme, from preconventional to conventional to postconventional—"meta-ethical"— development; she simply denies that the logic of justice alone accounts for the sequence; men seem to emphasize rights and justice, she says, and that needs to be supplemented with the logic of care and responsibility with which females progress through the same hierarchy—points we will return to later.)
These hierarchical networks necessarily unfold in a sequential or stage-like fashion, as I earlier mentioned, because you first have to have molecules, then cells, then organs, then complex organisms—they don't all burst on the scene simultaneously. In other words, growth occurs in stages, and stages, of course, are ranked in both a logical and chronological order. The more holistic patterns appear later in development because they have to await the emergence of the parts that they will then integrate or unify, just as whole sentences emerge only after whole words.
And some hierarchies do involve a type of control network. As Roger Sperry points out, the lower levels (which means, less holistic levels) can influence the upper (or more holistic) levels, through what he calls "upward causation." But just as important, he reminds us, the higher levels can exert a powerful influence or control on the lower levels—so-called "downward causation." For example, when you decide to move your arm, all the atoms and molecules and cells in your arm move with it—an instance of downward causation.
Now, within a given level of any hierarchical pattern, the elements of that level operate by heterarchy. That is, no one element seems to be especially more important or more dominant, and each contributes more or less equally to the health of the whole level (so-called "bootstrapping"). But a higher-order whole, of which this lower-order whole is a part, can exert an overriding influence on each of its components. Again, when you decide to move your arm, your mind—a higher-order holistic organization—exerts influence over all the cells in your arm, which are lower-order wholes, but not vice versa: a cell in your arm cannot decide to move the whole arm—the tail does not wag the dog.
And so systems theorists tend to say: within each level, heterarchy; between each level, hierarchy.
In any developmental or growth sequence, as a more encompassing stage or holon emerges, it includes the capacities and patterns and functions of the previous stage (i.e., of the previous holons), and then adds its own unique (and more encompassing) capacities. In that sense, and that sense only, can the new and more encompassing holon be said to be "higher" or "deeper." ("Higher" and "deeper" both imply a vertical dimension of integration not found in a merely horizontal expansion, a point we will return to in a moment.) Organisms include cells, which include molecules, which include atoms (but not vice versa).
Thus, whatever the important value of the previous stage, the new stage has that enfolded in its own makeup, plus something extra (more integrative capacity, for example), and that "something extra" means "extra value" relative to the previous (and less encompassing) stage. This crucial definition of a "higher stage" was first introduced in the West by Aristotle and in the East by Shankara and Lieh-tzu; it has been central to developmental studies ever since.
A quick example: in cognitive and moral development, in both the boy and the girl, the stage of preoperational or preconventional thought is concerned largely with the individual's own point of view ("narcissistic"). The next stage, the operational or conventional stage, still takes account of the individual's own point of view, but adds the capacity to take the view of others into account. Nothing fundamental is lost; rather, something new is added. And so in this sense it is properly said that this stage is higher or deeper, meaning more valuable and useful for a wider range of interactions. Conventional thought is more valuable than preconventional thought in establishing a balanced moral response (and postconventional is even more valuable, and so on).
As Hegel first put it, and as developmentalists have echoed ever since, each stage is adequate and valuable, but each deeper or higher stage is more adequate and, in that sense only, more valuable (which always means more holistic, or capable of a wider response).
It is for all these reasons that Koestler, after noting that all hierarchies are composed of holons, or increasing orders of wholeness, pointed out that the correct word for "hierarchy" is actually holarchy.
He is absolutely correct, and so from now on I will use "hierarchy" and "holarchy" interchangeably.
Thus heterarchists, who claim that "heterarchy" and "holism" are the same thing (and that both are contrasted to the divisive and nasty "hierarchy"), have got it exactly backward: The only way to get a holism is via a holarchy. Heterarchy, in and by itself, is merely differentiation without integration, disjointed parts recognizing no common and deeper purpose or organization: heaps, not wholes.

pathology

That is normal or natural holarchy, the sequential or stagelike unfolding of larger networks of increasing wholeness, with the larger or wider wholes being able to exert influence over the lower-order wholes. And as natural, desirable, and unavoidable as that is, you can already start to see how holarchies can go pathological. If the higher levels can exert influence over the lower levels, they can also overdominate or even repress and alienate the lower levels. And that leads to a host of pathological difficulties, in both the individual and society at large.
It is precisely because the world is arranged holarchically, precisely because it contains fields within fields within fields, that things can go so profoundly wrong, that a disruption or pathology in one field can reverberate throughout an entire system. And the cure for this pathology, in all systems, is essentially the same: rooting out the pathological holons so that the holarchy itself can return to harmony. The cure does not consist in getting rid of holarchy per se, since, even if that were possible, it would simply result in a uniform, one-dimensional flatland of no value distinctions at all (which is why those critics who toss out hierarchy in general immediately replace it with a new scale of values of their own, i.e., with their own particular hierarchy).
Rather, the cure of any diseased system consists in rooting out any holons that have usurped their position in the overall system by abusing their power of upward or downward causation. This is exactly the cure we see at work in psychoanalysis (shadow holons refuse integration), critical social theory (ideological holons distort open communication), democratic revolutions (monarchical or fascist holons oppress the body politic), medical science interventions (cancerous holons invade a benign system), radical feminist critiques (patriarchal holons dominate the public sphere), and so on. It is not getting rid of holarchy per se, but arresting (and integrating) the arrogant holons.
In short, the existence of pathological hierarchies does not damn the existence of hierarchies in general. That distinction is crucial and, for the most part, very easy to spot. Thus Riane Eisler, herself a rather staunch champion of heterarchy, nonetheless emphatically notes that "an important distinction should be made between domination and actualization hierarchies. The term domination hierarchies describes hierarchies based on force or the express or implied threat of force. Such hierarchies are very different from the types of hierarchies found in progressions from lower to higher orderings of functioning—such as the progression from cells to organs in living organisms, for example. These types of hierarchies may be characterized by the term actualization hierarchies because their function is to maximize the organism's potentials. By contrast, human hierarchies based on force or the threat of force not only inhibit personal creativity but also result in social systems in which the lowest (basest) human qualities are reinforced and humanity's higher aspirations (traits such as compassion and empathy as well as the striving for truth and justice) are systematically suppressed."
Let us further note that, by Eisler's own definitions, what dominator hierarchies are suppressing is in fact the individual's own actualization hierarchies!—what she calls "humanity's higher aspirations" instead of its "lowest (basest) qualities." In other words, the cure for pathological hierarchy is actualization hierarchy, not heterarchy (which would produce more heaps and fragments, not wholes and cures).
These types of distinctions are crucial, because not only are there pathological or dominator hierarchies, there are pathological or dominator heterarchies (which is a topic that heterarchists studiously avoid). I just suggested that normal hierarchy, or the holism between levels, goes pathological when there is a breakdown between levels and a particular holon assumes a repressive, oppressive, arrogant role of dominance over other holons (whether in individual or social development). On the other hand, normal heterarchy, which is holism within any level, goes pathological when there is a blurring or fusion of that level with its environment: a particular holon doesn't stand out too much, it blends in too much; it doesn't arrogate itself above others, it loses itself in others—and all distinctions, of value or identity, are lost (the individual holon finds its value and identity only through others).
In other words, in pathological hierarchy, one holon assumes agentic dominance to the detriment of all. This holon doesn't assume it is both a whole and a part, it assumes it is the whole, period. On the other hand, in pathological heterarchy, individual holons lose their distinctive value and identity in a communal fusion and meltdown. This holon doesn't assume it is both a whole and a part, it assumes it is a part, period. It becomes only instrumental to some other use; it is merely a strand in the web; it has no intrinsic value.
Thus, pathological heterarchy means not union but fusion; not integration but indissociation; not relating but dissolving. All values become equalized and homogenized in a flatland devoid of individual values or identities; nothing can be said to be deeper or higher or better in any meaningful sense; all values vanish into a herd mentality of the bland leading the bland.
Whereas pathological hierarchy is a type of ontological fascism (with the one dominating the many), pathological heterarchy is a type of ontological totalitarianism (with the many dominating the one)—all of which we will discuss in detail in later chapters (where we will see that pathological hierarchy and pathological heterarchy are, respectively, types of pathological agency and pathological communion; and we will further see that these two pathologies are often associated, respectively, with the male and female value spheres—as with the work of Gilligan, Eisler, et al.—the males "ranking" and the females "linking," with the possible respective pathologies of dominance and fusion; feminists center on the male pathologies of dominance and miss the equally catastrophic pathologies of fusion).
In the meantime, beware any theorist who pushes solely hierarchy or solely heterarchy, or attempts to give greater value to one or the other in an ontological sense. When I use the term "holarchy," I will especially mean the balance of normal hierarchy and normal heterarchy (as the context will make clear). "Holarchy" undercuts both extreme hierarchy and extreme heterarchy, and allows the discussion to move forward with, I believe, the best of both worlds kept firmly in mind.
Finally, I would say that in trying to redress the severe imbalances of pathological hierarchy (which, as I indicated, we will explore under the category of pathological masculinity and pathological agency, sometimes called "the patriarchy"), we are allowed, even enjoined, to give normal femininity and normal heterarchy an exaggerated emphasis and a greater value, simply because we are trying to balance the scales. We are not allowed, I believe, to go to the other extreme and replace pathological masculinity with pathological femininity—or, to say virtually the same thing, we don't cure pathological hierarchy with pathological heterarchy.

qualitative distinctions

The fact that actualization hierarchies involve a ranking of increasing holistic capacity—or even a ranking of value—is deeply disturbing to believers in extreme heterarchy, who categorically reject any sort of actual ranking or judgments whatsoever. With very good and often noble reasons (many of which I heartily support), they point out that value ranking is a hierarchical judgment that all too often translates into social oppression and inequality, and that in today's world the more compassionate and just response is a radically egalitarian or pluralistic system—a heterarchy of equal values. And while some of these critics are, as I said, quite nobly inspired, some of them have become quite rancorous, even vicious, in their vocal condemnation of any sort of value hierarchies. "Higher" has become their all-purpose dirty word.
What they don't seem to realize is that their valued embrace of heterarchy is itself a hierarchical judgment. They value heterarchy; they feel it embodies more justice, and compassion, and decency; they contrast it with hierarchical views, which they feel are dominating and denigrating. In other words, they rank these two views, and they feel one is definitely better than the other. That is, they have their own hierarchy, their own value ranking.
But since they consciously deny hierarchy altogether, they must obscure and hide their own. They must pretend that their own hierarchy is not a hierarchy. Their ranking becomes unacknowledged, hidden, covert. Further, not only is their own hierarchy hidden, it is self-contradictory: it is a hierarchy that denies hierarchy. They are presupposing that which they deny; they are consciously disavowing what their actual stance assumes.
By refusing even to look at hierarchy, even while making massively hierarchical judgments anyway, they are saddled with a rather crude and very poorly-thought-out hierarchy of values. This all too often, and unfortunately, lends an unmistakable air of hypocrisy to their stance. With much righteous indignation, they hierarchically denounce hierarchy. With their left hand they are doing what their right despises in everybody else. By hating judgments, and by hiding their own, they convert self-loathing into righteous condemnation of others.
In essence, their stance amounts to: "I have my ranking, but you shall not have yours. And further, by pretending that my ranking is not a ranking"—that move is done unconsciously—"I will say that I am without ranking altogether; and I shall then, in the name of compassion and equality, despise and attack ranking wherever I find it, because ranking is very bad."
By making these hierarchical judgments in an unacknowledged fashion, they avoid and suppress the really difficult issues of just how we go about making our value judgments in the first place. They are articulate on the lamentable hierarchical value judgments of others, but strangely inarticulate—totally silent, actually—as to how and why they arrived at their own. Their self-ethic of inarticulacy and their other-ethic of vocal condemnation combine to form a large club with which they simply bash others in the name of kindness. And while this is wonderful to get the emotions running in a politically correct college-age mentality, it does precisely nothing to help articulate the nature of human value systems, the nature of how men and women go about choosing the good, and the true, and the beautiful, choices that involve ranking, and choices that these critics make and then deny they have made.
Their heterarchy is a stealth hierarchy. They bury their tracks, then claim they have no tracks, and thus avoid and repress the truly profound and difficult topic: why do human beings always leave tracks? Why is the finding of value in the world inherent in the human situation? And since, even if we decide to value everything equally, that involves rejecting value systems that do not, why is some sort of ranking unavoidable? Why are qualitative distinctions built into the fabric of the human orientation? Why is trying to deny value itself a value? Why is denying ranking itself a ranking? And given that, how can we sanely and consciously choose our unavoidable hierarchies, and not merely fall into the ethics of unacknowledgment and suppression and inarticulacy?
Charles Taylor, whose book Sources of the Self will be one of our constant companions later in this volume, has done a masterful job of tracing the modern rise of the worldview that claims it is not a worldview. That is, the rise of certain value judgments that deny they are value judgments, the rise of certain hierarchies that deny the existence of hierarchies. It is an altogether fascinating story, and one we will later follow in detail, but for the moment we might observe the following.
Taylor begins by noting that the making of what he calls "qualitative distinctions" is an unavoidable aspect of the human situation. We simply find ourselves existing in various contexts, in various frameworks (as I would put it, we are holons within holons, contexts within contexts), and these contexts unavoidably constitute various values and meanings that are embedded in our situation. "What I have been calling a framework," says Taylor, "incorporates a crucial set of qualitative distinctions [a value hierarchy]. To think, feel, judge within such a framework is to function with the sense that some action, or mode of life, or mode of feeling is incomparably higher than the others which are more readily available to us. I am using 'higher' here in a generic sense. The sense of what the difference consists in may take many forms. One form of life may be seen as fuller, another way of feeling and acting as purer, a mode of feeling or living as deeper, a style of life as more admirable, and so on."
Thus, even those who embrace heterarchy or radical pluralism are making deep and profound qualitative distinctions, even though they denounce qualitative distinctions as brutal and vicious, even though they deny the notion of frameworks altogether. "But this person doesn't lack a framework. On the contrary, he has a strong commitment to a certain ideal of benevolence. He admires people who live up to this ideal, condemns those who fail or who are too confused even to accept it, feels wrong when he himself falls below it. He lives within a moral horizon which cannot be explicated by his own moral theory."
The point is that, even though this individual espouses diversity and equality of values, the idea is never, as Taylor puts it, that "whatever we do is acceptable."

I want to defend the strong thesis that doing without frameworks is utterly impossible for us; otherwise put, that the horizons within which we live our lives and which make sense of them have to include these strong qualitative discriminations [value hierarchies]. Moreover, this is not meant just as a contingently true psychological fact about human beings, which could perhaps turn out one day not to hold for some exceptional individual or new type, some superman of disengaged objectification. Rather, the claim is that living within such strongly qualified horizons is constitutive of human agency . . . and not some optional extra we might just as well do without.

Yet there is a modern outlook, says Taylor, "which is tempted to deny these frameworks altogether. My thesis here is that this idea is deeply mistaken . . . and deeply confused. It reads the affirmation of life and freedom as involving a repudiation of qualitative distinctions, a rejection of constitutive goods as such, while these are themselves reflections of qualitative distinctions and presuppose some conception of qualitative goods."
In the course of historically tracing the curious rise of this curious stance, Taylor notes that "the more one examines the motives—what Nietzsche would call the 'genealogy'—of these theories, the stranger they appear. It seems that they are motivated by the strongest moral ideals, such as freedom, altruism, and universalism [i.e., universal pluralism]. These are among the central moral aspirations of modern culture, the hyper goods [strong hierarchies] which are distinctive to it. And yet what these ideals drive the theorists toward is a denial of all such goods. They are caught in a strange pragmatic contradiction, whereby the very goods which move them push them to deny or denature all such goods. They are constitutionally incapable of coming clean about the deeper sources of their own thinking. Their thought is inescapably cramped." They are morally superior in a universe where nothing is supposed to be superior.
The resultant "frameworkless agent," says Taylor, "is a monster," motivated by the "deep incoherence and self-illusion which this denial involves." This hierarchical denial of hierarchy involves an ethics of suppression, as Taylor says, because "layers of suppression" are required to so thoroughly conceal from oneself the sources of one's own judgments.
And this further explains why these theorists are, as Taylor puts it, "parasitic." Since they can't "come clean about the deeper sources of their own thinking," they necessarily live off nothing but the vocal denouncements of those views that do manage to consciously acknowledge their own qualitative distinctions. "Because their moral sources are unavowable, they are mainly invoked in polemic. Their principal words of power are denunciatory. Much of what they [actually] live by has to be inferred from the rage with which their enemies are attacked and refuted. This self-concealing kind of philosophy is also thereby parasitic. . . ." It lives to conquer, in the name of never conquering again.
Thus, even the radical pluralists (the heterarchists) are motivated by values of freedom, altruism (universal benevolence), and universal pluralism. These are deeply hierarchical judgments, and judgments that— rightly, I believe!—vigorously reject other types of value judgments and other types of hierarchies that have flourished throughout history. They deeply reject the warrior ethic, the ethic of elite aristocracy, the male-only ethic, and the master-slave ethic, to name a few.
In other words, their heterarchical values are held in place by hierarchical judgments (most of which I thoroughly agree with), and they might as well come clean and join the rest of us in trying to consciously understand all that, and not simply bury their tracks in parasitic and denunciatory and suppressive rhetoric.
The same problems, of course, beset the "cultural relativists," who maintain that all diverse cultural values are equally valid, and that no universal value judgments are possible. But that judgment is itself a universal judgment. It claims to be universally true that no judgments are universally true. It makes its own universal judgment and then simultaneously denies all others, because universal judgments are very, very bad.
It thus utterly ignores the crucial issue of how we go about making valid universal judgments in the first place. It exempts its own universal claims from any scrutiny by simply claiming they aren't claims.
The extreme cultural relativists thus maintain that "truth" is basically what any culture can come to agree on, and thus no "truth" is inherently better than any other. There was a certain vogue for this type of obscurantism during the sixties and seventies, but its profoundly self-contradictory nature became apparent with, to give the most notorious example, Michel Foucault's book The Order of Things. In this work Foucault maintained, in essence, that what humans come to call "truth" is simply an arbitrary play of power and convention, and he outlined several epochs where the "truth" seemed to depend entirely on shifting and conventional epistemes, or discursive formations governed not by "truth" but by exclusionary transformation principles. All truth, in other words, was ultimately arbitrary.
The argument seemed quite persuasive, and even caused a bit of an international sensation. Until his brighter critics simply asked him: "You say all truth is arbitrary. Is your presentation itself true?"
Foucault, like all relativists, had exempted himself from the very criteria he aggressively applied to others. He was making a series of truth claims that denied all truth claims (except his own privileged stance), and thus his position, as critics from Habermas to Taylor pointed out, was profoundly incoherent. Foucault himself abandoned the extreme relativism of this "archaeological" endeavor and subsumed it in a more balanced approach (that would include continuities as well as abrupt discontinuities; he called the merely archaeological approach "arrogant").
Nobody is denying that many aspects of culture are indeed different and equally valuable. The point is that that stance itself is universal and rejects theories that merely and arbitrarily rank cultures on an ethnocentric bias (which is fine). But because it claims that all ranking is either bad or arbitrary, it cannot explain its own stance and the process of its own (unacknowledged) ranking system. And if nothing else, unconscious ranking is bad ranking, by any other name.
And the relativists are very bad rankers. A theorist such as Michael Winkelman, vocal and vociferous in his condemnation of others for doing precisely what he himself does unconsciously, is just one of a long line of bad rankers, living only to denounce. Jürgen Habermas, as we will see in detail, has launched a devastating critique of these positions, pointing out that they all involve a "performative contradiction": another way of saying that they are implicitly presupposing universal validity claims that they deny can even exist.
In short, extreme cultural relativity and merely heterarchical value systems are about as dead as any movement can become. The word is out that qualitative distinctions are inescapable in the human condition, and further, that there are better and worse ways to make our qualitative distinctions.
In many ways, we want to agree with the broad conclusions of the cultural diversity movements: we do want to cherish all cultures in an equal light. But that universal pluralism is not a stance that all cultures agree with; that universal pluralism is a very special type of ranking that most ethnocentric and sociocentric cultures do not even acknowledge; that universal pluralism is the result of a very long history hard-fought against dominator hierarchies of one sort or another.
Why is universal pluralism better than dominator hierarchies? And how did we develop or evolve to a stance of universal pluralism, when most of history despised that view? These are some of the many developmental and evolutionary themes of this volume. How we arrive at that universal pluralism, and how we can defend it against those who would, in a dominating fashion, elevate their culture or their beliefs or their values above all others—these are the crucial questions whose answers are aborted by merely denying ranking and denying qualitative distinctions in the first place.

conclusion

But here is my point: if frameworks are inescapable (we are contexts within contexts, holons within holons), and if frameworks involve qualitative distinctions—in other words, if we are inextricably involved in judgments that are hierarchical—then we can begin to consciously join these judgments with the sciences of hierarchy, that is, the sciences of holarchy, of frameworks within frameworks, of contexts within contexts, of holons within holons—with the result that values and facts are no longer automatically divorced.
This unifying and integrative move was blocked as long as the heterarchists were calling their view "holistic" (when it was really "heapistic"). Blocked, because the heterarchists insisted that reality was nonhierarchical, whereas the sciences of wholeness insisted altogether otherwise. But with the understanding that the only way you get a holism is via a holarchy, we are now in a position to realign facts and values in a gentler embrace, with science working with us, not against us, in constructing a truly holistic, not heapistic, worldview.
Further, let us simply note that the Great Chain of Being was in fact a Great Holarchy of Being—with each link being an intrinsic whole that was simultaneously a part of a larger whole—and the entire series nested in Spirit.
If these various holarchies—in the sciences, in value judgments, in the great wisdom traditions—could in fact be sympathetically aligned with one another, a truly significant synthesis might indeed lie in our collective future.

2

The Pattern That Connects

Matter, which appears to be merely passive and without form and arrangement, has even in its simplest state an urge to fashion itself by a natural evolution into a more perfect constitution.
— immanuel kant

God does not remain petrified and dead; the very stones cry out and raise themselves to Spirit.     —georg hegel

the nature of the pattern

WE  BEGIN WITH  the sciences of wholeness, or dynamic systems theory. The rest of this chapter and all of chapters 3 and 4 will be devoted to exploring some of the basic conclusions of the modern evolutionary sciences, with a view toward their possible integration in a larger scheme of things.
What follows are twenty basic tenets (or conclusions) that represent what we might call "patterns of existence" or "tendencies of evolution" or "laws of form" or "propensities of manifestation." These are the common patterns or tendencies, recall, that modern systems sciences have concluded are operative in all three domains of evolution—the physiosphere, the biosphere, and the noosphere—and tendencies that therefore make this universe a genuine uni-versum ("one turn"), or an emergent pluralism undergirded by common patterns—the "patterns that connect."
(At this point, I don't want to get involved in intricate arguments over whether these are "eternal laws" or simply "relatively stable habits" of the universe, and so I will be satisfied with the latter.)
These patterns (listed as the Twenty Tenets below) are drawn from the modern evolutionary and systems sciences, but I would like to emphasize that they are not confined to those sciences. As I mentioned earlier, we are now looking at the "half" of those sciences that seem accurate, and we have yet to examine the half that is extremely questionable (this will begin in chapter 3). As we will see in great detail, the problem with virtually every attempt to outline the common patterns found in all three domains of evolution is simply that the patterns are presented in the language of objective naturalism ("it"-language), and thus they fail miserably when applied to domains described only in I-language (aesthetics) and we-language (ethics). Every "unified systems attempt" that I have seen suffers from this crippling inadequacy.
I have been very careful, therefore, to cut these tenets at a level and type of abstraction that is, I believe, fully compatible with it-, we-, and I-languages (or the true, the good, and the beautiful), so that the synthesis can proceed nonviolently into domains where previously systems theory was intent upon aggressive reductionism to its own naturalistic and objectifying terms. (All of this will, as I said, be discussed in detail, beginning in chapter 3.)
Finally, a small warning. Many readers have found these tenets to be the most interesting part of the book; others have found them too abstract and rather boring. If you are of the latter, I should mention that they will be fleshed out and made obvious, I trust, in the succeeding chapters. In the meantime, a Reader's Digest version of them might go as follows:
Reality is not composed of things or processes; it is not composed of atoms or quarks; it is not composed of wholes nor does it have any parts. Rather, it is composed of whole/parts, or holons.
This is true of atoms, cells, symbols, ideas. They can be understood neither as things nor processes, neither as wholes nor parts, but only as simultaneous whole/parts, so that standard "atomistic" and "wholistic" attempts are both way off the mark. There is nothing that isn't a holon (upwardly and downwardly forever).
Before an atom is an atom, it is a holon. Before a cell is a cell, it is a holon. Before an idea is an idea, it is a holon. All of them are wholes that exist in other wholes, and thus they are all whole/parts, or holons, first and foremost (long before any "particular characteristics" are singled out by us).
Likewise, reality might indeed be composed of processes and not things, but all processes are only processes within other processes—that is, they are first and foremost holons. Trying to decide whether the fundamental units of reality are things or processes is utterly beside the point, because either way, they are all holons, and centering on one or the other misses the central issue. Clearly some things exist, and some processes exist, but they are each and all holons.
Therefore we can examine what holons have in common, and this releases us from the utterly futile attempt to find common processes or common entities on all levels and domains of existence, because that will never work; it leads always to reductionism, not true synthesis.
Thus, to say that the universe is composed primarily of quarks is already to privilege a particular domain. Likewise, at the other end of the spectrum, to say that the universe is really composed primarily of our symbols, since these are all we really know—that, too, is to privilege a particular domain. But to say that the universe is composed of holons neither privileges a domain nor implies special fundamentalness for any level. Literature, for example, is not composed of subatomic particles; but both literature and subatomic particles are composed of holons.
Starting with the notion of holons, and proceeding by a combination of a priori reasoning and a posteriori evidence, we can attempt to discern what all known holons seem to have in common. These conclusions are refined and checked by examining any and all domains (from cellular biology to physical dissipative structures, from stellar evolution to psychological growth, from autopoietic systems to the making of computer programs, from the structure of language to DNA replication).
Since all of those domains operate with holons, we can attempt to discern what all these holons have in common when they interact—what their "laws" or "patterns" or "tendencies" or "habits" are. And this gives us a list of some twenty tenets, which I have grouped into twelve categories (some of these are simple definitions, but for convenience I will always refer to the entire list as "twenty tenets." There is nothing special about twenty; some of these might not hold up, others can be added, and I have not tried to be exhaustive).

twenty tenets

1. Reality as a whole is not composed of things or processes, but of holons. Composed, that is, of wholes that are simultaneously parts of other wholes, with no upward or downward limit. To say that holons are processes instead of things is in some ways true, but misses the essential point that processes themselves exist only within other processes. There are no things or processes, only holons.
Since reality is not composed of wholes, and since it has no parts—since there are only whole/parts—then this approach undercuts the traditional argument between atomism (all things are fundamentally isolated and individual wholes that interact only by chance) and wholism (all things are merely strands or parts of the larger web or whole). Both of those views are absolutely incorrect. There are no wholes, and there are no parts. There are only whole/parts.
This approach also undercuts the argument between the materialist and idealist camps. Reality isn't composed of quarks, or bootstrapping hadrons, or subatomic exchange; but neither is it composed of ideas, symbols, or thoughts. It is composed of holons.
There is an old joke about a King who goes to a Wiseperson and asks how is it that the Earth doesn't fall down? The Wiseperson replies, "The Earth is resting on a lion." "On what, then, is the lion resting?" "The lion is resting on an elephant." "On what is the elephant resting?" "The elephant is resting on a turtle." "On what is the . . ." "You can stop right there, your Majesty. It's turtles all the way down."
Holons all the way down. "Subatomic particles are—in a certain sense which can only be defined rigorously in relativistic quantum mechanics— nested inside each other. The point is that a physical particle—a renormalized particle—involves (1) a bare particle and (2) a huge tangle of virtual particles, inextricably wound together in a recursive mess. Every real particle's existence therefore involves the existence of infinitely many other particles, contained in a virtual 'cloud' which surrounds it as it propagates. And each of the virtual particles in the cloud, of course, also drags along its own virtual cloud, bubbles within bubbles [holons within holons], and so on ad infinitum. . . ."
But it's also turtles all the way up. Take mathematics, for example. The notorious "paradoxes" in set theory (Cantor's, Burali-Forti's, Russell's), which, among other things, led to Tarski's Theorem and Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, placed mathematics in an irreversible, ever-expanding, no-upper-limit universe: "The totality of sets cannot be the terminus of a well-defined generating process, for if it were we could take all of what we had generated so far as a set and continue to generate still larger universes. The totality of sets [mathematical holons] is an 'unconditioned' or absolute totality which for just that reason cannot be adequately conceived by the human mind, since the object of a normal conception can always be incorporated in a more inclusive totality. Moreover, the sets are arranged in a transfinite hierarchy"—a holarchy that continues upwardly forever, and must continue upwardly forever ("transfinitely"), or mathematics comes to a screeching self-contradictory halt. Even mathematics is set in time's arrow, and time's arrow is indefinitely— "transfinitely"—holarchical.
This is important for philosophy as well, and particularly for many of the "new age" paradigms that now trumpet "Wholism." "Transfinite" (turtles all the way up) means that the sum total of all the whole/parts in the universe is not itself a Whole, because the moment it comes to be (as a "whole"), that totality is merely a part of the very next moment's whole, which in turn is merely a part of the next. . . and so ad infinitum.
This means that there is no place where we can rest and say, "The universe's basic principle is Wholeness" (nor, of course, can we say, "The basic principle is Partness"). This prevents us from ever saying that the principle of the Whole rules the world, for it does not; any whole is a part, indefinitely.
Thus, holons within holons within holons means that the world is without foundation in either wholes or parts (and as for any sort of "absolute reality" in the spiritual sense, we will see that it is neither whole nor part, neither one nor many, but pure groundless Emptiness, or radically nondual Spirit).
This is important because it prevents a totalizing and dominating Wholeness. "Wholeness"—this is a very dangerous concept (a point that will accompany us throughout this book)—dangerous for many reasons, not the least of which is that it is always available to be pushed into ideological ends. Whenever anybody talks of wholeness being the ultimate, then we must be very wary, because they are telling us that we are merely "parts" of their particular version of "wholeness," and so we should be subservient to their vision—we are merely strands in their wonderful web.
They like to engineer social Utopias, these Wholists. This becomes all the more alarming when you simply ask them what is included in their "Wholeness," and you find out immediately that there are an enormous number of things that they do not include in their version of "the Whole." Ecofeminists do not include the patriarchy in their "whole"; most deep ecologists do not include meditative states in their "ultimate wholeness"; ecophilosophers in general do not like industrialization (or farming, for that matter), and so on. They may or may not be right; my point is that for people who claim to be embracing the Whole, these theorists reject an awful lot of existence.
In other words, since there is actually no such beast as the ultimate "Whole"—it simply does not exist anywhere—then those who peddle it have to give it content, not from reality, but solely from their own ideology. And then, since we are all defined as merely strands in their glorious web, a totalizing social agenda seems eminently reasonable. It is not beside the point that theorists as diverse as Habermas and Foucault have seen such totalizing agendas as the main modern enemy of the life-world (a point we will return to in chapter 12).
I belabor this issue because it is extremely important to emphasize the indefiniteness of holarchy, its openness, its dizzifyingly nesting nature—an actualization holarchy, not a dominator holarchy. And a dominator holarchy, recall, occurs precisely whenever any holon is established, not as a whole/part, but as the whole, period. "Ultimate Wholeness": this is the essence of dominator holarchies, pathological holarchies. "Pure wholeness": this is the totalizing lie.
For all these reasons, I will usually refer to the sum total of events in the universe not as the "Whole" (which implies the ultimate priority of wholeness over partness) but as "the All" (which is the sum total of whole/parts). And this sum total is not itself a whole but a whole/part: as soon as you think "the All," your own thought has added yet another holon to the All (so that the first All is no longer the All but merely part of the new All), and so off we go indefinitely, never arriving at that which we symbolize as the "All," which is why it is never a whole, but an unending series of whole/parts (with the series itself a whole/part—and so on "transfinitely").
The Pythagoreans introduced the term "Kosmos," which we usually translate as "cosmos." But the original meaning of Kosmos was the patterned nature or process of all domains of existence, from matter to math to theos, and not merely the physical universe, which is usually what both "cosmos" and "universe" mean today.
So I would like to reintroduce this term, Kosmos. The Kosmos contains the cosmos (or the physiosphere), the bios (or biosphere), nous (the noosphere), and theos (the theosphere or divine domain)—none of them being foundational (even spirit shades into Emptiness).
So we can say in short: The Kosmos is composed of holons, all the way up, all the way down.
Let me end this section with one last example, from perhaps an unexpected source. The "postmodern poststructuralists"—usually associated with such names as Derrida, Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and stretching back to George Bataille and Nietzsche—have been the great foes of any sort of systematic theory or "grand narrative," and thus they might be expected to raise stern objections to any overall theory of "holarchy." But a close look at their work shows that it is driven precisely by a conception of holons within holons within holons, of texts within texts within texts (or contexts within contexts within contexts), and it is this sliding play of texts within texts that forms the "foundationless" platform from which they launch their attacks.
George Bataille, for instance. "In the most general way"—and these are his italics—"every isolable element of the universe always appears as a particle that can enter into composition with a whole that transcends it. Being is only found as a whole composed of particles whose relative autonomy is maintained [a part that is also a whole]. These two principles [simultaneous wholeness and partness] dominate the uncertain presence of an ipse being across a distance that never ceases to put everything in question."
Everything is put into question because everything is a context within a context forever. And putting everything in question is precisely what the postmodern poststructuralists are known for. And so in a language that would soon become quite typical (and is by now almost comical), Bataille goes on to point out that "putting everything into question" counters the human need to violently arrange things in terms of a pat wholeness and smug universality: "With extreme dread imperatively becoming the demand for universality, carried away to vertigo by the movement that composes it, the ipse being that presents itself as a universal is only a challenge to the diffuse immensity that escapes its precarious violence, the tragic negation of all that is not its own bewildered phantom's chance. But, as a man, this being falls into the meanders of the knowledge of his fellowmen, which absorbs his substance in order to reduce it to a component of what goes beyond the virulent madness of his autonomy in the total night of the world." Urn, and so forth.
The point is not that Bataille himself was without any sort of system, but simply that the system is sliding—holons within holons. So the claim to simply have "no system" is a little disingenuous. Which is why Andre Breton, the leader of the surrealists at the time, began a counterattack on this part of Bataille, also in terms that are echoed by today's critics of postmodernists: "M. Bataille's misfortune is to reason: admittedly, he reasons like someone who 'has a fly on his nose,' which allies him more closely with the dead than with the living, but he does reason. He is trying, with the help of the tiny mechanism in him which is not completely out of order, to share his obsessions: this very fact proves that he cannot claim, no matter what he may say, to be opposed to any system, like an unthinking brute."
Both sides are correct, in a sense. There is system, but the system is sliding. It is unendingly, dizzifyingly holoarchic. This is why Jonathan Culler, perhaps the foremost interpreter of Jacques Derrida's deconstruction, can point out that Derrida does not deny truth per se, but only insists that truth and meaning are context-bound (each context being a whole that is also part of another whole context, which itself . . .). "One could therefore," says Culler, "identify deconstruction with the twin principles of the contextual determination of meaning and the infinite extend-ability of context."
Turtles all the way up, all the way down. What deconstruction puts into question is the desire to find a final resting place, in either wholeness or partness or anything in between. Every time somebody finds a final interpretation or a foundational interpretation of a text (or life or history or Kosmos), deconstruction is on hand to say that the total context—or Wholistic interpretation—does not exist, because it is also unendingly a part of yet another text forever. As Culler puts it, "Total context [final Wholism] is unmasterable, both in principle and in practice. Meaning is context bound, but context is boundless." Transfinite turtles.
Even Habermas, who generally takes Breton's position to Derrida's Bataille, agrees with that particular point. As he puts it, "These variations of context that change meaning cannot in principle be arrested or controlled, because contexts cannot be exhausted, that is, they cannot be theoretically mastered once and for all."
That the system is sliding does not mean that meaning can't be established, that truth doesn't exist, or that contexts won't hold still long enough to make a simple point. Many postmodern poststructuralists have not simply discovered holonic space, they have become thoroughly lost in it (a point we will return to in chapter 13; George Bataille, for example, took a good, long, hard look at holonic space and went properly insane, though which is cause and which effect is hard to say).
As for our journey, we need only note that there is system, but the system is sliding: The Kosmos is the unending All, and the All is composed of holons—all the way up, all the way down.

2. Holons display four fundamental capacities: self-preservation, self-adaptation, self-transcendence, and self-dissolution. These are all very important, and we'll take them one at a time.
a. Self-preservation. All holons display some capacity to preserve their individuality, to preserve their own particular wholeness or autonomy. A hydrogen atom, in a suitable context, can remain a hydrogen atom. It doesn't necessarily display intentionality in any developed sense, but it does preserve its agency over time: it manages to remain itself across time's fluctuations—it displays self-preservation in the simple sense of maintaining identity across time (that itself is a remarkable accomplishment!).
A holon in a living context (e.g., a cell) displays an even more sophisticated capacity for self-preservation: the capacity for self-renewal (auto-poiesis); it retains its own recognizable pattern (or structure) even as its material components are exchanged; it assimilates the environment to itself (it is a "meta-stable dissipative structure").
In other words, although holons exist by virtue of their interlinking relationships or context, they are not defined by their context but rather by their own individual form, pattern, or structure (even particles that are bootstrappings of other particles retain their individual perspective, as Leibniz put it).
This intrinsic form or pattern is known by various names: entelechy (Aristotle), morphic unit/field (Sheldrake), regime or code or canon (Koestler), deep structure (Wilber). In the physiosphere, the form of a holon is relatively simple (although even that is bewilderingly complex); in the biosphere and noosphere, it takes on elaborate rules of relational exchange with its environment, all geared to preserve the stable (or teleologically recognizable), coherent, and relatively autonomous pattern that is the essence of any holon. Francisco Varela, for example, explains that the "old biology" was based on "heteronomous units operating by a logic of correspondence," whereas the entire essence of the new biology is "autonomous units operating by a logic of coherence."
In short, holons are defined, not by the stuff of which they are made (there is no stuff), nor by the context in which they live (though they are inseparable from that), but by the relatively autonomous and coherent pattern they display, and the capacity to preserve that pattern is one characteristic of a holon: the wholeness aspect of a holon is displayed in its pattern-preservation.
b. Self-adaptation. A holon functions not only as a self-preserving whole but also as a part of a larger whole, and in its capacity as a part it must adapt or accommodate itself to other holons (not autopoiesis but allopoiesis; not assimilation but accommodation). The partness aspect of a holon is displayed in its capacity to accommodate, to register other holons, to fit into its existing environment. Even electrons accommodate themselves, for example, to the number of other electrons in an orbital shell; they register, and react to, their environment. This doesn't imply intentionality on the part of the electron, just a capacity to react to surrounding actions. As a whole, it remains itself; as a part, it must fit in— and those are tenets 2a and 2b.
We can just as well think of these two opposed tendencies as a holon's agency and communion. Its agency—its self-asserting, self-preserving, assimilating tendencies—expresses its wholeness, its relative autonomy; whereas its communion—its participatory, bonding, joining tendencies— expresses its partness, its relationship to something larger.
Both of these capacities or tendencies are absolutely crucial and equally important; an excess of either will kill a holon immediately (i.e., destroy its identifying pattern); even a moderate imbalance will lead to structural deformity (whether we're talking about the growth of a plant or the growth of the patriarchy). And we have already suggested (in chapter 1) that an imbalance of these two tendencies in any system expresses itself as pathological agency (alienation and repression) or pathological communion (fusion and indissociation).
This primordial polarity runs through all domains of manifest existence, and was archetypally expressed in the Taoist principles of yin (communion) and yang (agency). Koestler: "On different levels of the inorganic and organic hierarchies, the polarisation of 'particularistic' [agency] and 'holistic' [communion] forces takes different forms, but it is observable on every level."
(I will have much more to say about these two tendencies when we reach the psychological and political levels of self-organization, and particularly with reference to the male and female value spheres, and to political theories of rights [agency] and responsibilities [communion]).
c. Self-transcendence (or self-transformation). When an oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms are brought together under suitable circumstances, a new and in some ways unprecedented holon emerges, that of a water molecule. This is not just a communion, self-adaptation, or association of three atoms; it is a transformation that results in something novel and emergent—different wholes have come together to form a new and different whole. There is some sort of creative twist on what has gone before. This is what Whitehead referred to as creativity (which he called "the ultimate category"—the category necessary to understand any other category), and what Jantsch and Waddington call self-transcendence.
Some writers, such as Koestler, lump together self-adaptation and self-transcendence and refer to them interchangeably, because both embody a type of "going beyond." But apart from that similarity, the two are different in degree and in kind. In self-adaptation or communion, one finds oneself to be part of a larger whole; in self-transformation one becomes a new whole, which has its own new forms of agency (relative autonomy) and communion. As Jantsch puts it:

It is not sufficient to characterize these systems simply as open, adaptive, nonequilibrium, or learning systems [communion]; they are all that and more: they are self-transcendent [his italics], which means that they are capable ... of transforming themselves. Self-transcendent systems are evolution's vehicle for qualitative change and thus ensure its continuity; evolution, in turn, maintains self-transcendent systems which can only exist in a world of interdependence. For self-transcendent systems, Being falls together with Becoming. . . ,

As Ilya Prigogine puts it, the various levels and stages of evolution are irreducible to each other because the transitions between them are characterized by symmetry breaks, which simply means that they are not equivalent rearrangements of the same stuff (whatever that "stuff" might be), but are in part a significant transcendence, a novel and creative twist. Jantsch explains:

Symmetry breaks introduce new dynamic possibilities for morphogenesis and signal an act of self-transcendence. Complexity becomes possible only through symmetry breaks. The world which emerges from them becomes increasingly irreducible to a single level of basic [properties]. The reality which emerges is coordinated at many levels.

All of which he summarizes this way: "In the self-organization paradigm, evolution is the result of self-transcendence at all levels." He also calls this "self-realization through self-transcendence."
In other words, this introduces a vertical dimension that cuts at right angles, so to speak, to the horizontal agency and communion. In self-transcendence, agency and communion do not just interact; rather, new forms of agency and communion emerge through symmetry breaks, through the introduction of new and creative twists in the evolutionary stream. There is not only a continuity in evolution, there are important discontinuities as well. "Nature progresses by sudden leaps and deep-seated transformations rather than through piecemeal adjustments. The diagram of the branching tree of life no longer resembles the continuous Y-shaped joints of the synthetic theory; it is now pictured in terms of abrupt switches. . . . There is significant evidence accumulated in many fields of empirical science that dynamic systems do not evolve smoothly and continuously over time, but do so in comparatively sudden leaps and bursts."
Paleontologist George Simpson referred to this as "quantum evolution," because these bursts "involved relatively abrupt alterations of adaptive capacity or bodily structure and left little or no evidence in the fossil record of the transitions between them." This "quantum evolution" led to Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould's "punctuational model," all of which Michael Murphy summarizes as "evolutionary transcendence."
Murphy points out that "evolutionary theorists Theodosius Dobzhansky and Francisco Ayala have called these . . . events instances of 'evolutionary transcendence' because in each of them there arose a new order of existence. G. Ledyard Stebbins, a principal architect of modern evolutionary theory, described certain differences between large and small steps in organic evolution, distinguishing minor from major advances in grade of plants and animals. The term grade is used among biologists to denote a set of characteristics or abilities that clearly give descendent species certain advantages over their ancestors. According to Stebbins, the development of pollination mechanisms in milkweeds and orchids is an example of minor advances in grade, while the appearance of the digestive tube, central nervous system, elaborate sense organs, vertebrate limbs, and elaborate social behavior represent major advances. There have been about 640,000 of the former, he estimated, and from 20 to 100 of the latter during the several hundred million years of eukaryote evolution."
The point is that there is nothing particularly metaphysical or occult about this. Self-transcendence is simply a system's capacity to reach beyond the given and introduce some measure of novelty, a capacity without which, it is quite certain, evolution would never, and could never, have even gotten started. Self-transcendence, which leaves no corner of the universe untouched (or evolution would have no point of departure), means nothing more—and nothing less—than that the universe has an intrinsic capacity to go beyond what went before.
d. Self-dissolution—Holons that are built up (through vertical self-transformation) can also break down. Not surprisingly, when holons "dissolve" or "come unglued," they tend to do so along the same vertical sequence in which they were built up (only, of course, in the reverse direction).

If a structure is forced to retreat in its evolution (e.g., by a change in the non-equilibrium), as long as there are no strong perturbations it does so along the same path which it has come. . . . This implies a primitive, holistic system memory which appears already at the level of chemical reaction systems.

This is true all the way up to psychological and linguistic (noospheric) holons. Roman Jakobson speaks of "those stratified phenomena which modern psychology uncovers in the different areas of the realm of the mind. New additions are superimposed on earlier ones and dissolution begins with the higher strata—the amazingly exact agreement between the chronological succession of these acquisitions and the general laws of irreversible solidarity which govern the synchrony of all the languages of the world."
In other words, that which is vertically built up can vertically break down, and the pathways in both cases are essentially the same.
Taken together, these four capacities—agency or self-preservation, communion or self-accommodation, self-transcendence, and self-dissolution—can be pictured as a cross, with two horizontal "opposites" (agency and communion) and two vertical "opposites" (self-transcendence and self-dissolution).
These four "forces" are in constant tension (as we will see throughout this volume). Horizontally, the more agency, the less communion, and vice versa. That is, the more intensely a holon preserves its own individuality, preserves its wholeness, the less it serves its communions or its partness in larger or wider wholes (and vice versa: the more it is a part, the less it is its own whole). When we say, for example, that an element (such as helium) is "inert," we mean it intensely resists joining with other elements to form compounds; it retains its agency and resists communion—it is relatively inert.
This is a constant tension, as it were, across all domains, and shows up in everything from the battle between self-preservation and species-preservation, to the conflict between rights (agency) and responsibilities (communions), individuality and membership, personhood and community, coherence and correspondence, self-directed and other-directed, autonomy and heteronomy. ... In short, how can I be both my own wholeness and a part of something larger, without sacrificing one or the other?
(Part of the answer, we will see, at all stages of evolution, including the human, involves self-transcendence to new forms of agency and communion that integrate and incorporate both partners in a supersession: not just a wider whole—a horizontal expansion—but a deeper or higher whole—a vertical emergence—which is indeed why "evolution is the result of self-transcendence at all levels," and why it is "self-realization through self-transcendence"—but that is somewhat ahead of the story.)
This constant horizontal battle between agency and communion extends even to the forms of pathology on any given level, where too much agency, too much individuality, leads to a severing (repression and alienation) of the rich networks of communion that sustain individuality in the first place; and too much communion leads to a loss of individual integrity, leads to fusion with others, to indissociation, to a blurring of boundaries and a meltdown and loss of autonomy.
(And we will see that the typical "male pathology" tends to be hyper-agency, or fear of relationship, like the inertness of helium!, and the typical "female pathology" tends to be hypercommunion, or fear of autonomy—the one leading to domination, the other to fusion; and we will see how this played itself out in the "patriarchy" and the "matriarchy.")
If the horizontal battle is between agency and communion, the constant vertical battle is between self-transcendence and self-dissolution, the tendency to build up or to break down (and, of course, these forces complexly interact with agency and communion on any given level; for example, both too much agency and too much communion leads to break down—as we will see, this is a constant problem in human affairs, where the desire to find a "larger meaning" often leads to too much communion or fusion with a "greater cause," and this fusion is mistaken for transcendence, whereas it is simply loss of autonomy and release from responsibility, which apparently is the attraction).
Now I have been giving mostly examples from the human domain, but the point is that, in simpler forms, these four forces are operative in even the simplest of holons, because it's turtles all the way down. That is, every holon is actually a holon within other holons transfinitely—that is, every holon is simultaneously both a subholon (a part of some other holon) and a superholon (itself containing holons). As a holon, it must preserve its own pattern (agency over time), and it must register and react to its environment (its communions in space). If it does not appropriately respond, it is erased: too much agency, or too much communion, will destroy its identifying pattern.
Because each holon is also a superholon, then when it is erased—when it undergoes self-dissolution into its subholons—it tends to follow the same path down as its subholons followed up: cells break down into molecules, which break down into atoms, which break into particles, which disappear into transfinite clouds of probabilistic "bubbles within bubbles." . . .
Preserve or accommodate, transcend or dissolve—the four very different pulls on each and every holon in the Kosmos.

3. Holons emerge. Owing to the self-transcendent capacity of holons, new holons emerge. First subatomic particles, then atoms, then molecules, then polymers, then cells, and so on. The emergent holons are in some sense novel; they posses properties and qualities that cannot be strictly and totally deduced from their components; and therefore they, and their descriptions, cannot be reduced without remainder to their component parts. "Levels of organization involve ontologically new entities beyond the elements from which the self-organization process proceeds. There is no absolute deterministic level of description." As Hofstadter puts it, "It is important to realize that the high-level law cannot be stated in the vocabulary of the low-level description"—and, he points out, this is true from gas particles to biological speciation, from computer programs to DNA replication, from musical scores to linguistic rules.
Emergence also means that indeterminacy (and one of its correlates, degrees of freedom) is sewn into the very fabric of the universe, since unprecedented emergence means undetermined by the past (although pockets of the universe can regularly collapse in a deterministic fashion, as in classical mechanics). Holons, that is, are fundamentally indeterminate in some aspects (precisely because they are fundamentally self-transcending). As Laszlo summarizes the available evidence, "The selection from among the set of dynamically functional alternative steady states is not predetermined. The new state is decided neither by initial conditions in the system nor by changes in the critical values of environmental parameters; when a dynamic system is fundamentally destabilized it acts indeterminately."
It now seems virtually certain that determinism arises only as a limiting case where a holon's capacity for self-transcendence approaches zero, or when its own self-transcendence hands the locus of indeterminacy to a higher holon (we will return to this important topic below).
Emergence is neither a rare nor an isolated phenomenon. As Varela, Thompson, and Rosch summarize the available evidence: "It is clear that emergent properties have been found across all domains—vortices and lasers, chemical oscillations, genetic networks, developmental patterns, population genetics, immune networks, ecology, and geophysics. What all these diverse phenomena have in common is that in each case a network gives rise to new properties. . . . The emergence of global patterns or configurations in systems of interacting elements is neither an oddity of isolated cases nor unique to [special] systems. In fact, it seems difficult for any densely connected aggregate to escape emergent properties."As Ernst Mayr put it in his exhaustive work The Growth of Biological Thought:

Systems almost always have the peculiarity that the characteristics of the whole cannot (not even in theory) be deduced from the most complete knowledge of the components, taken separately or in other partial combinations. This appearance of new characteristics in wholes has been designated as emergence. Emergence has often been invoked in attempts to explain such difficult phenomena as life, mind, and consciousness. Actually, emergence is equally characteristic of inorganic systems. . . . Such emergence is quite universal and, as Popper said, "We live in a universe of emergent novelty."

Let me note in passing that this means all sciences are fundamentally reconstructive sciences. That is, we never know, and never can know, exactly what any holon will do tomorrow (we might know broad outlines and probabilities, based on past observations, but self-transcendent emergence always means, to some degree: surprise!). We have to wait and see, and from that, after the fact, we reconstruct a knowledge system.
However, when a holon's self-transcendence approaches zero (when its creativity is utterly minimal), then the reconstructive sciences collapse into the predictive sciences. Historically, the empirical sciences got their start by studying precisely those holons that show minimal creativity. In fact, they basically studied nothing but a bunch of rocks in motion (mass moving through space over time), and thus they mistook the nature of science to be essentially predictive.
I mean no offense to rocks, but by taking some of the dumbest holons in existence and making their study the study of "really real reality," these physical sciences, we have seen, were largely responsible for the collapse of the Kosmos into the cosmos, for the reduction of the Great Holarchy of Being to the dumbest creatures on God's green Earth, and for the leveling of a multidimensional reality to a flat and faded landscape defined by a minimum of creativity (and thus maximum of predictive power).
It would take such a turn of events as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle to remind us that even the constituents of rocks are neither as predictable nor as dumb as these silly reductionisms. In the meantime, the "ideal" of knowledge as predictive power would ruin virtually every field it was applied to (including rocks), because its very methods would erase any creativity it would find, thus erasing precisely what was novel, significant, valuable, meaningful. . . .

4. Holons emerge holarchically. That is, hierarchically. That is, as a series of increasing whole/parts. Organisms contain cells, but not vice versa; cells contain molecules, but not vice versa; molecules contain atoms, but not vice versa. And it is that not vice versa, at each stage, that constitutes unavoidable asymmetry and hierarchy (holarchy). Each deeper or higher holon embraces its junior predecessors and then adds its own new and more encompassing pattern or wholeness—the new code or canon or morphic field or agency that will define this as a whole and not merely a heap (as Aristotle clearly spotted). This is Whitehead's famous dictum: "The many become one and are increased by one." Laszlo comments:

The empirical evidence for this process is indisputable. Diverse atomic elements converge in molecular aggregates; specific molecules converge in crystals and organic macromolecules; the latter converge in cells and the subcellular building blocks of life; single-celled organisms converge in multi-cellular species; and species of the widest variety converge in ecologies.

Bertalanffy put it very bluntly: "Reality, in the modern conception, appears as a tremendous hierarchical order of organized entities, leading, in a superposition of many levels, from physical and chemical to biological and sociological systems. Such hierarchical structure and combination into systems of ever higher order, is characteristic of reality as a whole and is of fundamental importance especially in biology, psychology and sociology." Likewise, Edward Goldsmith's The Way: An Ecological World-view, a highly regarded explanation of the "new paradigm," summarizes it thus: "Ecology explains events in terms of their role within the spatio-temporal Gaian hierarchy." And even Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphic fields—which is considered extremely innovative and very daring—does not evade the obvious; as Sheldrake concludes: "Thus the morphogenetic fields, like morphic units themselves, are essentially hierarchical in their organization."
Francisco Varela, whose research in the autonomous nature of holonic cognition is a cornerstone of the "new biology" (see tenet 2a), points out that "it seems to be a general reflection of the richness of natural systems that indication can be iterated to produce a hierarchy of levels. The choice of considering the level above or below corresponds to a choice of treating the given system as autonomous or constrained"—that is, every holon is both a whole and a part, and can be considered in terms of its autonomy (agency) or in terms of its being constrained by other holons (in communion), both views being correct (but partial).
Virtually all deep ecologists and ecofeminists reject the notion of holarchy, for rather confused reasons, it seems to me. From what I can tell, they seem to think that hierarchy and atomism are "bad," and that their "wholism" is the opposite of both. But no less than the patron saint of deep ecology, Arne Naess, clearly points out that "wholism" and "atomism" are actually two sides of the same problem, and that the cure for both is hierarchy. All reality, he points out, consists of what he calls "subordinate wholes" or "subordinate gestalts"—that is, holons. "We have therefore," he says, "a complex realm of gestalts, in a vast hierarchy. We can therefore speak of lower- and higher-order gestalts."
Further, Naess points out, this hierarchic conception is necessary to counteract both wholism (meaning an emphasis on just wholes) and atomism (just parts), because gestalts are holons; they are both wholes and parts, arranged in a hierarchic order of higher and lower. As he puts it, "This terminology—a vast hierarchy of lower- and higher-order gestalts—is more useful than speaking about wholes and holism, because it induces people to think more strenuously about the relations between wholes and parts. It [also] facilitates the emancipation from strong atomistic or mechanistic trends in analytical thought."
Hierarchy, in short, is for Naess the antidote both to atomism and wholism (extreme heterarchy). I don't know why his followers have such a difficult time grasping his notion. Perhaps it is, as I suggested earlier, that they are in such reaction to pathological hierarchies that they toss the baby out with the bathwater. I think this is very understandable, because in some early versions of hierarchy, the conception was rather rigid and "fascist," and resulted, no doubt, from what we have called pathological agency.
The point, of course, is to tease apart pathological hierarchies—where one holon usurps its position in the totality—from normal holarchies in general, which express the natural interrelations between holons that are always both parts and wholes in horizontal and vertical relationships. As we saw earlier, both pathological holarchies and pathological heterarchies do exist and need to be addressed as pathologies, but that does not damn the existence of normal heterarchies and normal holarchies themselves, both of which are necessary for wholes and parts to coexist.
Jantsch expresses the more recent and balanced understanding:

Evolution [appears] as a multilevel reality in which the evolutionary chain of autopoietic levels of existence appear in hierarchic order. Each level includes all lower levels—there are systems within systems within systems . . . within the total system in question. However, it is essential that this hierarchy is not a control hierarchy in which information streams upward and orders are handed from the top down. Each level maintains a certain [relative] autonomy and lives its proper existence in horizontal relations [heterarchy] with its specific environment. [For example:] The organelles within our cells go about their business of energy exchange in an autonomous way and maintain their horizontal relationships within the framework of the world-wide Gaia system.

If the deep ecologists and ecofeminists would follow Naess's lead, the whole discussion could move forward much more rapidly. As it is now, they are simply the defenders of flatland "wholism" and extreme heterarchy, which indeed is the opposite of atomism: two sides of the same mistake.

5. Each emergent holon transcends but includes its predecessor(s). Each newly emergent holon, as we have seen, includes its preceding holons and then adds its own new and defining pattern or form or wholeness (its new canon or code or morphic field). In other words, it preserves the previous holons themselves but negates their separateness or isolatedness or aloneness. It preserves their being but negates their partiality or exclusiveness. "To supersede," said Hegel, "is at once to preserve and to negate."
Another way to express this is: all of the lower is in the higher, but not all of the higher is in the lower. For example, hydrogen atoms are in a water molecule, but the water molecule is not in the atoms (we might say the water molecule "pervades" or "permeates" the atoms but is not actually in them, just as all of a word is in a sentence but not all of the sentence is in a word).
Varela points out that "at a given level of the hierarchy, a particular system can be seen as an outside to systems below it, and as an inside to systems above it; thus the status of a given system changes as one passes through its level in either the upward or the downward direction." This is simply another example of asymmetry, and it means that all holons are not equally internal to all other holons (some have a relation of partial externalness marked by the emergence or the symmetry break): all of the lower is in the higher, but not all of the higher is in the lower.
Nobel laureate Roger Sperry puts it very straightforwardly: "It is important to remember in this connection that all of the simpler, more primitive, elemental forces remain present and operative; none has been canceled. These lower-level forces and properties, however, have been superseded in successive steps, encompassed or enveloped as it were, by those forces of increasingly complex organizational entities." The higher embraces the lower, as it were, so that all development is envelopment.
But there is an important distinction that needs to be emphasized, which I indicated earlier by saying that supersession "preserves the being but negates the partiality" (or "preserves and negates"). A simple example will suffice: before Hawaii became a state, it was its own nation, and as a nation it had all the prerogatives of sovereignty: it could declare war, print its own money, conscript an army, and so forth. These were all parts of its regime or code or cannon—its self-preservation or agency as a whole, as an individual nation.
When Hawaii became an American state, all of its basic property, land, and fundamental features became part of the U.S.A. All of these basic structures were preserved in the new Union; none of them were destroyed or harmed in the least. What was not preserved, however, what was lost and actually negated, was Hawaii's capacity to be its own nation, to declare war, print its own money, and so on. Hawaii's isolated and autonomous regime was subsumed in the higher regime of the United States (where it retained some relatively autonomous rights as a state).
This is what I mean when I say "transcends but includes" or "negates and preserves"—all the basic structures and functions are preserved and taken up in a larger identity, but all the exclusivity structures and functions that existed because of isolation, set-apartness, partialness, exclusiveness, separative agency—these are simply dropped and replaced with a deeper agency that reaches a wider communion.
This leads to a general phenomenon observed at all levels of holistic organization: in normal holarchies, the new and senior pattern or wholeness can to some degree limit the indeterminacy (organize the freedom) of its junior holons (precisely because it transcends but includes them; i.e., via "downward causation," or more generally, "downward influence").
Rupert Sheldrake is worth quoting at length, to show exactly what is involved, and how widespread and crucial the phenomenon is:

In living organisms, as in the chemical realm, the morphogenetic fields [holons] are hierarchically organized: those of organelles—for example the cell nucleus, the mitochondria and chloroplasts—act by ordering physico-chemical processes within them; these fields are subject to the higher-level fields of cells; the fields of cells to those of tissues; those of tissues to those of organs; and of organs to the morphogenetic field of the organism as a whole. At each level the fields work by ordering processes which would otherwise be indeterminate.
For example, in the case of free atoms, electronic events take place with the probabilities given by the unmodified probability structures of the atomic morphogenetic fields. But when the atoms come under the influence of the higher-level morphogenetic field of a molecule, these probabilities are modified in such a way that the probability of events leading toward the actualization of the final form are enhanced, while the probability of other events is diminished. Thus the morphogenetic fields of molecules restrict the possible number of atomic configurations which would be expected on the basis of calculations which start from the probability structures of free atoms. And this is what is found in fact; in the case of protein folding, for example, the rapidity of the process indicates that the system does not "explore" the countless configurations in which the atoms could conceivably be arranged. Similarly, the morphogenetic fields of crystals restrict the large number of possible arrangements which would be permitted by the probability structures of their constituent molecules.
At the cellular level the morphogenetic field orders the crystallization of microtubules and other processes which are necessary for the coordination of cell division. But the planes in which the cells divide may be indeterminate in the absence of a higher-level field: for instance, in plant wound-calluses the cells proliferate more or less randomly to produce a chaotic mass. Within organized tissue, on the other hand, one of the functions of the tissue's morphogenetic field may be to impose a pattern on the planes of cell division, and thus control the way in which the tissue as a whole grows. Then the development of tissues itself is inherently indeterminate in many respects, as revealed when they are artificially isolated and grown in tissue culture; under normal conditions this indeterminacy is restricted by the higher-level field of the organ. Indeed at each level in biological systems, as in chemical systems, the morphic units in isolation behave more indeterminately than they do when they are part of a higher-level morphic unit. The higher-level morphogenetic field restricts and patterns their intrinsic indeterminism.

This brings us directly to our sixth major tenet.

6. The lower sets the possibilities of the higher; the higher sets the probabilities of the lower. We just saw that as a higher level of creative novelty emerges, it in many ways goes beyond (but includes) the givens of the previous level. However, even though a higher level "goes beyond" a lower level, it does not violate the laws or the patterns of the lower level. It cannot be reduced to the lower level; it cannot be determined by the lower level; but neither can it ignore the lower level. My body follows the laws of gravity; my mind follows other laws, such as those of symbolic communication and linguistic syntax; but if my body falls off a cliff, my mind goes with it.
This is what is meant by saying that a lower sets the possibilities, or the large framework, within which the higher will have to operate, but to which it is not confined. To use Polanyi's example, nothing in the laws governing physical particles can predict the emergence of a wristwatch, but nothing in the wristwatch violates the laws of physics. As Laszlo nicely summarizes it for any level:

The processes of cosmic evolution bring forth a variety of matter-energy systems; these systems define the range of constraints and the scope of possibilities within which systems on higher levels can evolve. Systems on the lower level clusters can permit the evolution, but can never determine the nature, of systems on higher-level clusters. The evolution of physical matter-energy systems sets the stage and specifies the rules of the game for the evolution of biological species, and biological evolution sets the stage and specifies the rules of the game for the evolution of sociocultural systems.

As for the higher restricting the probabilities of the lower, we already heard Sheldrake's summary of the extensive evidence, which he concludes in this way:

At every level, the fields of the holons are probabilistic, and the material processes within the holon are somewhat random or indeterminate. Higher-level fields may act upon the fields of lower-level holons in such a way that their probability structures are modified. This can be thought of in terms of a restriction of their indeterminism: out of the many possible patterns of events that could have happened, some now become much more likely to happen as a result of the order imposed by the higher-level field. This field organizes and patterns the indeterminism that would be shown by the lower-level holons in isolation.

Now, a "level" in a holarchy is established by several objective criteria: by a qualitative emergence (as explained by Popper); by asymmetry (or "symmetry breaks," as explained by Prigogine and Jantsch); by an inclusionary principle (the higher includes the lower, but not vice versa, as explained by Aristotle); by a developmental logic (the higher negates and preserves a lower, but not vice versa, as explained by Hegel); by a chronological indicator (the higher chronologically comes after the lower, but all that is later is not higher, as explained by Saint Gregory).
Despite the clarity of the concept of levels (and the meaning of "higher" and "lower"), some critics have maintained that the concept itself cannot be maintained, because of the purely arbitrary nature of the number of levels in any given holon. It is definitely true that the number of levels in any holon has an element of arbitrariness to it, simply because there is no upper or lower limit to a manifest holarchy and therefore no absolute referent.
For example, when it was thought that atoms were the ultimate holons, then a simple atom had one level, a water molecule had two levels, an ice crystal had three levels, and so on. When it was then thought that protons, neutrons, and electrons were the ultimate holons, then they had one level, a nucleus had two levels, an atom then had three levels, and so forth. But that doesn't change the relative placement of the holons themselves and thus doesn't change in the least the meaning of higher and lower.
Also notice that we can count as one level any truly emergent quality, which means we can divide and subdivide a series in any number of ways. To give a crude analogy, take a three-story house with a stairway consisting of twenty steps between each floor. We usually say the house has three main levels (just as we refer to the three general realms of evolution), but we could also use the stairs as the scale and say the house has sixty levels or steps. Obviously this is somewhat arbitrary.
The level claim is simply that (1) the existence of floors and steps is not itself purely arbitrary—there are quanta in the universe with or without the presence of humans—and (2) in making any comparison, use the same ruler, thus factoring out that particular arbitrariness (just as we can measure the temperature of water with any number of arbitrary scales, Celsius or Fahrenheit or whatever, as long as we agree which to use). Whenever we refer to the "number of levels" in a holon, then, we are using a relative scale consistently applied within the particular comparison.
With that in mind, we can introduce two very important definitions, first clearly suggested by Arthur Koestler. In his words:

7.   "The number of levels which a hierarchy comprises determines whether it is 'shallow' or 'deep'; and the number of holons on any given level we shall call its 'span: "
For this example, let us arbitrarily assign atoms a depth of three (they contain as components at least two other levels). We can imagine a time, early in the universe, when there were only atoms and not yet molecules. Atoms had a small depth (3) but an enormous span, stretching, we presume, throughout the existent universe and numbering in the megazillions (thus, depth = 3, span = zillions). When molecules first emerged, they had a greater depth, a depth of four, but initially a very small span (presumably in the hundreds, or whatever, and then growing rapidly).
This again recognizes a crucial distinction found in any holarchy—the vertical dimension and the horizontal dimension. The greater the vertical dimension of a holon (the more levels it contains), then the greater the depth of that holon; and the more holons on that level, the wider its span.
This is important, because it points out that it is not merely population size that establishes order of richness (or order of qualitative emergence), but rather depth. And we will see that one of the greatest confusions in general ecological or new-paradigm theories (whether "pop" or "serious") is that they often mistake great span for great depth. For what we will find is that:

8.  Each successive level of evolution produces GREATER depth and LESS span. The greater the depth of a holon, the more precarious is its existence, since its existence depends also on the existence of a whole series of other holons internal to it. And since the lower holons are components of the higher, there physically cannot be more numbers of the higher than there are numbers of components.
Thus, for example, the number of water molecules in the universe will always be less than the number of hydrogen and oxygen atoms in the universe. The number of cells in the universe will always be less than the number of molecules in the universe, and so on. It simply means the number of wholes will always be less than the number of parts, indefinitely.
Thus, greater depth always means less span, in relation to a holon's predecessor(s). Of course, what we might call "total span" increases—if there is more of anything, the sum total of everything increases—but simple span, the span of any given type of holon, becomes less and less vis-à-vis its predecessor(s). (This is why the span of mental holons is much less than the span of living holons, which is much less than the span of material holons—the so-called pyramid of development.) We will return to this momentarily.
Throughout this book I will be adding what might be called "fundamental additions" to the twenty tenets. These additions are tenets that seem crucial to an understanding of evolution and the Kosmos, but tenets that, for reasons we will be investigating in detail, simply cannot be established in the it-language of instrumental and objectifying naturalism (i.e., systems theory). Why they cannot be established in systems theory will form a large part of the discussion about the "wrong half" of modern systems sciences.
These additions do not violate systems theory; they simply can find no place whatsoever in its tenets (the subjective world of "I," for example, cannot be captured without remainder in the objectivistic language of "its" and "objects" and "processes"; nor can the collective worlds of "we" be captured in systems theory without a reduction to totalitarian principles). As I said, we will later return to all of this in much detail, and so for the moment we need only note our first addition:
Addition 1: The greater the depth of a holon, the greater its degree of consciousness. The spectrum of evolution is a spectrum of consciousness. And one can perhaps begin to see that a spiritual dimension is built into the very fabric, the very depth, of the Kosmos.
But this addition takes us a bit ahead of our story, and so let me return to the more orthodox account and pick up the story at tenet 7, the distinction between depth and span, or the distinction between vertical richness and horizontal reach. We have two different scales here: a vertical scale of deep versus shallow, and a horizontal scale of wide versus narrow.
One of the difficulties in keeping these distinctions in mind is that, once we disavow reductionism, once we disavow the flatland approach to the Kosmos (which recognizes only and absolutely a depth of one everywhere in the universe), then theoretically we are no longer just playing chess, which is hard enough; we are now playing three-dimensional chess, which is extremely complicated! And I won't even mention n-dimensional chess! For wherever development proceeds, we must, at the very least, distinguish between depth and span, not only because there are objective (real) correlates to the distinction, but because to fail to do so, even under the guise of being "holistic," simply reintroduces a subtle form of reductionism, for everything is then compared merely and automatically in terms of population span (bigger or smaller, wider or narrower), and thus all depth is erased from existence.
As we will see in the next chapter, many such theorists then attempt to construct holistic sequences based on size. They completely mistake great span for great depth, because now the only qualitative distinction they possess is actually quantitative: they only have one way to go—namely, that "bigger is better." And thus their "holistic sequences," because they are based on span alone, are actually in themselves regressive, because evolution is not bigger and better, but smaller and better (greater depth, less span). These theorists, as we will see in detail, end up unknowingly recommending pure regression as our salvation.
One last point in this regard: other critics accept the term "depth," but strenuously object to the word "height," again feeling, apparently, that "height" is the height of human arrogance. And yet they accept "depth," this being, I suppose, the depth of human daffiness. Any way we slice it, depth without height is just another name for shallow.
With reference to the vertical scale (which just as well could be any direction we agree upon; I will use vertical), we can speak of height and depth synonymously. The height of a holon and the depth of a holon refer to the same thing, the (relative) number of levels of other holons internal to it. Huston Smith, however, makes the interesting observation that traditionally height was used when referring to the Kosmos (as in "high Heaven") and depth in regard to individuals (as in "the depth of her soul").
But I will use the two words interchangeably, so that the vertical dimension is a scale of depth/height versus shallow/flat, and the horizontal scale is one of width versus narrowness.
We have, of course, on several occasions already met these two dimensions. Agency and communion (or self-preservation and self-accommodation) refer to changes in the horizontal dimension; self-transcendence and self-dissolution refer to changes in the vertical dimension. So we can introduce a few more simple definitions:
Changes in the horizontal dimension I will call translation, and changes in the vertical dimension I will call transformation.
The agency (or regime or code) of any given holon translates the world according to the terms of its code or regime—it will recognize, or register, or respond to, only those items that fit its code. An electron, for example, will register numerous other physical forces, but will not register or respond to the meaning of literature, nor will it respond to the sexual advances of a rabbit.
Holons, in other words, do not simply reflect a pregiven world. Rather, according to their capacity, they select, organize, give form to, the multitude of stimuli cascading around them. Their responses never simply "correspond" to something "out there"; they register (and thus respond to) only that which fits the coherency of their regime (or code or agency or deep structure). This is what Varela means, for example, when he says holons are not "heteronomous units operating by a logic of correspondence," but rather relatively "autonomous units operating by a logic of coherence." Holons translate their reality according to the patterns of their agency, their relatively autonomous and coherent deep structures; and stimuli that don't fit the deep structure or regime are simply not registered and might as well not exist (in fact, do not exist, do not disclose themselves, for that holon).
In transformation, however, new forms of agency emerge, and this means a whole new world of available stimuli becomes accessible to the new and emergent holon. The new holon can respond to deeper or higher worlds, because its translation processes transcend and include those of its subholons. A deer, for example, will register and respond not only to physical forces that continue to impact it, but also to a whole range of biological forces, from hunger to pain to sexual drive, that simply make no impression on its constituent atoms. To the individual atom, these new forces are all "otherworldly"—literally out of this world, or not in its world.
Thus, in transformation (or self-transcendence), whole new worlds of translation disclose themselves. These "new worlds" are not physically located someplace else; they exist simply as a deeper perception (or deeper registration) of the available stimuli in this world. They appear to be— and might as well be—"other worlds" to the junior holons, but these "other worlds" disclose themselves—they become this worldly—via transformation and self-transcendence. And we will see, in later chapters, that development is a constant conversion of "otherworldly" into "this worldly" via a deepening of perception brought about by emergent evolution and transformation. Greater depth pipes other worlds into this world, constantly. . . .
A holon's regime or deep structure, then, governs the range of its possible translations, governs the types of worlds that it can respond to.
This is what actually allows a holon's stability, its relative autonomy or coherence. We noted that any stable holon is stable by virtue of its identifying pattern—its relatively autonomous code, canon, regime, entelechy, morphic unit—what I have been calling its deep structure. The human body, for example, has 208 bones, 1 heart, 2 lungs, and so forth, wherever it appears. But what we do with the human body—its various modes of play, work, sex, and so on—varies from culture to culture. These variations within the deep structure I call surface structures. Koestler refers to this difference as "fixed codes and flexible strategies"—that is, relatively stable deep structures and changing surface structures within the basic guidelines (or basic limiting principles) of the deep structure.
And so we can say: translation is a change in surface structures ("horizontal"), whereas transformation is a change in deep structures ("vertical").
(The relation between deep structures and surface structures I call "transcription," which we will discuss later, and for now, in a note.)
This is yet another reason why evolution cannot be explained merely in terms of horizontal additions—that is, cannot be explained merely in terms of translation, of horizontal changes in agency and communion. When the regimes or deep structures of hydrogen and oxygen are brought together in a certain fashion, a water molecule emerges with a new regime or deep structure, a regime that incorporates the separate regimes of the atoms into a single "morphic unit," a holon with a new deep structure that subsumes its predecessors. This is a vertical transformation, or change in deep structure; it is not the mere addition of more and more atoms, which would simply produce a mess, not a molecule; a heap, not a whole. Translation shuffles parts; transformation produces wholes.
We can use our simple analogy of the three-story building to summarize all of these definitions. Each of the three main floors is a deep structure; the furniture, chairs, and tables on each floor are the surface structures. Rearranging the furniture on any given floor is translation; changing floors is transformation. (And the relation of the furniture to each floor is transcription.)
The point, then, is that evolution is first and foremost a series of transformations ("self-realization through self-transcendence"). Transformation is how you get levels in the first place. And each major transformation produces greater depth, and less span, in relation to its previous level(s), in relation to its predecessors.

9. Destroy any type of holon, and you will destroy all of the holons above it and none of the holons below it. There is an enormous amount of confusion in the literature as to how to determine whether a given holon is "higher" or "lower" in the developmental sequence—not to mention the large numbers of critics who deny higher and lower altogether.
But we can actually locate the level of a holon in any evolutionary or holistic sequence very simply, by asking ourselves, as a type of thought experiment, "What other types of holons would be destroyed if we destroyed this type of holon?"
For example, take the holistic sequence: subatomic particles, atoms, molecules, cells. Everybody agrees that that is indeed a holistic sequence—each member includes its predecessor(s) but not vice versa, and thus each successive member is indeed more encompassing (or more holistic).
But notice what that also unavoidably means: If we destroyed, for example, all of the molecules in the universe, we would also destroy all of the cells in the universe (all of the holons above molecules in the sequence), but atoms and subatomic particles would or could still exist (none of the lower holons would have to cease existence).
In other words, destroy any type of holon, and that also destroys all the higher holons in the sequence, because those higher wholes depend upon the lower as constituent parts.
Molecules cannot exist without atoms; atoms can exist without molecules. There is nothing arbitrary in this arrangement; it is not the product of a particular "human value judgment." It is true physically, and logically, and chronologically as well. (Atoms and molecules existed perfectly well on their own before the emergence of any cells. Destroy every cell in the universe, and everything that came after it—plants, animals, societies—will likewise be destroyed, but nothing that came before it— subatomic particles, atoms, molecules, polymers.)
This allows us to easily determine what is lower, and what is higher, in any holistic sequence: destroy the particular holon, and everything else that is also destroyed is higher; those holons not destroyed are lower.
This is true for any developmental sequence, and is partially responsible for the "retreat" we see when holons dissolve: they regress to the next lower level, whereas if any lower level is destroyed, all the higher levels automatically go with it. This also points up very clearly why there is a vertical and not just a horizontal dimension to evolution, and shows why "higher" and "lower" are not arbitrary.
In the next chapter, we will apply this principle to the work of several theorists who are attempting to construct "holistic sequences." These theorists, in order to help men and women more accurately position themselves in the larger universe, are attempting to find a "more holistic" reality in which humans can situate their communions—an altogether commendable task. But because so many of these theorists confuse great span with great depth, they end up creating "holistic sequences" that are in fact regressive, that slide down the pyramid of greater depth / less span and land us in the ontological basement.
As we will see, the careful application of this thought experiment allows us, in a nonarbitrary fashion, to determine if their sequences are really holistic (or merely regressive), and allows us to offer an alternative "big picture" in which men and women can situate themselves in a truly holistic fashion.
In the meantime, this thought experiment allows us to introduce another important definition, the difference between fundamental and significant. For what we will find is that the more fundamental a holon is, the less significant it is, and vice versa. That is:
The less depth a holon has, the more fundamental it is to the Kosmos, because it is a component of so many other holons. Atoms, for example, are very fundamental, relatively speaking, because molecules and cells and organisms all depend upon them. The more fundamental a holon is, the more of the universe contains that holon as a necessary part or constituent, without which these other holons could not function (or even exist). Less depth means more fundamental, means the particular holon is a "building block" of so many other holons.
At the same time, the less depth a holon has, the less significant it is to the Kosmos, because it embraces (as its own components) so little of the Kosmos. There is, relatively speaking, less of the Kosmos that is actually internal to this holon, that is actually embraced within the being of the holon itself. (Put differently, it is less significant because more of the Kosmos is external to it.)
On the other hand, the greater the depth, or the greater the particular wholeness of a holon, then the less fundamental it is, because fewer other holons depend on it for their own existence. Primates, for example, are not very fundamental holons, because neither atoms nor molecules nor cells depend upon them. But by the same token, the less fundamental, the more significant: the more significant that holon is for the universe, because more of the universe is reflected or embraced in that particular wholeness (more of the Kosmos is internal to it, as part of its own being). Primates are very significant, relatively speaking, because they represent and contain atoms and molecules and cells: they signify more of the Kosmos.
Thus an atom, for example, is more fundamental, and less significant, than a cell. More fundamental, because everything above it (including the cell) depends upon it for its existence. Less significant, because less of the Kosmos is embraced in it (or is actually internal to it). A cell, on the other hand, is more significant because it embraces atoms and therefore reflects or signifies more of the Kosmos in its own being. It is more significant, but less fundamental, than an atom. And so on.
(We will return throughout the book to this whole topic, and see that it is related to the issue of intrinsic and extrinsic values; and see also that theorists who mistake great span for great depth are always confusing more fundamental with more significant, and thus, once again, end up recommending regression as a direction for further growth; with a flat-land ontology, the crucial depth dimension is missing, so there is no way for them to spot their mistake.)

10. Holarchies coevolve. Holons do not evolve alone, because there are no alone holons (there are only fields within fields within fields). This principle is often referred to as coevolution, which simply means that the "unit" of evolution is not an isolated holon (individual molecule or plant or animal) but a holon plus its inseparable environment. Evolution, that is, is ecological in the broadest sense.
Jantsch refers to this as the interdependence of microevolution and macroevolution, by which he simply means the coevolution of the individual (micro) and its larger environment (macro). This is just another way of saying that all agency is always agency-in-communion. Jantsch:

The immediate consequence is ... the simultaneity of macro- and microevolution in the universe. Macroscopic structures become the environment for microscopic structures and influence their evolution in decisive ways, or make it possible at all. Vice versa, the evolution of microscopic structures becomes a decisive factor in the formation and evolution of macroscopic structures. This interdependence constitutes nothing but an aspect of co-evolution [operative, he says, "in all three realms"]. This principle implies that every system is linked with its environment by circular processes which establish a feedback link between the evolution of both sides. This holds not only for systems at the same hierarchical level; the entire complex system plus environment evolves as a whole.

In other words, according to Jantsch (and others), micro and macro— individual and social—evolve heterarchically to new holarchical levels of each.
This distinction between an individual holon and its social holon (environment) is not as easy to draw as it may first appear, however, because it's almost impossible to define what we mean by an individual in the first place. The word itself, from the Latin individualis, means not divisible or not separable; by that definition, there are no individuals anywhere in the Kosmos. There are only holons, or dividuals.
On the other hand, we do recognize that enduring holons possess a specific form or pattern, and this pattern is to some degree autonomous, or resistant to environmental obliteration. And this is usually what we mean by calling a holon an "individual"—we mean an enduring compound individual, compounded of its junior holons and adding its own defining form or wholeness or canon or deep structure (which is the novel holon in its own compound individuality). And we further mean, usually (although we might not use these terms), that the overall wholeness or morphic field of the individual holon organizes the indeterminateness of its junior partners.
In other words, even though an "individual holon" exists inseparably from its social environment, its defining factor is its own particular form or pattern. To the degree that we can reasonably recognize that pattern, we will refer to an individual holon. Its environment we will call the social holon.
This is still somewhat arbitrary, of course, because there are some social holons that seem to act as individual holons or "superorganisms"—an ant colony, for example. But in human affairs, to give a counterexample, most of us resist the temptation to describe a social holon, such as the State, as being literally a superorganism, because all organisms have priority over all of their components, and yet with the rise of democratic structures, we like to think that the State is subservient to the people, that the whole is subservient to the parts, and to the degree that that is true, then the social system is not a true organism (it is a social or environmental holon, not an individual holon). Further, the State, unlike a concrete individual, does not have a locus of self-prehension, a unitary feeling as a oneness. In more general terms, it lacks a locus of individual self-being (one of Whitehead's main conclusions; and Habermas: the State is not a macrosubject). And finally, the parts in this social system are conscious, but the "whole" is not.
Nonetheless, in many people's minds the distinction is still somewhat arbitrary; after all, how to draw that line between individual and State is the main dilemma of political theory, and there is no clearcut winner in the debate, although history has decisively rejected both extremes, that of anarchism (there are only individual holons) and totalitarianism (there is only the social holon). And, indeed, I will later argue that the essence of pathological social hierarchies is precisely the attempt to turn them into individual holons (L'état c'est mot) and treat citizens as mere components in a "more holistic system" or as mere "strands in the wonderful web."
We will devote much of the next chapter to this topic. For the time being, let us simply recognize that there are important distinctions between micro- and macroevolution, between an individual holon and a social holon (even though they are inseparably interactive, which is the meaning of "coevolution"). A social holon is still a holon—and not a mere heap or aggregate—because it displays a whole/part pattern, it is rule-bound, it in a sense develops (we speak coherently of stellar evolution), and it can function with various degrees of upward and downward causation (depending on its depth). But it is not a true individual holon, as Whitehead and Habermas and others have noted. Jantsch refers to this as the difference between "vertical organismic and horizontal ecosystemic (symbiotic) organization"—individual and social holons.
Although this general distinction between micro and macro holds good at all levels of development (except, perhaps, at the extremes—Jantsch sees it coming into play within microseconds of the Big Bang), it nevertheless becomes more pronounced, and more obvious, the greater the depth of evolution.

11. The micro is in relational exchange with the macro at all levels of its depth. This tenet is extremely important, particularly when it comes to holons of greater depth and the types of ecosystems (in the broad sense) that they must co-create and upon which their existence depends.
Take, for example, a human being, using just the three levels of matter, life, and mind: all of these levels maintain their own existence through an incredibly rich network of relational exchange with holons of the same depth in the environment. The physical body exists in a system of relational exchange with other physical bodies—in terms of gravitation, material forces and energies, light, water, environmental weather, and so on— and the physical body itself depends for its existence on these physical relationships. Further, the human race reproduces itself physically through food production and food consumption, through social labor organized in an economy for basic material exchanges in the physiosphere.
Likewise, humanity reproduces itself biologically through emotional-sexual relations organized in a family and an appropriate social environment, and depends for its biological existence on a whole network of other biological systems (and ecosystems)—it depends upon harmonious relational exchanges with the biosphere.
Finally, human beings reproduce themselves mentally through exchanges with cultural and symbolic environments, the very essence of which is the relational exchange of symbols with other symbol exchangers. These relational exchanges are embedded in the traditions and institutions of a particular society in such a way that that society can reproduce itself on a cultural level, can reproduce itself in the noosphere.
In short, as holons evolve, each layer of depth continues to exist in (and depend upon) a network of relationships with other holons at the same level of structural organization. I usually refer to this, for short, as "same-level relational exchange." The point is that all holons are compound individuals, compounded of their previous holons and adding their own distinctively emergent pattern; and each level of these holons (i.e., every holon) maintains its existence through relational exchanges with same-depth holons in the social (or macro-) environment.

12. Evolution has directionality. This is the famous arrow of evolutionary time first recognized in the biosphere, but now understood, in the sciences of complexity, to be present in all three of the great domains of evolution. This directionality is usually stated as being one of increasing differentiation, variety, complexity, and organization. But I think it would be helpful to gather together, from different sources, the various indicators of this evolutionary directionality and briefly examine them one at a time.
We have already seen that evolution is marked by creative emergence (novelty), symmetry breaks, self-transcendence, increasing depth (and greater consciousness, which we will discuss later as an addition). Those are already indicators of evolution's directionality. Here are some others. Aside from regressions, dissolutions, arrest, etc., evolution tends in the direction of:
a. Increasing complexity. The German biologist Woltereck coined the term anamorphosis—literally, "not being formless"—to describe what he saw as the central and universal feature of nature: the emergence of ever-increasing complexity. As Jantsch puts it,

The evolution of the universe is the history of an unfolding of differentiated order or complexity. Unfolding is not the same as building up. The latter emphasizes structure and describes the emergence of hierarchical levels by the joining of systems "from the bottom up." Unfolding, in contrast, implies the interweaving of processes which lead simultaneously to phenomena of structuration at different hierarchical levels. Evolution acts in the sense of simultaneous and interdependent structuration of the macro- and the micro-world. Complexity thus emerges from the interpenetration of processes of differentiation and integration. . . .

Ballmer and von Weizsacker, in fact, refer to this maximization of complexity as the "general statement of evolution," and L. L. Whyte called it "the fundamental principle of the development of pattern."
We need one qualification here. As Laszlo points out, the emergence of a new level of complexity also brings with it, from a slightly different angle, a new simplicity, precisely because the new whole, as a single whole, is simpler than its many parts. Thus, says Laszlo, "the emergence of a higher-level system is a ... simplification of system function." He continues:

However, once a new hierarchical level has emerged, systems on the new level tend to become progressively more complex. For example, on the atomic level of organization, hydrogen, the first element to be synthesized in the processes of cosmic evolution, is structurally simpler than the subsequently synthesized, heavier elements. On a higher level of organization, a molecule of water is simpler than a protein molecule; on a still higher organizational level, a unicellular organism is less complex than a multicellular one. . . . Thus, while a new level of organization means a simplification of system function, and of the corresponding system structure, it also means the initiation of a process of progressive structural and functional complexification.

b. Increasing differentiation/integration. This principle was given its first modern statement by Herbert Spencer (in First Principles, 1862): evolution is "a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity, to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, through continuous differentiations and integrations" (this definition of the term evolution allowed biologists to begin using it instead of Darwin's phrase "descent with modification"). And we already quoted Jantsch: "Complexity thus emerges from the interpenetration of processes of differentiation and integration. . . ."
Differentiation produces partness, or a new "manyness"; integration produces wholeness, or a new "oneness." And since holons are whole/ parts, they are formed by the joint action of differentiation and integration.
The differentiating processes are obviously necessary for the undeniable novelty and diversity created by evolution, but integration is just as crucial, converting manyness into oneness (the regime or canon or pattern of a holon is its integrative coherence). Thus Whitehead's view that "the ultimate character pervading the universe is a drive toward the endless production of new syntheses [integrations]." We saw that Whitehead called this drive "creativity"; he says it is "the eternal activity," "the underlying energy of realization"—"nothing escapes it."
Thus Whitehead's all-important dictum: "The many [differentiation] become one [integration] and are increased by one [the new holon]."
These two processes are very obvious in the physiosphere (atoms integrating differentiated particles, molecules integrating differentiated atoms, etc.) and in the biosphere (e.g., the progressive differentiation of the zygote and the progressive integration of the resultant parts into tissues, organ systems, organism), but they are also rampant in the sciences of the noosphere. Even psychoanalysis is on board. Gertrude Blanck and Rubin Blanck, for example, pioneers in psychoanalytic developmental psychology, have persuasively argued that the aggressive drive is the drive to differentiation, and Eros is the drive to integration, and disruption of either one results in serious pathology (we will return to this in chap. 9).
And for all the commotion surrounding Derrida's notion of différance (to differ and defer)—some critics have used the notion to deconstruct anything they didn't happen to like—Derrida himself defines the notion very simply as "the process of differentiation." Before communication can begin, entities have to be differentiated in the first place, and in one sense these entities do not exist prior to the differentiating process per se. Différance is thus part of that "eternal activity" of creativity, a dynamic force of bringing into being—"it has impulsive force, the force of articulation or differentiation." In other words, as one of his interpreters points out, "Derrida sees the dynamic difference that characterizes reality as also composing the nature of language itself. This enables language, through its inherent process of difference, to function as a means of realization .. . language participates in the reality it manifests . . . the dynamic becoming of reality itself." But differentiating also demands integrations and syntheses—as Derrida puts it, "The play of differences supposes, in effect, syntheses and referrals. . . ."
This play of differentiating and integrating forces, or différance and synthesis and referral, is behind Derrida's notorious critique of "presence." As Derrida words it: 

The play of differences involves syntheses and referrals which prevent there from being at any moment or in any way a simple element which is present in and of itself and refers only to itself. Whether in written or spoken discourse, no element can function as a sign without relating to another element which itself is not simply present. This linkage means that each "element" is constituted with reference to the trace in it of the other elements of the system. Nothing, in either the elements or the system, is anywhere ever simply present or absent.

In other words, there is nothing that isn't a holon, a context within a context forever. You cannot point to any thing, to any holon, and say it's just that and nothing else, because every holon is simultaneously a superholon and a subholon: it is composed of holons and composes others (across both space and time); nothing is ever simply present.
As for the conjoint operation of differentiation and integration in the noosphere, Habermas notes that "the different lifeworlds that collide with one another do not stand next to each other without any mutual understanding. As totalities [holons], they follow the pull of their claims to universality and work out their differences until their horizons of understanding 'fuse' [integrate] with one another." Across the board we see this dual operation of extension and condensation, he says: "The increasing reflexivity of culture, the generalization of values and norms, and the heightened individuation of socialized subjects, the enhancement of critical consciousness, autonomous will formation, and individuation, takes place under conditions of an ever more extensive and ever more finely woven net of linguistically generated intersubjectivity." And his point is that all of this "means differentiation and condensation [integration] at once—a thickening of the floating web of intersubjective threads that simultaneously holds together the ever more sharply differentiated components of culture, society, and person."
That phrase is significant: it is not just an extension of the web, but a thickening: not just span, but also depth.
Finally, to touch bases with Foucault, we might note that his "archaeological holism asserts that the whole determines what can count even as a possible element. The whole verbal content is more fundamental and thus is more than the sum of its parts. Indeed, there are no parts except within the field which identifies and individuates them"—that is, differentiates and integrates them. And let us immediately note that Foucault eventually abandoned archaeology as an exclusive methodology precisely because archaeology was itself merely a part of the larger holon of social practices: not wholes, but whole/parts.
In sum, evolution requires both differentiation and integration operating together—"the many become one and are increased by one"—and, indeed, these two normally (in healthy holarchies) occur conjointly, which is why I usually write it as "differentiation/integration." These appear as opposites (or utterly opposed tendencies) only in a flatland ontology, where more of the one means less of the other. But in the multidimensional Kosmos, more of one means more of the other. They join hands endlessly to produce new whole/parts or many/ones or holons. The dialectics of depth . . .
c.  Increasing organization/structuration. "The further evolution of the suprasystem leads to the progressive complexification of its defining system level—and ultimately to the creation of hypercycles that shift it to the next organizational level. Thus evolution moves from the simpler to the more complex type of system, and from the lower to the higher level of organization." This is, for example, behind the standard distinction, in evolutionary biology, between clades and grades: "A group of species with a recent common ancestor forms a clade; a group with the same level of structural organization forms a grade." Grade, of course, is another term for depth.
d.  Increasing relative autonomy. This is a much misunderstood concept. It simply refers to a holon's capacity for self-preservation in the midst of environmental fluctuations (relative autonomy is another term for agency). And according to the sciences of complexity, the greater the depth of a holon, the greater its relative autonomy. This does not mean greater permanence or greater concrete stubbornness. Worms are less durable than rocks. Relative autonomy simply refers to a certain flexibility in the face of changing environmental conditions. A fox can maintain its internal   temperature   relatively   independently   of  changing  weather, whereas a rock's temperature fluctuates immediately with every passing circumstance.
By the time we reach the noosphere, in humans, relative autonomy is of such a high degree that it can produce not just differentiation from the environment, which is necessary, but dissociation from the environment, which is disastrous—an expression of pathological agency that, among many other things, lands it squarely in ecological hell (we will, of course, be returning to this topic).
The reason that autonomy is always relative is that there are no wholes, only whole/parts. As a whole, a holon possesses a degree of autonomy, expressed in its identifying and enduring pattern, its self-preservation. It possesses coherence and identity across space and time (or else it simply ceases to exist), which is why autonomy is virtually synonymous with agency, regime, code, canon, deep structure. As a part, however, every holon—the autonomy of every holon—is subjected to larger forces and systems of which it is merely a component. This doesn't change its fundamental pattern or identifying regime, but it does subject it to a host of limiting circumstances and conditions that can alter its expression, and it often moves the source of the initiation of action to other regimes (e.g., if my country declares war, I am included, like it or not).
In other words, as we have seen time and again, all agency is agency-in-communion. (This is nicely captured in Varela's notion of "structural coupling": the agency of a biological system is relatively autonomous, but the form of the autonomy evolved in structural coupling with its environs; i.e., its present agency is the result of evolutionary communions.)
Thus, autonomy, like all aspects of a holon, is sliding: a holon is relatively autonomous vis-à-vis its juniors and relatively subservient vis-à-vis its seniors.
Much of the fun, if one can call it that, of postmodern poststructuralist games consists in the upsetting of established autonomies by pointing to larger contexts which actually "determine" the supposed "autonomy" of the isolated unit, whereupon the isolated unit itself is promptly declared "dead" (death of the writer, death of the subject, death of the patriarchy, death of the mythic god, death of the ego, death of rationality, death of logocentrism, etc.), with the "autonomy" or systemic structure of the larger context being in turn merely a part of ... The game simply continues until the critic gets tired (or settles on an ideology), because there is nothing in reality that can stop the sliding game any sooner, for contexts are boundless.
But the "decentering" of previously "autonomous" units is indeed part of the important truths of postmodern critiques, and we will return to them throughout this volume. Thus, to give a few examples now: the autonomous ego of the Enlightenment is not that autonomous because it is actually set in the context of its own organic drives (the psychoanalytic critique of the Enlightenment), and these previously unconscious drives must be integrated for true autonomy to emerge. But even the entire integrated and autonomous person of psychoanalysis is not really autonomous, because that individual is actually set in contexts of linguistic structures that autonomously determine meaning without the individual even knowing about it (the critique launched by structuralism, archaeology). But linguistic structures aren't really that autonomous, because they exist only in the context of pre-articulate worldviews that use language without language ever registering that fact (the critique by Heidegger, Gebser). But further, worldviews themselves are merely a small component of massive networks and contexts of social practices (in various ways, Marx, Habermas, the later Foucault). And further yet, theorists from Kierkegaard to Schelling to Hegel would insist that those social practices only exist in, and because of, the larger context of Spirit.
In every one of those cases, the theorist (Freud, Marx, Heidegger, Foucault, Schelling, etc.) tells us something important about the meaning of our existence by situating our existence in a larger context—since meaning and context are in important ways synonymous, as we earlier noted. And each successive theorist gives a deeper or bigger or wider meaning to existence by finding previously hidden contexts that suddenly shift the autonomy out from under our feet and point to larger communions in which we live and breathe and have our being.
And in a sense, each of them is quite right: the ego does exist in the context of the total organism and its drives, which does exist in the context of its linguistically disclosed world, which does exist in terms of overall networks of social practices, which themselves subsist in Spirit. That is the very nature of holon, contexts within contexts within contexts. And each time we spot one of these larger (deeper) contexts, we find a new meaning conferred on a given holon, because, as we earlier noted, the larger context confers a meaning on its holons that the holons themselves, alone and isolated, do not and cannot possess.
Likewise, each discovery of a new and deeper context and meaning is a discovery of a new therapia, a new therapy, namely: we must shift our perspectives, deepen our perception, often against a great deal of resistance, to embrace the deeper and wider context. The self is situated in contexts within contexts within contexts, and each shift in context is an often painful process of growth, of death to a shallow context and rebirth to a deeper one.
But for just that reason, each time we identify a deeper context, our relative autonomy actually increases, because in identifying with a deeper perception, we have found a wider freedom.
We will be discussing all these notions as we proceed. The simpler point of this section is just that, even though all autonomy is relative, nonetheless relative autonomy increases with evolution (as we said, a fox is more autonomous than a rock). And the reason that relative autonomy increases with emergent evolution is that more external forces impinging on the autonomy of a holon become internal forces cooperating with it (due to supersession, or transcendence and inclusion). It identifies with deeper contexts and thus finds wider freedom. We will see numerous examples of this as we proceed.
e. Increasing telos. The regime, canon, code, or deep structure of a holon acts as a magnet, an attractor, a miniature omega point, for the actualization of that holon in space and time. That is, the end point of the system tends to "pull" the holon's actualization (or development) in that direction, whether the system is physical, biological, or mental.
Again, this was an item that was largely ignored as long as science was intent on studying a bunch of rocks in motion, but even in the physiosphere the "entelechy" (regime, canon, deep structure, morphogenetic field) of a holon governs the final form of its actualization, whether from an electron cloud or a chaotic attractor of complex systems. "In the geometric orientation that dominates in contemporary dynamic systems theory, the principal features of dynamic systems are the attractors: they characterize the long-run behavior of the systems. Dynamic systems evolve from a given initial state along a unique trajectory of states in accordance with the laws of evolution [some version of the twenty tenets]. This leads eventually to some recognizable pattern where the trajectory remains trapped. The pattern defines the attractors of the system. . . ."

If the series of system states come to a rest, their evolution is governed by a static attractor [studied, for example, by Rene Thorn's topologi-cal "catastrophe theory"]. If the states consist of a repeated cycle of states with a definite periodicity, the system is under the sway of a periodic attractor. And if the trajectory of system states neither comes to rest nor exhibits periodicity but is highly erratic, it is under the influence of a so-called chaotic attractor.

"In recent years chaotic behavior has been discovered in a wide variety of natural systems, and their mathematical modeling has made rapid progress. An entire discipline has sprung up within dynamic systems theory devoted to the study of the properties of chaotic attractors and of the systems governed by them; it became popularly known as chaos theory. Despite its name, the theory seeks to eliminate rather than discover or create chaos—it studies processes that appear chaotic on the surface but on detailed analysis prove to manifest subtle strands of order. Chaotic attractors are complex and subtly ordered structures that constrain the behavior of seemingly random and unpredictable systems."
These attractors, in other words, are examples of the regimes or organizing forces of social holons and their inherent teleological pull to pattern (without which a holon would simply not exist). Of particular interest are "bifurcations," which consist of the shift from one type of attractor to another. "Models with catastrophic bifurcations (conducing from turbulent to newly ordered states through the reconfiguration of the attractors) simulate rapid evolutionary leaps with the greatest fidelity. The significant simulations occur when dynamic systems are destabilized and pass through a chaotic phase on the way toward essentially new—and in practice unpredictable—steady states."
The conclusion for chaos theory is that these are "the kind of transformations that underlie the evolution of all third-state [far from equilibrium] systems in the real world, from atoms of the elements to societies of human beings." These types of transformations (not merely translations) generate "a statistically significant tendency toward greater complexity and a higher level of organization. The system leaps to a new plateau and thus becomes more dynamic and more autonomous in its milieu." So that, finally, these factors converge to "push bifurcating systems up the ladder of the evolutionary hierarchy"—that is, holarchy.

When growing fluctuations upset the dynamic stability of a system, its stable point of periodic attractors can no longer maintain it in its established state; chaotic attractors appear and with them an interval of transition hallmarked by transitory chaos. When the system achieves a new state of dynamic stability, the chaotic attractors of the bifurcation epoch give way to a new set of point or periodic attractors. These attractors maintain the system in a condition far from thermo-dynamic equilibrium, with more effective use of information, greater efficiency in the use of free energies, greater flexibility [relative autonomy], as well as greater structural complexity on a higher level of organization.

Telos—the miniature omega-point pull of the end state of a holon's regime—is, of course, rampant not only in physical systems but in the biosphere and noosphere as well. An acorn's code (its DNA) has oak written all over it. Through processes of translation, transcription, and transformation, the seed unfolds into a tree, holarchically. These biological processes have been studied so much, and are so familiar to most readers, that I will not dwell on them (we will see many examples later); we need only note that biologists "recognize the existence of direction toward future functions," and that "the purposeful aspect of organisms is incontrovertible."
In the noosphere, once the mental and linguistic sciences stopped trying to ape the study of moving rocks and concentrated on mental processes, the mind's telos inexorably came to the fore. Freud's psychoanalysis, for example, was profoundly developmental in nature, and the whole point of development is that it is not a random hopping about but is indeed going somewhere, and therefore it can be derailed and sabotaged, with resultant pathology.
An old joke from Vermont: A city fellow, driving through the Vermont countryside, sees a man in a truck on the side of the road. The truck is axle-deep in the mud, and the wheels are spinning. "Are you stuck?" asks the city fellow. "I would be, if'n I was goin' somewhere."
Well, the psyche, for better or worse, is going somewhere, and that is why the process can get stuck, why it is fraught with frustration, arrest, fixation, stick points, logjams. If the mind weren't going somewhere, it could never get stuck, never get "sick." And these "sick points," these "stick points," can only be understood in terms of the mind's omega point, of where it wants to go. And not just Freud. "In an oft-cited formula, Piaget declares that there is no structure which lacks a development, and that the process of development can only be understood in view of the structure which exists at the beginning and the structures into which it will evolve." The basin and their attractors, their miniature omega points.
Or America's undeniable philosophical genius, Charles Peirce: "The being governed by a purpose or other final cause is the very essence of the psychical phenomenon." He adds that "to say that the future does not influence the present is untenable doctrine." Or Roman Jakobson, who was one of the first to introduce, as he put it, "a consistent application of a means-ends [telos] model to language design, to its self-regulating maintenance of integrity and dynamic equilibrium, as well as to its mutations [transformations]," so that the "adoption of teleology was a central concern." All the way to Habermas: "There is a relentless pressure built into the use of language oriented toward mutual understanding." And even Derrida: "This archetrace contains within itself all the possibilities of manifestation as the primordial 'difference.' This 'difference' is the inherent ideological force within us that leads to self-manifestation."
Now, I haven't actually mentioned the nature or the actual content of the mind's omega point, its basic attractor, its end state toward which earlier stages are struggling to reach, because it is at this point that the story becomes truly fascinating. The mind's omega point, for each theorist, is the context that they believe cannot be outcontexted, the context beyond which growth or expansion cannot or does not or should not proceed.
For Freud, the omega point, the end of development, was genital organization and integrated ego: all stages and all roads lead to that Rome. For Piaget, the omega point is formal operational thinking, which alone reaches "equilibration" and thus alone marks the end of development. For Habermas, rational inter subjective exchange of uncoerced mutual understanding: when this fully unfolds, the relentless pressure subsides.
And so the omega points would proceed, with each theorist postulating, in some sense, the "end of history," the omega point that, when reached, would answer all the really difficult questions and usher in some sort of relatively paradisaical condition. For Hegel, a rational State in which individuals could realize absolute Spirit acting in and through them in a mutual community. For Marx, a classless society in which alienation of labor and produce would be healed in shared mutual care. And most people are familiar with Teilhard de Chardin's ultimate omega point, the resurrection of Christ consciousness in each and all, which, like all omega points, is maintained to be the purpose of history and evolution itself.
And once again, there are important moments of truth in all of those omega points. Each stage of growth, because it is a holon, faces a dual tension. As a whole, it is relatively autonomous and relatively "healthy, happy, whole." But as a part, it is in some sense alienated, set apart, or disconnected from those contexts that are beyond its own perception. And until it takes the larger and deeper context into account, the limitations of its own shallower position will torment it, inflict it with the agony of incompleteness, tear at its boundaries with hints of something deeper, higher, more meaningful. . . .
And I don't mean that poetically. Piaget, for example, found that the earlier/lower stages of cognition, such as preoperational and concrete operational thinking, had inherent limitations or conflicts built into them, and that thought stuck in those levels wobbles endlessly without resolution around certain very important tasks. Only with the emergence of formal operational thinking could these conflicts come to some sort of peace or resolution, which Piaget called equilibration, a type of balanced but dynamic harmony. And further, it was only from the view of formal ' operational that these earlier conflicts made any sense at all: they were struggling to their resolution, struggling to their omega point, struggling to equilibration in the larger context of formal operational cognition, and, put rather simply, they could not be happy until they found that larger horizon.
Limited contexts find resolution, not by anything that can be done on the same level, but only by transcending that level, by finding its deeper and wider context. Deeper and wider contexts exert a pull, a telos, on present limited contexts.
And that is the truth common to all omega-point theorists (and any decent theorist is an omega-point theorist). Assuming that their contexts are well founded, and assuming that they do not engage in reductionism, then there is much we can learn from each of these types of theorists. They always point to ways beyond our present perception, and assuming their contexts are genuine, they are right: we will never be happy until we, too, can live with a larger horizon. Until we, too, can accept the therapia of embracing gently a greater depth. . . .
And a final Omega Point? That would imply a final Whole, and there is no such holon anywhere in manifest existence. But perhaps we can interpret it differently. Who knows, perhaps telos, perhaps Eros, moves the entire Kosmos, and God may indeed be an all-embracing chaotic Attractor, acting, as Whitehead said, throughout the world by gentle persuasion toward love.
But that, to say the least, is quite ahead of the story.

3

Individual and Social

If I am what I am because you are what you are, and you are what you are because I am what 1 am, then I am not I and you are not you.                                                                        —HlLLEL

WE SAW,   in chapter 1, that various theorists with a "holistic" orientation—systems theorists, ecological theorists, "new paradigm" thinkers, deep ecologists, ecofeminists, and so on— maintain that the various crises facing the modern world are all fundamentally due to a "fractured" worldview. we lack a unifying vision, and thus our world is fragmented, broken, alienated. And so, they maintain, what is required is some sort of systems theory orientation, some way for us to see and feel that we are all interwoven into the single pattern and web of life. We need, they would all maintain in their various fashions, a profoundly ecocentric worldview.
But no sooner do such theorists make that claim than they run into profound problems. First of all, they maintain that, as John Seed summarizes this view, "the world is seen not as a pyramid but as a web. Humans are but one strand of that web." In other words, human beings are a part of a deeper (or greater) web of life, the biosphere. But we could destroy all humans and the biosphere would still exist (but not vice versa), showing that the biosphere is a lower and shallower, not deeper or higher, reality. This profoundly confuses ecotheorists; they seem to have no coherent way to honor the biosphere without absolutizing it.
Second, as Fritjof Capra summarizes the "new paradigm" thought, "In the new paradigm, the properties of the parts can be understood only from the dynamics of the whole. Ultimately, there are no parts at all. What we call a part is merely a pattern in an inseparable web of relationships." It's true that there are no parts, but equally true that there are no wholes—only whole/parts forever, which forever escape the totalizing lie. But even if there were only wholes, how would this translate into, say, political theory? Ultimately, there are no free citizens, only the whole State? If the "whole" is primary, and we are parts of the State, then clearly we exist to serve the State, and clearly a totalitarian regime would be a shining example of the new paradigm, where all those nasty parts will disappear in the glorious web.
It is not, as I will repeat a dozen times throughout this volume, that systems theory is wrong; it is that, ironically, it is incredibly partial and lopsided. And so we will begin, in this chapter and the next, to redress some of these partialities and imbalances. And we will see, as this book progresses, that systems theory, in and by itself, is not a force of healing and wholing the planet; rather, we will see, and again ironically, that systems theory (in all its many variants) is part of the flatland paradigm that is still contributing to the despoliation and devastation of Gaia. We will see that the "Eco" philosophies, with few exceptions, are the photographic negative of the "Ego" philosophies, and that the two of them are the flatland twins in the dance of Gaia's destruction.

micro and macro

Virtually all of the popular theorists of systems theory, deep ecology, and ecofeminism present some version of a great holarchy of being, a web of life, with fields within fields within fields. The ecofeminist Julia Russell:

At the same time, a body, a nation, exists in a larger context in which it functions as a part. The nation exists in the context of all nations that make up the whole political body of humanity. And all of humanity exists in a biosphere that is the body of the whole Earth. We exist as part of a seamless whole in which everything is connected to everything else.

Biosphere 
Society / Nation
Culture / Subculture 
Community 
Family Person
Nervous System 
Organs / Organ Systems
Tissues 
Cells 
Organelles 
Molecules 
Atoms 
Subatomic Particles

Figure 3-1. Typical Holarchy	
Figure 3-1 is very typical of the various holarchies that have been presented, either explicitly or implicitly, by different holistic or ecological or systems-oriented theorists (similar holarchies can be found in Popper, Laszlo, Sessions, Miller, Engels, and others). Many of these holarchies are represented by the theorists as a series of levels or "stratified order" (Capra), like a "ladder," which is perfectly acceptable as long as we remember the circular complexity that these authors maintain is actually involved and don't make the unfair and unwarranted charge that these theorists are being "linear." That, as we will see, is not the problem.
If we look at Figure 3-1—or at almost any of the other and similar holarchies—we notice immediately that there is a confusion and conflation of individual and social holons. That is, micro- and macroworlds are confused. The social holon is assumed to be of the same type and same nature as the compound individual holon, so that they can be arranged "above" or "below" each other. Look, for example, at Karl Popper's biospheric holarchy (fig. 3-2). Popper (and he is far from alone) counts individuals and populations as being of the same logical (and existential) type, and thus arrangeable one above the other, as different "levels" on the same scale (such as, in his scheme, level 7 and level 8, or level 10 and level 11). This is quite incorrect.
We saw in the last chapter (with tenet 9), that in any holistic sequence, individual or social, if we destroy any level, we destroy all the levels above it and none of the levels below it, by the simple definition of wholeness/
12) Level of ecosystems (total biosphere) 
11) Level of populations of metazoa and plants 
10) Level of metazoa and multicellular plants 
9) Level of tissues and organs 
8) Level of populations of unicellular organisms 
7) Level of cells and of unicellular organisms 
6) Level of organelles (and perhaps viruses) 
5) Liquids and solids (crystals) 
4) Molecules 
3) Atoms 
2) Elementary particles 
1) Sub-elementary particles 
0) Unknown: sub-sub-elementary particles?
Figure 3-2. Popper's Holarchy	
partness. A higher-level holon is in part composed of its lower-level holons, and thus if we destroy any lower level, we will also destroy any levels above it because we have taken away some of their component parts. But these parts themselves existed before the whole emerged and therefore can, in general terms, exist without it.
Look again at figure 3-1. The claim of these holists is that nation-states exist as parts of a larger biosphere, a higher (or deeper) wholeness. But if the biosphere were really a higher level of organization than nation-states, if it really were a higher-level whole organizing or containing nation-states as parts, then (1) you couldn't have a biosphere until you had nation-states, since the latter are claimed to be parts of the biosphere; and (2) if you destroyed all nation-states you would destroy the biosphere (since the whole cannot exist without its parts).
Both of those assumptions are obviously not true. In fact, it is just the opposite: destroy the biosphere and you destroy all nation-states, but theoretically remove all nation-states and the biosphere would and could continue (just as it did long before nations showed up). This means that the biosphere is a lower and shallower level (which does not mean less important for existence, but more important for existence, because the lower a level you destroy, the more higher levels it takes with it; it is, as we put it in tenet 9, more fundamental to existence).
So let us locate the "biosphere" or "total ecosystem" by asking what would or would not be destroyed if we theoretically "disappeared" it. Looking at Popper's diagram, we find that if we destroyed the biosphere (if a thermonuclear holocaust destroyed all life forms on earth), we would destroy all the levels down to and including his level 6, but no lower. That means the ecosystem starts at his level 6, and not, as he lists it, at level 12. (This, as we will see, is a crucial error in the ontologies of many ecotheorists as well.)
In other words, we obviously have ecosystems, in the broadest sense, as soon as we have different life forms interacting with each other and with a physical environment, and this begins to occur in its most fundamental fashion at the level of prokaryotes (organelles). Putting the ecosystem at level 12 would imply, for example, that poor level 10—plants and metazoa—don't have ecosystems.
Thus, if we consider "the" ecosystem as a single level, then it is obvious that both diagrams completely misplace it. But it's worse than that. Ecosystem (or "total population") isn't a particular level among other levels of individual holarchy, but the social environment of each and every level of individuality in the biosphere. And neither of these diagrams distinguishes between micro and macro (or individual and social) on any level; both treat them as separate levels on the same scale. (This is a second crucial error in most eco-ontologies.)
With reference to Popper's diagram, for example, level 8 and level 7 are not two different levels, as he imagines, but the individual and social aspects of the same level. (We know this to be true because if we destroy either "level," the other is also destroyed, which means neither is higher or lower relative to the other.) If one were really lower—if level 7 were really lower than level 8, as he states—then it could exist without the higher. But you cannot have cells without a society (population) of other cells, and you cannot have a population of cells with no cells at all— nothing exists alone without an environment of the similar.
In other words, the individual and social are not two different coins, one being of a higher currency than the other, but rather the heads and tails of the same coin at every currency. They are two aspects of the same thing, not two fundamentally different things (or levels).
What is necessary, then, is to construct a series of true holarchies of compound individuals and then indicate, at the same level of organization, the type of environment (or social holon) in which the individual holon is a participant (and on whose existence the individual holon depends). And this needs to be done in all three of the great realms of evolution—physiosphere, biosphere, and noosphere.
Fortunately, much of this work has already been done by Erich Jantsch, the only theorist, to my knowledge, to have investigated extensively (and often brilliantly) the relationships between micro and macro (individual and social) patterns of coevolution in all three domains (although, as we will see, his argument becomes somewhat garbled as he approaches the noosphere).
Figures 3-3 and 3-4 are Jantsch's schematic diagrams of the coevolution of micro and macro patterns in, respectively, the physiosphere and the biosphere. Figure 3-4 picks up where figure 3-3 leaves off (namely, the passing of matter into life). The explanations under each diagram are his own. (With the exceptions that I will mention, I am in substantial agreement with everything in these two diagrams and with his explanations of them.)

Figure 3-3. Cosmic coevolution of macro- and microstructures. The asymmetrical unfurling of the four physical forces calls into play step by step new structural levels, from the macroscopic side as well as from the microscopic. These levels mutually stimulate their evolutions. (Jantsch, The Self-Organizing Universe, p. 94)

Figure 3-4. The history of life on earth expresses the coevolution of self-organizing macro- and microsystems in ever-higher degrees of differentiation. (Jantsch, The Self-Organizing Universe, p. 132)

The lower portion of each diagram represents microevolution—the evolution of individual holons. The upper portion represents macroevolution—the correlative level of social or environmental relationships (relational exchanges) in which the individual holons are inextricably embedded. The earlier figures (3-1 and 3-2) suffer badly by comparison because they treat micro and macro as different levels of the overall evolutionary process, instead of seeing them as two different aspects of each level of the overall evolutionary process, and they leave out altogether the macro component of the lower levels, a grave omission.
Notice in particular that both the micro and macro holarchies given by Jantsch (in both the physiosphere and the biosphere) constitute a genuine higher/lower relationship: destroy any lower (whether individual or social), and the levels above it are also destroyed, but not vice versa. Jantsch is presenting genuine holarchies of both individual and social holons.

gaia

Notice, in figure 3-4, where Jantsch places "Gaia"—it is the social holon composed primarily of the individual holons of prokaryotes. Jantsch is here using the term Gaia in its technically correct sense, as originally proposed by Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock (and named by William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies). As Jantsch explains, "The autocatalytic units in this system [Gaia] which make possible the formation of a dissipative structure far from equilibrium and maintain the through-flow of the various gases [in the atmosphere] are none else but the prokaryotes. It seems that after the profound transformations of the earth's surface by the oxidation of sediments and the accumulation of free oxygen, they have been instrumental in bringing the overall system bio- plus atmosphere into global, autopoietic stability, reigning now for 1500 million years."
The prokaryotes mediate exchanges with the atmosphere (the physiosphere), but also form a global and interconnected network with all other prokaryotes—the overall Gaia system. This is precisely tenet 11, "The micro is in relational exchange with the macro at all levels of its depth." Further, and this is the fascinating part, since some prokaryotes were taken up and incorporated into higher (eukaryotic) cells and these in turn in complex organisms, the prokaryotic Gaia system is still serving its original global function. As Jantsch puts it, "The descendents of the prokaryotes, in the form of parts of more highly developed cells, are still at their old job." And this, of course, is precisely tenet 5, "Each emergent holon transcends but includes its predecessor(s)."
Jantsch points out that the Gaia system is the largest living social holon on the planet (has the most units, or the greatest span), precisely because it is the shallowest (most primitive). Again, evolution produces greater depth, less span. At the same time, precisely because Gaia is the shallowest of all living social holons, it is exactly the most fundamental. As we earlier put it, the less depth a holon has, the more fundamental it is to the Kosmos, because it is a component of so many other holons. And thus Gaia is the most fundamental (and least significant) of all living social holons: all higher life forms depend upon it (destroy higher life forms, and Gaia is basically untouched; destroy Gaia, and everything else goes with it). Gaia is indeed our roots and our foundation.
But aside from this technical usage, Gaia has come to mean, for many people, the total biosphere; for some, it means the total planet and all life forms; and for a few, it means Spirit itself, or the Goddess, as the total Life Force of the planet. There is in all these approaches a tendency to confuse fundamental with significant. Nonetheless, although none of these usages is technically correct, using Gaia to mean the overall biosphere or overall life dimension of the planet is acceptable enough, as long as we are clear about what exactly is meant. I will often use Gctia in both the narrow technical sense (prokaryotic network) and the broader "mythic" sense (total biosphere or living planet as a whole), and the context will make clear which is intended.

size, span, embrace

In this section I am going to be splitting some theoretical hairs, and for those readers less than interested in such goings on, a simple summary might go as follows:
We saw, with tenet 8, that increasing evolution produces greater depth (or greater embrace) and less span (or fewer holons capable of the greater embrace). Many theorists, including Jantsch, have tried to correlate these changes with changes in physical size, since size often does seem to indicate this change.
For example, greater depth is sometimes indicated by the fact that cells are bigger than the molecules they contain, and the molecules in turn are bigger than the atoms they contain, and so on. And less span is sometimes indicated by the fact that the populations of greater depth get smaller and smaller (planets are smaller than galaxies, ecosystems are smaller than planets, families are smaller than ecosystems, and so forth).
However, in this section I try to point out that what is always the case—greater depth and less span—only sometimes translates into actual physical size, and sometimes it doesn't translate at all. Thus, focusing on the size changes obscures what is actually going on, what is actually the case.
And this is important not just for theoretical hair-splitting but because most "new paradigm" and "ecological" theorists are constructing a scheme of things (and constructing their holarchies) based principally on size (bigger is better—precisely as in fig. 3-1), and this leads to a host of unfortunate consequences. Since virtually all ecophilosophies are built around something like figure 3-1, it is crucial to understand the errors that result in that diagram, and one of the central issues is simply this obsession with size.
The focus on size is a remnant of science's trying to ape the study of a bunch of moving rocks—can't deny size there—and this is part of the flatland reductionism that collapsed the Kosmos into the cosmos, ditched quality in favor of quantity, and made some people think that "bigger is better" is actually a value system around which to build a life. We will return to this point at the end of this section, but first the hair-splitting.
Notice that in both figures 3-3 and 3-4 Jantsch plots spatial extension (or physical size) against evolutionary time, and his conclusion in both figures is that, with increasing evolution, individual holons tend to become larger (in the sense that organisms are larger than molecules) and social holons tend to become smaller (planets are smaller than galaxies)— and he directly and explicitly indicates this on his diagrams.
Jantsch is on to something very important here, I believe, but he completely confuses the issue by putting it solely in terms of size (or spatial extension).
We recognize that evolution produces greater depth and less span. On the one hand, individual holons transcend but include their predecessors—development is envelopment—and so the total embrace of individual holons increases: cells embrace molecules which embrace atoms which embrace particles. So far, so good. But this Jantsch tries to indicate by saying that the size of individual holons always becomes larger (and there's the problem).
Likewise, since the greater the depth of a holon, the more precarious its existence, then the fewer of them can be produced and maintained, relative to the number of their predecessor(s). There will always be fewer molecules than atoms—greater depth, less span. And therefore, the population of greater-depth holons will always be less than the population of its predecessor(s). So far, so good. But this Jantsch tries to indicate by saying that the spatial extension of social holons always becomes smaller (and there's the same problem).
In correlating these changes with actual size, Jantsch goes too far (or becomes too simplistic). Depth or embrace always increases, but embrace is not necessarily translatable into simple sizes. Some molecules are bigger than some cells (but there are exceptions). It is true that in any specific individual holon, embrace always correlates with size (the molecules in any given cell are always smaller than the cell itself, obviously); but as a general statement of evolutionary progression, the only thing that is constant is increase in depth, and while this often shows up in size, it is not size that indicates depth or development.
In the same way, increasing evolution means less relative span (or decreasing simple span), but this does not necessarily show up as decreasing physical size. (Jantsch particularly gets into trouble here, as I shall try to indicate.) For once a given level has emerged, then its simple span begins to increase, and this will always show up as an increase in the spatial extension of the population. (When this starts happening in human evolution, Jantsch gets confused, because, he supposes, macroevolution is supposed to get smaller, and yet human sociocultural evolution keeps getting larger and more global, which leads Jantsch to say that human evolution completely "turns on its head" the previous trend seen everywhere else in evolution; but, of course, it does nothing of the sort—all that gets turned on its head is his incorrect assumption about size.)
So, with reference to Jantsch's two diagrams, what we need to keep in mind here (and for future discussion) is that increasing evolution means increasing depth (or embrace) and decreasing span relative to its predecessor(s), but increasing span on its own level as it continues to grow (to stasis). And that although actual size or spatial extension is often a good indicator of these yardsticks, it does not necessarily and always translate into simple physical dimensions.
The reason Jantsch's "size rule" gets into so much trouble with human or sociocultural evolution is that the human mind, as Descartes knew, is characterized more by intention than extension. That is why it is so important to state the "rule" strictly in terms of embrace (depth of holon, regardless of size of holon) and span (number of individuals at that depth, regardless of their actual size). A concept, we will see, always embraces a symbol (it is a symbol plus another cognitive function; it has greater depth), but we can't say a concept is physically bigger than a symbol. One value might be better than another, but it doesn't occupy a bigger space. All of these category errors are remnants of science's trying to ape the study of moving rocks and allow only empirical/physical dimensions to be the measurement of anything really, really real.

the problem with size

Now all of these seemingly hair-splitting distinctions are actually very important when it comes to the prevalent "holistic theories," because many of them try to construct their holarchies based on increasing size (or, secondarily, increasing span)—just as in figure 3-1—and this leads to some very unpleasant and confusing results.
I will mention only two problems at this point. For the evolution of individual holons, greater embrace means that more of the universe is being taken into the holon (is actually internal to that holon). As we will see, an individual holon can eventually embrace the entire Kosmos—its depth can go to infinity—but the actual number of holons (the span) that can realize this total embrace might be very, very few. Cosmic consciousness means cosmic embrace, it doesn't mean cosmic span.
Further, many holistic theorists are admirably trying to construct a series of "wider and wider wholes," and this series is of absolutely crucial significance, they maintain, because it is meant to help us humans find our place, our context, in the larger scheme of things, so that we may more accurately orient ourselves—morally, emotionally, cognitively—to our fellows and to our world. I am in complete sympathy with that approach.
But if depth is confused with span (or with size), then the resultant "holistic sequence of wider wholes" ends up being perfectly regressive and antiholistic! Since, with evolution, simple span always gets smaller, then by constructing a holistic sequence of bigger span, we are headed in precisely the opposite and altogether wrong direction.
For example, many holistic theorists create their "holistic" sequences using simple span, and end up with this: the noosphere is part of the larger whole called the biosphere, which itself is part of the larger whole called the cosmos (or the entire physiosphere).
Absolutely not true. Absolutely the other way around. As we have seen, if the noosphere were really a part of the biosphere, then if we destroyed the noosphere the biosphere would disappear, and that is clearly not the case. An atom is genuinely a part of a molecule, and thus if we destroy the atoms we also destroy the molecule: the whole needs its parts. Just so, if the noosphere were really a part of the biosphere, then destroying the noosphere would eliminate the biosphere, and yet it is just the other way around: destroy the biosphere, and the noosphere is gone, precisely because the biosphere is a part of the noosphere, and not vice versa.
In other words, because these theorists look mostly at simple span (and its size), and because they think that bigger span is a "higher or deeper whole," and since in fact greater evolution produces less span, then these theorists get the holistic sequence exactly backward.
What these holists mean to say, correctly, is that the noosphere depends on the biosphere, which depends on the physiosphere—and that is true precisely because the physiosphere is a lower component of the biosphere, which is a lower component of the noosphere, and not the other way around.
Because this is such an important topic, I want to go over it using some very simple examples.

same-level relational exchange

We said that with emergent evolution we are, in effect, playing three-dimensional checkers or chess, not flatland chess. So imagine this: imagine one chessboard (or checkerboard) with forty black checkers placed on it. The depth is one, the span is forty. Place another chessboard over it, but leave it empty for the moment. The depth is two, the span zero.
Now, in evolution, the only way to get to level 2 is through level 1, and, in fact, the checkers on level 2 are composed in part of checkers from level 1—they are all holons or compound individuals. Represent this by taking one black checker from level 1, placing it on level 2, then adding a red checker on top of it. The new and "total holon" on level 2 thus incorporates its predecessor (the black checker) and adds its own distinctive properties (the red checker). If we did this, say, three times, the holons on level 2 would have a depth of 2 and a span of 3.
Now, the individual holons or checkers on level 1 (the physiosphere) depend for their existence on intricate networks of interrelationships with all the other black checkers in their environment—depend, that is, on networks of their own social holons (the coevolution of micro and macro). They exist in intricate networks of relational exchange with holons at the same level of structural organization (tenet 11).
But the situation on level 2 (the biosphere) is much more complicated, because the new total holon (the black-and-red compound checker) depends for its existence on intricate relationships on both levels. The red-and-black checkers on level 2 depend in part on their relationships with other red-and-black checkers—depend, that is, on ecological or macro relations with other living holons at the same level of structural organization. In other words, the "red" component of the red-and-black checkers depends on interrelations with the "red" component of other red-and-black holons—depends on relational exchanges such as sexual reproduction (which are not found on the black level and cannot be sustained by that level).
However, because the red-and-black checkers also have a black component, they also depend on the intricate relationships that sustain black holons themselves—depend, that is, on all of the mutually sustaining relationships and processes that constitute level 1 holons. So level 2 holons depend not only on the new and "red" relationships or social holons found only on level 2, they also depend upon the prior "black" relationships and sustainable patterns established on level 1 (but not vice versa: destroy level 1, and level 2 is destroyed; destroy level 2, and level 1 black checkers will still exist).
So any holon, or compound individual, depends on a whole series of intricate relational exchanges with social environments of the same level of structural organization for each level in the individual holon. And that means that a holon of depth three, for example, has to exist in an environment that also possesses holons of at least the same depth. So any holon is fundamentally a compound individual and its same-level relational exchanges at all of its levels—a compound individual in a compound environment, exchanging black with black and red with red and so forth.
We need one last point. The red-and-black checkers are not in the black universe. The only things that are in level 1 are more black checkers. The red-and-black checkers are to some degree beyond the level 1 universe (that is the meaning of emergence). In their "redness" they are beyond the mere blackness of level 1. They are a perfect expression of the self-transcending thrust of evolution, of the creative emergence of a "redness" that cannot be reduced to, or found in, the black universe.
And, in a sense, it is just the opposite. The red-and-black checkers contain "redness" as well as "blackness." The level 2 holons embrace level 1 holons and then go beyond them with their own defining emergents (tenet 5). Since the red-and-black checker depends for its existence on its own component black checkers, and since the black checkers themselves depend ultimately for their particular type of existence on all the other black checkers in their universe, then any level 2 holon in essence embraces all of its level 1 world by simple virtue of its own compound individuality. A single living cell embraces its entire physical universe. The many has become one and is increased by one—another meaning of Whitehead's crucial dictum. And according to Whitehead, in this "prehensive unification"
all antecedent actual occasions participate to some degree (in a holarchy of embrace, as he carefully points out).
And that is what I mean when I say that a level 2 holon is not in level 1, but level 1 is in level 2, utterly and totally embraced by it—one of the meanings, we will see, of love, a loving embrace which, like consciousness and creativity and self-transcendence, is built into the very depth of the Kosmos.
All of this means, in short, that the biosphere is not in the physiosphere. The biosphere is not a component or a part of the greater whole called the physiosphere, because the only thing "greater" about the physiosphere is its span, not its depth or wholeness. The bios is not a part of the cosmos, but just the opposite: the cosmos is a part of, a component of, the bios.
Thus, a part of the biosphere (namely, its physical component) is indeed a part of the larger physiosphere; but its defining, emergent qualities are not in the set of physically definable determinants governing nonliving forms (as Maturana and Varela point out, autopoiesis is found nowhere in the nonliving world; autopoiesis is a red-checker quality found nowhere in black checkers). The biosphere is not in the physiosphere, but the physiosphere is indeed in the biosphere, contained in it as a part.
Thus, just as an atom is in a molecule but a molecule is not in an atom—even though the span of atoms is much, much larger than molecules—so the cosmos is in the bios but the bios is not in the cosmos, even though the span of the cosmos is astronomically larger.
And note: the bios is a part of the Kosmos, but not a part of the cosmos, and in that simple move we have forever disavowed reductionism: physics is the most fundamental, and least significant, of the sciences (the reason physics can't explain biology is precisely because the bios is not in the cosmos).
This is just the opposite of what a naive faith in simple span or size would tell us. Just because the cosmos is bigger than the bios, we assume that the cosmos must be more significant. But it is only more fundamental; the bios is much more significant than the cosmos, because it contains much more reality internal to it, embraces a much deeper and greater wholeness, has more depth, and in fact subsumes the entire cosmos in its own being: transcends and includes.
Likewise, as we will see, the noosphere is not a part of the biosphere, but just the opposite: the bios is a lower component, a part of, the noosphere. So of course the biosphere has a greater span (is "bigger"), just as the cosmos is bigger than the bios. But from what we have now seen, that, of course, just proves my point.
And precisely because the biosphere is a component part of the noosphere, the destruction of the biosphere guarantees the destruction of the noosphere—and that is one of the points we will be returning to throughout this volume. This is a profoundly ecological orientation without regressively absolutizing the biosphere (nor the noosphere, as we will see).
But for now, let us note that the number (the span) of holons at a higher level of development will always be less than the number at a preceding level (tenet 8). The number of red-and-black checkers will always be less than the number of black checkers. There are no exceptions, because the number of wholes will always be less than the number of parts contained in them. There will always be fewer fifth-graders than fourth-graders, because you have to go through the fourth to get to the fifth. There are always fewer oaks than acorns—the so-called pyramid of development that necessarily gets smaller and smaller toward the top. Laszlo, for example, represents this pyramid as in figure 3-5 (which also indicates accurately that, for example, the biosphere is not in the physiosphere). Where matter is favorable, life emerges. Where life is favorable, mind emerges. Greater depth, smaller span.

Figure 3-5. The Realms of Evolution (Laszlo, Evolution, p. 55)

Accordingly, when holistic theorists construct their holarchies in terms of increasing span ("wider and wider"), they take us right down the pyramid, scraping off more and more levels of depth in search of a bigger (and therefore shallower) span. They should be taking us to a greater depth that involves both a deeper embrace and a wider identity—an expansion vertically and horizontally, not just horizontally.
Thus, we can start to see why diagrams like figure 3-1 are such an ontological disaster: they confuse micro and macro, they confuse depth and span, and they confuse whole and part.
These theories have their eyes absolutely riveted on physical size— bigger and bigger and wider and wider and larger and larger—and poor depth gets no attention at all. The results, needless to say, are much less than satisfying. These theories, instead of helping us escape from the reductionistic and objectifying flatland of instrumentalism, are simply leading the way for an expansion of its reach, tossing the net wider by making it shallower.

the brain of a human holon

Jantsch's diagrams (figs. 3-3 and 3-4) cover the physiosphere and the biosphere. It is now time to look at the emergence of the noosphere.
It is with the brain that we usually associate the emergence of the noosphere from (or rather through) the biosphere. Jantsch, following Gunther Stent, divides communication in the biosphere into genetic, metabolic, and neural (and the highest part of the latter is said to correlate with noospheric evolution). Jantsch:

Genetic communication acts in time intervals which are long compared to the lifetime of an individual. It makes phylogeny and coherent evolution across many generations possible. Metabolic communication which in the organism is transmitted by special messenger molecules, the hormones, fulfils two tasks within an organism. One task is the regulation of the development of multicellular organisms, in plants as well as in animals. The other task concerns the damping of the consequences of environmental fluctuations for the organism, or in other words, the enhancement of the organism's autonomy [tenet 12d]. Metabolic communication based on hormones acts relatively slowly, from seconds to minutes. The third type of biological communication is transmitted by the nervous system. This type acts in organisms typically within a hundredth to a tenth of a second and is thus about a thousand times faster than metabolic communication.

Jantsch points out that these three systems emerge holarchically, and he then proceeds to give a holarchical breakdown of neural structures themselves, based primarily on Paul MacLean's highly influential notion of the triune brain (see fig. 3-6). In MacLean's own words:

Man finds himself in the predicament that Nature has endowed him essentially with three brains which, despite great differences in structure, must function together and communicate with one another. The oldest of these brains is basically reptilian. The second has been inherited from lower mammals, and the third is a later mammalian development, which, in its culmination in primates, has made man peculiarly man.
Speaking allegorically of these three brains within a brain [i.e., holons], we might imagine that when the psychiatrist bids the patient to lie on the couch, he is asking him to stretch out alongside a horse and a crocodile. . . . The reptilian brain is filled with ancestral lore and ancestral memories and is faithful in doing what its ancestors say, but it is not very good for facing up to new situations [relatively low autonomy expressed in reflex and "instinctive" behavior].

Figure 3-6. The "triune brain." (After MacLean)

In evolution one first sees the beginning of emancipation from the ancestral [inflexibility] with the appearance of the lower mammalian brain, which Nature builds on top of the reptilian brain. ... Investigations of the last twenty years have shown that the lower mammalian brain plays a fundamental role in emotional behavior. It has a greater capacity than the reptilian brain for learning new approaches and solutions to problems on the basis of immediate experience. But like the reptilian brain, it does not have the ability to put its feelings into words.

MacLean is very specific about the holarchical nature of these three brains.

In its evolution, the brain of [humans] retains the hierarchical organization of the three basic types which can be conveniently labelled as reptilian, paleo-mammalian and neo-mammalian. [The brain stem represents the reptilian brain, inherited from reptilian ancestors.] The limbic system represents the paleo-mammalian brain, which is an inheritance from lower mammals. Man's limbic system is much more highly structured than that of lower mammals, but its basic organization, chemistry, etc., are very similar. The same may be said of the other two basic types. And there is ample evidence that all three types have their own special subjective, cognitive (problem-solving) memory and other parallel functions.

In other words, each of the brains is a relatively autonomous holon. And because each is a holon, we cannot say that any specific function is simply located in one of the holons; they all mutually act and interact with upward and downward influence. But in general, the three brains have the following basic functions:
Reptilian brain (or brain stem): "This is the phylogenetically oldest part of the brain, its core or chassis, roughly corresponding to the basic structures of the reptile's brain. It contains the essential apparatus for internal (visceral and glandular) regulations, for primitive activities based on instincts and reflexes, and also the centers for arousing the animal's vigilance or putting it to sleep." We may refer to it as the overall level of rudimentary sensorimotor intelligence and instinctive drives or impulses.
Paleomammalian brain (or limbic system): "The limbic system is intimately connected by two-way neural pathways with the hypothalamus and other centers in the brain-stem concerned with visceral sensations and emotional reactions—including sex, hunger, fear and aggression; so much so that the limbic system once bore the name 'the visceral brain.' " In short, "The limbic system processes information in such a way that it becomes experienced as feelings and emotions, which become guiding forces for behavior."
Neomammalian brain (or neocortex): "The explosive growth of the neocortex," says Jantsch, "in a later phase of evolution is one of the most dramatic events in the history of life on earth," and presumably connected with the emergence of the noosphere. It acts as "an immense neural screen on which the symbolic images of language and logics (including mathematics) appear. The neocortex is the location at which information is processed in the ways characteristic of the self-reflexive mind."
MacLean underscores the holoarchic nature of these three brains by comparing them with the components of literature, which Jantsch elegantly summarizes in this fashion:

The reptilian brain stands for the [basic] figures and roles which underlie all literatures. The limbic system brings emotional preferences, selection and development of the scenarios into play. And the neocortex, finally, produces on this substrate as many different poems, tales, novels and plays as there are authors.

Again we see the lower setting the possibilities and the higher setting the probabilities (or actualizing potentials).

the human social holon

Jantsch gives several diagrams, similar to figures 3-3 and 3-4, which he believes represent developments in the noosphere (or what he calls socio-cultural evolution). I will not reproduce them here, because I believe they are fundamentally confused. Jantsch says that once evolution reaches the noosphere, "things become completely inverted." But all that is inverted is his own prior confusion between span and size, and his insistence on finding extension where there is largely intention. Without that confusion, the same principles and the same evolutionary process can be seen at work—there is no "inversion." As I said, Jantsch often attempts to make spatial extension (physical size) a fundamental correlate of mental (socio-cultural) growth, and as even Descartes was well aware, in the noosphere, extension gives way to intention, upon which rulers do not well fit.
I will return to that point in a moment and go over it carefully, but for the moment let us look instead to the work of those systems theorists who have plotted out the growth of human social holons during humanity's million-or-so-year history.
Keep in mind that we have already outlined (however briefly) the growth of individual holons, from atoms to cells to multicellular organisms to complex animals (the micro components as suggested roughly in the bottom halves of figs. 3-3 and 3-4), and we also indicated the correlative environmental or social holons at each stage (the macro components suggested in the upper halves in figs. 3-3 and 3-4). We then briefly sketched the further evolution of the individual holon of complex animals up to and including those with the triune brain (from reptile to mammal to primate). We want to look now at the social environment in which the triune-brained organisms existed, and the types of social holons upon which the triune-brained organism existed for its own relational exchanges.
And this moves us directly into the noosphere, or the realm of sociocul-tural (and not just biosocial) evolution. We are adding a third chessboard to the game—matter, life, mind.
If we look at Jantsch's figure 3-4, we will be reminded that individual complex animals, up to and including primates (which includes humans), needed social holons at the level of groups/families, and if given those appropriate social holons, the individual holons could be sustained quite adequately (assuming, of course, that all junior levels in the compound individual are also existing in a balanced and sustainable set of relationships with their own environments—assuming, that is, that the whole multilevel arrangement is ecologically sound in the broadest sense, which we have every reason to believe was the case at this point in evolution).
Put more simply, the social holon of the family/group could have sustained the human triune brain indefinitely, just as it still sustains the roughly similar triune brain of other primates (who continue to exist in kinship social holons). But the human holon pushed beyond an environment of kinship (or biospherically based) social holons such as the family and began also producing villages, towns, cities, states. ... As I said, a third chessboard had been added to the evolutionary game.
Of course, this raises all the old and thorny problems, from the relation of mind and body to the whole issue of whether the noosphere itself was a good idea in the first place. All I can say is that I will try to address these issues as best I can, but we must proceed one step at a time, and each step will have its own true meaning disclosed only as the whole picture begins to emerge.
So, for the moment, let us simply note that there was no compelling biological reason to produce villages and cities and states. The social holon of the family/group could have sustained the human triune brain, just as it does other primates to this day. But just as matter had pushed forth life, the self-transcendent drive within biology pushed forth something beyond biology, pushed forth symbols and tools that both created and depended upon new levels of social holons in which the users of symbols and tools could exist and reproduce themselves, but the reproduction was now the reproduction of culture through symbolic communication and not just the reproduction of bodies through sexuality. Kinship gave way to "cultureship": add a blue checker on top of the red checker on top of the black checker.
And only a reductionist will be bold enough to claim that culture was really just a nifty new way to gain food, that the blue checker is just a sneaky rearrangement of red checkers, that the noosphere is nothing but a new twist on the biosphere. But just as the biosphere is not in the physiosphere (you can't find red checkers anywhere on level 1), so the noosphere is not in the biosphere (there are no blue checkers on level 2, no self-reflexive linguistic concepts; prototypes, yes—but a prototype becomes a real type through novel emergence).
As far as we can tell, the human brain has remained virtually unchanged in the past fifty thousand years. And yet during that fifty-thousand-year period, the same triune brain produced an extraordinary range of cultural achievements and cultural disasters. In other words, nothing truly novel happened to the triune brain during that period, no new major biospheric evolution occurred. And yet the entire majesty and catastrophe of culture paraded across the scene, all on the same biological base, but a majesty and catastrophe that could not be reduced to, explained by, or contained in that base.
Once again the lower had set the foundation and prepared the possibilities for (but did not determine) evolution in the higher, and those new possibilities were now played out in the noosphere, in the realm of culture and symbols and toys and tools.
We will be looking at the noospheric changes in the individual holons in the next chapter. For the moment let us center on the evolution of the social holons in the newly emerging noosphere. Figure 3-7 is adapted from Alastair Taylor's "sociocultural nonequilibrium systems model," a social approach based on dynamic systems theory (and at this point we are centering on the "true" aspects of systems theory). Taylor maintains that each succeeding social holon "builds upon the properties and societal experiences of the level(s) below and in turn contributes its own 'emergent qualities,' which take the form of new technologies and societal structures, accompanied by new apperceptions of the human-environment relationship. We can discern progressive developments in complexity and heterogeneity (although in any one historical situation a different, or even contrary, experience may occur)"—all familiar concepts (all found in the twenty tenets).
We could of course include an enormous number of components in the evolving noosphere of social humans, from types of tools to various worldviews, from political institutions to styles of art, from modes of production to legal codes. And, indeed, we will be returning to these various aspects as we proceed with our story. But for the moment, figure 3-7 may serve as one example of the growth of social holons in the newly emergent noosphere. Serve enough, that is, to allow us a few important observations.

differentiation and dissociation, transcendence and repression

The evolution of holons is not all sweetness and light, as some proponents of "evolutionary progress" seem to maintain. For the grim fact is that greater structural complexity—whether individual or social—means that more things can go horribly wrong. Atoms don't get cancer; animals do. ``Nonetheless, the opposite conclusion, that most evolution is really devolution, is not warranted either. The existence of cancer does not damn the existence of animals per se. And we will want to tease apart the cancers of the noosphere without damning the noosphere in toto.

Figure 3-7. Emergent geopolitical systems levels. (Taylor)

As I indicated in the last chapter, the fact that evolution always produces greater transcendence and greater differentiation means that a factor of possible pathology is built into every evolutionary step, because transcendence can go too far and become repression—the higher does not negate and preserve the lower, it tries only to negate (or repress or deny) the lower, which works about as well as denying our feet.
Likewise, differentiation can go too far and become dissociation—a failure to adequately integrate the newly emergent differences into a coherent whole that is both internally cohesive and externally in harmony with other correlative holons and with all junior components. Whenever a new differentiation is not matched by a new and equal integration, whenever there is negation without preservation, the result is pathology of one sort or another, a pathology that, if severe enough, evolution sets about to erase in earnest.
This becomes particularly acute in the noosphere, in cultural evolution, simply because the human holon contains so many levels of depth— physiosphere and biosphere and noosphere—and something can go wrong at every level.
When the biosphere was first emerging on Earth, we can imagine all the fits and starts, all the dead-ends, that the first populations of cells tried out in their attempt to fit with the preconditions set by the physiosphere, whose territory the living cells were now invading. A false start—a start not consonant with the physiosphere—was simply erased. And throughout biological evolution, as the biosphere itself began adding layers and layers of new depth, each of these levels had to be brought into an adequate harmony with both its predecessors and its peers—no easy or trivial task, as the awesome example of the dinosaurs reminds us.
All of that was still true with humans, but with an extra and rather gruesome burden: fit the noosphere not only with its peers (holons at the same level) but also with all of its predecessors—mineral to plant to reptile to paleomammal—that not only continue to inhabit the same environmental space but also exist as components in the human beings' own compound individuality. When MacLean said that when humans lie on the couch for psychoanalysis, they lie down with a crocodile and a horse, that wasn't the half of it: we lie down with the planets and the stars, the lakes and the rivers, the plankton and the oaks, the lizards and the birds, the rabbits and the apes—and, to repeat, not simply because they are neighbors in our own universe, but because they are components in our own being, they are literally our bones and blood and marrow and guts and feelings and fears.
And just as the biosphere had to find its acceptable niche in (and beyond) the physiosphere, so too the noosphere had to find its allowable or harmonious place in (and beyond) the biosphere. And to borrow Shakespeare's phrase: "Aye, there's the rub."
The noosphere evolved. And as various stages of political, linguistic, and technical development emerged—incorporating and transcending their predecessors—not only could these higher stages of cultural development repress and alienate their own previous connections in the noosphere (as we will see), they could also come perilously close to severing their connections with the biosphere as well, and to such an alarming degree that, today, humans have earned, through enormously hard work and labor, the privilege and the possibility of being the first cultural dinosaurs in the fragile noosphere.
Instead of transcendence, repression; instead of differentiation, dissociation; instead of depth, disease. Because of the very nature of evolution, that type of dissociation can occur at any and all stages of growth and development. The noosphere is not privileged or unique in this regard. It is simply more alarming now because of its global dimensions. If we violate the possibilities given us by the biosphere, then the biosphere will flick us off its back like a bunch of fleas, and be none the worse for it.
But just as the existence of cancer does not damn the existence of animals per se, so the existence of cultural diseases and repressions does not damn cultural evolution itself. This particularly applies to successive stages of cultural evolution, from the hunt to the farm to the engine to the computer. Each successive stage brought new information, new potentials, new hopes and new fears; brought a greater complexity, a greater differentiation, a greater relative autonomy—and the capacity for a new and greater pathology if a corresponding integration and embrace did not ensue. And we will see that the history of cultural evolution is the history of new achievement, the history of new disease.
But I have no sympathy for those theorists who simply confuse differentiation and dissociation, transcendence and repression, depth and disease.
Whenever evolution produces a new differentiation, and that differentiation is not integrated, a pathology results, and there are two fundamental ways to approach that pathology.
One is exemplified by the Freudian notion (introduced by Ernst Kris) of "regression in service of ego." That is, the higher structure relaxes it grip on consciousness, regresses to a previous level where the failed integration first occurred, repairs the errors on that level by reliving it in a benign and healing context, and then integrates that level—embraces that level, embraces the former "shadow"—in the new and higher holon of the ego (or total self-system). For the ego's problem was that during its formative growth, where it should have transcended but included its lower-level drives (such as sex and aggression), it transcended but repressed them, split them off, alienated them—one of the prerogatives of a higher-level structure with its greater relative autonomy, but a prerogative, we have seen, that is bought only and always at the price of pathology. Thus the cure: regression in service of a higher reintegration—a regression that allows evolution to move forward more harmoniously by healing and wholing a previously alienated holon.
The other general approach is the retro-Romantic, which recommends regression, period. This approach, in my opinion, simply confuses differentiation and dissociation, confuses transcendence and repression. Thus, whenever evolution produces a new differentiation, and that differentiation happens to go into pathological dissociation, then this approach seeks to permanently turn back the pages of emergent history to a time prior to the differentiation. Not prior to the dissociation—we all agree on that!—but prior to the differentiation itself!
That will indeed get rid of the new pathology, at the cost of getting rid of the new depth, the new creativity, the new consciousness. By that retro-Romantic logic, the only way to really get rid of pathology is to get rid of differentiation altogether, which means everything after the Big Bang was a Big Mistake.
All the more disturbing in the retro-Romantic approach is the whole problem of where these theorists rather arbitrarily decide to stop their retrogression. For example, many theorists, looking with justifiable alarm at the repressions and alienations that often accompanied the Machine Age, maintain that we should never have gone past farming, and there then follows a lovely and wonderful eulogizing of the glories of the "non-mechanized" and "nondehumanizing" agrarian societies, where few humans were alienated from the products of their own labor and the "Great Mother" ruled in peaceful and holistic happiness. Never mind that these societies introduced deliberate human sacrifice, multiplied the extent and means of war, put gender stratification at its peak, and made vast numbers of its populations into slaves.
Spotting those obvious difficulties, other theorists then go further and maintain that most of humankind's problems came with the invention of farming itself, because with farming the human animal began to deliberately alter the biosphere for its own gratification, produced a written language that ensconced power in the dogmatic text, produced an agricultural surplus that allowed some individuals to begin to economically control and enslave others, and began the wholesale subjugation of women. And, indeed, most of that did begin with farming.
So, these theorists maintain, we really should never have gone past hunting-and-gathering societies. The marvelously delightful things then said about these societies—some of which were peace-loving and rather egalitarian, and some of which most definitely were not—simply boggle the mind with romantic wonderfulness. Until other theorists carefully point out that precious few of these societies were actually egalitarian, that warfare most definitely existed, that the very seeds of sexist subjugation were planted here, that slavery was not unheard of. ...
We really should never have gone past gorillas, who at least don't deliberately sacrifice their own or engage in renegade warfare, where slavery is nonexistent and no animal is alienated from its own labors. Until you realize . . .
And so it goes. As I said, it is always fascinating to see to just what date the Romantics set their Way Back Machine, scraping layers and layers of depth off the Kosmos looking for a Garden of Eden that ever recedes into a shallower darkness.
My point is that it is one thing to remember and embrace and honor our roots; quite another to hack off our leaves and branches and celebrate that as a solution to leaf rot. So we will celebrate the new possibilities of evolution even as we gasp in horror—and try to redress—the multiplicity of new pathologies.
But to reiterate the one point of strong agreement with the Romantics in general: we have added such depth (height) to the noosphere itself that it is in danger of sliding off the biosphere altogether. And while that will merely detour and in no way stop the biosphere, which will go its merry way with or without us, it does spell catastrophe for the animal that not only transcends but represses.

interiority

If we look now at all of the diagrams presented in this chapter, we notice a startling fact. All of these diagrams claim to be holistic, to cover all of reality in an encompassing fashion. That is, if we take out the errors in their presentation (like confusing micro and macro), and put all of these diagrams together, the systems theorist would claim that the resultant "big picture" covers the whole of reality, from atoms to cells to animals, from stars to planets to Gaia, from villages to towns to planetary federations (all of which are on our diagrams). The noosphere transcends but embraces the biosphere, which transcends but embraces the physiosphere—one huge holistic and all-embracing system, stretching from here to eternity.
And yet, and yet. Something is terribly wrong. Or rather, terribly partial. All of these diagrams represent things that can be seen with the physical senses or their extensions (microscopes, telescopes). They are all, all of them, how the universe looks from the outside. They are all the outward forms of evolution, and not one of them represents how evolution looks from the inside, how the individual holons feel and perceive and cognize the world at various stages.
For example, take the progression: irritability, sensation, perception, impulse, image, symbol, concept. . . . We might believe that cells show protoplasmic irritability, that plants show rudimentary sensation, that reptiles show perception, paleomammals show images, primates show symbols, and humans show concepts. That may be true (and is true, I think), but the point is that none of those appear on any of our diagrams. Our diagrams (thus far) show only the outward forms of evolution, and none of the corresponding "interior prehensions" of the forms themselves (sensation, impulse, etc.).
So the diagrams themselves are not wrong (once we have revised a few errors), but they are terribly partial. They leave out the insides of the universe.
And there is a reason for this. The general systems sciences seek to be empirical, or based on sensory evidence (or its extensions). And thus they are interested in how cells are taken up into complex organisms, and how organisms are parts of ecological environments, and so on—all of which you can see, and thus all of which you can investigate empirically. And all of which is true enough.
But they are not interested in—because their empirical methods do not cover—how sensations are taken up into perceptions, and perceptions give way to impulses and emotions, and emotions break forth into images, and images expand to symbols. . . . The empirical systems sciences cover all of the outward forms of all that, and cover it very well; they simply miss, and leave out entirely, the inside of all of that.
Take, for example, the mind and the brain. Whatever else we may decide about the brain and the mind, this much seems certain: the brain looks something like figure 3-6 (or some anatomically correct figure), but my mind does not look like figure 3-6. I know my mind from the inside, where it seems to be seething with sensations and feelings and images and ideas. It looks nothing like figure 3-6, which is simply how my brain looks.
In other words, my mind is known interiorly "by acquaintance," but my brain is known exteriorly "by description" (William James, Bertrand Russell). That is why I can always to some degree see my own mind, but I can never see my own brain (without cutting open my skull and getting a mirror). I can know a dead person's brain by simply cutting open the skull and looking at it—but then I am not knowing or sharing that person's mind, am I? or how he felt and perceived and thought about the world.
The brain is the outside, the mind is the inside—and, as we will see, a similar type of exterior I interior holds for every holon in evolution. And the empirical systems sciences or ecological sciences, even though they claim to be holistic, in fact cover exactly and only one half of the Kosmos. And that is especially what is so partial about the web-of-life theories: they indeed see fields within fields within fields, but they are really only surfaces within surfaces within yet still other surfaces—they see only the exterior half of reality.
It is time now to look at the other half.

4

A View from Within

Things have their within. I am convinced that the two points of view require to be brought into union, and that they soon will unite in a kind of phenomenology or generalised physic in which the internal aspect of things as well as the external aspect of the world will be taken into account. Otherwise, so it seems to me, it is impossible to cover the totality of the cosmic phenomenon by one coherent explanation.
— pierre teilhard de chardin

alongside  THE  without of things, the without of individual and social holons, which we presented in the last chapter, we need to present the within of things, the within of those same holons. This part of our approach might seem at first a somewhat strange notion. How, for example, can we know the insides of a cell, the "interiority" of a cell? The answer, I believe, rests on the fact that cells are a part of us, we embrace cells in our own compound individuality. That is, nothing in the preceding stages of evolution can be ultimately foreign to us since they are all, in various degrees and ways, in us, as part of our very being.
Thus, it is through an interior feeling of the shades of myself that I might reasonably know the shades of other holons—which is how they know me, too; for we are all ultimately in each other, in various degrees, and right now. Gravity pulls at the minerals in my bones just as surely as it pulls on the distant planets; hunger churns my belly as it does in every starving wolf; the terror in the eyes of the gazelle being eaten by the lion is not alien to me, or to you; and is that not joy in the song of the robin at the rising of the morning sun?
Nobody is more wary than I of the dangers of what Love joy called "retrotension"—reading "higher" thoughts and feelings into "lower" forms simply because we humans feel them—the anthropomorphic fallacy. But we are aided in this quest by precisely those evolutionary sciences that have already mapped the outward forms of the various holons at each stage of development, for we can reasonably make correlations between outward form and interior perception.
For example, it seems quite likely that, at this point in evolution anyway, intentional symbolic logic is found only where the outward form known as the complex neocortex has developed, and thus any other living holon on Earth whose exterior lacks the form of that neocortex—such as a plant, a lizard, a horse—will probably lack an interior that contains intentional symbolic logic. Likewise, animal holons that lack the exterior form known as the limbic system will probably also lack an interior that contains differentiated emotions, and so on. This puts a sharp curb to our "retrotensive tendencies," and helps us dig out, in the depths of our own feelings, just how far (and which of) those feelings extend into the depth of other beings.
Thus, we do indeed want to try to avoid retrotension, but this still leaves us in a far different place from the empiricists, who stare blankly at the rose and wonder how the epistemological gap shall ever be bridged, as if they were staring at an alien creature materialized from a wholly different dimension. They actually refer to it, with a puzzled expression, as "knowledge of the outer world." But I can know the outer world because the outer world is already in me, and I can know me. All knowledge of other is simply a different degree of self-knowledge, since self and other are of the same fabric, and speak softly to each other at any moment that one listens.
And, of course, this approach is not new. We find something like it from Aristotle to Spinoza, from Leibniz to Whitehead, from Aurobindo to Radhakrishnan. We don't find it in empiricism or positivism, and we don't find it in the "holistic" systems theories, which want ever so much to be empirical. That imbalance we wish to redress, drawing on, among others, the theorists I just mentioned.
Finally, we will want to look also at the higher stages of growth in the human holon, the higher stages of consciousness that, in mystical experience, for example, are said to issue forth in illuminations of the superconscious, illuminations of the very Divine (if such indeed exists). We will want to look, that is, at the field known as transpersonal psychology. For we are now entering the domain of our first Addition: the greater the depth of evolution, the greater the degree of consciousness.

interiority and consciousness

Spinoza, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Whitehead, Aurobindo, Schelling, and Radhakrishnan are just a few of the major theorists who have explicitly recognized that the within of things, the interiority of individual holons, is in essence the same as consciousness, though of course they use different names with slightly different meanings.
Whitehead uses "prehension" to describe the contact and thus "feeling" of an object by any subject, no matter how "primitive," including atoms (thus his famous statement, "Biology is the study of big organisms, physics the study of little organisms"). Spinoza uses "cognition" for knowing an event "from the inside" and "extension" (or matter) for knowing the same event "from the outside." Leibniz uses "perception" for the interior of his monads (holons) and "matter" for the exterior, with the added proviso that only the interior is actually real and can be known directly—matter (or extension) is only an appearance devoid of any substantial reality; it is simply what mind looks like from the outside. As for Teilhard de Chardin, he put it very simply: "The within, consciousness, spontaneity—three expressions for the same thing."
I will not, at this point, get involved in the philosophical nuances of those various positions, which are inextricably bound up with the problems of panpsychism and historical solutions to the mind-body problem (we will return to this later). Rather, I will, for the time being, take a more generalized position and simply say that, for me, the within of things is consciousness, the without of things is form.
Or, as we put it earlier, the within of things is depth, the without is surface. But all surfaces are surfaces of depth, which means, all forms are forms of consciousness.
Further, I don't want to haggle over whether the very lowest holons are totally or only mostly devoid of rudimentary forms of consciousness or prehension. First, there is no lower limit to holons, so there is no rock bottom to serve as a standard. Second, they are all forms of depth, so the actual amount of consciousness in them is a completely relative affair. Thus, whatever we take at present as the lowest or most primitive holons (quarks, for example), I will simply say that they have the least depth, the least consciousness, relatively speaking, and I will, with Whitehead, call that form "prehension." You are free to call the lowest levels "totally inert" if you wish, and pick up the argument from there.
Let me emphasize that it really does not matter, as far as I am concerned, how far down (or not) you wish to push consciousness. Whitehead, as we said, saw prehension as the irreducible "atom" of existence. Mahayana Buddhism maintains that literally all sentient beings possess Buddha Mind, and liberation involves a realization of that all-pervading consciousness. Lynn Margulis, the noted biologist, believes that cells possess consciousness. A handful of scientists think that plants show proto-sensation. Animal rights activists insist that most animal forms show rudimentary feelings. And I suppose most orthodox theorists don't really see consciousness emerging until primates and usually humans.
But my main point is not where precisely to draw this line—draw it wherever you feel comfortable—but that the line itself involves preeminently the distinction between inferiority and exteriority. We will be returning to this point throughout the book, and in the meantime, I will simply assume that consciousness is synonymous with depth, and depth goes all the way down, but progressively less and less and less . . . into those dark shades of night. As Teilhard eloquently put it, "Refracted rearwards along the course of evolution, consciousness displays itself qualitatively as a spectrum of shifting shades whose lower terms are lost in the night."
Now for some simple correlations. Figure 4-1 lists some of the milestones in the evolution of the outward forms of individual holons, and alongside them some of the corresponding milestones in the emergent forms of consciousness that I suggest are correlated with them.
Each new interior holon, of course, transcends but includes its prede-cessor(s)—incorporates the essentials of what went before and then adds its own distinctive and emergent patterns (as we will see in detail in a moment). And notice: these interior holons have nothing to do with size or spatial extension; a symbol is not bigger than an image, an image isn't bigger than an impulse—this is where the application of physicalist sciences becomes very distorting.
atoms                                                 prehension cells (genetic)                                       irritability metabolic organisms                         rudimentary sensation (e.g., plants) proto-neuronal organisms                 sensation (e.g., coelenterata) neuronal organisms                            perception (e.g., annelids) neural cord (fish/amphibians)          perception/impulise brain stern (reptiles)                          impulse/emotion limbic system (paleomammals)         emotion/image neocortex (primates)                          symbols complex neocortex (humans)           concepts
Figure 4-1. The Without and the Within	
The important point, for now, is simply that each new and emergent interior holon transcends but includes, and thus operates upon, the information presented by its junior holons, and thus it fashions something novel in the ongoing cognitive or interior stream. Hence, each new growth in consciousness is not just the "discovery" of more of a pregiven world, but the co-creation of new worlds themselves, what Popper calls a "making and matching" of new epistemological domains, a discovery/ creation of higher and wider worlds.
There can be much discussion over the actual details of that list (fig. 4-1), the choice of words and the precise placement. But I think most people, even if they disagree with the details as given, would agree that something like that is indeed occurring. Greater depth, greater interiority, greater consciousness. Teilhard expressed this in his "law of complexity and consciousness"—namely, the more of the former, the more of the latter. Since, as we already saw, evolution tends in the direction of greater complexity, it amounts to the same thing to say that it tends in the direction of greater consciousness (again, depth = consciousness).
Most of the words in figure 4-1 are self-explanatory, but I should mention that an image is a mental construct that represents a thing by resemblance (the image of a dog "looks like" the actual dog); a symbol represents a thing by correspondence, not resemblance (the word Fido represents my dog but the word itself does not look like my dog at all—a more difficult cognitive task); and a concept represents an entire class of resemblance (the word dog represents the class of all dogs, an even more complicated cognitive task).
When a fox spots a rabbit on the other side of a fence and then runs hundreds of yards around the fence to get to the rabbit, presumably the fox carries an image or proto-image of the rabbit in its mind. Moving up, there is abundant evidence that apes and chimpanzees are capable of forming symbols (or at least paleosymbols) and indeed can be taught to recognize and use a simple denotative language. As far as we can tell, only humans create and consciously utilize fully formed concepts (or universals), and these concepts, among many other things, reach down and differentiate and color all previous levels in the human compound individual (a paleomammal may feel rage, but only humans conceptually elaborate that into anger and then hatred, a long slow burn maintained conceptually).
In other words, concepts transcend and include symbols, which transcend and include images (which transcend and include impulses, etc.)— and none of that has much to do with physical extension.

the limits of the exterior approach

In the previous chapter I said that holistic systems theories leave out the interiority of the holons they describe. Let me be more precise. Some of the theories do, indeed, attempt to take into account the insides of the universe, for they at any rate mention things like feelings and symbols and ideas. But they then subject these interiors to the same analysis as they apply to the surfaces, because they are trying to be empirical, and this produces some very unpleasant results.
We can explain this with reference to figure 4-2. Here I have indicated the three general domains of evolution from the angle of a compound individual holon on level 3. The physiosphere is labeled A, the biosphere B, and the noosphere C, so that the holon on level 3 can be represented as A + B + C, transcending but including its predecessors.
Now the claim of the evolutionary systems theories (from Bertalanffy to Laszlo to Jantsch) is that, although none of the levels can be reduced to any other, general laws or regularities of dynamic patterns can be found that are the same in all three realms. These are called "homolog laws" and not "analog laws," which means they are the same laws and not just similar laws.

Figure 4-2. Levels of Evolution

I agree with that position (as far as it goes), and in chapter 2 we outlined twenty tenets, or "homolog laws," that are characteristic of holons wherever they appear. So far, so good.
But these tenets have to be of such a general nature that they will apply to all three general realms, and that means, in essence, that they apply basically to the realm labeled A, since A is the only thing that all three realms have in common. A runs from A through the core of B and the core of C, and thus what holds for A will hold for (but not totally cover) whatever happens on all three levels. Thus, on level 1, or A, we already find dissipative or self-organizing structures, holons with depth and span, creative emergence, increasing complexity, evolutionary development, differentiation, self-transcendence, teleological attractors, and so forth. When I presented the twenty tenets, I used examples from all three realms, but all of the tenets can be found, to some degree or another, in the physiosphere itself (thus acknowledging some degree of continuity in the overall evolutionary process—the "no gaps in nature" side of the equation). And all of that, too, is just fine.
But none of the twenty tenets—as crucially important as they are— describes specifically what is happening in B and C. To the extent that B and C are composed of holons—and they are—they will follow all of the twenty tenets. But holons with Life injected into them also do other things that A holons do not—such as sexual reproduction, metabolic communication, autopoietic self-preservation, and so forth; and holons with Mind injected into them do still other things that B holons do not—such as verbal communication, conceptual self-expression, artistic endeavors, and so on. The B and C qualities and functions and cognitions will follow the same tenets that also apply to A, but they will further follow other laws and patterns and actions not specifically derivable from the twenty tenets (which state, for example, that evolution gets more complex, but do not state that evolution will produce poetry). There is nothing in the twenty tenets that will tell us how to resolve an Oedipus complex, or why pride can be wounded, or what honor means, or whether life is worth living.
In other words, the twenty tenets—by which I mean dynamic systems theory in general—are the most fundamental tenets of all of development, and therefore the least interesting, least significant, least telling tenets when it comes to B and especially C (and super-especially anything higher). Systems theory—precisely in its claim and desire to cover all systems—necessarily covers the least common denominator, and thus nothing gets into systems theory that, to borrow a line from Swift, does not also cover the weakest noodle.
And the weakest noodles, the lowest holons, have the least depth, the least interiority, the least consciousness—so that a science of that is correspondingly a weakest noodle science. It is a science of surfaces. And this is invariably why, in such "systems books" as Laszlo's, one finds a very rich and impressive setting forth of something like the twenty tenets, and a rich application of them to the physiosphere and somewhat to the biosphere, but then the presentation, as it really explores the biosphere and then gets into the noosphere, becomes positively pale and anemic and peters out very quickly.
When it comes to social or historical evolution, for example, Laszlo correctly points out that noospheric evolution proceeds from less ordered to more ordered, from less complex to more complex, that it is irreversible, and a few other such items. That's about all he says, and that's about all he can say. But we already know that; that's what happens to any complex system far from equilibrium. About the really interesting and utterly unique things that make history history and not just a dissipative structure, systems science can tell us precious little. Of the system A + B + C, it will tell us about the lowest common-denominator patterns, which, I repeat, are the most fundamental—and least significant—of patterns for the higher levels.
(Of course, many system theorists actually use the dynamics of B, or living systems, and make them paradigmatic for all levels, with equally embarrassing results but now in both directions: B underexplains C and overexplains or is retrotensive with A, trying, for example, to read autopoiesis into the physiosphere—unconvincingly. All of these difficulties come from the lowest common denominator approach and/or the attempt to privilege any single domain).
This is why presentations that are otherwise often so brilliant, such as Jantsch's, will say things like, "In the same way, these mathematical relationships may be applied to the modelling of dynamics at other than the chemical levels"—by which he means (and explicitly states) that the system patterns holding for A are significantly inclusive for levels B and C. He then adds, "A certain imagination is required, of course. . . ."
It takes more than imagination; it takes hallucination. This is exactly what Sheldrake is objecting to when he says, "In a similar way, to return to one of Prigogine's examples, a mathematical model of urbanization may shed light on the factors affecting the rate of urban growth, but it cannot account for the different architectural styles, cultures, and religions found in, say, Indian and Brazilian cities." Cannot account, that is, for a single thing that is specifically cultural.
Michael Murphy makes the same point in a strong fashion. He first points out the similarities (or continuities) in the three major domains: "Though the kinds of development that occur in the physical, biological, and psychosocial domains are shaped by different processes and have different patterns, they proceed in sustained, irreversible sequences that are called evolutionary—these three domains have many features in common." These common features I have distilled in the twenty tenets. Yet Murphy then emphasizes, "But the three kinds of evolution—inorganic, biological, and psychosocial—though having many features in common, operate according to separate principles. Helpful scientific reductions do not erase the fact that these [domains] proceed according to their own distinctive patterns."
So the twenty tenets are the backbone of our system, holding true for holons anywhere, or so I maintain. But for the meat and flesh and feelings and perceptions—for these we will have to look elsewhere, look instead to an empathic feel from within of those degrees of the All that are degrees of us as well. And we do not honor the richness of these feelings—in us, in others—by reducing or narrowing them to the lowest common denominator. The robin, the deer, and the amoeba, I presume, are as insulted by this as I. Our answer, as always, is never to be found in flatland, in the world of black checkers scurrying endlessly, meaninglessly, dimly, and disappearing finally into those dark shades of the night that are ever so fundamental, ever so insignificant.

the evolution of the within of human holons

We have sketched the evolution of the without of individual holons up to the complex triune brain (embracing or enfolding all previous exteriors) and the correlative evolution of the interior of the same holons up to that of concepts (embracing or enfolding all previous interiors). It is time now to pick up the story with the emergence of the first human animals—with a complex triune brain producing concepts or proto-concepts and living in a social holon of the group/family—and briefly follow the succeeding evolution up to the present day.
Once again, most of our work has already been done for us, and we have two major sources to draw on in this regard. One is my own previous work in this area, published in Up from Eden and Eye to Eye. The other is the work of Jürgen Habermas, whom many (myself included) consider the world's foremost living philosopher and social theorist. The conclusions of these two sources are in strong agreement, even though they were arrived at independently and from very different angles. When I was working on Up from Eden, I was only beginning to come into contact with Habermas, and so I unfortunately did not have the chance to include his incisive commentaries. I drew instead on the works of such pioneers as Jean Gebser, Erich Neumann, L. L. Whyte, Georg Hegel, and Joseph Campbell. In a sense this was fortunate; the fact that Habermas, working from a very different direction, arrived at the same general conclusions lends added strength to the overall thesis.
What I would like to do, then, in this and the next chapter, is very briefly outline Habermas's observations on the evolution of human consciousness and social communication (and parenthetically indicate the points of agreement with my own work; those familiar with Eden and Eye to Eye will immediately spot the similarities). Habermas's overall views on communication and the evolution of society are set in the context of his theory of communicative action (or action geared toward mutual understanding as an omega point); I will be cutting many corners and giving only the briefest skeleton of a small part of his rich theory; readers are urged to consult his original works.In Up from Eden (and Eye to Eye) I followed the groundbreaking work of Jean Gebser in recognizing four major epochs of human evolution, each anchored by a particular structure (or level) of individual consciousness that correspondingly produced (and was produced by) a particular social worldview. These general stages Gebser called the archaic, the magic, the mythic, and the mental.
I (and to a lesser extent Gebser) further suggested that each of these structures of consciousness generated a different sense of space-time, law and morality, cognitive style, self-identity, mode of technology (or productive forces), drives or motivation, types of personal pathology (and defenses), types of social oppression/repression, degrees of death-seizure and death-denial, and types of religious experience.
The archaic, the magic, the mythic, and the mental worldviews in the social holon are each correlated with a particular individual structure of consciousness (the coevolution of macro and micro). Drawing on the works of Jean Piaget, I (and Habermas) correlate the magic with preoperational thought, the mythic with concrete operational thought, and the mental with formal operational thought (and we both then add some further stages and subdivisions, all of which we will discuss later). The archaic is for both Gebser and myself a loose "catchall" epoch that simply and globally represents all the structures of consciousness up to and including the first hominids. We could just as easily have broken the archaic down into its dozens of components and individual stages, such as the more detailed breakdown given in figure 4-1 (where everything up to concepts is "the archaic fund"). The archaic is simply a symbol of the totality of our rich evolutionary history, but it is not just a symbol, because this history lives on in each of us as part of our present compound individuality.
In this chapter, and especially in the next, we will carefully examine the archaic, the magic, the mythic, and the mental worldviews (and suggest possible higher developments as well).
But first, let me be very clear about what is being attempted here. I have suggested that there are individual and social holons, each of which has an interior and an exterior. Thus, in evolution in general, and human evolution in particular, we are tracing four different strands, each of which is intimately related and indeed dependent upon all the others, but none of which can be reduced to the others.
The four strands are the interior and the exterior of the individual and the social.
We have already looked at (1) the development of the exterior forms of individual holons, ranging from atoms to molecules to cells to organisms to neural organisms to triune-brained neural organisms. And we have already looked at (2) the development of the exterior forms of the social holon, from superclusters to galaxies to planets to Gaia to ecosystems to groups/families (and briefly suggested its continuation into villages, nation-states, and planetary systems). Further, we have already suggested (3) the interior development of the individual holon, from prehension to sensation to impulse to image to symbol to concept (and briefly suggested its continuation into concrete and formal operational thought, with higher stages yet to come). And finally, we have just suggested that, in human evolution anyway, (4) the interior development of the social holon evidences itself in a series of shared worldviews (from magic to mythic to mental, and possibly higher). (We'll go over all these correlations in a moment.)
The lower levels possess a "worldview"—by which I mean a "common worldspace"—to precisely the same degree that you believe they possess a degree of consciousness or prehension. If lower holons possess interiority, which I believe they do, and if any holon exists only in a system of relational exchange with other same-level holons, which it does, then any holon possesses a shared interiority with its peers, and that is a "world-view" or "common worldspace" in the broadest sense. We have already agreed, for example, that if a holon possesses a reptilian brain stem, then it possesses an interiority of impulse, and we have already agreed that that interiority cannot be captured without remainder in objective it-language, and thus it must possess a subjective (or proto-subjective) space, a space shared with similar-depth holons. It is not just shared surfaces, but shared depths, or a common worldspace.
Or again: if holons share common exteriors, which they do, then they share common interiors (or worldspaces). How far down we push this is a matter of reasonable disagreement, but confining it to humans alone is preposterous.
Nonetheless, as before, feel free to pick up the argument at the point in evolution where you feel that some form of rudimentary consciousness or prehension enters the scene; presumably, by the time we reach humans, we can all agree that shared worldviews exist, and these shared world-views are simply the inside feel of a social holon, the inside space of collective awareness at a particular level of development; it is not just how "I" feel, it is how "we" feel.

the four quadrants

We will be going into these distinctions in an enormous amount of detail as we proceed. For the moment, a quick summary is given in figure 4-3. (It might also help to glance at the more detailed diagram given in the next chapter, fig. 5-1, page 193.) The upper half of the diagram represents individual holons; the lower half, social or communal holons. The right half represents the exterior forms of holons—what they look like from the outside; and the left half represents the interiors—what they look like from within.
Thus we have four major quadrants or four major aspects to each and every holon. The Upper Right (UR) is the exterior form or structure of an individual holon. This quadrant runs from the center—which is simply the Big Bang—to subatomic particles to atoms to molecules to cells to neural organisms to triune-brained organisms. With reference to human beings, this quadrant is the one emphasized by behaviorism. Behavior can be seen, it is empirical—which is precisely why empirical science is always concerned only with the behavior of holons (the behavior of atoms, the behavior of gases, the behavior of fish, the behavior of humans) and wants nothing to do with nasty ol' introspection, which involves, of course, the interiors of individuals.

Figure 4-3. The Four Quadrants

Which would be the Upper Left (UL) quadrant. This quadrant—the interior form of an individual holon—runs from the center to prehension, sensation, impulse, image, symbol, concept (and so on). These interiors (UL) are correlated, we saw, with specific exteriors (UR), so that emotions "go with" limbic systems and concepts "go with" the neocortex of complex triune brains, and so forth (that is, every point on the right side has a correlate on the left side: every exterior has an interior). With reference to human beings, this quadrant contains all the "interior" individual sciences (among other things), from psychoanalysis to phenomenology to mathematics (nobody ever saw the square root of a negative one running around in the external world; that is apprehended only interiorly).
But individuals only exist in relational exchanges with other holons of similar depth (micro and macro, individual and social). In other words, every point on the upper half of the diagram has a corresponding point on the lower half (so that all four quadrants have corresponding points with each other). Taking the two lower quadrants one at a time:
The Lower-Right (LR) quadrant runs, as we saw, from the Big Bang to superclusters to galaxies to stars to planets to (on Earth) the Gaia system to ecosystems to societies with division of labor to groups/families (each getting "smaller" owing to less simple span). With reference to humans, this quadrant then runs from kinship tribes to villages to nation-states to global world-system (getting "bigger" on its own level). But this quadrant also refers to any of the concrete, material, embedded social forms of communities (the exterior forms of social systems), including modes of tools and technology, architectural styles, forces of production, concrete institutions, even written (material) forms, and so on.
The Lower-Right quadrant, in other words, represents all the exterior forms of social systems, forms that also can be seen, forms that are empirical and behavioral (everything on the Right half of the diagram is empirical, because it involves the exterior forms of holons; in this case, the social holon). This is why the study of human "sociology" (especially in Anglo-Saxon countries) has usually been the study of the observable behavior of social systems (or "social action systems"). Something is a "really real" science if its data can be seen empirically, and since all social holons do have an exterior form that can be seen empirically, sociology has all too often confined its studies to this one component (the LR quadrant) and been very distrustful of the study of anything other than monological, observable variables in a social action system.
This is why it has been so hard for sociologists to buck the positivistic trend of studying only behavior-oriented action systems, and to study not just society but also culture, or the shared values that constitute the common worldviews of various social systems—that is, the interiors of the social systems, the Lower Left (LL) quadrant. Thus, for example, a recent anthology entitled Cultural Analysis (as opposed to "social analysis") could find only four major theorists working this side of the street: Peter Berger, Mary Douglas, Michel Foucault, and Jürgen Habermas (we could certainly add Charles Taylor and Clifford Geertz, among a few others; the influence of these six theorists can be heavily felt throughout this presentation).
But the editors' point is well taken: "While theories, methods, and research investigations in other areas of the social sciences have accumulated at an impressive pace over the past several decades, the study of culture appears to have made little headway." The reason is that the orthodox and positivistically oriented researchers "turned from the ephemeral realm of attitudes and feelings . . . inter subjective realities . . . beliefs and values—the stuff of which culture is comprised—to the more obdurate [empirical] facts of social life—income inequality, unemployment, fertility rates, group dynamics, crime, and the like. On the whole, it may be only slightly presumptuous to suggest that the social sciences are in danger of abandoning culture entirely as a field of enquiry." Abandoning, that is, the Lower Left in favor of the Lower Right.
At the same time, the editors note, these four theorists are nonetheless at the forefront of a revolution in the approach to the study of culture. However "ephemeral" aspects of culture might be, various phenomenological and analytical and structural tools can nonetheless be brought to bear on the issue. To say something is "subjective" is not to say it doesn't exist or can't be carefully studied. Each of these theorists, the editors point out, "have attempted to identify systematic patterns among the elements of culture itself, or patterns within culture"—as I would put it, cultural holons, structures or patterns from within, not just without. "Largely outside the mainstream of social sciences, these approaches have been oriented primarily toward the realms of meaning, symbolism, language, and discourse. Each is rooted in deeper philosophical traditions themselves quite distinct and in significant ways alien to the so-called 'positivist' tradition of contemporary social science. The first, and perhaps most familiar of these, is phenomenology [Berger]; the second, cultural anthropology [Douglas]; the third, structuralism [Foucault]; and the fourth, critical theory [Habermas]." These approaches have already had a profound impact and are helping to reverse the positivistic trend where, as the editors put it, "nuts and bolts have replaced hearts and minds."
But this distinction between social (in the sense of social action system, the empirical nuts and bolts) and cultural (meaning shared worldviews and values, hearts and minds) is very much the distinction between the exterior and the interior of a social (or communal) holon. These two dimensions are in intimate interaction and correlation, but neither can simply, without further ado, be reduced to the other (and thus not explained, but explained away).
Notice that, because we have only so many words to go around, I am forced to use social in two senses: in the narrow sense (as the social system or exterior observable patterns in a society [LR], contrasted to "cultural,"
or the interior values and meanings that cannot be captured empirically [LL]), and social in the broad or general sense (where it means both social, in the narrow sense, and cultural; where it means the entire lower half of the diagram). I trust that in the following discussion the context will make clear which meaning is intended.
As for the difference between social (narrow sense) and cultural, here's a simple example. Imagine you go to a foreign country where you do not speak the language. As soon as you arrive in that country, you are in the social system, or the actual material components of the country. You are in that country. People around you are speaking a foreign language, which you do not understand, but the physically spoken words hit your ears just like they do anybody else's; you and the natives are both immersed in the identical physical vibrations of the social system.
But you don't understand a word. You are in the social system, but you are not in the worldview, you are not in the culture. You hear only the exteriors, you do not understand the interior meaning. All the social signifiers impinge on you, but none of the cultural signifieds come up. You are an insider to the social system but an outsider to the culture.
The study of the interior cultural meanings cannot be reduced to a study of exterior action systems (even though they have various correlations), or else you could know everything there is to know about a community without ever learning the language: you would just report the "behavior" of the inhabitants (like the behavior of gas particles), and to hell with that tricky "meaning" stuff. (Foucault, in his reductionistic archaeology phase, actually proceeded in just this manner, bracketing both the truth and the meaning of linguistic statements, and just reported their systematic behavior, which caused quite an uproar. He later recanted and labeled the exclusive use of that approach "arrogant." But it is an arrogance that all such "happy positivism" is prone to.) Every holon has a component in the Lower-Right quadrant; it's just not the whole story.
The Lower-Left quadrant is the study of shared interior meanings that constitute the worldview (or common worldspace) of social or communal holons. With regard to humans, we have seen that these run from archaic to magic to mythic to mental (with all sorts of variations, and holding open the possibility of still-further developments).
And as for the worldspace of lower holons, I simply mean a shared space of what they can respond to: quarks do not respond to all stimuli in the environment, because they register a very narrow range of what will have meaning to them, what will affect them. Quarks (and all holons) respond only to that which fits their worldspace: everything else is a foreign language, and they are outsiders. The study of what holons can respond to is the study of shared worldspaces.

the right- and left-hand paths

There are an enormous number of correlations between this scheme of the four quadrants and the work of other theorists, and we will be exploring these in more detail as we proceed. For the moment, just a few preliminary notes.
The entire Right half of figure 4-3, the exterior half, can be described in "it" language (or "object" language) and can be studied empirically (in behavioristic or positivistic or monological terms). The entire Right half, as we said, is something you can see "out there," something you can register with the senses or their extensions (telescopes, microscopes, photographic plates, etc., and you tie your theorizing to these empirical ob-servables, which is what "monological" or "empiric-analytic" means).The components of the Right half—both the Upper-Right and Lower-Right quadrants—are, in themselves, neutral surfaces, neutral exteriors, neutral forms, all of which can fairly be described in "it" language. You don't ever have to engage the interiors of any of those holons: you don't have to engage in introspection or interpretation or meaning or values. You just describe the exterior form and its behavior. Nothing is better or worse, good or bad, desirable or undesirable, good or evil, noble or debased. The surface forms simply are, and you simply observe and describe them.
And you can do that; the surfaces forms are there; it is a legitimate and altogether necessary story. It is just not the whole story.
I will often refer to the study of both the Upper-Right and Lower-Right quadrants as the Right-Hand path: the path of that which can be seen with the eye of flesh or its extensions. In short, the path of "it"-language (objectivist, monological, observable, empirical, behavioral variables).
The Right-Hand path has two major and warring camps: the atomists, who study the surfaces of only individuals, and the wholists, who insist that whole systems, and not individuals, are the primary object of study. But both are equally exterior approaches confined to surfaces only. They are the two camps of flatland ontology: that which can be seen, detected with the senses, empirical through and through.
The entire Left half of the diagram, on the other hand, cannot be seen with the eye of flesh (except as those Left-side aspects become embedded in material or exterior forms, which we will discuss later). In other words, the Left half cannot be described in "it" language. Rather, the Upper-Left is described in "I"-language, and the Lower-Left is described in "we"-language (as I will explain in a moment). I will refer to both of them as the Left-Hand path.
Whereas the Right half can be seen, the Left half must be interpreted. The reason for this is that surfaces can be seen—there they are, anybody can look at them; but depth cannot be directly perceived—depth must be interpreted. The Right-Hand path always asks, "What does it dot" The Left-Hand path asks, "What does it meant"
A deer sees me approach. It sees my exterior form, my shape, and registers all the appropriate physical stimuli coming from my form to the deer. But what do they meant Am I the friendly fellow with the food, or the hunter with the rifle? The deer must interpret its stimuli in the context of its own worldspace and how I might affect it. And this is not just a matter of seeing: the deer sees just fine. But it might be mistaken in its interpretation; I might actually have the rifle, not the food. All the physical stimuli are hitting the deer fully (that's not the problem); the problem is, what do they actually meant The surfaces are given, but what is lurking in the depths? What are the intentions lying behind the surfaces? What is transmitted empirically but not merely given empirically?
Almost from its inception, and down to today, social theory has divided into two often sharply disagreeing camps: hermeneutics and structural-functionalism. Hermeneutics (the art and science of interpretation) attempted to reconstruct and empathically enter the shared cultural worldspace of human beings, and thus bring forth an understanding of the values contained therein. Structural-functionalism, on the other hand, dispensed with meaning (in any participatory sense) and looked instead at the external social structures and social systems that governed the behavior of the action system.
Both were holistic, in the sense that both situated individual existence in a larger network of communal practices and insisted that the individual could not be understood without reference to the holistic background of shared practices. But they were, almost exactly, representatives of the Left-Hand and Right-Hand paths, with hermeneutics asking always, "What does it mean?" and structural-functionalism asking instead, "What does it do?"
To reconstruct meaning (the Left-Hand path) I must engage in interpretation (hermeneutics); I must try to enter the shared depths, shared values, shared worldviews of the inhabitants; I must try to understand and describe the culture from within (while maintaining a delicate distance so as to be able to report at all). I cannot simply see meaning; meaning does not sit on the surface waiting, like a patch of color, to hit my senses. Rather, to the extent that I can, I must resonate with the interior depth of the inhabitants. The depth in me ("lived experience") must empathically align itself, intuitively feel into, the corresponding depth (or lived experience) that I seek to understand in others, and not simply blankly register an empirical patch. Mutual understanding is a type of interior harmonic resonance of depth: "I know what you mean!"
What, for example, does the Hopi Rain Dance mean? I might find, as many "participant observers" have, that it means, that it expresses, a connection with nature felt to be sacred, so that the dancing is both an expression of sacred nature and a request directed toward that same nature. To understand and articulate this in a sociological fashion (and not simply become a member of the tribe), I must look into the whole network of shared social practices and the "background unconscious" of linguistically (and prelinguistically) structured meanings and intersubjective exchanges that constitute the "pre-understanding" or "background" or "foreknowledge" of the particular worldspace or worldview—all of the contexts within contexts within contexts that structure the interior values and meanings of a culture, some of them explicit (requiring understanding), and some of them implicit (requiring excavation). (That is a short summary of the hermeneutic program from Wilhelm Dilthey and Weber and Heidegger down to today with Paul Ricoeur and Hans Gadamer and Geertz and Taylor.)
On the other hand, to reconstruct function (the Right-Hand path), I must carefully, and in largely detached fashion, observe not what the natives say they are doing, but what function the dance actually serves in the overall social action system (a function unknown to the natives). The detached observer concludes (as Talcott Parsons did) that the dance performs the function of securing social solidarity and social cohesion. Whether it is really going to make rain or not, or trying to make rain or not, is quite secondary to our concerns; because what it is really doing is providing an occasion that binds individuals together into the social fabric of the tribe (i.e., the self-organizing and autopoietic regime of the social action system). In order to determine this, the tribe is viewed as a holistic system, with its overall pattern (structure) and overall function (behavior) carefully observed, and then the "meaning" of any individual event is simply its place (or function) in the overall system. (And that is a summary of the structural/functional and "system theory" program in various forms, from Comte to Parsons to Niklas Luhmann, and even in its structuralistic and archaeological variants, Claude Lévi-Strauss to early Foucault).
The one path asking always, "What does it do?" and thus seeking to offer explanations based on naturalistic, empirical, observable variables; the other path asking always, "What does it meanì" and thus attempting to arrive at understanding that would be mutual.
Surfaces extend; interiors intend—it's still almost as simple as that.

subtle reductionism

There are important truths in both the Left- and Right-Hand approaches, and both are required for a balanced or "all-quadrant" view. My position is that every holon has these four aspects or four dimensions (or four "quadrants") of its existence, and thus it can (and must) be studied in its intentional, behavioral, cultural, and social settings. No holon simply exists in one of the four quadrants; each holon has four quadrants.
Of course, the more primitive the holon, the less we seem to care about its intrinsic value or its intentions or its culture, but that's partly arrogance. The point now is that, regardless of what we think of lower holons, when it comes at least to human beings, none of the four quadrants can be privileged. (If you don't believe that consciousness or prehension in any form extends below humans, a study of the four quadrants will at least show you in which directions and in which ways interiors would extend if you thought otherwise, which itself can be a very useful exercise.)
Which brings us to the subject of gross reductionism versus subtle re-ductionism. Gross reductionists, first of all, do not believe any interiors exist anywhere, so the issues of meaning, value, consciousness, depth, culture, and intentionality—these never come up for them; and, in fact, they hope to die with the boast on their lips that they never saw a value they couldn't reduce to atoms.
Gross reductionism first reduces all quadrants to the Upper-Right quadrant, and second—this is the gross part—then reduces all the higher-order structures of the Upper-Right quadrant to atomic or subatomic particles. The result is purely materialistic, mechanistic (usually), atomistic (always). Historically, only a very few, highly gifted nuts have actually taken this path with any sort of brilliance, starting with the Epicureans and running to Holbach, La Mettrie, and the like (what Polanyi referred to as "prejudice backed by genius" and Lovejoy summarized as, "There is no human stupidity that has not found its champion").
Opposed to these flatland atomists are the flatland holists. They do not reduce all holons to atoms. Rather, they reduce everything on the Left half of the diagram to a corresponding reality on the Right half. That is, they are the systems theorists and the structural/functionalists, in all their forms, from General System Theory to modern dynamic systems theory to virtually all of the "new paradigm" and "ecological/holistic" theories.
As I said, in many cases their hearts are in the right place, but their theories—because they are empirical and monological, because they are weakest-noodle sciences, because they deal with exteriors than can be seen and not interiors that must be arduously interpreted—because of all that, they end up with a truly insidious form of reductionism, insidious because they are almost completely unaware of what they have done. They claim to embrace the whole of reality, when in fact they have just devastated half of it.
(As only one example now, we can look at Habermas's withering attack on systems theory, and his demonstration that, although systems theory has its important but limited place, it is now, by virtue of its reductionism, one of the great modern enemies of the lifeworld—what he refers to as "the colonialization of the lifeworld by the imperatives of functional systems that externalize their costs on the other. ... a blind compulsion to system maintenance and system expansion." And what is Foucault's biopower—the "modern danger"—if not, in large part, the systems/instrumental mentality biologized and applied to humans, converting each and all to strands and means in the great interlocking bio-web—the chief form of coercive power in the modern world?)
What these systems and "holistic" theorists don't seem to understand is that while they have indeed avoided gross reductionism—and for that are to be highly praised—they are nonetheless (and apparently unknown to them) the exemplars of subtle reductionism. They don't reduce everything to atoms; they reduce everything in the Left-Hand to a Right-Hand description in the "system."
Gross reductionism still rears its peculiar head every now and then, usually when somebody discovers a recursive law (a simple procedure that, when repeated, generates complex procedures), but by and large it has not been historically that influential, and certainly not as influential as many new-paradigm critics seem to think.
The truly devastating contributor to modern flatland ontology, to an erasure of the Kosmos, has been the Right-Hand path of systems theory or structural/functionalism in its many forms. The systems theorists like to claim that the reductionistic villains are the atomists, and that in emphasizing the wholistic nature of systems within systems, they themselves have overcome reductionism, and that they are therefore in a position to help "heal the planet." Whereas all they have actually done is use a subtle reduction to overcome a gross one.
These flatland holists claim, for example, that the great "negative legacy" of the Enlightenment was its atomistic and divisive ontology. But atomism was not the dominant theme of the Enlightenment. As we will see in great detail (in chapters 12 and 13)—and as virtually every historian of the period has made abundantly clear—the dominant theme of the Enlightenment was the "harmony of an interlocking order of being," a systems harmony that was behind everything from Adam Smith's great "invisible hand" to John Locke's "interlocking orders" to the Reformers' and the Deists' "vast harmonious whole of mutually interrelated beings."
To give only a few examples now, Charles Taylor represents the virtually uncontested conclusion of scholars that "for the mainstream of the Enlightenment, nature as the whole interlocking system of objective reality, in which all beings, including man, had a natural mode of existence which dovetailed with that of all others, provided the basic model, the blueprint for happiness and hence good. The Enlightenment developed a model of nature, including human nature, as a harmonious whole whose parts meshed perfectly," and the "unity of the order was seen as an interlocking set calling for actions which formed a harmonious whole." As Alexander Pope would have it, speaking for an entire generation: "Such is the World's great harmony, that springs from Order, Union, full Consent of things; Where small and great, where weak and mighty, made to serve [each other], not suffer; strengthen, not invade; Parts relate to Whole; All served, all serving; nothing stands alone."
Already the Encyclopedic, bastion of Enlightenment thought, had announced that "everything in nature is linked together," and Lovejoy points out that "they were wont to discourse with eloquence on the perfection of the Universal System as a whole."
No, the downside of the Enlightenment was that it took a Kosmos of both Left and Right dimensions and reduced it to a cosmos that could be empirically (or monologically) described: it collapsed the Left half to its correlates on the Right half. Its great crime was not gross reductionism but subtle reductionism. The Great Holarchy of Being was collapsed into a "harmonious whole of interlocking orders," as John Locke put it, but orders that now had no depth, no gradations, no interiors, no qualitative distinctions, but instead could be approached through an objectifying and empiricist gaze (all being equal strands in the flatland web).
In short, the Left was reduced to the Right, and thus depth tended to get lost and flattened into mere span (and we will see more precisely what that entailed as we proceed). This indeed ended up being a divisive and dualistic ontology, precisely because, in describing the whole of reality in objective terms as a harmonious interlocking order or system (the great interlocking span), it left no room for the subject that was doing the describing (it had no language for depth)., Vertical interpretive depth was converted to horizontal interlocking span—the precise essence of subtle reductionism.
In short, Nature was a harmonious whole known by a subject that could not fit into it. And once this holistic/instrumental or "just-parts-of-the-whole" approach was applied to the subject itself—what Foucault called "knowledge closing in on itself"—the subject inadvertently began to erase itself (and not in the sense of a genuine transcendence, but in the sense of shooting itself in the foot). Precisely because the subject's world-view was empirically completely holistic, the subject aced itself out of the picture altogether, and hovered above the holistic world, dangling and disengaged, now helplessly, now viciously (thus the famous, or infamous, self-defining and disengaged subject cut off from the holistic/instrumental world, the "hyper-autonomous self" that so defined the Enlightenment, as we will see later in more detail).
In other words, the profound dualism inherent in the flatland "holism,"
although hidden (or not immediately obvious, as it still is not obvious to its adherents), was nonetheless already at work, and contributed directly to the Enlightenment's "dehumanizing humanism" that has been so severely criticized, from Foucault's "Age of Man" to Habermas's philosophy of the subject to Taylor's disengaged subject of instrumentally interlocking orders. They all tell a similar tale of the objectifying holistic/ instrumental mode of knowing turned back onto the subject, with various forms of internal and external violence resulting.
As we will see later in this chapter (and again in chapter 12), the holistic paradigm of the Enlightenment collapsed a Kosmos that was both vertically and horizontally holoarchic (and thus included both interior and exterior, Left and Right), into a flatland cosmos that was only horizontally holoarchic (exterior or Right only): a flatland web that replaced vertical depth with the great universal system of interlocking span, and reduced all interiors to exteriorily perceived strands in the great functional web. The holistic paradigm sounded like it covered "all" of reality (as against the atomists), but in fact it had just violently torn the Kosmos in half, tossed out depth and interiority, and settled aggressively on exteriors, surfaces, and the great interlocking span—with the "good" of men and women now being how they fit into the span, not how they discovered the depth.

an example

Once this flatland reduction occurred (which we will examine in great detail in chapters 12 and 13)—the Left-Hand aspects of reality were all reduced to their corresponding aspects on the Right Hand. Precisely because there are correlations between all four quadrants, this type of reductionism can be aggressively carried out. This is what makes subtle reductionism so hard to spot and so hard to combat.
For example, I have a thought; a thought occurs to me. That's the given holon, which we will use as an example. For this holon, in the Upper-Right quadrant, there is a change in brain physiology, a change that can be described in completely objective terms (it-language): there was a release of norepinephrine between the neural synapses in the frontal cortex, accompanied by high-amplitude beta waves . . . and so on. All of which is true enough, and all of which is very important.
But that is not how I experienced the thought, and I will never actually experience my thought in those terms. Instead, the thought had an interesting and important meaning to me, which I may or may not share with you. And even if you know what every single atom of my brain is doing, you will never know the actual details of my thought unless I tell you. That is the Upper-Left quadrant or aspect of this holon, this thought that occurred to me (and that is one of the many reasons why the Upper Left can never be reduced without remainder to the Upper Right; strong and general correlations and interactions, yes; detailed reduction, no).
Parenthetically, this is why the brain, even though it is "inside" my organism, is still only the exterior of my being—the brain is still Upper-Right quadrant, still exterior. I can surgically cut open a human body and look at all the "insides," even down to the tissues and cells and molecules, but those are not the within or the interior, they are merely more surfaces, more exteriors that now can be seen. They are inside surfaces, not real interiors (which is why they are all listed on the Upper-Right quadrant; they are all the aspects of holons that can be empirically registered).
But the crucial point is that you can look at the "insides" all you want and you will never see an interior, because whereas surfaces or exteriors can be seen, interiors must be interpreted. If I want to know what your brain looks like from within, what its actual lived interior is like (in other words, your mind], then I must talk to you. There is absolutely no other way. "What do you think? What's up? How do you feel?" And as we talk, I will have to interpret what you say, because all depth requires interpretation (whereas the brain physiologist doesn't have to talk to you at all; in fact, if a brain physiologist has got his hands on you, you are probably dead, which severely limits conversation; the brain physiologist can know all about your brain, and never know a single thought you had).
This is why the surfaces are all referred to as "monological"—they can be examined with a monologue, not a dialogue (which is why depth is dialogical or dialectical, or empathic in the broadest sense). You can study a bunch of moving rocks monologically; you can study brain physiology monologically; you can study suicide rates monologically. But you can only study interiors empathically, as a feel from within, and that means interpretation: both you and I might be mistaken as we try to assess each other.
In the Right-Hand path, all I basically have to do is look. I will need certain conceptual and material tools, it is true, but finally and fundamentally I just look: I look at a star with a telescope; I look at a cell with a microscope; I look at particle trails with a cloud chamber; I look at the behavior of rats in a maze; I look at a social system with empirical data and statistics. In each of these cases, I don't have to talk to the object of investigation. I don't try to reach mutual understanding. I don't try to interpret the depths or the interiors. I simply look at the surfaces, describe the exteriors, describe what I see. It can all be done in a monologue; it never needs a dialogue. And it's not that one is right and the other wrong; it's that both are extremely important.
This emphasizes the importance of the notion of sincerity in investigating the Upper-Left quadrant. When it comes to the developed forms of depth in humans, I only have access to that depth via interpreting what you tell me in a dialogue (and in body language or some such communication). And you might be lying. Further, you might be lying to yourself— which is where the numerous "sciences of depth," such as psychoanalysis, enter the picture. You and I can not only translate what we perceive, we can mistranslate. And all the various forms of "the hermeneutics of suspicion" (as Ricoeur called them) seek to dig beneath the stated surface content and assess the genuine or actual meaning of a communication: not what's sitting on the surface, but what hides in the depths.
The therapist, for example, based on formal training and on empathic (or sympathetic) intuition, might conclude that "the feeling of depression that you are experiencing is actually the disguised feelings of rage at your father for abandoning you." And if this makes sense to you, if you go, "Aha! that's exactly it!," then you have discovered a depth in you that you did not know was there, and that you consequently had been mistranslating (or misinterpreting) all those years. You and the therapist will then begin to retranslate those mistranslated feelings, correctly labeling them in the context of your own development: you are not "sad," you are actually "mad."
In this sense (which we will explore more later), my "unconscious," my "shadow," is the sum total of my past mistranslations carried into the present, where it distorts perception now ("transference"). My feelings of "sadness" were actually insincere; I was lying to myself in order to hide the worse pain of rage at a loved one; I deliberately (but "unconsciously") misinterpreted my feelings in order to protect myself ("defense mechanisms"). My shadow is the locus of my insincerity, my misinterpretation of my own depth (and this indeed is what all forms of "depth psychology," Freudian to Jungian to Gestalt, have in common).
Further, I will also mistranslate or misinterpret the depth in others ("What do you mean by that!") because I have mistranslated it in myself. And thus I have to reread the text of my own feelings, locate the source of my insincerity, and reinterpret my own depth more faithfully, with the help, usually, of somebody who has seen the mistranslation before and can help interpret me to myself. The issues are meaning, interpretation, and sincerity (or its lack).
Behaviorism, of course, wants nothing to do with any of this "black box" of interior meaning, and consigns the lot of it, at best, to "intervening variables" lying in that terra incognita between observable stimuli and observable response, internal variables that are defined merely as "tendencies to behavior," because behaviorism, being a Right-Hand path, does not trust anything it cannot see and monologically tinker with or reinforce. (I wonder if any of the behaviorists ever explain to their spouses that their shared love is just an intervening variable.)
In other words, behaviorism, like all Right-Hand paths, is fundamentally concerned with propositional truth. I, as a researcher, make a statement or a proposition about an objective state of affairs, and the research attempts to ascertain whether that statement is true or false (usually by trying to disprove it). But in all cases it boils down to statements like, "Is it or is it not raining outside?" I go and look, and I find out what the objective situation is ("It is indeed raining outside"). Other researchers go and look, and if everybody agrees, we say it is propositionally true that it is raining outside.
All propositional truth is of that variety, although it can get quite complicated, and the monological looking often requires telescopes, microscopes, EEGs, and other complex instruments of one sort or another. But they all attempt to align propositions with an objective state of affairs. They are monological, propositional, empirical. The validity criterion is one of truth, of matching map and territory accurately enough.
But in the Upper-Left quadrant, the validity criterion is not so much truth as truthfulness, or sincerity. The question here is not "Is it raining outside?" The question here is: when I tell you it is raining outside, am I telling you the truth or am I lying? Or perhaps self-deceived? Am I being truthful and sincere, or deceitful and insincere? This is not so much a matter of objective truth as one of subjective truthfulness. It is not so much whether the map matches the territory, but whether the mapmaker can be trusted.
Truthfulness, then, is a matter of trust and sincerity. Precisely because depth does not sit on the surface for all to see, my reporting of depth may or may not be trusted. Truthfulness, sincerity, trustworthiness—these are some of the crucial guideposts for navigating in the Upper-Left quadrant.
In short, it is not just a matter of true exteriors, but sincere interiors. And this sincerity cannot be determined empirically or objectively or monologically. We can give people empirical lie-detector tests, but if they have first lied to themselves, the monological machine will wrongly indicate they are telling the truth. The locus of sincerity is not objective, but subjective, and that can only be accessed in dialogical interpretation, not monological indication.
We will be returning to these points later, but those are some of the individual aspects of "this thought that occurred to me," this thought holon we are using as an example. The thought holon has brain correlates that can be determined objectively, monologically, propositionally (UR), guided by truth; and it has interior correlates that can be determined only dialogically and interpretively, guided by truthfulness. Not only are the two domains different in nature, they have different criteria for what is valid in each.
But, to continue the example, those individual aspects also have social or communal components (the lower half). Whether I tell you my specific thoughts or not, those thoughts do indeed have meaning to me (and would have meaning to you if I tell them to you), because that meaning is itself sustained by a whole network of background practices and norms and linguistic structures existing in our shared culture. If I tell them to you and you don't speak the language, then you won't get the meaning, even though all the physical words and stimuli freely bombard you. That is the Lower-Left quadrant, the shared cultural worldspace necessary for the communication of any meaning at all, and without which most (or even all) of my own private thoughts would be largely meaningless as well.
The question here is not one of truth so much, nor even truthfulness, but one of cultural fit, of the appropriateness or justness or "fitness" of my meanings and values with the culture that helps to produce them. My own individual meanings and values are not reducible to this cultural fitness (no quadrant is reducible to any other), but they do depend thoroughly on all the background contexts and cultural practices that allow me to form meanings in the first place. My thought-holon is inextricably situated in cultural contexts of relational exchange and intersubjective communications, without which my own subject (and its truthfulness) and the world of objects (with their truth) would not and could not disclose themselves in the first place.
If my thought-holon does not culturally fit, then I may be a genius rising above conventions, or I may be psychotic and totally out of touch with my fellows. But the criterion in any case is not so much truth or truthfulness, but justness, appropriateness: not whether my thought corresponds with a world of objects, nor whether I am being subjectively truthful, but whether I am inter subjectively in tune, appropriately meshed with the cultural worldspace that allows subjects and objects to arise in the first place. (Whether I agree or disagree with aspects of that culture, I have in all cases depended upon it to provide me with the capacity for intersubjective meaning in the first place.)
In other words, the criterion for validity in the Lower-Left quadrant is not just the truth of my statement, nor the truthfulness with which I put it, but whether you and I can come to mutual understanding with each other. Not objective, not subjective, but intersubjective.
But none of those meanings, whether individual or cultural, are simply or merely disembodied. My individual thoughts register a change in my brain physiology; likewise, cultural patterns are registered in exterior, material, observable social behaviors (even if they can't be reduced to them). And that is the Lower-Right quadrant.
That is, just as my thoughts have brain correlates, cultural meanings have correlates in objective social institutions and material social structures. Food production, transportation systems, written records, school buildings, geopolitical structures, behavioral actions of groups, written legal codes, architectural styles and the buildings themselves, types of technology, linguistic structures in their exterior aspects (written or spoken signifiers), economic forces of production and distribution—all the physical components of a social action system, all the aspects of a social system that can be seen empirically or monologically.
Here the criterion is not the truth of objects, nor the truthfulness of subjects, nor the mesh of intersubjective understanding and meaning, but rather the functional fit or the interobjective mesh of social systems. A social action system, for example, can only produce so much butter or so many guns, and the more of one, the less of the other—they must functionally fit with what is physically possible (whereas, in inter subjective meaning, the more meaning I have does not mean the less meaning available to you: these are qualities, not quantities, so they don't have to physically add or subtract from each other, as quantities in functional fit must).
Functional fit ("What does it Jo?") is, of course, the only validity claim recognized by systems theory. And that is part of its subtle reductionism. Interpretive depth (sincerity and truthfulness) and cultural meaning (justness and moral appropriateness) are all reduced to functional fit in exterior span: all are reduced to flatland holism.
(Even propositional truth, or subject and object corresponding fit, is reduced to functional fit, or interobjective fit, and "truth" becomes anything that furthers the autopoietic regime of the self-organizing social system; such theories dissolve their own truth value in the functional fit of that which they describe, so that their subjective theories become merely one among other interobjects, a very neat trick indeed; we will return to this later.)
Now the point of this overall example is simply that my "single" thought, the original holon, is not really a single thought as such, but rather a holon with four inseparable aspects (intentional, behavioral, cultural, and social), each with its own validity claims (subjective truthfulness, objective truth, inter subjective justness, and interobjective functional fit). As I said, no holon whatsoever simply exists in one or another quadrant; all holons possess these four quadrants, and each quadrant is intimately correlated with, dependent upon, but not reducible to, the others.
But precisely because these quadrants are all so intimately correlated, I can indeed attempt an aggressive reductionism, and it can actually seem to make a lot of sense. For example, since every thought does indeed register some sort of change in brain physiology (even if I have an out-of-the-body experience!), I can always maintain that thoughts are just brain states, even though I will probably maintain (as most brain theorists do) that the brain states themselves are higher-order (or hierarchical) emergent patterns that cannot be reduced to their atomistic elements.
This position is not yet gross reductionism. It is subtle reductionism. It has simply reduced interior depth, value, meaning, and consciousness (the Left Hand) to functional parts of a mutually interlocking order of holistic and empirical events (the Right Hand). It has reduced three-dimensional chess to flatland chess, the Kosmos to the cosmos, the interrelated pyramid of life to the interrelated web of life. And we have already summarized this with a short-hand phrase: it has collapsed vertical depth into horizontal span; or simply: it collapsed depth into span.
In short, this subtle reductionism still recognizes holarchy (hierarchy), but only the hierarchies on the Right Hand—only the hierarchies of size, extension, and surface. And therefore these hierarchies are all fundamentally defined by physical inclusion (a cell physically includes molecules, which physically include atoms, and so on; but these "depths" are all flatly monovalent: they are not holarchies of value, beauty, meaning, motivation, understanding, intention, consciousness, or anything else even vaguely Left Hand: all of those genuinely interior depths have been scrubbed clean and empirically whitewashed in the monochrome tones of exterior physical span, ex-span-sion, or extension/inclusion: no better or worse, only bigger or smaller).
And this subtle reductionism is helped by the fact that all four strands of evolution, all four quadrants, follow the twenty tenets. They are all holarchical. But whereas the Right Hand is preeminently involved in physical extension (organisms are bigger than cells), the Left-Hand involves intentions (concepts per se are not bigger or smaller than symbols, even though they "include" them and are more intentional; these are gradations of value and beauty, not gradations of size).
Further, the deeper one proceeds, the less the twenty tenets tell us anything significant anyway (since they are the lowest-common-denominator factors, the weakest-noodle laws). Nonetheless, the twenty tenets do capture certain fundamentals in all four quadrants.
Thus, this subtle reductionism can still champion loudly all the twenty tenets, the notion of development, the emergent characteristic of evolution, the mutually interrelated nature of all holons, the holarchical nature of all holons, and so on. All of that can still be heartily embraced by the subtle reductionist; it's just that all holarchies of quality have been lost entirely in holarchies of quantity, and all gradations of interior depth have been replaced by gradations of meaningless exteriors (compassion is better than murder, but quarks are not better than photons, and thus to explain the entire Kosmos in terms of exterior span and empirical forms is to find only a cosmos with no value whatsoever: guaranteed).
And since for every event in the Left-Hand dimension there is always something registered in the Right Hand, it can appear that an exhaustive description of the Right-Hand path actually covers everything there is to be said. Put differently, since every event in the Kosmos does indeed have a Right-Hand component, it can mistakenly appear that the Right-Hand path alone exhausts the Kosmos, whereas it has merely registered and measured the footprints of the giant.
It's very subtle, this program of collapsing the Kosmos.

the fundamental enlightenment paradigm

As we will see in chapter 12, this subtle reductionism was the fundamental Enlightenment paradigm? And within this subtle reductionism, within the fundamental Enlightenment paradigm, there were two warring camps: flatland atomists and flatland holists. And it is in an unbroken lineage that today's systems theorists carry on the latter pole of the Enlightenment paradigm: the task of both overcoming gross reductionism, which is altogether commendable, and covertly propagating subtle reductionism, the reduction of all intention to extension, all quality to quantity, all interpreted depths to unambiguously seen surfaces, all hierarchical values to monological mesh, all interiors to holistic strands, all truth and meaning to functional fit, all degrees of interior depth to mere functions of exterior span.
This is why Morris Berman can point out that the "contemporary quest for holism is just as formal, abstract, 'value-free,' and disembodied as the mechanistic paradigm it seeks to replace." This totally confuses and bitterly angers the holists, because they sincerely think they are the good guys, since they managed to defeat gross reductionism. "But we have shown that everything is connected to everything else!" The flatland web of life.
It is from this flat and faded landscape, armed with good intentions and a weakest-noodle science, that they cry out to us as our saviors, as those who would heal and make us whole, as those who have seen, and will show us now, the long-sought Promised Land.

harmony and fracture

Keep in mind that I am not saying systems theory and eco-holism is wrong; I would not have spent all of chapter 2 extolling it if I thought that. It is simply very partial—what Hegel called "a vanity of the understanding"—and that vanity tends to become dangerous, because when half the Kosmos claims to have the whole, certain types of aggression are about to ensue.
This is a prime example of how flatland holistic theories almost always end up aggressively instrumentalizing individuals: since all are really strands in the wonderful web, all are subservient to its overall functions (its functional fit). And the theorists who can describe the "final Whole" (even though there isn't one) get to tell you what your purpose, your role, and your real meaning is (because they have the final context, the "real Whole" that defines the functional fit—and therefore the "truth" and "meaning"—of each member).
And, indeed, the social systems theorists and eco-holists never tire of telling us our functional fit in their version of the "Whole." (Precisely as Habermas said: "the colonialization of the lifeworld by the imperatives of functional systems that externalize their costs on the other, a blind compulsion to system maintenance and system expansion.") They battle mighty and breathless to defeat atomism and triumphantly toss us all in their wondrous web of interlocking orders, never hesitating to speak for the "Whole" and what its needs and desires must truly be.
Never mind that there is no "Whole," only Emptiness and whole/parts forever; never mind that in reducing all domains and all validity claims to merely functional fit, the integrity and true integrations of the other domains are totally devastated; never mind that, politically, totalitarian functional fit is exactly what democratic revolutions everywhere have fought to overthrow. Never mind all that—we have the Whole!
In chapter 1 we saw that, according to the holists themselves, we today suffer from a fractured worldview. And that is indeed true; but the holists have not healed it; they have merely cloned it. Reducing everything to functional fit destroys completely the integrity of each domain, and further renders true integration of each impossible. The world is indeed fractured; the holists are some of the prime promoters of the fracture.
The holists, of course, tell the tale of the Enlightenment as being primarily an atomistic paradigm, which they maintain is the real cause of the world's fracture. This story allows the holists to hide the deeper crime of the Enlightenment that the holists themselves are still perpetuating. As we will see throughout the remainder of this volume, modernity's world-view is indeed fractured, not because everything isn't reduced to the Lower-Right quadrant of functional fit (the eco-holistic "solution"), but because the four quadrants themselves have yet to be integrated.
And it is in that integration that truth, truthfulness, meaning, and fit can be brought into a mutual harmony. That harmony—and not a reductionism that tears into the fabric of each in the name of a pretend wholeness—is one of the overall themes of this volume.
What we will find is that functional fit is indeed important, but it is only part of the harmony available. And it is not even the most important quadrant for today's world, because before we can even attempt an ecological healing, we must first reach a mutual understanding and mutual agreement among ourselves as to the best way to collectively proceed. In other words, the healing impulse comes not from championing functional fit (Lower Right) but mutual understanding (Lower Left). And that depends first and foremost, we will see, on individual growth and transformation (Upper Left).
Anything short of that, no matter what the motives, perpetuates the fracture (or so I will try to demonstrate). In understandably emphasizing the importance and the urgency of eco-holistic fit, the holists have absolutized the Lower-Right quadrant, which, in thus sealing it off from any true integration, condemns it to the fate of all fragments. Reducing all domains to the Lower Right, to functional fit, doesn't just destroy the other domains, it destroys the Lower Right as well.
This is just another way of pointing out that absolutizing the biosphere destroys the biosphere. At this point of sorely needed integration, the eco-holists are no friends of Gaia. They might protect a patch of Gaia here or there, which is wonderful; but without an overall integration of the available domains, Gaia continues to wither in the winds of disregard.

the big three

With reference to the four quadrants: because both of the Right-Hand quadrants are exteriors that can be described in it-language, I will sometimes count them as one major domain, the other two being the I-lan-guage of the Upper Left and the we-language of the Lower Left. And for simplicity's sake I will refer to these as the Big Three (it, I, we).
Numerous comparisons with other researchers could be pointed out here, and we will eventually discuss them in much detail. For the moment we might note that the Right half of the diagram is Karl Popper's World I (the objective world of it); the Upper Left, World II (the subjective world of I); and the Lower Left, World III (the cultural world of we, which can also, as Popper points out, be embodied or embedded in material social institutions, or the Lower Right).
Likewise, Habermas's three validity claims, for truth (objects), truthfulness or sincerity (subjects), and rightness or justice (intersubjectivity), refer respectively to the Right half, the Upper Left, and the Lower Left (I will return to Habermas in a moment and emphasize the importance of his formulations in this regard). And in the broadest sense this is Plato's the True (or prepositional truth referring to an objective state of affairs, it), the Good (or cultural justice and appropriateness, we), and the Beautiful (or the individual-aesthetic dimension, I). The Big Three are likewise Kant's three critiques: the Critique of Pure Reason (theoretical it-reason), of Practical Reason or intersubjective morality (we), and of personal Aesthetic Judgment (I). Thus, although other items are included as well, these three great domains—the Big Three—are especially the domains of empirical science, morality, and art.
But even when we move into a discussion of spirituality, we will see the Big Three appear in such all-important formulations as the Three Jewels of Buddhism: Buddha, Dharma, Sangha. Buddha is the ultimate I, Dharma the ultimate It, and Sangha the ultimate We. (I will be especially emphasizing this in subsequent chapters; it is absolutely crucial in spiritual concerns.)
Charles Taylor points out that "radically different senses of what the [cultural] good is go along with quite different conceptions of what a human agent is, different notions of the self. Our modern senses of the self not only are linked to and made possible by new understandings of good but also are accompanied by new forms of narrativity and new understandings of social bonds and relations. These all evolve together, in loose 'packages,' as it were." We are always situated in relation to the I, the it, and the we—and they evolve together.
And, to return to Habermas, this is the essence of the Habermasian revolution. We are inescapably situated in relation to the Big Three, each of which has its own validity claim and its own standards, and none of which can be reduced to the others. "With any speech act," he says, "the speaker takes up a relation to something in the objective world [it], something in a common social world [we], and something in his own subjective world [I]." And the claims made with reference to each of those worlds have their own validity criteria, namely, propositìonal truth (referring to an objective state of affairs, or it), normative rightness (cultural justness or appropriateness, we), and subjective truthfulness (or sincerity, I). And this means that none of them can be reduced to the others:

The "world" to which subjects can relate with their representations or propositions [propositional truth] was hitherto conceived of as the totality of objects or existing state of affairs [it]. The objective world is considered the correlative of all true assertoric [propositional] sentences. But if normative rightness [we] and subjective truthfulness [I] are introduced as validity claims analogous to truth, "worlds" [our "quadrants"] analogous to the world of facts have to be postulated for legitimately regulated interpersonal relationships [we] and for attributable subjective experiences [I]—a "world" [quadrant] not only for what is "objective," which appears to us in the attitude of the third person, but also one for what is normative, to which we feel obliged in the attitude of addresses, as well as one for what is subjective, which we either disclose or conceal [sincerity] in the attitude of the first person [the I].

Likewise, each of these validity claims (for truth, truthfulness, and justness) can be exposed to its own different kinds of evidence, and thus its own kind of truth claims can be exposed to evidence and checked for their actual validity.

Correlative to the three fundamental functions of language [related to I, we, it], each elementary speech act can be contested under three different aspects of validity. The hearer can reject the utterance of a speaker by either disputing the truth of the proposition asserted in it (or of the existential presuppositions of its propositional content), or the Tightness of the speech act in view of the normative context of the utterance (or the legitimacy of the presupposed context itself), or the truthfulness of the intention expressed by the speaker (that is, the agreement of what is meant with what is stated).

And so we can now return to (and better understand) the notion of subtle reductionism, or the attempt to collapse the Kosmos to the Right-Hand path (or reduce the Left Hand to the Right, or reduce "I" and "we" to "it," or reduce interiors to exteriors, whether atomistic or functional):
Truth is reduced to mere representation (the "reflection paradigm").That is, thoughts are no longer an integral part of the Kosmos, they are merely disengaged and hovering propositions that are supposed to mirror the cosmos, or simply "reflect accurately" a world of matter and facts out there (propositional thought as reflecting an objective state of affairs, or "its"). Reason is reduced from a substantive vision of the Kosmic order to a procedural process for mapping flatland. Truth no longer means attunement with the Kosmos, but merely how to map the cosmos.
More subtly, truth comes to mean functional fit. Truth no longer refers to attunement with the Kosmic state of affairs (interiorly and exteriorly, vertically and horizontally), nor even reflection on a state of affairs; it comes to mean merely instrumental means in the autopoietic self-maintainance of the system of functional span (at which point it bizarrely dissolves its own status; functional fitness can claim to be a true theory only by negating the meaning of truth: the theory, if it is true, must itself actually be an instrumental production of the system, at which point it can no longer be said to be true, only useful).
Similarly, personal integrity and intentions (UL) are reduced to healthy brain functioning (UR), to the now rampant model of biological psychiatry (one is depressed, not if one's life becomes meaningless or lacks values, but if one's neurotransmitters lack serotonin). Or, likewise, one's personal integrity and meaning is reduced to behavioral modification (also UR). Not "Where am I situated in the Kosmos?" but "How can I function better in the cosmos?" Not "What does my existence mean?" but "How can I get it to work better?"
Personal meaning is thus reduced to behavioral fitness, and this is unconsciously judged by the prevailing conventional cultural reality (without acknowledging the implicit judgment involved). "Adaptation to society" is thus the standard yardstick against which behavioral (and brain chemistry) modifications are judged (explicitly or implicitly): not whether adaptation to a given society is a good idea or not, but how to function better in that society regardless (and if you can't adapt to being a good Serb while you rape and murder, then a little Prozac will help us over those rough spots). Self-understanding is replaced by behavioral functioning, where one reinforces the desired response without a clue as to what responses are actually desirable and worth reinforcing in the first place.
Cultural meaning (LL) is reduced to social integration (LR), yet another version of functional fit. The whole validity of a cultural set of values is converted into a question of whether they promote social cohesion, functional fitness, and the integration of the social action system. By this criterion, the Nazis were altogether valid, because they certainly had one of the most coherent social orders ever devised: holism in action. Nothing beats fascism for a sturdy autopoietic regime. And nothing shows more clearly how limited social integration is as a criterion of the true and the good.
Put differently, since "What does it mean?" (the Left Hand) has been collapsed to "What does it do?" (the Right Hand), then the only criterion is "How well does it do it?" and not also "Is it worthy to pursue in the first place?"
Likewise, with subtle reductionism, morals no longer embody a statement of the good life, or what it means to lead a decent and worthy and noble life—a life worth being emulated, a life that empowers, a life plugged into moral sources that inspire worth and worship, awe and admiration—but rather what is merely required of us as a part, as a fraction, of a social action system. Intersubjective understanding is reduced to systems steering problems and technical tinkering. Morals and meanings become anemic markers of what procedures are required for systems maintenance and systems expansion. The True, and the Good, and the Beautiful are reduced to place settings at the dinner table of monological mesh.
And we are all reduced to whatever promotes the functional capacity of the autocratic system, reduced to what works, reduced to fitting in. Reduced to leading life by looking at a representational map of a flat and faded landscape, trying to fit into that landscape, and to trying to persuade others to embrace the same cheerful ontological suicide.
And this program of monological and functional fit has simply been translated directly into the various "eco-holistic paradigms," where our salvation is viewed as a matter of agreeing with, or simply accepting, the objective truth that we are all supposed to be functional parts of the "larger" biosphere. These approaches therefore attempt to demonstrate, in objectivistic and naturalistic terms (in it-terms of interrelated processes), that we are primarily strands or parts in the wonderful web of life—and my point is that, even if that were propositionally true, that paradigm still reduces the interior dimensions of truthfulness and mutual understanding to merely exterior functional fit, and thus these approaches do precisely nothing to further the understanding of how we can mutually come to agree on the courses of action necessary for biospheric sanity in the first place.
As I mentioned earlier, before we can even attempt an ecological healing, we must first reach a mutual understanding and mutual agreement among ourselves as to the best way to collectively proceed. In other words, the healing impulse comes from championing not functional fit (Lower Right) but mutual understanding (Lower Left) and interior qualitative distinctions (Upper Left). Anything short of that, no matter what the motives, perpetuates the fracture.
In understandably emphasizing the importance and the urgency of eco-holistic fit, the holists have absolutized the Lower-Right quadrant, which, in thus sealing it off from any true integration, condemns it to the fate of all fragments. Reducing all domains to the Lower Right, to functional fit, doesn't just destroy the other domains; it destroys the Lower Right as well.
We will see that the great task of modernity and postmodernity, as theorists from Schelling to Hegel to Habermas to Taylor have pointed out, is not to replace atomism with holism (a simple and obvious task), but to integrate the Big Three (integrate the it of flatland holism with the depth of I and community of we)—a very difficult and altogether tricky task, but one made all the more urgent by the fractured and dualistic worldviews of both atomism and holism.
In other words, if the great achievement of the Enlightenment (and "modernity") was the necessary differentiation of the Big Three, the great task of "postmodernity" is their integration, overcoming what Taylor called "a monster of arrested development" (both of these points will be discussed in later chapters).
What we need to do, then, is look now to the evolution of the Left-Hand dimensions (I and we) as they appear in humans, so that these can be "added" to the accounts of the Right-Hand path for a more balanced overview, an overview that more hopefully might contribute to the integration of the Big Three domains.
We can start with Habermas.

micro and macro, phylo and onto

Habermas begins with the observation that the same structures of consciousness (his phrase) can be found in the individual self (UL) and its cultural setting (LL), that is, in the micro and macro branch of the evolution of human consciousness. Habermas often uses "social" in the broad sense, but here we are centering mostly on what I have called cultural, as the context will make clear:

If one examines social institutions and the action competences of socialized individuals for general characteristics, one encounters the same structures of consciousness. This can be shown in connection with [to give only one example] law and morality. One can see here the identity of the conscious structures that are, on the one hand, embodied in the institutions of law and morality and that are, on the other hand, expressed in the moral judgements and actions of individuals. Cognitive developmental psychology has shown that in ontogenesis there are different stages of moral consciousness, stages that can be described in particular as preconventional, conventional, and post-conventional patterns of problem-solving [which we will explain later]. The same patterns turn up again in the social evolution of moral and legal representations.

As Habermas indicates, the individual and the cultural holon evidence the same basic structures of consciousness, and these same basic structures of consciousness show up in the development or evolution of both the individual and the species:

The ontogenetic models are certainly better analyzed and better corroborated than their social-evolutionary counterparts. But it should not surprise us that there are homologous structures of consciousness in the history of the species, if we consider that linguistically established intersubjectivity of understanding marks that innovation in the history of the species which first made possible the level of sociocultural [noospheric] learning. At this level the reproduction of society and the socialization of its members are two aspects of the same process; they are dependent on the same structures.

Let me repeat that Habermas is saying two things here: an individual human being and its sociocultural environment evidence the same basic structures of consciousness (correlation of micro and macro), and further, these same basic structures can be found in the evolution of the individual and the species (ontogenetic and phylogenetic parallels).

The homologous structures of consciousness in the histories of the individual and the species [are not restricted to the domain of law and morality. They can also be found] in the domain of ego development and the evolution of worldviews on the one hand, and in the domain of ego and collective identities on the other [correlations between UL and LL].

Here are a few of the correlations according to Habermas (and using only his terms): an individual at the level of preoperational thought participates in a natural or bodily identity, a shared worldview that is magic-animistic, and a preconventional morality; an individual at the level of concrete operational thought is open to a role identity, participates in a shared worldview of mythological thought, and in a conventional morality; and an individual at the level of formal operational thought possesses an ego identity, participates in a shared worldview that is rational, and evidences a postconventional morality (all of which we will be explaining).
Habermas's point is that, just as an infant of today develops from preconventional (magic) to conventional (mythic) to postconventional (rational)—which we will investigate in chapter 6—so the species itself evolved from magic to mythic to rational. It is the same basic structures of consciousness underlying both the micro and macro branch in both their ontogenetic and phylogenetic evolution, and it is the same developmental logic (holoarchic in nature, I would add) that governs their evolution.
I had taken virtually the identical approach in Up from Eden and Eye to Eye, and a few critics have objected to Habermas's and my use of phylogenetic and ontogenetic parallels, claiming that this is an old and outmoded way of thinking that nobody subscribes to anymore. And, indeed, the notion of onto/phylo parallels—first introduced by Ernst von Haeckel (1834-1919)—was originally used in such a rigid and simplistic way that the entire notion itself fell into disrepute. But in its modern versions it simply outlines a series of abstract patterns that indeed show similarities, and in this version it is even accepted by orthodox science itself, as witness that bastion of orthodoxy, Isaac Asimov, in his widely respected New Guide to Science:

It is almost impossible to run down the roster of living things, as I have just done, without ending with a strong impression that there has been a slow development of life from the very simple to the complex [tenet 12a]. The phyla can be arranged so that each seems to add something to the one before [tenet 5]. Within each phylum, the various classes can be arranged likewise; and within each class, the orders.
We can trace practically a re-enactment of the passage through the phyla, even in the development of a human being from the fertilized egg. In the course of this development, the egg starts as a single cell (a kind of protozoon), then becomes a small colony of cells (as in a sponge), each of which at first is capable of separating and starting life on its own, as happens when identical twins develop. The developing embryo passes through a two-layered stage (like a coelenterate), then adds a third layer (like an echinoderm), and so continues to add complexities in roughly the order the progressively higher species do.

As for cognitive development, the empirical conclusion of develop-mentalists from Silvano Arieti to Piaget is that there are indeed certain onto/phylo parallels in the evolution of deep structures (not surface structures), as Arieti explains: "What is of fundamental importance is that the [ontogenetic and phylogenetic] processes to a large extent follow similar developmental plans. This does not mean literally that in the psyche ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, but that there are certain similarities in the [two] fields of development and that we are able to individualize schemes of highest forms of generality which involve all levels of the psyche in its [two] types of development. We also recognize concrete variants of the same overall structural plans in the types of development."
That version of onto/phylo parallels is explicitly accepted by researchers and theorists from Erich Jantsch ("recapitulation does not act in a rigid and structurally oriented way, but in the sense of the flexible modification of a space-time structure") to Karl Popper and John Eccles. Massive evidence has been accumulated in this regard by the Jungians and given its most powerful statement in Erich Neumann's book The Origins and History of Consciousness.
But perhaps the most intriguing use of this notion is to be found in Rupert Sheldrake, who sees general recapitulation as a form of morphic resonance (or Kosmic memory) from all previous stages of evolution. It is as if, he says, nature develops habits—morphic units with morphic fields, which he also calls holons—and once these holons are developed or become set as habits of nature, then nature simply keeps reusing them in succeeding stages—another version of compound individuality.
Nobody is more aware than Habermas of the misuses and fallacies to which this notion has been put, and indeed he outlines eight ways that the notion has been erroneously used, objections which I strongly share (the critics of this approach might wish to consult Habermas, because he seems to be much clearer about its problems than they are). Habermas nonetheless concludes, "All provisos notwithstanding, certain homologies can be found"—certain parallels between the development of individuals and the development of the species.We can now look directly to these homologies, remembering always that these are not just some archaeological digs from a distant past, interesting but irrelevant. On the contrary, this is also an archaeology of our own souls. These "digs" exist now in the present, enfolded in us as part of our own compound individuality, past interiors taken into our own present interiors, living on in the depths of our own being today, enriching us or destroying us, depending entirely on our own capacity to embrace and to transcend.

5

The Emergence of Human Nature

Today, makes yesterday mean.               —emily dickinson

I think that there is a widespread and facile tendency, which one should combat, to designate that which has just occurred as the primary enemy, as if this were always the principal form of oppression from which one had to liberate oneself. Now this simple attitude entails a number of dangerous consequences: first, an inclination to seek out some cheap form of archaism or some imaginary past forms of happiness that people did not, in fact, have at all. There is in this hatred of the present a dangerous tendency to invoke a completely mythical past.           —michel foucault

AT this point in our discussion, we have sketched the evolution of the exterior of individual holons up to the complex triune-brained organisms (hominids) with an interior space of symbols and concepts. They lived in a social holon of a group/family (tribe) possessing a cultural archaic worldview. (Those are the four quadrants up to this point in our story.) But then something happened that transformed hominids (or "proto-humans") into true humans (Homo sapiens). What was it?

the emergence of homo sapiens

Habermas begins with the Marxist idea that what separates humans— Homo sapiens—from hominids and other primates is social labor or the existence of an economy. But Habermas finds that it is very likely that hominids also possessed an economy, and thus the mere existence of economic exchange does not mark the specifically human form of life, does not separate hominids from Homo sapiens.

If we examine the concept of social labor [economy] in the light of more recent anthropological findings, it becomes evident that it cuts too deeply into the evolutionary scale; not only humans but hominids too were distinguished from the anthropoid apes in that they converted to reproduction through social labor and developed an economy. The [hominid] adult males formed hunting bands, which (a) made use of weapons and tools (technology), (b) cooperated through a division of labor, and (c) distributed the prey within the collective (rules of distribution). The making of the means of production and the social organization of labor, as well as of the distribution of its products, fulfilled the conditions for an economic form of reproducing life.

Since part of my aim in this series is to follow the course of the male and female value spheres, it is instructive to note that, even in archaic hominid societies, these two spheres were already beginning to differentiate, and often sharply. Habermas:

The society of hominids is more difficult to reconstruct than their mode of production. It is not clear how far beyond interactions mediated by gestures—already found among primates—their system of communication progressed. The conjecture is that they possessed a language of gestures and a system of signal calls. In any event, cooperative big-game hunting requires reaching understanding about experiences, so that we have to assume a protolanguage, which at least paved the way for the systematic connection of cognitive accomplishments, affective expressions, and interpersonal relations that was so important for hominization.
The division of labor in the hominid groups presumably led to a development of two subsystems: on the one hand, the adult males, who were together in egalitarian hunting bands and occupied, on the whole, a dominant position; on the other hand, the females, who gathered fruit and lived together with their young, for whom they cared.
In comparison to primate societies, the strategic forms of cooperation and the rules of distribution were new [my italics; Habermas is searching for emergents]; both innovations were directly connected with the establishment of the first mode of production, the cooperative hunt.

Thus, Habermas concludes, the emergence of an economy "is suitable for delimiting the mode of life of the hominids from that of the primates; but it does not capture the specifically human reproduction of life."Rather, it "appears now that the evolutionary novelty that distinguishes Homo sapiens is not the economy but the family.''

Up to this point we have been using the term "family" in Jantsch's very loose sense, meaning any genetic-relative group of animals. But the specifically human family, according to Habermas, is marked by an emergent characteristic that is found nowhere else in evolution.

Not hominids, but humans were the first to break up the social structure that arose with the vertebrates—the one-dimensional rank ordering in which every animal was transitively assigned one and only one status. Among chimpanzees and baboons this status system controlled the rather aggressive relations between adult males, sexual relations between male and female, and social relations between the old and the young. A familylike relationship existed only between the mother and her young, and between siblings. Incest between mothers and growing sons was not permitted; there was no corresponding incest barrier between fathers and daughters, because the father role did not exist. Even hominid societies converted to the basis of social labor did not yet know a family structure.

The novel emergence of the human family, according to Habermas, occurred only as the male was also assigned the role of father, for it was only in this way that the two value spheres of the male and female could be linked. In ways (and for reasons) that we will examine in exhaustive detail in volume 2 of this series, the male and female value spheres had already been differentiated into social labor (hunting) and nurturance of the young. Lenski reports, for example, that of the known societies at this stage, an astonishing 97 percent show that pattern of male/female differentiation. If evolution were to continue, a new integration was also needed. Since presumably the female could not be pregnant and simultaneously hunt, the integrating link was established by the novel emergence of the role of the father, with one foot in both spheres.

The mode of production of the socially organized hunt created a system problem that was resolved by the familialization of the male, that is, by the introduction of a kinship system based on exogamy. The male society of the hunting band became independent of the plant-gathering females and the young, both of whom remained behind during the hunting expeditions. With this differentiation, linked to the division of labor, there arose a new need for integration, namely, the need for a controlled exchange between the two subsystems [what we called relational exchange with same-level holons]. But the hominids apparently had at their disposal only the pattern of status-dependent sexual relations. This pattern was not equal to the new need for integration, the less so, the more the status order of the primates was further undermined by forces pushing in the direction of egalitarian relations within the hunting band. Only a family system based on marriage and regulated descent permitted the adult male member to link— via the father role—a status in the male system of the hunting band with a status in the female and child system, and thus (1) integrate functions of social labor with functions of nurture of the young, and, moreover, (2) coordinate functions of male hunting with those of female gathering.

The familialization of the male. Thus began the one, single, enduring, and nightmarish task of all subsequent civilization: the taming of testosterone.

male advantage and female advantage

Notice that, unlike the role of the father, the role of the mother was not sufficient to link the two value spheres, because the mother could not, or at any rate did not, participate in the social labor of the hunt (with rare exceptions). And so we see that here, right at the very defining transformation from hominids to humans, a sexual differentiation emerged, a differentiation that could, as we will see, dissociate into extreme sexual polarization.
At this early point, this differentiation or asymmetry does not appear to have been strongly evaluative—that is, one sphere was not particularly more important or more valued than the other. It appears to have been mostly a simple differentiation of function, not a massive differentiation of status. There is no evidence that it was intensely ideological or exploitative, but rather seems to have been based largely on such simple biological factors as physical strength and mobility (male advantage) and procreation and biological nursing (female advantage).
These are intricate and emotionally charged issues, especially for the various schools of feminism, which is why the second volume of this series is devoted to an extensive review of just such issues. Some liberal feminists feel that any sexual differentiation or asymmetry is due exclusively to male domination. Many radical feminists, on the other hand, strongly accept and embrace the differentiation between the male and female value spheres (which, we will see, they equate with agency and communion, respectively), and they urge society to embrace more of the latter and less of the former. Social feminists tend to see sexual differences arising from different modes of production and technology, and see these unfair differences "evening out" as capitalistic modes become more human and humanizing.
I will be examining all of those positions carefully in volume 2. But until then we need an agreed-upon truce in the gender wars. My claim is that the structures of human consciousness that I will be presenting in the rest of this volume are in fact gender neutral, that there is no fundamental gender bias in the deep structures themselves. However, in the course of historical development, these gender-neutral structures, for numerous reasons we will examine, became loaded with various factors (technological, economic, cultural, social, and intentional) that biased some of these structures in an often specifically subjugating and certainly polarizing (or dissociating) fashion.
Thus, in volume 2, I will be looking at each of the cultural stages or worldviews (archaic, magic, mythic, mental, centauric) and correlating them with their historical modes of material production and technology (foraging, horticultural, agrarian, industrial, informational), and further, I will then specifically examine the status of men and women in each of those stages. My claim is that a consensus of liberal, radical, and social feminist views already exists on many of these important issues, and I will present those at that point.
In the meantime, when we reach, for example, the mythic-agrarian structure in the present discussion, I will have little to say about the status of women in those societies, even though the strong consensus of orthodox and feminist researchers alike is that sexual polarization and male domination of the public sphere were at their historical peak (and almost reversed from the previous horticultural societies, where many feminists feel women were at their greatest power). I would just like to point out that the fact that I don't discuss that issue now does not mean I am ignoring it.
But I will indicate now just a few of the ways that I believe this approach is novel. In studying gender and possible gender differences, what is required initially is a set of constants that acknowledge certain unambiguous differences in function (women give birth and lactate, and men have on average a moderate advantage in physical strength and mobility—these specific differences, for example, are emphasized by feminist researchers from Janet Chafetz to Joyce Nielsen, as we will see). These simple differences might not seem all that important today, but historically and prehistorically they were often some of the most important and determining factors in all of culture.
For example, when the animal-drawn plow was developed and eventually replaced the handheld hoe for farming (this is referred to as a shift from horticultural to agrarian modes), there was a massive shift from a largely female work force to a largely male work force, due almost entirely to the fact that the plow, unlike the hoe or digging stick, is a heavy piece of equipment. In horticultural societies, women produced about 80 percent of the foodstuffs (and consequently shared considerable public power with men); a pregnant woman could still easily use a handheld hoe, but not a plow. When the plow was invented, men took up virtually all of the productive work, the matrifocal modes of production gave way to patrifocal modes, and the reigning deity figures switched from Great Mother to Great Father focus.
(Peggy Sanday has demonstrated that predominant female deity figures appear almost exclusively in horticultural societies—about a third of them have female-only deities, and another third have male and female deities; whereas virtually all agrarian societies have male-only deities. Thus, one of the conclusions of volume 2 is that where women work the fields with a hoe, God is a Woman; where men work the fields with a plow, God is a Man. Exactly how that fits with any enduring masculine and feminine faces of Spirit is a major topic of volume 2. Are these deity figures just economic byproducts, or is something more enduring being reflected here?)
Feminist researchers such as Janet Chafetz have pointed out that women who participated in heavy plowing had a much higher rate of miscarriage, and thus it was not to their genetic advantage to do so. This aspect of the shift from matrifocal to patrifocal, in other words, cannot reasonably be ascribed to oppression or male domination, but to a joint decision on the part of men and women in the face of a set of natural givens.
That initial differentiation of function, however, could be (and in many cases was) parlayed into a difference in status, with males dominating the public/productive sphere and women relegated to the private/reproductive sphere. And what we will want to examine are these natural differentiations as they moved into dissociations (and extreme sexual polarizations) that disadvantaged one or the other sex (and usually both)—at each of the six or so major epochs/stages/structures we will be examining.
In other words, we will find that a set of constants (a handful of factors that, according to most feminist researchers, have not changed much from culture to culture, such as birthing/nursing), when applied to the various gender-neutral structures of consciousness and stages of technological unfolding, will together generate the specific gender differences in the status of men and women at each stage (and this will help us to decide what is, and what is not, oppression). These constants (such as physical strength/ mobility and birthing/nursing) are presented in the first two chapters of volume 2 ("Strong and Weak Universals in the Sexual Scheme"), and how they play out and unfold, for better and for worse, is examined in five or six chapters following.
What we are discussing now, however, is simply the gender-neutral structures of consciousness within which these sexual and gender polarizations would occur.

male and female liberation

Before we pick up the story of the evolution of these consciousness structures, let me give a final example of the ground we will be covering later in this chapter (and extensively in volume 2). Some of what I am going to say now will not make total sense until the end of this chapter (after I have introduced some much-needed evidence), but it would be useful to introduce the general topics at this point, because of both their importance and their intricacy. (We will return to these topics at the end of the chapter and review them in light of the material presented.)
Part of the disagreement between liberal feminism (men and women are fundamentally equivalent in capacities) and radical feminism (men and women represent two quite different value spheres, the former being hyperautonomous, individualistic, a bit power-crazed, but generally agency-oriented, the latter being more relational, nurturing, and communion-oriented) is that these two approaches are almost impossible to reconcile, and this has caused much dissension, sometimes quite bitter, within the ranks of the women's movement.
But what if the radical feminists are right when it comes to the biospheric component of human beings, and the liberal feminists are right when it comes to the noospheric component? If this integration could be effected in a genuine fashion, and not merely as a verbal flourish, we could simultaneously honor some of the important differences in sexual being—so emphasized by the radical feminists—and yet also insist on, and maintain, equality before the law (which means, in the noosphere)— the important demand of liberal feminists.
But it would mean something else as well, something even more important. In this chapter we will see the evidence (presented by Habermas, although he is not alone in this conclusion), that the noosphere and the biosphere did not finally differentiate in the West until around the sixteenth-seventeenth century. (That this differentiation went too far into dissociation—that is one of our central topics, but for the moment, it is a separate issue.) The point now is that, with the differentiation of the noosphere and the biosphere, the roles of men and women were no longer necessarily or automatically determined (or largely influenced) by biological factors (such as physical strength/mobility and birthing/nursing), factors that, one way or another, had largely dominated not only the relation of men to women but also of men to men, up to that point in history.
In other words, with the differentiation of the noosphere and the biosphere, biology was no longer destiny. That is, no longer necessarily destiny: the relationships between men and women (and men and men) were no longer necessarily dominated by the heavy hand of biological differences and determinants, physical strength and reproduction.
Thus, as evolution continued to move into the noosphere and transcend its exclusive grounding in the biosphere, those two universals that we briefly mentioned—bodily strength and bodily reproduction—which have value only in the biosphere, could be transcended as well (i.e., preserved and negated). This, of course, is a matter of degree; biology is still preserved and its inclinations still taken up and reworked by culture; but the greater the differentiation, the greater the possible negation and reworking.
If, for the moment, we simply agree with the radical feminists that the "female value sphere" tends to emphasize communion, then this value sphere could be decoupled from exclusive biological reproduction and could begin to enter the world of agency or production or "male culture," while still retaining its roots in the richness of the reproductive sphere. The more evolution transcended the biosphere, the more women could participate in both worlds (noospheric-mental and biospheric-familial), because in the world of the mind, physical strength, for example, is irrelevant.
In other words, with the differentiation of the noosphere and the biosphere, women could also become agents in the noosphere (historical agents), as well as being grounded in the biosphere. And this precisely reverses the roles that men and women had played up to this point in history. Previously, the male and female spheres were integrated by placing the male in the family via the role of the father (as biological agent); now the two spheres could be integrated—demanded to be integrated—by placing the female in the public sphere (as noospheric agent).
Thus, at this present time in history—in today's world—it is especially the role of the female as historical agent that can bridge the two value spheres, whereas in all previous history that role rather necessarily fell to the male as father (this "familialization of the male" is the point that Habermas has just introduced in our narrative).
In this way, and this way only, I believe, can we maintain the otherwise paradoxical and confusing truth—a paradoxical truth that has crippled feminism vis-à-vis "female liberation"—in this way only can we maintain both that women now stand open to and in need of liberation yet previously were not acting in an unliberated (or duped) fashion. The widespread emergence of the women's movement in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries occurred precisely because the noosphere and the biosphere were finally differentiated. And this inescapably means that the widespread emergence of the women's movement was not primarily the undoing of a nasty state of affairs that easily could have been different, but rather it marked the emergence of an altogether new state of affairs that was in significant ways unprecedented.
What had grounded both men and women in narrowly based biological roles was an evolutionary process that was itself, until fairly recently, grounded in the biosphere, and that only recently is now in the process of liberating both men and women from confinement to those particular roles, which were necessary at the time but are now outmoded; and the lead in this evolutionary transformation can most easily come (as Ynestra King has pointed out) primarily in the form of women assuming cultural agency and not just family communion (just as in the previous integration, the familialization of the male, men were placed in family communion and not just cultural agency).
That is the new integration now demanded on a societal level. And viewing it in this evolutionary light allows us to bypass much of the standard and useless rhetoric that men have been oppressive pigs from day one, with the unavoidable implication that women have been herded sheep. It's not so much that that view is demeaning to men, although it is meant to be, but rather that one cannot claim women have been oppressed for five thousand years (some say for five hundred thousand years) without simultaneously implying that women are stupider and/or weaker than men—there are no other explanations.
If we see the biologically differentiated roles of men and women as something imposed by men on women, then we have to simultaneously assume the complete pigification of men and the total doltification of women. To automatically assume that differentiation of roles is the result of domination is to automatically define a particular group as victim, which automatically and irrevocably disempowers that group in the very attempt to liberate it.
But if men and women were largely operating in the face of certain biological givens, and if these givens are no longer primarily determinate, then both men and women stand in need of liberation from those previously confining roles. The "patriarchy" was not something that could have simply and easily been avoided or bypassed (wherever evolution moved beyond the hoe, the patriarchy accompanied it). If it could have been easily bypassed but wasn't, then men indeed are pigs and women dolts. The patriarchy, however, is not something that needs to be reversed but rather something that needs to be outgrown: and that releases the male from blame and the female from sheepdom.
And it further allows us to see the real cause of the unfortunate resistance to today's feminism. It is not a resistance to undoing thousands of years of male obnoxiousness and female dupedom, but a resistance to the emergence of an entirely novel structure of consciousness, a structure that, having for the first time in history differentiated the noosphere and the biosphere (and that, among many other things, created feminism), is now in the process of trying desperately to integrate both women and men into that utterly new worldspace. That is what is feared and resisted (by many men and many women). And that is the new integration of which I will speak at length (under the names "centaur" and "vision-logic," the stage beyond egoic-rational).
We will see that there have indeed been forms of oppression and subjugation, but these have to be judged, not against today's structures of consciousness, but against what could have been otherwise at a given previous structure. Within the possibilities of a given structure, we judge its degree of nastiness: the judgment needs to be stage-specific and stage-appropriate. And this means we have to carefully reconstruct the notion of oppression in this regard, because if something could not occur under any given circumstances at a particular time, then the "not occurring" cannot simply be ascribed to oppression without further ado. If, for example, widespread feminism could not have emerged until the differentiation of the noosphere and biosphere, then its nonexistence in earlier cultures was not the result of oppression, but the result of not-yet-enough evolution, an entirely different story: women were not being weak and ignorant and men were not being insensitive slobs (nothing, that is to say, out of the ordinary).
When the noosphere and the biosphere were finally differentiated, biology was no longer destiny. Women could begin to move out of the biosphere and into the noosphere, albeit against much resistance to this new emergence. (And indeed, every male today starts his own development as a biospheric beast, and he won't "get it" until he, too, differentiates noosphere and biosphere, and acts from the former, not the latter. The battle has to be fought anew with every birth, and the resistance, in different forms, is present in both women and men. Polls consistently showed, for example, that in the United States a majority of men favored the Equal Rights Amendment but a majority of women rejected it. The new emergence is difficult for all, precisely because it in many ways means leaving the predeterminatedness and comfort of biological givens.)
In the course of history and prehistory, it would take three or four major and profound cultural transformations to climb up and out of this biological destiny. (And each step would have its own and very new forms of pathology and possible dissociation, all of which would have to be negotiated—sometimes not very successfully.)
At this point in our narrative, we are still at the very first transformation. The first sexual-functional differentiation has just taken place, based largely on simple biospheric differences (physical strength/mobility versus birthing/nursing). And the first major integration of these two spheres has also occurred: placing the male in both worlds via the altogether novel emergence of the role of the father.

magical-animistic

With the familialization of the male, and the emergence of human socio-cultural evolution, we move from the archaic to the magic. As for the magical structure itself, according to the extensive research of Habermas and his associates:

Apparently the magical-animistic representational world of paleolithic societies was very particularistic and not very coherent. The ordering representations of mythology [i.e., early mythology, and not the complex mythology that is the next stage, the mythological stage proper] first made possible the construction of a complex of analogies in which all natural and social phenomena were interwoven and could be transformed into one another ["magical displacement"]. In the egocentric world conception of the child at the preoperational level of thought, these phenomena are made relative to the center of the child's ego; similarly, in sociomorphic worldviews they are made relative to the center of the tribal group. This does not mean that the members of the group have formed a distinct consciousness of the normative reality of a society standing apart from objectivated nature—these two regions have not yet been clearly separated [i.e., the biosphere and the noosphere have not yet been clearly differentiated/integrated]. This magical-animistic stage is characterized by a conventional kinship organization, a preconventional stage of law, and an egocentric interpretive system. . . .

Preoperational thinking, for cognitive anthropologists, is thinking that works with images, symbols, and concepts (but not yet complex rules and formal operations). It is also called "representational" because symbols and concepts essentially present and represent (make and match) sensory objects in the external world. For this reason, cognitive psychologists and anthropologists refer to representational thought as being "close to the body." That is, the noosphere is just emerging, the mind is just emerging, and as such it is still relatively undifferentiated from the biosphere, from the body and sensorimotor intelligence.
This is why Habermas refers to the self-identity of this stage as a natural identity or a body-based identity (as Freud put it, "the ego is first and foremost a bodyego"). It is not yet an identity based upon extensive mental rules and roles—which develop only with the next stage, the concrete operational—and so the law and morality of this stage is likewise body-based, dependent upon physical pragmatic concerns and "naive instrumental hedonism." As McCarthy summarizes it, the individual at this preconventional moral stage "is responsive to cultural rules and labels of good and bad, right and wrong, but interprets these labels in terms of either the physical or the hedonistic consequences of action (punishment, reward, exchange of favor), or in terms of the physical power of those who enunciate the rules and labels."
It is also called "magical" (by Habermas, Gebser, Piaget) because the mind and body are still relatively undifferentiated, and thus mental images and symbols are often confused or even identified with the physical events they represent, and consequently mental intentions are believed to be able to "magically" alter the physical world, as in voodoo, exoteric mantra, the fetish, magical ritual, "sympathetic magic," or magic in general (we will return to this topic in the next chapter). Likewise, and from the other side of the indissociation, physical objects are "alive," possessing not just prehension but explicitly personal intentions (animism).
In other words, because the biosphere and the noosphere are not yet clearly differentiated/integrated, the subject has special power over the object (magic) and the object has special subjective qualities (animism). Whether that was or was not "spiritual" in any genuine sense we will investigate later.
Cognitive anthropologists often refer to this as "global syncretism" or "indissociation." Habermas explains:

[In these societies] collective identity was secured through the fact that individuals traced their descent to the figure of a common ancestor [kinship] and thus, in the framework of their worldview, assured themselves of a common cosmogonic origin. On the other hand, the personal identity of the individual developed through identification with a tribal group, which was in turn perceived as part of a nature interpreted in interaction [magical] categories. As social reality was not yet clearly distinguished from natural reality, the boundaries of the social world merged into those of the world in general. Without clearly defined boundaries of the social system there was no natural or social environment in the strict sense; contacts with alien tribes were interpreted in accord with the familiar kinship connection.

It is that indissociation that is so often eulogized by retro-Romantics, because, I believe, they mistake indissociation for integration. The magical-animistic structure, as lovely as it might appear to us jaded moderns, was not an integration of the biosphere and the noosphere, because these had not yet been differentiated in the first place.
At the same time—and for precisely the same reason—that "lack of separation" might have embodied a type of ecological wisdom, a wisdom that many moderns are understandably trying to recapture. Namely, the tribal kinship consciousness, still lying "close to the body," close to the biosphere, was for just that reason sometimes more "ecologically sound," more in tune with natural wisdom, with the Earth and its many moods. And thus it is small wonder that, in these ecologically disastrous times, many moderns are attempting to resurrect the natural wisdom of tribal awareness more attuned with the biosphere.
I am in complete sympathy with that approach; I am not in sympathy with the attempt to turn back the clock and elevate this structure to a privileged status of integrative power that it simply did not possess. Further, whether "close to nature" automatically translates into "ecologically sound" is hotly debated. Lack of capacity to devastate the environment on a large scale does not automatically mean wisdom, let alone reverence for the environment. And, in fact, many tribes, as Lenski points out, simply remained at one location until they had ecologically depleted the area, and then were forced to move on. Tribal awareness was in all cases close to nature, in the sense of indissociated; ecologically sound is another matter.
Riane Eisler is specific: "If we carefully examine both our past and present, we see that many peoples past and present living close to nature have all too often been blindly destructive of their environment. While many indigenous societies have a great reverence for nature, there are also both non-Western and Western peasant and nomadic cultures that have overgrazed and overcultivated land, decimated forests, and, where population pressures have been severe, killed off animals needlessly and indifferently. And while there is much we can learn today from tribal cultures, it is important not to indiscriminately idealize all non-Western cultures and/or blame all our troubles on our secular-scientific age. For clearly such tribal practices as cannibalism, torture, and female genital mutilation antedate modern times. And some indigenous . . . societies have been as barbarous as the most 'civilized' Roman emperors or the most 'spiritual' Christian inquisitors."
As Rene Dubos summarizes the available evidence, "All over the globe and at all times in the past, men have pillaged nature and disturbed the ecological equilibrium, usually out of ignorance, but also because they have always been more concerned with immediate advantages than with long-range goals. Moreover, they could not foresee that they were preparing for ecological disasters, nor did they have a real choice of alternatives."
Theodore Roszak, himself a staunch advocate of a certain type of "primal/tribal wisdom," nonetheless points out that in many instances "tribal societies have abused and even ruined their habitat. In prehistoric times, the tribal and nomadic people of the Mediterranean basin overcut and overgrazed the land so severely that the scars of the resulting erosion can still be seen. Their sacramental sense of nature did not offset their ignorance of the long-range damage they were doing to their habitat."
Likewise, he says, other indigenous or primal societies have, "in their ignorance, blighted portions of their habitat sufficiently to endanger their own survival. River valleys have been devastated, forests denuded, the topsoil worn away; but the damage was limited and temporary."
The correct conclusion, in other words, is that the primal/tribal structure in itself did not necessarily possess ecological wisdom, it simply lacked the means to inflict its ignorance on larger portions of the global commons.
The main difference between tribal and modern eco-devastation is not presence or lack of wisdom, but presence of more dangerous means, where the same ignorance can now be played out on a devastating scale. As we will see, our massively increased means have led, for the first time in history, to an equally massive dissociation of the noosphere and the biosphere, and thus the cure is not to reactivate the tribal form of ecological ignorance (take away our means), nor to continue the modern form of that ignorance (the free market will save us), but rather to evolve and develop into an integrative mode of awareness that will—also for the first time in history—integrate the biosphere and noosphere in a higher and deeper union (all of which we will investigate later in this chapter).
Evolution moved beyond tribalism, and its limited capacity for social-planetary integration, for good reason. Tribes may or may not have known how to remain reverential of nature; it was other tribes they could not integrate, and this because they lacked recourse to a binding conventional level of law and morality that very soon would start to build unified societies out of separate and conflicting tribal desires. The problem wasn't getting along with nature in the biosphere; it was getting along with other and conflicting interests in the noosphere that brought tribalism to its limits for evolutionary integrative power.
Habermas and his collaborators (particularly Klaus Eder and Rainer Dobert), who have been carefully studying the anthropological data, have mapped out some of the inherent limitations that brought tribal kinship systems to an evolutionary dead end.

In the evolutionarily promising neolithic societies, system problems arose which could not be managed with an adaptive capacity limited by the kinship principle of organization. For example, ecologically conditioned problems of land scarcity and population density or problems having to do with an unequal distribution of social wealth. These problems, irresolvable within the given framework, became more and more visible the more frequently they led to conflicts that overloaded the archaic [magic] legal institutions (courts of arbitration, feuding law).
A few societies under the pressure of evolutionary challenges from such problems made use of the cognitive potential in their worldviews [cognitive capacities of higher moral-pragmatic stages not yet socially embedded] and institutionalized—at first on a trial basis—an administration of justice at a conventional level [mythic-membership, concrete operational]. Thus, for example, the war chief was empowered to adjudicate cases of conflict, no longer only according to the distribution of power, but according to socially recognized norms grounded in tradition. Law was no longer only that on which the parties could agree.

It was at this point that complex systems of mythology, whatever other functions they might have performed, began to serve first and foremost as a way to unify peoples beyond mere blood lineage. The human race was not only self-adapting, it was self-transcending.

The phenomenon to be explained is the emergence of a political order that organized a society so that its members could belong to different lineages. The function of social integration passed from kinship relations to political relations. Collective identity was no longer represented in the figure of a common ancestor but in that of a common ruler [or leader or governor, who sometimes, but not always, would abuse this newly emergent power; we will return to Habermas's thoughts on this later; he is at present focusing on the necessary and new integrative power brought by this transformation, and not on any of its particular abuses, which are legion and which he also discusses in great detail].
A ruling position gave the right to exercise legitimate [or agreed-upon] power. The legitimacy of power could not be based solely on authorization through kinship status; for claims based on family position, or on legitimate kinship relations in general, were limited precisely by the political power of the ruler. Legitimate power crystallized around the function of administering justice and around the position of the judge after the law was recognized in such a way that it possessed the characteristics of conventional morality. This was the case when the judge, instead of being bound as a mere referee to the contingent constellations of power of the involved parties, could judge according to intersubjectively recognized legal norms sanctified by tradition, when he took the intention of the agent into account as well as the concrete consequences of action, and when he was no longer guided by the ideas of reprisal for damages caused and restoration of a status quo ante [characteristic of preconventional morality], but punished the guilty party's violation of a rule. Legitimate power had in [this] instance the form of a power to dispose of the means of sanction in a conventional administration of justice. At the same time, mythological worldviews also took on—in addition to their explanatory function—justificatory functions. . . .

In short, what was needed was not tribal but transtribal awareness, negating but preserving heretofore isolated tribal interests in a higher and wider communion; and mythology, not magic, provided the key for this new transcendence.
And so: some people today eulogize the primal tribal societies because of their "ecological wisdom" or their "reverence for nature" or their "nonaggressive ways." I don't think the evidence supports any of those views in a sweeping and general fashion. Rather, I eulogize the primal tribal societies for entirely different reasons: we are all the sons and daughters of tribes. The primal tribes are literally our roots, our foundations, the basis of all that was to follow, the structure upon which all subsequent human evolution would be built, the crucial ground floor upon which so much history would have to rest.
Today's existent tribes, and today's nations, and today's cultures, and today's accomplishments—all would trace their lineage in an unbroken fashion to the primal tribal holons upon which a human family tree was about to be built. And looking back on our ancestors in that light, I am struck with awe and admiration for the astonishing creativity—the original breakthrough creativity—that allowed humans to rise above a given nature and begin building a noosphere, the very process of which would bring Heaven down to Earth and exalt the Earth to Heaven, the very process of which would eventually bind all peoples of the world together in, if you will, one global tribe.
But in order for that to occur, the original, primal tribes had to find a way to transcend their isolated tribal kinship lineages: they had to find a way to go transtribal, and mythology, not magic, provided the key for this new transcendence.

mythological

The transition to societies organized through a state required the relativization of tribal identities and the construction of a more abstract [meaning less body-bound] identity that no longer based the membership of individuals on common descent but on belonging in common to a territorial organization. This took place first through identification with the figure of a ruler who could claim close connection and privileged access to the mythological originary powers. In the framework of mythological worldviews the integration of different tribal traditions was accomplished through a large-scale, syncretic expansion of the world of the gods—a solution that proved to be rather unstable [and precipitated the next major transformation, which we will examine in a moment].

It wasn't that magical-animistic societies had no mythologies, for they did. It was simply that, as Joseph Campbell explained, the rise of the first early states was marked by an explosion of codified mythologies—an enormous differentiation/integration of mythic motifs—and Habermas's point is that these mythologies became a large part of the integrating structures for society (i.e., providing both cultural meaning and social integration).
As we saw, in the previous or magical structure, personal identity was natural or body-based, and collective identity was likewise kinship or blood-bound, particularly through a common ancestor. Without a common ancestor (or kinship lineage), there was no way to socially integrate various interests. With the rise of the mythological structure, however, personal identity switched to a role identity in a society of a common political (not genetically related) ruler, and this ruler was given legitimacy not because of blood ties but because of his (or sometimes her) special relation to mythological gods/goddesses—"mythic-membership."
Under this arrangement, an enormous number of not-genetically-related tribes could be unified and integrated, something the preconven-tional magical structure—lying close to the body and close to nature— could never accomplish.

Only with the transition to societies organized around a state do mythological worldviews also take on the legitimation of structures of [governance], which already presuppose the conventional stage of moralized law. Thus the naive attitude to myth [characteristic of the magical] must have changed by that time. Within a more strongly differentiated temporal horizon, myth is distantiated to a tradition that stands out from the normative reality of society and from a partially objectivated nature. With persisting sociomorphic traits, these developed myths establish a unity in the manifold of appearances; in formal respects, this unity resembles the sociocentric-objectivistic world conception of the stage of concrete operations [and conventional-stage morality] .

We will later address in more detail the topic of whether these myths actually contained any genuinely transcendental, mystical, or transformative spiritual capacities (as maintained by, e.g., Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell).
For the moment let us only note that these various "epochs," such as the magical or mythical, refer only to the average mode of consciousness achieved at that particular time in evolution—a certain "center of gravity" around which the society as a whole orbited. In any given epoch, some individuals will fall below the norm in their own development, and others will reach quite beyond it.
Habermas strongly believes, for example, that even in preoperational magical times, some individuals clearly developed cognitive capacities all the way up to formal operational cognition, not as fully formed structures but as potentials for understanding. This is an example of what I referred to in Up from Eden as the leading edge or most advanced form of consciousness evolution, in contrast to the average mode of the time. And I believe that the evidence clearly suggests that, to stay with the magical structure as an example, the most advanced mode of that time was not just formal operational, although I believe that was clearly present, but beyond that to the psychic level, again not as fully formed structures but as a potential for a certain type of understanding and awareness (which we will examine in chapter 8).
My point is that in each epoch, the most advanced mode of the time—in a very small number of individuals existing in relational exchange in microcommunities (lodges, academies, sanghas) of the similarly depthed—began to penetrate not only into higher modes of ordinary cognition (the Aristotles of the time) but also into genuinely transcendental, transpersonal, mystical stages of awareness (the Buddhas of the time).
Thus, in the magical, as I just mentioned, the most advanced mode seems to have been the psychic (embodied in a few genuine shamans or pioneers of yogic awareness); in mythological times the most advanced mode seems to have reached into what is known as the subtle level (embodied in a few genuine saints); and in mental-egoic times the most advanced modes reached into the causal level (embodied in a few genuine sages), all of which we will discuss in chapter 8.
But the average mode of the mythological epoch did not reach into these subtler and transpersonal dimensions, but remained grounded in a concrete-literal interpretation of myth (e.g., Moses actually did part the Red Sea, as an empirical fact). There is precious little that is transpersonally inspired about such myths; rather, as Habermas suggests, they clearly represent the sociocentric-literal integration offered by concrete operations and conventional morality, and for that reason were extremely important in moving social integration beyond the tribal and the preconventional—and with that their transcendental status, exceptionally important but limited, seems most definitely to end.

mythic-rational

The word rational is an impossible label; it means a million things to a million people, and not all the meanings are kind. Moreover, even if we decide what it means, there are still several different types of "it." Weber, for example, differentiated between purposive-rationality (such as scientific-technological knowledge), formal rationality (such as mathematics), and intersubjective or practical rationality (as displayed in morality and communication).
Cognitive psychologists and anthropologists tend to use rationality to mean "formal operational cognition," which simply means the capacity not just to think, but to think about thinking (and thus "operate upon" thinking: "formal operational"). Since you can operate upon or reflect upon your own thought processes, you are to some degree free of them; you can to some degree transcend them; you can take perspectives different from your own; you can entertain hypothetical possibilities; and you can become highly introspective. As we will see in the next chapter, all of these come into existence with the emergence of formal operational cognition, or "rationality."
Moreover, since you can now reflect on your own thoughts and patterns of behavior, you will now seek to justify your thoughts and actions, based not simply on what you were taught, or on what your society tells you (that is the rule-bound or conformist or conventional or sociocentric mode of the previous concrete operational cognition), but rather on a review of the reasons and the actual evidence for such beliefs. Did Moses really part the Red Sea?
Rationality, in this sense, means that you seek "reasonable reasons" for your beliefs. What is the evidence? Why should I believe this? Who says so? Where did you get that idea?
And finally, because we can reflect on our own thought processes, and thus to some degree remove ourselves from them, we become capable of imagining all sorts of other possibilities; we become dreamers in the true sense of the word. Other perspectives, other beliefs, other horizons open before the mind's eye, and the soul can take flight in the worlds of the not-yet-seen. Rationality is the great doorway to the invisible, through which, and then beyond which, lie so many secrets not given to the senses or to conventions (which is why all true mysticism is transrational and never antirational; "right thought" always precedes "right meditation").
Thus, the idea that rationality is somehow "dry and abstract," or that it has "no feelings," is way off the mark. Rationality creates a deeper space of possibilities through which deeper and wider feelings can run, feelings not bound to one's isolated desires or the narrow confines of official conventional reality. The fact that rationality is a relatively high level of development means, as always, that it can repress its lower ho-lons, particularly emotions of sex and aggression, and that, as always, leads to pathology. And it is the pathological expression of rationality that has given rationality a bad name ("dry and abstract"), but that is definitely not characteristic of the structure as a whole. However, since rational is something of a loaded word, we might better use the word reasonable—they mean the same thing: what are your reasons, why are you doing that?
And this is why rationality or reasonableness tends to be universal in character, and is highly integrative. If my reasons are going to be valid, I want to know that they make sense, or that they hold true, not just for me or my tribe or my isolated culture (however important those might also be). If science, for example, is going to be true, then we are not going to have a Hindu chemistry that is different from a German chemistry that is different from a Greek chemistry. There is simply chemistry, and its truth is not forced or coerced or ideologically imposed, but is freely open to any who wish to look into its reasons.
This doesn't mean that we can't have special cultural differences that make each society unique and special; it means only that rationality alone will allow these differences to exist side by side by seeing them as different perspectives in a more universal space, something that cultural differences, left to their own conventional or sociocentric or ethnocentric devices, could never do. It is only rationality, in other words, that allows the beginning emergence of a truly global or planetary network, which, freed from any particular society, can allow all societies their own unique and special place.
But you can imagine what happened historically when the mythological structure (Moses parted the Red Sea) ran into the newly emerging rational structure (What does that mean, parted the Red Sea? Where is your evidence for that?). Was it really right for the gods to lie and rape, as Homer had maintained? Or could the myths simply be wrong? Plutarch records his father saying to him: "You seem to me to be handling a very large and dangerous question—or rather you are disturbing subjects which ought to be left alone, when you question the opinion we hold about the gods, and ask reason and proof for everything."
The indictment handed down by the city of Athens began, "Socrates is guilty of refusing to recognize the gods of the State." It ended with, "The penalty demanded is death." When asked, as was customary, if Socrates could suggest an alternative punishment, he suggested free meals for life.
But he refused a prison escape that had been arranged for him, and freely drank the hemlock. In choosing death instead of state mythology, Socrates died for the cause of emergent reason.
The rest of humanity, however, did not move quite as fast in that particular transformation. Rather, in this clash between myth and newly emerging reason, the traditional mythological structures were at first rationalized. That is, the old myths were propped up with rational reasons. And this structure, in general, I call mythic-rational. Habermas does not specifically use the term mythic-rational; he speaks of the rationalization of mythological organization, an essentially similar notion.
Habermas makes several interesting observations about this mythic-rational space. First of all, we are dealing with the universalizing tendency in rationality—the desire of rationality to embrace and make room for and integrate a global or planetary consciousness. But this planetary or global tendency first expressed itself in an attempt to extend a particular mythology to world-embracing dimensions. In other words, a military attempt to conquer as many peoples as possible.
Thus, according to Habermas, at this point historically we see the emergence, around the world, of the great Empires. From the Incas to the Aryans, from the Aztecs to the Alexanders, from the Khans to the Romans: the coming of the Empires was the first brutal step in a planetary expansion struggling to reach beyond isolated cultures by simple conquest.
Once conquered, the peoples were then usually given a genuinely equal access to citizenship (in many cases this included citizenship for women, slaves, and children). But these citizens could only be global citizens if the empire itself conquered the globe—that is, if everybody embraced the mythology that rationality was trying to prop up—if everybody became "true believers" in the chosen mythic god or goddess (we still see this type of mythic-imperialism operative in the world today), a rather twisted version of planetary citizenship.
Likewise, the old mythological structures had contained implicitly another type of partial move toward global or planetary citizenship, namely, equal citizens of the faith. Although this was also a faltering step in the right direction, it too suffered from the fact that the various mythologies themselves differed from each other. All Christians anywhere, of whatever color or race or sex, were equally saved; but all Hindus would go to hell. The great mythologies, and the great Empires that carried them to various corners of the globe, ran up against their own inherent limitations for integrative power, simply because they ran into each other; and the only way to overcome those differences was to shed particularistic and divisive mythologies and transform to a more global reasonableness (the next stage, the mental-rational).
But we are now at the point where the old mythologies, carried now by empires, are trying to be propped up and rationalized. But that means that there was already a profound break with pure mythological thought, which previously was simply accepted on its own terms. Habermas:

For this reason, imperially developed civilizations [empires] had to secure their collective identity in a way that presupposed a break with mythological thought. The universalistic world interpretations of the great founders of religions and of the great philosophers grounded a commonality of conviction mediated through a teaching tradition and permitting only abstract objects of identification. As members of universal communities of faith, citizens could recognize their ruler and the order represented by him so long as it was possible to render political domination plausible in some sense as the legacy of an order of the world and of salvation that was believed in and posited absolutely [mythic dogma].
The great empires had to demarcate themselves from a desocialized outer nature [biosphere] as well as from the social environment of those alien to the empire. But since collective identity could now be secured only by way of doctrines with a universal claim, the political order also had to be in accord with this claim—the empires were not universal in name alone [but in attempted global conquest as well]....
But the reality of other empires was incompatible with this definition of the boundaries and social environment of an empire. Despite the existence of trade relations, and despite the diffusion of innovations, the empires shielded themselves from this danger; between themselves they maintained no diplomatic relations in the sense of an institutionalized foreign policy. Their political existence was not dependent on a system of reciprocal recognition [they were not truly rational-planetary] ,

Even though it was a mythological worldview that was trying to be propped up, the propping up was nevertheless being done with formal operational thought, and thus central parts of the mythic-rational world were centered around formal rationality and its universalizing or global outreach:

There arise cosmological worldviews, philosophies, and the higher religions [so-called "rational religions"], which replace the narrative explanations of mythological accounts with argumentative foundations [they give reasons]. The traditions going back to the great founders are an explicitly teachable knowledge that can be dogmatized, that is, professionally rationalized. In their articulated forms rationalized worldviews are an expression of formal operational thought and of a moral consciousness guided by [postconventional] principles.

But a propping-up is still a propping-up. And in one of the most difficult of all historical transformations, a universal or global reasonableness began slowly to replace local and divisive mythologies, mythologies that, precisely because they could not be universally argued and supported by shared evidence, could only be supported militarily and imperialistically.
But slowly, in both the East and West, began to emerge rational philosophies, rational sciences, rational policies, rational religions—some of which indeed pointed beyond reason, but all of which depended on reason as a platform that could secure a common and mutual understanding for anyone, of any color, race, or creed, who cared to talk about it, share their evidence, discuss their reasons, and not simply shout dogmatisms and claim divine support.

rational

As the planetary reach of reasonableness began to shake off the divisive mythologies, empires gave way to modern states—which at least formally and mutually recognized one another, thus making room for each on the planet. The modern state thus separated from its embeddedness in particular mythologies—the all-important separation of church and state—and further removed itself from the economic sphere by allowing the emergence of a global market economy, all of which had to be grounded in universalistic reasons (but still tinged, initially, by remnants of imperialism, which indicated not an excess of reason but a lack of it).

The highest principles lost their unquestionable character; religious faith and the theoretical attitude became reflective. The advance of the modern sciences and the development of moral-practical will-formation were no longer prejudiced by an order that—although grounded—was posited absolutely [mythology]. For the first time, the universalistic [global] potential already contained in the rationalized worldviews could be set free. The unity of the world could no longer be secured objectively, through hypostasizing unifying principles (God, Being, or Nature); henceforth it could be asserted only reflectively, through the unity of reason. The unity of theoretical and practical reason then became the key problem for modern world interpretations... .

In other words, it was no longer simply the case of a subject trying to look at and understand and operate on a world of objects (concrete operational); it was the subject looking at and trying to understand and operate on itself; it was the subject trying to understand the subject (formal operational). Suddenly, very suddenly, humanity had taken a new turn, a new transcendence, had discovered a new and deeper interior, with a new and higher consciousness, and that consciousness was to be found by looking within.
As we will see, Habermas, Gebser, and I (and many others) place the rough beginning of this new emergence (egoic-rational) in the middle of the first millennium bce, but it reaches its fruition with the rise of the modern state, roughly the sixteenth century in Europe. We will be concentrating on this fruition, but let us at least note that what many of the central endeavors of this entire period have in common is a new type of looking within. In philosophy, for the first time, the theme is not "What is there to know?" but "How can I know it?" Not "What objects are out there?" but "What is the structure of the subject that wants to know?" From Socrates' Delphic "Know thyself" to the exhaustive introspections of Hume and Locke and Descartes and Kant (and Nagarjuna and Garab Dorje and Chih-i and Fa-tsang), the common theme heard over and over and over again: Look within.
We see precisely the same thing with the rise of the "rational religions," which does not mean that these religions were only rational—indeed, their aim was to go even beyond rationality in all cases. But these were the first great religions that took their stand, not in a mythological pantheon of gods and goddesses out there that had to be appeased through magic or mythic ritual, but rather took as their starting point: "The Kingdom of Heaven is within" as Jesus of Nazareth would put it.
Likewise, the essential message of Gautama the Buddha could be summarized in the statement "Don't worry about gods, goddesses, spirits, the afterlife, any of that—rather, look very carefully at the nature of your own subject, your own self, and try to penetrate to the bottom of that, for if enlightenment exists, it lies through an understanding of (and going beyond) the subject itself." All of that was radically, radically new.
For precisely the same reasons, individuals were no longer identified by the simple and unreflexive roles that they played in society, as was the case with sociocentric and mythic-membership societies. Rather, in a postconventional society, individuals were identified in many ways by their own free choices, as free subjects, within the broad constraints of civil law. In other words, as Habermas puts it, an ego identity replaced a role identity.

This domain of decentralized individual decisions was organized on universalistic principles in the framework of bourgeois civil law. It was thereby supposed that the private, autonomous, legal subjects pursued their interests in the morally neutralized domain of intercourse in a purposive-rational manner, in accord with general [universal] maxims. From this conversion of the productive sphere to universalistic [global] orientations there proceeded a strong structural compulsion for the development of personality structures that replaced conventional role identity with ego identity. [As I said, Habermas and I both place the beginning of this change to ego identity in the middle of the first millennium bce, but it reaches its fruition here, with the rise of the modern state, beginning roughly in the sixteenth century in Europe]. In fact, emancipated members of bourgeois society, whose conventional [sociocentric] identity had been shattered, could know themselves as one with their fellow citizens in their character as (a) free and equal subjects of civil law, (b) morally free subjects, and (c) politically free subjects (the citizen as democratic citizen of the state).
This is an extraordinary development, for many reasons (so much so that the third volume in this series is devoted to it). But, at this point, let us briefly return to the themes raised earlier in this chapter and at least note how this new egoic-rational emergence (with, among many other things, its differentiation of the noosphere and the biosphere) would affect the sexes, for it is here that we find some of the most surprising developments.

liberation in the noosphere

According to radical feminists, one of the special strengths of women is their ages-old connection with the Earth, with nature, with embodiment (in fact, a good summary of the female value sphere according to radical feminism would be "embodiment in communion"). The radical feminists maintain that woman's special association with embodied nature needs to be honored and cherished and celebrated. The connection of woman and nature is the source of female power and freedom and liberation.
According to liberal feminists, it is precisely the opposite. The equation of woman and nature, they maintain, is the primary and overwhelming source of female oppression. The woman/nature "identity," they maintain, has been the primary identification that men have, throughout the ages (literally from day one), used to keep women locked out of the noosphere (out of the public, productive, legal, cultural, power-wielding sphere). "Woman = nature" translates directly into "barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen," and the liberal feminists are alarmed that the radical feminists are even thinking such thoughts, let alone championing them.
But my point is that, once the noosphere and the biosphere had differentiated, it was—it is—an entirely different world, where all the old equations suddenly take on entirely new meanings. And although some of those meanings might indeed have been oppressive in the past, they are not necessarily so in the new world (in the new worldspace, literally).
First, even if the radical feminists are right, and woman's special power is her rootedness in nature and body (the biosphere), nonetheless the differentiation of the noosphere and the biosphere meant that women were no longer just that, or only that, or exclusively that. Since the noosphere and the biosphere had at this point been clearly differentiated on a collective scale, this is the first time that the exclusive identity "woman/nature" was no longer needed, or appropriate, or even relevant (as an exclusive identity, which does not deny the radical feminist claim that women have special connections with Earth and body and nature; it means only that that is not all they are or have).
It was here, in the clearly differentiated noosphere, that there was then no conceivable reason that women could not enter the world of public agency (bringing with them their own forms of communion). Biological roles were no longer primary; physical strength was no longer the major determinate of public power; the parameters of biospheric evolution were shading into those of noospheric evolution, such that right began to replace might. And it was right for the female to assume cultural agency in the newly differentiated world, a right that wasn't prevented before but was simply meaningless before (on any collective scale).
And indeed, it is precisely here, and never before, that we first start to see the beginning of a widespread and organized women's movement, a movement not just discontent about this or that particular mistreatment (which had happened since day one), but about women's place in society on the whole.
This was radically new—a new emergence, a new transcendence, and a new differentiation that demanded a new integration—woman as public and historical agent (where heretofore, as we saw, that role largely fell to the male as father).
Thus, we do not find the emergence of a widespread women's movement prior to this time, not because women were duped or brainwashed or submissive chattel, but because liberation in the feminist sense (woman as free agent) was virtually meaningless as long as the biosphere and the noosphere were not clearly differentiated, first, and as long as the state and the economic sphere were not clearly differentiated, second (both of which came to fruition, we have said, around the sixteenth century). At that point, and not before, the rights of women as free agents would have profound meaning and profound desirability.
And indeed, the first great feminist treatise anywhere in history was Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman, written in 1792. Women did not then suddenly become strong and intelligent and responsible after a million years of dupedom; but rather, using the same intelligence and strength and insight with which they had mined the natural wisdom of the biosphere for a million years, they now saw the first structural opening in the noosphere and they acted immediately on it. It would be a mere two hundred years later—a blink in evolutionary time— that women would secure access to the public and political sphere of agency in the form of the right to vote and the right to own possessions. This was blazingly fast action on the part of women once the structural conditions of social life had switched its center of gravity from the biosphere to the noosphere.
And so henceforth, the role of the father (the "familialization of the male") would no longer suffice to link the two value spheres, but would have to be joined by the role of female as historical agent, equal noo-spheric agent (not just embodied in communion, but enculturated in agency). And here is where the liberal feminist argument surely finds its strongest voice and its unshakable moral authority.
But since the noosphere transcends and includes the biosphere, there is no reason that the liberal cannot embrace the radical and then add its own extra demands. It's not like we're on a flatland playing field, where more of the one means less of the other. On a multidimensional field, in the real Kosmos, the more of both, the better.
In other words, special rootedness in the biosphere can indeed be reasonably claimed—there is literally a million years of rich tradition of the wise woman who feels the currents of embodiment in nature and communion, and celebrates it with healing rituals and knowing ways of connecting wisdom, a wisdom that does not worship merely the agentic sun and its glaring brightness, but finds in the depths and the organic dark the ways of being linked in relationship, that puts care above power and nurturance above self-righteousness, that reweaves the fragments with concern, and midwifes the communions and the unsung connections that sustain us each and all. And finds, above all, that being a self is always being a self-in-relationship.
The liberal position ought to be able gladly to embrace all that, as rootedness, and then add its own special and emergent ideas and demands—which are precisely those demands made possible for the first time in history by this extraordinary new emergence, by this differentiation of the noosphere and the biosphere, by the emergence of global rationality—and those demands are exactly the possibilities we just saw Habermas elaborate, applied now to women as well: to be (a) free and equal subjects of civil law, (b) morally free subjects, and (c) politically free subjects. And that is the enduring truth and strength of liberal feminism, which arose at this time, and not before this time, precisely to announce that emergent truth.
There is one final twist in the story. If the differentiation of the biosphere and noosphere (and the differentiation of the Big Three) began in earnest only with modernity, it is nonetheless the case, as we will see, that this differentiation has tended in many respects to slide into dissociation. And that gives the radical feminist component of the integration an important and urgent weight. We have somehow forgotten our embodiment.
And further: Since "woman, body, nature" have often been different aspects of the same dissociated fabric, this gives a certain cogency to the concerns of the ecofeminists as well (though we don't necessarily have to embrace their theoretical and historical explanations, which tend to the ideological).
This is all part of the new integration ("centauric," "vision-logic") that I have been referring to, and which involves, among other things, the integration of mind and body, the integration of noosphere and biosphere (after their differentiation). And since, for whatever reasons, throughout history and prehistory there was a special connection between woman, nature, and body, then the integration of mind and body means virtually the same as the integration of male and female—in each of us.
At that point, both the male and the female would have one foot in the biosphere and one foot in the noosphere—an emergent integration utterly unprecedented, and the exact meaning of which we are all still trying to figure out.
Which is why the past is of no real help here. Calling on inherited archetypes and old mythological motifs is of little help in this new, emergent, and unprecedented endeavor. Likewise, many ecofeminists feel they have to be able to point to a past society (almost always horticultural) where women were "equal" in order to show that such equality is at least a possibility of human nature and human societies. But my point is that the possibility itself is an emergent—it never was, but is now coming to be—and so we don't need to wildly reinterpret the past in order to find hope for the future.
We are looking at an emergence, not an exhumation; at a birth, not a disinterment.
So I suppose it is all somehow deeply symbolic that Mary Wollstonecraft died giving birth to Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein. A death, a birth, a monster.
The image of "that monster!" seems to fit how both men and women view each other as their new and unprecedented roles in the noosphere continue to be worked out, and why, I suppose, a certain kindness on both sides is so necessary. Throughout this new and difficult integration— this death and this new birth—each sex is the monster of the other's creation.

vision-logic/planetary

Which brings us up to the present, and the new integration that is struggling to emerge, in all four quadrants. . . .

We are concerned no longer with cultural inflections, but with a passage from one culture stage to another. In all previous ages, only restricted portions of the surface of the earth were known. Men looked out from the narrowest, upon a somewhat larger neighborhood, and beyond that, a great unknown. They were all, so to say, insular: bound in. Whereas our view is confined no longer to a spot of space on the surface of this earth. It surveys the whole of the planet. And this fact, this lack of horizon, is something new.

Those words, by the great Leo Frobenius in his Monumenta Terrarum, were written in 1929. The previous age, that of the early emergence of the rational and its first extraordinary discoveries, Frobenius called the Monumental Age, and the opening of the new, just now under way, he called the Global or World Culture.
As rationality continues its quest for a truly universal or global or planetary outlook, noncoercive in nature, it eventually gives way to a type of cognition I call vision-logic or network-logic. Where rationality gives all possible perspectives, vision-logic adds them up into a totality, which is simply the new and higher interior holon. Aurobindo gave the classic description of vision-logic, which "can freely express itself in single ideas, but its most characteristic movement is a mass ideation, a system or totality of truth-seeing at a single view; the relations of idea with idea, of truth with truth, self-seen in the integral whole."
What I am trying to do in this book, and what you are trying to do as you read it (or other similar books), is use vision-logic: not just reasonably decide the individual issues, but hold them all together at once in mind, and judge how they fit together as a truth-vision. In other words, vision-logic is a higher holon that operates upon (and thus transcends) its junior holons, such as simple rationality itself. As such, vision-logic can hold in mind contradictions, it can unify opposites, it is dialectical and nonlinear, and it weaves together what otherwise appear to be incompatible notions, as long as they relate together in the new and higher holon, negated in their partiality but preserved in their positive contributions.
This is, for example, what Hegel called "Reason" as opposed to "the understanding" (or the simpler, empiric-analytic rationality of propositions, or Aristotelian logic). And this is why Hegel maintained that the central defining characteristic of Reason (vision-logic) was its capacity to unify opposites and see identity-in-difference. (As such, Hegel was one of the first great philosophers of vision-logic, as were Schelling, Whitehead, and a few others we will explore later; and not just because of their systematic wholeness—that had been attempted before—but because of their explicit grasp of identity-in-difference or "nonbifurcated Reason" or vision-logic, beyond which lies the transrational altogether.)
And it is vision-logic that drives and underlies the possibility of a truly planetary culture (or, rather, the first true forms of planetary organization, which themselves will most likely evolve according to yet higher categories, as we will see).
Recall that we left off Habermas's account with the emergence (beginning on a collective scale around sixteenth-century Europe) of an ego identity (first secured by men, relatively swiftly followed by women) wherein all people were considered (1) free and equal subjects of civil law, (2) morally free subjects, and (3) politically free subjects as citizens of the democratic state (which also, of course, for the first time in history, would put a final end to slavery and back that emancipation by law).
But, Habermas continues, "these abstract determinations are best suited to the identity of world citizens, not to that of citizens of a particular state that has to maintain [and defend] itself against other states." In other words, legally, morally, and politically free subjects: this is a state of affairs that actually applies to world citizens, not just to citizens of this or that state. The free subject, created by rationality, could not easily or for long be confined to the state, but belonged rather to what Habermas calls "global forms of intercourse" and "permanent variation of all reference systems"—that is, vision-logic.
Thus, true world citizenship belongs not to national organizations but to planetary organizations (as Habermas puts it, "The need for coordination at a supra-national level cannot easily be satisfied as long as governments have to legitimate themselves exclusively in terms of national decisions"). The modern nation-state, founded upon initial rationality, has run into its own internal contradictions or limitations, and can only be released by a vision-logic/planetary transformation.

the centaur in vision-logic

The worldview or worldspace of vision-logic I also refer to as "existential" and "centauric." "Existential" we will examine in a moment. "Centaur" is the mythic beast, half human and half horse, which I (and others such as Hubert Benoit and Erik Erikson) have taken as a symbol of the integration of body and mind, or biosphere and noosphere. For if it is true that, a few hundred years ago, we finally succeeded in clearly differentiating these two great domains, it is equally true that we have not yet found a way to integrate them. On the contrary: the necessary differentiation of the biosphere and the noosphere has now moved clearly into the beginning stages of dissociation, and, indeed, some ecologists feel that the dissociation is fast becoming irreversible. Be that as it may, that some sort of dissociation is under way is all but undeniable.
It is the integrative power of vision-logic, I believe, and not the indissociation of tribal magic or the imperialism of mythic involvement that is desperately needed on a global scale. For it is vision-logic with its centauric/planetary worldview that, in my opinion, holds the only hope for the integration of the biosphere and noosphere, the supranational organization of planetary consciousness, the genuine recognition of ecological balance, the unrestrained and unforced forms of global discourse, the nondominating and noncoercive forms of federated states, the unrestrained flow of worldwide communicative exchange, the production of genuine world citizens, and the enculturation of female agency (i.e., the integration of male and female in both the noosphere and the biosphere)—all of which, in my opinion, is nevertheless simply the platform for the truly interesting forms of higher and transpersonal states of consciousness lying yet in our collective future—if there is one.
Jean Gebser refers to the emerging vision-logic as the "integral-aperspectival" mind, which is a particularly apt phrase. The previous structure (the egoic-rational), Gebser refers to as the "rational-perspectival," because rationality can indeed take different perspectives, as we saw. But vision-logic, or the integral-aperspectival mind, adds up all the perspectives tout ensemble, and therefore privileges no perspective as final: it is aperspectival.
The aperspectival mind, in other words, is holonic through and through: contexts within contexts within contexts forever. Of course, every structure of consciousness is actually holonic (there are only holons), but vision-logic consciously grasps this fact for the first time, and thus finds its own operation increasingly transparent to itself (this "transparency," according to Gebser, is a primary characteristic of the integral-aperspectival mind.) "Aperspectivity expresses itself in a structure of consciousness which is in process of emerging and is, therefore, new," he says. "We would like to designate this new structure the 'integral structure' of consciousness, and the modality of the world in the process of emerging the 'aperspective world.' "
Gebser's masterpiece, The Ever-Present Origin, was completed in 1953, the culmination of several decades of thought and research. He died in 1973 and thus he did not live to see the full extent of the explosion of aperspectivism in today's postmodern world. Not only has the aperspectival vision-logic defined postmodernity (in its best aspects), it has also defined many of postmodernity's self-conscious problems: individuals are not only aware of holonic and aperspectival space, but are often totally lost in it. The postmodern poststructuralists, for example, have gone from saying that no context, no perspective, is final, to saying that no perspective has any advantage over any other, at which point they careen uncontrollably in their own labyrinth of ever-receding holons, lost in aperspectival space.
That all perspectives interrelate, or that no perpsective is final (aperspectivism), does not mean that there are no relative merits among them. The postmodern poststructuralists go from saying "there is no final perspective" (or "perspectives are boundless") to saying "therefore there is no advantage in any perspective over another." This leveling of perspectives is not an interrelation of all perspectives but is itself merely one particular and covertly privileged perspective (and thus ends up, as we have seen, being perfectly self-contradictory: there is no advantaged perspective except mine, which maintains that all other perspectives are not so privileged). The postmodern poststructuralists confuse their own aperspectival madness with literary and political critique, following, I presume, the pioneering insanity of Bataille.
Nonetheless I believe, and I think Gebser would agree, that recent events have, if anything, strengthened his thesis: for better or for worse, the world is in the midst of the torturous birth throes of a collective emergence of an entirely new structure of consciousness, the centaur in vision-logic, the integral-aperspectival mind.
Gebser refers to such transformations as "mutations in consciousness," emphasizing their radically emergent nature. Nonetheless, each structure unfolds holarchically, transcending and including its predecessor(s). "None of these mutations of consciousness is responsible for the loss of previous possibilities and properties, but suddenly incorporates them into a new structure. Within the mutations of consciousness there takes place a process of rearrangement beyond the reach of mere space-time-bound events, an [emergent] process, which manifests itself discontinuously, or by leaps and bounds. With every new mutation of awareness, consciousness unfolds more powerfully. . . ."
This new integral-aperspectival structure is, of course, integrative. But integral vision-logic is not merely a sum of previous parts—that, again, would be mere horizontal expansionism, not vertical and creative emergence (and transcendence). As Gebser says, "The part is to a certain degree always a betrayal of the whole, for which reason the sum of the parts also only yields a fictitious but not an efficacious whole." Likewise, the dialectical nature of vision-logic—that is, the unity-of-opposites conceived mentally (as "mutual interpenetration")—is a hallmark of the integral structure, is "intrinsic to the emergent aperspectival consciousness."
But the emphasis, indeed, is on integration. As Georg Feuerstein, Gebs-er's ablest interpreter, says of the integral-aperspectival structure: "This nascent structure of consciousness, for the first time in human history, permits the conscious integration of all previous (but co-present) structures, and through this act of integration the human personality becomes, as it were, transparent to itself. . . ."
Likewise, centauric-integral awareness integrates the body and mind in a new transparency; the biosphere and the noosphere, once finally differentiated, can now be integrated in a new embrace. Feuerstein therefore refers to this newly emerging structure as "psychosomatic," involving "the resurrection of the body," evidenced in such movements as holistic medicine and ecological sensitivity. "It is a whole-bodily event," he says, "feeling through the lived body. It does not take flight from bodily existence in any form. Rather it is grounded in one's unmitigated acceptance of, or primal trust in, corporeality. It is the transparent body-mind."
Precisely because this centauric awareness transcends (but includes) so much of the verbal-mental-egoic dimension, that entire dimension itself becomes increasingly objective, increasingly transparent, to centauric consciousness. Where previously the verbal-mental-egoic self used those structures as something with which to view (and co-create) the world, now those structures themselves increasingly become an object of awareness and investigation by centauric consciousness (it is not just the mind looking objectively and "representationally" at external objects—the "reflection paradigm"—but the mind looking at the mind intersubjectively).
This is behind Gebser's claim that integral-aperspectival consciousness is especially a consciousness of language. As he puts it, "Language itself is treated as a primordial phenomenon by recognizing its originating-creative nature. Structurally, a new estimation of grammatical aspects and a novel use of syntactical freedom are evident" (and here we are on the trail of Foucault and Derrida, and the whole "linguistic turn" dating especially to de Saussure).
Likewise, Gebser relates the integral-aperspectival structure to the emergence of most forms of phenomenology, with their emphasis on a "postrational paradigm" that is also "embodied." He particularly focuses on Bergson, Husserl, and Heidegger, although he had some sharp criticisms of them as well (the last-named is also a "pioneer" of poststructuralism, and his notion of the Destruktion of rationalist ontology appears in Derrida as deconstruction).
Gebser's full genius comes to the fore in his brilliant descriptions, across virtually all disciplines, of the mutation, now globally in progress, from rational-perspectivism to integral-aperspectivism, and I cannot hope to do any sort of justice to his exhilarating presentation. (Readers are urged to consult The Ever-Present Origin—it is by far the pioneering book in "emergent world transformation"—and an excellent introduction, Georg Feuerstein's Structures of Consciousness.)
Gebser knows this aperspectival structure so intimately that he can spot even the most telltale signs of its emergence in virtually any endeavor. Here are just a few of the areas he covers in enormous detail (and remember, The Ever-Present Origin was published in 1953; the following list therefore includes only some of the very earliest signs of the emergence of vision-logic, of those movements that would be "postrational" or "post-structural" or "postmodern" in the best sense, those movements attempting to overcome the "self-defining subject" and the "Age of Man," those movements that would point not just to a differentiation of the Big Three, but to their integration as well): biology (e.g., Hans Driesch, Hugo de Vries), mathematics (Hubert's axiomatics), psychology (both Freud and Jung in their own ways with an emphasis on depth psychology), philosophy (linguistics, phenomenology), jurisprudence (where care and "responsibility have entered the language of law in juxtaposition to justice and rights . . . this leads to 'open justice,' a hitherto impossible flexibility"—notice the integration of agency-rights and communion-responsibility, which we postulated as one of the centauric hallmarks), economics (Feuerstein takes E. F. Schumacher to be most recently representative), history (e.g., Arnold Toynbee and Swiss historian J. R. von Salis), music (Schoenberg, Stravinsky—"the new music is aperspectival inasmuch as it seeks to overcome the earlier fixities of meter or tonality as aspects of aesthetics"), architecture (Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto), painting (Delacroix "revolted against the tyranny of the straight line, and Cezanne first seriously challenged the reign of perspectivity"), and, of course, the new physics, associated especially with Einstein and Planck (although this is not, as popularizers such as Fred Alan Wolf would have it, a "proof of mysticism"; as Feuerstein comments, "it would be imprudent to ignore the mythologizing trend within the new physics, which Gebser would readily have recognized as regressive rather than integrative").
As for the centauric-integral dimension being a fully worldcentric vision, Gebser refers to it as "universal-integral'''' and "world open," "world transparent"—which Feuerstein, correctly I believe, equates with the rising Global or Planetary Culture. In Gebser's words, the perspectives of the egoic-rational world are "replaced by the open expanse of the open world," the "aperspectival world"—the culmination of the worldcentric vision started by rationality and completed by vision-logic.
Neither Gebser nor I (nor Murphy nor Habermas, nor any of the evolutionary-oriented theorists) see the emergence of the "aperspectival world-centric" structure as being a sure thing, as being somehow guaranteed. Not only does evolution, as Michael Murphy put it, meander more than progress; not only, when it does progress, is there always the "dialectic of progress"; there is also the ever-lurking possibility that the whole thing might simply blow up, that evolution will take a wrong turn (in the short run), but a wrong turn that includes us; that the stresses induced by the differentiation of the noosphere and the biosphere will make the whole system unsustainable. Evolution, we have amply seen, is not predictable, only reconstructable.
Nor does the fact that the integral structure is integral guarantee that the necessary integration will in fact occur. The claim is simply, to put it in the terms we have been using, that the integral structure can integrate the physiosphere, the biosphere, and the noosphere—it has the potential for that integration. Whether that potential becomes actual is up to you and me; it depends on the concrete actions that each of us takes.
As always, we have to make the future that is given to us.
Figure 5-1 is a summary of the four quadrants as we have followed them in the evolutionary curve thus far. Like all diagrams, it is very schematic and leaves out more than it includes. But it will serve to indicate the four quadrants and a handful of their milestones up to the present.
A few points about the diagram: in the Lower-Right quadrant, where evolution enters the human domain, I have only indicated the most concrete forms of geopolitical structures. But this quadrant includes the exterior of any of the social aspects of human interaction, including forces of production and techno-economic modes (bow and arrow, horticultural tools, agrarian implements, industrial machinery, computers, and so on), architectural structures, transportation systems, physical infrastructure, even written (material) forms of books, legal codes, linguistic structures, verbal signifiers, and so forth. Likewise, in the Lower Left, the cultural, I have included only worldviews; but this quadrant also includes interpretive understandings, cultural meanings in general, collective and group identities, intersubjective moral and ethical understanding, and so on.
In the Upper-Right quadrant, as evolution moves into the human domain, I have indicated states marked by SF1, SF2, and SF3. These are the structure-functions of the human brain that correspond with concrete operational, formal operational, and vision-logic. These are currently being mapped using PET and other sophisticated instruments, and I am simply indicating the correlation, whatever it turns out to be, with these symbols. Everybody agrees that mental states and structures have some sort of correlates in brain physiology, and this is all I mean by the symbols SF1, etc.
Of course, it would be better to draw this diagram as an inverted pyramid, so that several of the multidimensional relationships within each quadrant could be better indicated. But then it would begin to lose the advantage of a certain type of simplicity. As long as its schematic and simplifying nature is kept firmly in mind, this figure will suffice. We will continue to draw on the implications of this diagram—and the four quadrants—as we continue to unfold our narrative.

the world in transformation

About the centauric/planetary transformation, now haltingly but unmistakably in progress, I will make only a few passing comments now (all of volume 3 is devoted to this topic). The previous, mythic-imperial empires (East and West, North and ), with their inherent dominator hierarchies, were deconstructed by the rise of egoic-rationality (wherever it did arise) and the switch from a role identity to an ego identity, and the correlative rise of the democratic state, where dominator hierarchies were replaced, in law, by (1) free and equal subjects of civil law, (2) morally free subjects, and (3) politically free subjects as citizens of the democratic state.

Figure 5-1. Some Details of the Four Quadrants South
There still exist, of course, mythic-imperialisms that wish to dominate the world—that is, imperialisms that will accord you the status of equal world citizen if you embrace the particular mythology (with its particular dominator hierarchy). If you don't want to embrace the mythology, they will be glad to help you do so. We still hear the rumble of mythological fundamentalism arise from all corners of the globe, in secular and religious guises, none of which conceal their inherent drive to salvation via domination (and the women in these societies support the domination every bit as much as the men do).
But the rise of rationality—although it generated the worldspace in which all peoples could be recognized as free and equal subjects of the law and politically free subjects as citizens—did not produce, or has not yet produced, transformations of a global (and not just national) nature that would seek to socially empower the world in a noncoercive and nondominating fashion, that would be driven by a recognition of what we all have in common as human beings and not what we have in common merely as believers in a particular and divisive mythology or as members of a particular ethnocentric tribe (however much those differences would also be cherished and honored in a worldcentric context).
With one major exception. The only serious global social movement, in all of history to date, has been the international labor movement (Marxism), which had one great, enduring, and legitimate strength—and one altogether fatal weakness. The strength was that it discovered a common trait that all humans possess, regardless of race, creed, nationality, mythology, or gender: we all have to secure our bodily survival through social labor of one sort or another. We all have to eat. And thus social labor puts us all in the same boat, makes us all world citizens. This movement was genuine enough, and serious enough, and made such immediate good sense to so many people that it set off the first modern globally intent revolutions from Russia to China to South America.
Such for its genuinely noble strengths. Its fatal weakness was that it did not just ground higher cultural endeavors in the economic or material realm (the physiosphere), it did not just ground them in social labor and material exchange—it reduced them to that exchange, reduced them to their lowest common denominator, reduced them to material productions and material values and material means, with all higher productions, especially spirituality, serving only as the opiate of the masses.
In a nutshell, that movement did not just ground the noosphere in the physiosphere (which is vitally important because of compound individuality); it reduced the noosphere to the physiosphere, such an egregious reduction that it took evolution less than a mere century to begin to erase that mistake in earnest. This reductionistic thrust of Marxism, because it could find no support in the real Kosmos, had to be converted into a religious mythology, and thus had to press its vision in an imperialistic fashion.
The other major movement that has shown, or has claimed, some possibilities for underpinning a global citizenship is the Greens movement. While I have enormous sympathy for that movement as a particular endeavor, I believe it comes nowhere close to having the integrative potential for a planetary federation of world citizens freely embracing its tenets (forced to embrace its tenets, yes; but that is not unrestrained global discourse but a new coercion).
For the Greens are in essentially the same predicament as the Marxists—both of them are reducing higher levels to lower levels simply because of the undisputed fact that the lower is indeed more fundamental (and therefore necessary but not sufficient for the life of the higher and deeper). Where the Marxists tended to reduce all concerns to the material exchanges of the physiosphere, the Greens tend to reduce all concerns to the ecological exchanges of the biosphere. This is definitely a step up from the Marxists, but it does not escape the fact that it is still a type of lowest common denominator approach, which is true and important as far as it goes (as is Marxism), but catastrophic beyond that particular point, and utterly incapable of mobilizing world citizens beyond that particular point.
The Greens use, as their philosophical platform, two central notions: (1) the cultural noosphere is a part of the larger whole of the biosphere, and (2) the web-of-lífe systems theory. The first notion is simply wrong, as we have seen, and the second notion is a blatant form of subtle reductionism, as we have also seen. The biosphere is indeed more fundamental than the noosphere, not because it is higher but precisely because it is lower and shallower, and the lower in any evolutionary sequence must always come first and always be honored first and foremost.
But the Greens (all the way to Earth First!) mistake "first and foremost" with "first and last." Like Marxists, they wander in the biomaterial dimension, cleaning up the distortions they find there, which is admirable and noble, but end up merely stuck there, with no integrative possibilities of deeper awareness, higher embrace, wider vision, or genuine release (merely a type of theoretical, regressive, biospheric indissociation). And, like Marxists, they call all truly deeper or higher endeavors "escapist," "opiate," "illusory," "false consciousness"—the stock-in-trade epithets of social reductionists.
What is needed, rather, is a much more integrative approach that works with our present historical actualities. A planetary culture will in effect have to deal with equitable material-economic distribution in the physiosphere (the enduring concern of Marx, even if we reject his particular solutions), and it will have to deal with sustainable ecological distribution in the biosphere (the enduring contribution of the Greens). But it will have to go much, much further and deal specifically and nonreductionistically with the noosphere and its distributions and distortions, and it will have to do so with something other than reductionistic web-of-life theories, if it is to freely engage the motivation of an entire globe. It will have to work toward specific theories of free noospheric exchange, including but transcending ecological concerns.
Social labor could unite world citizens to the extent, but only to the extent, that we all share matter in common. The Greens can unite world citizens to the extent, but only to the extent, that we all share bodies in common. But it will take a vision-logic movement of tremendous integrative power (integral-aperspectival as universal-integral) in order to unite world citizens on the centauric basis that we all share matter and bodies and minds in common (not to mention a Spirit and a Self prior to all that). The Greens have produced a promising platform, but if it isn't any more than that (and it isn't so far, neglecting noospheric exchange), then it will be merely snapped up by egoic-rationality structures of capital production, and we will simply have McDonald's selling burgers in recyclable bags, which is nowhere near anything deserving to be called a Planetary Transformation.
In the meantime, the platform for an emerging world culture is being built by international markets of material-economic exchange, and by the increasingly free exchange of rationality structures, particularly empiric-analytic science and computer-transmitted information (the "Age of Information" is simply the "Age of Noosphere"), all of which are supranational in essential character (we will return to this in a moment).
As for the coming transformation itself, it is being built, as all past transformations have been, in the hearts and minds of those individuals who themselves evolve to centauric planetary vision. For these individuals create a "cognitive potential" in the form of new worldviews (in this case, centauric-planetary) that in turn feed back into the ongoing mainstream of social institutions, until the previously "marginalized" worldview becomes anchored in institutional forms which then catapult a collective consciousness to a new and higher release. The revolution, as always, will come from the within and be embedded in the without.
And, at this point, aside from the inner work that each of us individually can do, I personally see no obvious collective bearers of the new and deeper within.

the dialectic of progress

Recall that one of the defining aspects of evolution is that it brings new and emergent possibilities and therefore new and potential pathologies. Habermas, working from a different angle, arrives at the same conclusion, and he refers to it as the "dialectic of progress":

Evolutionarily important innovations mean not only a new level of learning but a new problem situation as well, that is, a new category of burdens that accompany the new social formation. The dialectic of progress can be seen in the fact that with the acquisition of problem-solving abilities new problem situations come to consciousness. A higher stage of development of productive forces and of social integration does bring relief from problems of the superseded [previous] social formation. But the problems that arise at the new stage of development can—insofar as they are at all comparable with the old ones—increase in intensity.
Thus we can make an attempt to interpret social evolution taking as our guide those problems and needs that are first brought about by evolutionary advances. At every stage of development the social-evolutionary learning process itself generates new resources, which mean new dimensions of scarcity and thus new historical needs.

Habermas's attack on Romantic regression is along the same lines as mine: of course there are new problems and new pathologies at each stage of development, but to take only the pathologies of the higher stage and compare them with only the achievements of the previous stage is perverse in the extreme. What is required, rather, is a balanced view that takes into account the limitations and failures of the previous stage that necessitated and propelled a new evolutionary transformation beyond them.
Habermas gives one very long paragraph where he outlines his view of what amounts to a phylogenetic needs hierarchy, including the achievements and the burdens of each of the major stages we have examined so far. It is worth studying (all italics are his):

With the transition to the sociocultural form of life, that is, with the introduction of the family structure [during preoperational/magic], there arose the problem of demarcating [beginning to differentiate] society from external nature. In neolithic societies, at the latest, harmonizing society with the natural environment became thematic [problematic]. Power over nature came into consciousness as a scarce resource [which conflicts sharply with the eulogized accounts of this stage]. The experience of powerlessness in relation to the contingencies of external nature had to be interpreted away in myth and magic. With the introduction of a collective political order [mythic and mythic-rational], there arose the problem of the self-regulation of the social system. In developed civilizations, at the latest, the achievement of order by the state became a central need. Legal security came to consciousness as a scarce resource. The experience of social repression and arbitrariness had to be balanced with legitimations of domination. This was accomplished in the framework of rationalized world views [mythic-rational] (through which, moreover, the central problem of the previous stage—powerlessness—could be defused). In the modern age [egoic-rational], with the autonomization of the economy (and complementarization of the state), there arose the problem of a self-regulated exchange of the social system with external nature [biomaterial economic exchange]. In industrial capitalism, at the latest, society consciously placed itself under the imperatives of economic growth and increasing wealth. Value came into consciousness as a scarce resource. The experience of social inequality called into being social movements and corresponding strategies of appeasement. These seemed to lead to their goal in social welfare state mass democracies (in which, moreover, the central problem of the preceding stage—legal insecurity—could be defused). Finally, if postmodern societies, as they are today envisioned from different angles [planetary/vision-logic], should be characterized by a primacy of the scientific and educational systems, one can speculate about the emergence of the problem of a self-regulated exchange of society with internal nature [by which he means, essentially, self-esteem and self-actualization and its pathologies; he specifically mentions existential anomie]. Again a scarce resource would become thematic—not the supply of power, security, or value, but the supply of motivation and meaning.

The emergence of a new level solves or "defuses" some of the central problems and limitations of the previous stage (or else it wouldn't emerge), but it also introduces its own new problems and new scarce resources. One can't help but notice that this hierarchy of "deficiency needs" or "scarce resources" bears striking resemblance to Abraham Maslow's (and Jane Loevinger's and others') present-day ontogenetic needs hierarchy—from safety/power to conventional security/belonging to personal/egoic value to existential meaning. I believe it is no accident that I have long referred to the centauric level as the existential level of meaning, and I believe it is no accident that there would be Habermas/ Maslow/Loevinger parallels (all of which we will return to in chapters 6 and 7).
But any way we slice the evolutionary pie, there is where we stand today: on the verge of a planetary transformation, struggling to be secured by rationality and completed by vision-logic, and embedded in global-planetary social institutions.

transnationalism

The global nature of this transformation is now being driven, particularly in its technological-economic base, by three interrelated factors: (1) the necessity to protect the "global commons," the common biosphere that belongs to no nation, no tribe, no creed, no race; (2) the necessity to regulate the world financial system, which no longer responds to national borders; (3) the necessity to maintain a modicum of international peace and security, which is now not so much a matter of major war between any two nations, but between a "new order" of loosely federated nations and renegade regimes threatening world peace.
The point is that all three of those concerns no longer respond to actions taken merely on the part of individual nations. Not one of those problems can be solved on a national level. They are literally transnational crises demanding transnational, worldcentric responses. And exactly how to negotiate this difficult transition, with nations voluntarily surrendering some of their sovereignty for the global betterment—therein precisely is the extremely difficult nature of this "postnational" global transition.
But the situation is clear enough: these are transnational crises that have rendered national responses obsolete.
As I said, I will not at this time enter into a discussion of the intricacies of these crises and the requisite global transformation, except to indicate one factor crucial to our discussion at this point. Although each of those three factors have important material-economic components (the relational exchange of monetary-financial systems, the protection of the bio-material global commons, the physical security of nonaggression between nations)—none of those physical and material and economic components can be secured in the long run without a corresponding change in consciousness among the citizens of the nations surrendering some of their sovereignty for the transnational good.
Thus, solutions to the various global crises certainly demand efforts on the biomaterial-economic-financial front, which is where most efforts are now being concentrated. But it's a losing proposition without a corresponding shift in worldviews that will allow citizens and their governments to perceive the greater advantage in the lesser death (the surrender of some sovereignty for the greater good).
Tribal consciousness will not do; mythic-imperialism will surrender nothing; ethnocentric cleansing could care less about a worldcentric consensus. Mythic-membership is and always has been perfectly willing to sacrifice the lives of its true believers (and thus even more so the lives of nonbelievers) in order to advance the cause of the One True God, and if that means global suicide in exchange for life eternal, well, that's a small price, no? And magical blood cleansing would rather take its ethnic tribal self, and the world, into oblivion than mix with unpure tribes.
Thus, without in any way denying the crucial importance of the ecological and economic and financial factors in the world-demanding transformation, let us not forget that they all rest ultimately on a correlative transformation in human consciousness: the global embrace, and its pluralistic world-federation, can only be seen, and understood, and implemented, by individuals with a universal and global vision-logic, where the new scarce resources involve not only material-economic shortages, but the resources of a meaning-in-life that can no longer be found in self or tribe or race or nation, but will find its context, its therapia, its omega, and its release, in a worldcentric embrace through which runs the blood of a common humanity and beats the single heart of a very small planet struggling for its own survival, and yearning for its own release into a deeper and a truer tomorrow.

MULTICULTURALISM

In the meantime, it seems to be the case that the vast majority of the world's population does not now need ways to get beyond rationality, but ways to get up to it. The great mass of the world's social holons are still caught in magic and warring tribalisms based on blood and ethnic lineage, or in mythological empire-building: remnants of Marxism as a mythic-rational "world religion"; Christian and Muslim fundamentalists who would "convert" (coerce) the world; mythic-religious missionaries with a global and proselytizing fury; a type of national-economic imperialism bordering on a mythology of the leading developed countries; and— strangest of all—a dissolution of some of the great modern mythic-imperialist States into their tribal subholons, bathed in blood and kinship lineage and tribal warfare on a vicious scale: the retribalization of large portions of the world.
Thus, the single greatest world transformation would simply be the embrace of global reasonableness and pluralistic tolerance—the global embrace of egoic-rationality (on the way to centauric vision-logic).
The "multicultural movement," which claims a universal tolerance of all cultures freed from the "logocentric, rational-centric, Eurocentric"
dominance and hegemony, is a step in the right direction, with all good intentions, but ends up being self-contradictory and finally hypocritical. It may claim to be "not rational-centric," but in fact cultural tolerance is secured only by rationality as universal pluralism, by a capacity to mentally put yourself into the other person's shoes and then decide to honor or at least tolerate that viewpoint even if you don't agree with it. You, operating from the pluralism of rational worldspace, might decide to tolerate the ideas of a mythic-believer; the problem is, they will not tolerate you—and, in fact, historically they would burn your tolerant tail at the stake in order to save your soul (whether your saviors be Christian, Marxist, Muslim, or Shinto).
In other words, multiculturalism is a noble, logocentric, and rational endeavor that simply misidentifies its own stance and claims to be not rational because some of the things it tolerates are not rational. But its own tolerance is rational through and through, and rightly so. Rationality is the only structure that will tolerate structures other than itself.
Nor can a genuine multiculturalism be established by "feelings" or by "coming from the heart," because my feelings are merely mine, not necessarily yours or theirs. Only in the space of rational pluralism can different feelings and thoughts and desires be given a fair play and an equal voice. It is from the platform of rational pluralism that the next stage, the truly aperspectival-integral (and universal-integral), can be reached.
Put differently, multiculturalism is a noble attempt to move to the integral-aperspectival structure, but, like many postmodern poststructural-ists, it thoroughly confuses the fact that no perspective is final with the notion that all perspectives are therefore simply equal. It thus fails to notice that that stance itself actually (and appropriately) rejects all narrower perspectives (which clearly shows that all perspectives are not equal).
In other words, the "multicults" regress from "no stance is ultimate" to "every stance is equally acceptable," thus burying (and denying) their own otherwise accurate judgment that lesser stances and smaller perspectives are unacceptable. They correctly glimpse aperspectival space, but then get thoroughly disoriented in the dizzifyingly holonic nature of eversliding contexts, failing to notice that sliding contexts do not in any way prevent some contexts from still being relatively better than less encompassing contexts.
Thus, that everything is relative does not mean nothing is better; it means some things are, indeed, relatively better than others, all the time. Neither atoms nor molecules are final or ultimate constituents of the universe; nonetheless, wherever they appear, molecules always contain atoms in a deeper embrace. (Indeed, the whole point of Einstein's somewhat mislabeled "relativity theory" was to find invariant transforms across relative spacetime.) The system is relative and sliding, for sure, but it slides in stable ways, and this stability-in-relativity allows the types of correct judgments that the multiculturalists do in fact make (namely, that pluralistic tolerance is better than narrow-minded intolerance)—even though their own theory (mistaken to be "we have no judgments since all judgments are relative")—even though their own theory cannot account for their actual stance (even though their own theory, in fact, denies their actual stance).
By failing to see the definiteness of relative judgments—and thus being totally disoriented and lost in aperspectival space—they miss the integral part, the universal-integral part, of their own stance, and thus they all too often regress into a riot of idiosyncratic differences that destroys the integrity of their own position. In a recent U.S. court case, a Chinese man found his wife, also Chinese, having an affair. He took a claw hammer and savagely beat her to death. He was acquitted on the "multicult defense": that's what they do in China, and we have to honor cultural differences, since no perspective is "better" than another. Aperspectival madness.
As for "Eurocentrism" being somehow despicable, the dividing line is not and should not be between cultures—some cultures are "good," some are "bad," some are "higher," some are "lower." Rather, the dividing line is within cultures—it is between those who, in any culture, wish to develop from egocentric to sociocentric to worldcentric, from magic to mythic to reason-planetary (first as egoic-rationality, then completed as centauric vision-logic).
For the most part, these egoic-rationality structures are already available for those individuals and social systems who can endure the transformation beyond their own provincial dogmatisms and embrace international recognition and mutual respect for each other's particular existence. This transformation—from the submergence of the individual in collective mythic-membership totalities to the emergence of the individual person or ego-subject, legally and morally and politically free within rational space secured by law—this transformation has already been embraced by Russia and the Eastern Bloc (which has temporarily thrown some of its junior holons back into vicious tribalistic warring simply because these tribal subholons were once held together by Marxism as a military mythic-rational empire: in holonic dissolution, the path of regression follows the reverse line of buildup, which now means: rampant re-tribalization).
Further, the transformation from mythic-membership to egoic-ratio-nality (and its perils) is already open to China, Cuba, Libya, Iraq, North Korea, Serbia, and any other social holon that wishes to surrender its mythic "superiority" and join the community of nations governed by international law and mutual recognition, that wishes to cease dissociating and splitting off from the free exchange of planetary consciousness, that wishes to reintegrate into a common world spirit and collective sharing of reason and communication and vision. (This does not excuse those nation-states, particularly the United States, Japan, and an ominously emerging "fortress Europe"—which are still distorting supranational exchanges for their own particular interests and remnants of mythic-imperial hegemony—does not prevent or relieve them from continuing to search for more reasonable and equitable exchanges with the world community at large, and particularly with regard to the common biosphere).
But for those individuals who have already done so; for those who have begun to emerge as centauric vision-logic; for those who take their stand in a planetary awareness beyond this or that narrow parochialism; for those attempting to secure a centauric identity that integrates physiosph-ere and biosphere and noosphere (in male and female alike), and looking for that sense of meaning, existential meaning, global meaning—for those small few, the simple living of a planetary perspectivism (that is, an integral-aperspectivism) creates small pockets of leading-edge consciousness, creates small pockets of "cognitive potential" that slowly but surely feed back into collective worldviews and then into social institutions themselves (UL to LL to LR), and once materially embedded and institutionalized, those institutional structures automatically, as it were, act as pacers of transformation for all who follow.
And transformation into what, exactly? Is the centaur the end of the line? Put it another way: is there any conceivable reason that evolution, which has labored so mightily for fifteen billion years and produced so much undeniable wonderment, would just up and abruptly cease? Are there not yet higher spirals lying ahead? If we have discerned even the vaguest features of time's arrow, can we not stand on tiptoe and foresee dimly the arrow's arc into tomorrow?

6

Magic, Mythic, and Beyond

That little prigs and three-quarter-mad men may have the conceit that the laws of nature are constantly broken for their sakes—such an intensification of every kind of selfishness into the infinite, into the impertinent, cannot be branded with too much contempt. And yet Christianity [any form of mythic-literalism] owes its triumph to this miserable flattery of personal vanity: it was precisely all the failures, all the rebellious-minded, all the less favored, the whole scum and refuse of humanity who were thus won over to it: The "salvation of the soul"—in plain language: "the world revolves around me."
—friedrich nietzsche  

IN the LAST chapter we looked at the formative stages in the collective evolution of the human species, up to the present—archaic to magic to mythic to mental (or egoic-rational on the verge of centauric vision-logic). In this chapter we will examine those same stages, those basic holons, as they appear in an individual's development today. And this will set the stage for a discussion of any future—and possibly higher—developments, in the individual and the species as a whole. And straining to see the arc of time's arrow into tomorrow, brings some surprises indeed.

the pre/trans fallacy

Ever since I began writing on the distinctions between prerational (or prepersonal) states of awareness and transrational (or transpersonal)
states—what I called the pre/trans fallacy—I have become more convinced than ever that this understanding is absolutely crucial for grasping the nature of higher (or deeper) or truly spiritual states of consciousness.
The essence of the pre/trans fallacy is itself fairly simple: since both prerational states and transrational states are, in their own ways, nonrational, they appear similar or even identical to the untutored eye. And once pre and trans are confused, then one of two fallacies occurs:
In the first, all higher and transrational states are reduced to lower and prerational states. Genuine mystical or contemplative experiences, for example, are seen as a regression or throwback to infantile states of narcissism, oceanic adualism, indissociation, and even primitive autism. This is, for example, precisely the route taken by Freud in The Future of an Illusion.
In these reductionistic accounts, rationality is the great and final omega point of individual and collective development, the high-water mark of all evolution. No deeper or wider or higher context is thought to exist. Thus, life is to be lived either rationally, or neurotically (Freud's concept of neurosis is basically anything that derails the emergence of rational perception—true enough as far as it goes, which is just not all that far). Since no higher context is thought to be real, or to actually exist, then whenever any genuinely transrational occasion occurs, it is immediately explained as a regression to prerational structures (since they are the only nonrational structures allowed, and thus the only ones to accept an explanatory hypothesis). The superconscious is reduced to the subconscious, the transpersonal is collapsed to the prepersonal, the emergence of the higher is reinterpreted as an irruption from the lower. All breathe a sigh of relief, and the rational worldspace is not fundamentally shaken (by "the black tide of the mud of occultism!" as Freud so quaintly explained it to Jung).
On the other hand, if one is sympathetic with higher or mystical states, but one still confuses pre and trans, then one will elevate all prerational states to some sort of transrational glory (the infantile primary narcissism, for example, is seen as an unconscious slumbering in the mystico unio). Jung and his followers, of course, often take this route, and are forced to read a deeply transpersonal and spiritual status into states that are merely indissociated and undifferentiated and actually lacking any sort of integration at all.
In the elevationist position, the transpersonal and transrational mystical union is seen as the ultimate omega point, and since egoic-rationality does indeed tend to deny this higher state, then egoic-rationality is pictured as the low point of human possibilities, as a debasement, as the cause of sin and separation and alienation. When rationality is seen as the anti-omega point, so to speak, as the great Anti-Christ, then anything nonrational gets swept up and indiscriminately glorified as a direct route to the Divine, and consequently the most infantile and regressive and pre-rational occasions get a field promotion on the spot: anything to get rid of that nasty and skeptical rationality. "I believe because it is absurd" (Tertullian)—there is the battle cry of the elevationist (a strand that runs deeply through Romanticism of any sort).
Freud was a reductionist, Jung an elevationist—the two sides of the pre/trans fallacy. And the point is that they are both half right and half wrong. A good deal of neurosis is indeed a fixation/regression to preratio-nal states, states that are not to be glorified. On the other hand, mystical states do indeed exist, beyond (not beneath) rationality, and those states are not to be reduced.
For most of the recent modern era, and certainly since Freud (and Marx and Ludwig Feuerbach), the reductionist stance toward spirituality has prevailed—all spiritual experiences, no matter how highly developed they might in fact be, were simply interpreted as regressions to primitive and infantile modes of thought. However, as if in overreaction to all that, we are now, and have been since the sixties, in the throes of various forms of elevationism (exemplified by, but by no means confined to, the New Age movement). All sorts of endeavors, of no matter what origin or of what authenticity, are simply elevated to transrational and spiritual glory, and the only qualification for this wonderful promotion is that the endeavor be nonrational. Anything rational is wrong; anything nonrational is spiritual.
Spirit is indeed nonrational; but it is trans, not pre. It transcends but includes reason; it does not regress and exclude it. Reason, like any particular stage of evolution, has its own (and often devastating) limitations, repressions, and distortions. But as we have seen, the inherent problems of one level are solved (or "defused") only at the next level of development; they are not solved by regressing to a previous level where the problem can be merely ignored. And so it is with the wonders and the terrors of reason: it brings enormous new capacities and new solutions, while introducing its own specific problems, problems solved only by a transcendence to the higher and transrational realms.
Many of the elevationist movements, alas, are not beyond logic but beneath it. They think they are, and they announce themselves to be, climbing the Mountain of Truth; whereas, it seems to me, they have merely slipped and fallen and are sliding rapidly down it, and the exhilarating rush of skidding uncontrollably down evolution's slope they call "following your bliss." As the earth comes rushing up at them at terminal velocity, they are bold enough to offer this collision course with ground zero as a new paradigm for the coming world transformation, and they feel oh-so-sorry for those who watch their coming crash with the same fascination as one watches a twenty-car pileup on the highway, and they sadly nod as we decline to join in that particular adventure. True spiritual bliss, in infinite measure, lies up that hill, not down it.
We will want to look at the deeper, higher structures of awareness, the transrational structures. But in order to fully understand them, we need first to look carefully at the prerational structures, so we will know, if nothing else than by a process of subtraction, what the transpersonal states are like.
So as we pick up the story of ontogeny at the archaic and magic structures, and follow it into the realms of the superconscious, it is these two distortions—reductionism and elevationism—that we will most want to try to avoid.

PIAGET

We are now following the development of the interior of an individual human holon in today's world, a recapitulation, in broad stroke, of the same basic holons we saw, in the last chapter, emerge over historical and prehistorical epochs in the various cultural worldspaces (worldspaces still available today owing to compound individuality, and spaces that unfold in the same sequence in individual development). As Sheldrake says, it is as if nature, once it has produced a basic holon and made sure it functions adequately, keeps using the same holon in subsequent development as building blocks (preserving the basic holon but negating its partialness or exclusivity by transcending it in a higher, deeper pattern). Each interior development that we will be following is, of course, governed by the twenty tenets (though not by those alone), and thus each development involves a new and creative emergence, a new transcendence, a new depth, a new interiority, a new differentiation/integration, a greater degree of relative autonomy (greater capacity for both agency and for communion), a greater degree of consciousness, a greater total embrace—with new fears, new anxieties, new needs, new scarcities, new desires, new moral engagements in new shared worldviews, and the ever-present possibility of new and higher pathologies and distortions.
Nowhere have the vicissitudes of the mind's developmental emergence been chartered in greater detail than in the works of Jean Piaget; and although nobody imagines that Piaget's system is without its own inadequacies, nonetheless the wealth of research and data that he and his colleagues generated over a four-decade period stands as one of a handful of the truly great contributions to psychology (and philosophy and religion).
Without, therefore, endorsing all of the Piagetian system, I would like to draw on his data (and some of his conclusions) to point out very carefully the nature of the mind's development from archaic to magic to mythic to mental, as it appears in today's ontogeny. For if there can be legitimate questions about, for example, the "magical-animistic" times in the phylogenetic past, there can be much less doubt about that structure (and about the mythic structure) as it appears in development today.
Further, and just as important for our concern, a simple study of Piaget is the quickest cure for elevationism. For what we find as we carefully study Piaget is that the productions of, say, the preoperational mind initially look very holistic, very interconnected, very "religious" in a sense, until we even barely scratch the surface and find the whole production supported by egocentrism, artificialism, finalism, anthropocentrism, and indissociation. We then have two very clear choices: try to prop up those productions as being "really religious," or look elsewhere for a genuine God.
I said this is extremely important, and the reason is simple: before we can carefully say what higher development is, what genuine mystical or contemplative or spiritual development is, we have to know what it is not. And above all else, what it is not is: it is not infantile indissociation.
As is well known, Piaget divided mental or cognitive development into four broad stages—the sensorimotor (0-2 years), the preoperational or "preop" (2-7 years), the concrete operational or "conop" (7-11 years), and the formal operational or "formop" (11 years onward). Each of these broad stages he divided into several substages. We will take them one at a time, with a few brief correlations with other major researchers.

sensorimotor (archaic and archaic-magic)

The human being at conception is a single-celled holon, embracing in itself, as junior holons, organelles, molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles, reaching all the way back into those dark shadows that fade into the evolutionary night.
By the time of birth, the human being has developed from protoplasmic irritability to sensation to perception to impulse to proto-emotion, embracing each as a successive holon in its own compound individuality. But none of these functions is yet clearly differentiated (or integrated), and the first years of life are a quick coming-to-terms with the physiosphere and the biosphere both within and without, in preparation for the emergence of the noosphere, which begins in earnest around age two with the emergence of language.
Thus Piaget, for example, in speaking of the first year of life, says that "the self is here material, so to speak." It is still, that is, embedded primarily in the physiosphere. In the first place, the infant cannot distinguish between subject and object or self and material environment, but instead lives in a state of "primary narcissism" (Freud) or "oceanic adualism" (Arieti) or "pleromatic fusion" (Jung) or primary "indissociation" (Piaget). The infant's self and the material environment (and especially the mother) are in a state of primitive nondifferentiation or indissociation. On the psychosexual side, this is the "oral phase" because the infant is coming to terms with food, physical nourishment, life in this physiosphere.
Sometime between the fifth and the ninth month, this archaic indissociation gives way to a physical bodyself differentiated from the physical environment—the "real birth" of the individual physical self. Margaret Mahler actually refers to it as "hatching." The infant bites its thumb and it hurts, bites the blanket and it doesn't. There is a difference, it learns, between the physical self and the physical other.
Another way to put this is to say that, with this first major differentiation (or first major "fulcrum of development," as researchers call it),
consciousness seats itself in the physical body, grounds itself in the physi-osphere of the individual holon and not in the physiosphere of the social holon (its environment). Many researchers, from Kernberg to Mahler, have concluded that if, due to physiological/genetic factors or repeated trauma, consciousness fails to seat itself in the physical self, the result is psychosis of one sort or another. Psychosis is many things (including, perhaps, an influx from higher dimensions), but it certainly includes a failure to establish a grounded physical self clearly differentiated from the environment. The psychotic, as R. D. Laing put it, is constantly "jumping out of the body"; he or she cannot easily differentiate where the body stops and the chair begins; subject and object collapse in a state of fusion and confusion, with hallucinatory blurring of boundaries, and so forth. Psychosis, we may say, is a failure to differentiate and integrate the physiosphere.
If all goes relatively well, then the infant transcends this archaic fusion state and emerges or hatches as a grounded physical self.
The sensorimotor period (0-2 years) is thus predominantly concerned with differentiating the physical self from the physical environment, and results, toward the end of the second year, in what Piaget calls physical "object permanence," the capacity of the infant to understand that physical objects exist independently of him or her (i.e., the physical world exists independently of one's egocentric wishes about it).
Thus, out of an initial state of primary indissociation ("protoplasmic," Piaget also calls it), the physical self and the physical other emerge:

It is through a progressive differentiation that the internal world comes into being and is contrasted with the external. Neither of these two terms is given at the start. . . .
Consequently, during the gradual and slow differentiation of the initial protoplasmic reality into objective and subjective reality, it is clear that each of the two terms [interior and exterior, Left Hand and Right Hand] in process of differentiation will evolve in accordance with its own structure. . . .
This phenomenon is very general. During the early stages the [physical] world and the self are one; neither term is distinguished from the other. But when they become distinct, these two terms begin by remaining very close to each other: the world is still conscious and full of intentions, the self is still material, so to speak, and only slightly interiorized. At every stage there remain in the conception of nature what we might call "adherences," fragments of internal experience which still cling to the external world.

At the end of the sensorimotor period, the physical self and physical other are clearly differentiated, but as the mind begins to emerge with preop, the mental images and symbols themselves are initially fused and confused with the external world, leading to what Piaget calls "adherences," which children themselves will eventually reject as being inadequate and misleading.

We have distinguished [several] varieties of adherences defined in this way. There are, to begin with, during a very early stage, feelings of participation accompanied sometimes by magical beliefs; the sun and moon follow us, and if we walk, it is enough to make them move along; things notice us and obey us, like the wind, the clouds, the night, etc.; the moon, the street lamps, etc., send us dreams "to annoy us," etc., etc. In short, the world is filled with tendencies and intentions which are [centered on] our own.
A second form of adherence, closely allied to the preceding, is that constituted by animism, which makes the child endow things with consciousness and life [oriented solely toward the child]. ... In this magico-animistic order: on the one hand, we issue commands to things (the sun and the moon, the clouds and the sky follow us), on the other hand, these things acquiesce in our desires because they themselves wish to do so.
A third form is artificialism [anthropocentrism]. The child begins by thinking of things in terms of his own "I": the things around him take notice of man and are made for man; everything about them is willed and intentional, everything is organized for the good of men. If we ask the child, or the child asks himself, how things began, he has recourse to man to explain them. Thus artificialism is based on feelings of participation which constitute a very special and very important class of adherences.

As we will see, Piaget believes that the major and in many ways defining characteristic of all adherences is egocentrism, or an early and initial inability to transcend one's own perspective and understand that reality is not self-centered. Development thus proceeds slowly from egocentrism to perspectivism, from realism to reciprocity and mutuality, and from absolutism to relativity:

This formula means that the child, after having regarded his own point of view as absolute, comes to discover the possibility of other points of view and to conceive of reality as constituted, no longer by what is immediately given, but by what is common to all points of view taken together.
One of the first aspects of this process is the passage from realism of perception to interpretation properly so called. All the younger children take their immediate perceptions as true, and then proceed to interpret them according to their own egocentric relations. The most striking example is that of the clouds and the heavenly bodies, of which children believe that they follow us. The sun and moon are small globes traveling a little way above the level of the roofs of houses and following us about on our walks. Even the child of 6-8 years does not hesitate to take this perception as the expression of truth, and, curiously enough, he never thinks of asking himself whether these heavenly bodies do not also follow other people. When we ask the captious question as to which of two people walking in opposite directions the sun would prefer to follow, the child is taken aback and shows how new the question is to him. [Older children,] on the other hand, have discovered that the sun follows everybody. From this they conclude that the truth lies in the reciprocity of the points of view. that the sun is very high up, that it follows no one. . . .

Piaget is at pains to indicate that the process of differentiation/integration between internal and external world is a long and slow one. It is not, for example, that magico-animistic beliefs are present at one stage and then completely disappear at the next, but rather that cognitions referred to as "magical" become progressively less and less as development proceeds, moving from a "pure magical autism" to mental egocentricity to reciprocal and mutual sharing. In a very important passage Piaget gets to the heart of the matter:

For the construction of the objective world and the elaboration of strict reasoning both consist in a gradual reduction of egocentricity in favor of... reciprocity of viewpoints. In both cases, the initial state is marked by the fact that the self is confused with the external world and with other people; the vision of the world is falsified by subjective adherences, and the vision of other people is falsified by the fact that the personal point of view predominates, almost to the exclusion of all others. Thus in both cases, truth is obscured by the ego.
Then, as the child discovers that others do not think as he does, he makes efforts to adapt himself to them, he bows to exigencies of control and verification which are implied by discussion and argument, and thus comes to replace egocentric logic by the logic created by social life. We saw that exactly the same process took place with regard to the idea of reality.
There is therefore an egocentric logic [LH] and an egocentric ontology [RH], of which the consequences are parallel: they both falsify the perspective of relations and of things, because they both start from the assumption that other people understand us and agree with us from the first, and that things revolve around us with the sole purpose of serving us and resembling us.

A note on terminology: Piaget divides each of the major cognitive stages into at least two substages (early and late preop, early and late conop, early and late formop), and I have generally followed Piaget in this regard. Since we have also been using Gebser's general worldview terminology of archaic, magic, mythic, and mental (with the clear implication that they are referring to essentially similar stages), I will often hybridize Gebser's terminology to match Piaget's substages, so that we have a continuum of archaic, archaic-magic, magic, magic-mythic, mythic, mythic-rational, rational, rational-existential (and into vision-logic, psychic, etc.). These particular names are, of course, arbitrary; but the actual stages they refer to are based on extensive empirical/phenome-nological research. I also believe these names (such as magic, mythic-rational, etc.) help to capture the essential "flavor" of each stage and sub-stage.
The preponderance of indissociations and "adherences" at the sensorimotor and early preoperational (the archaic and the archaic-magic— roughly 0-3 years) have led Piaget himself to often refer to this general early period as one of "magical cognitions" or "magic proper." As he explains:

The first [general stage] is that which precedes any clear consciousness of the self, and may be arbitrarily set down as lasting until the age of 2-3, that is, till the appearance of the first "whys," which symbolize in a way the first awareness of resistance in the external world.
As far as we can conjecture, two phenomena characterize this first stage [the overall archaic-magic]. From the [internal] point of view, it is pure autism, or thought akin to dreams or daydreams, thought in which truth is confused with desire. To every desire corresponds immediately an image or illusion which transforms this desire into reality, thanks to a sort of pseudo-hallucination or play. No objective observation or reasoning is possible: there is only a perpetual play which transforms perceptions and creates situations in accordance with the subject's pleasure [this stage is a constant source of envy to the Romantics]. From the ontological viewpoint, what corresponds to this manner of thinking is primitive psychological causality, probably in a form that implies magic proper [his italics; I refer to it as archaic-magic]: the belief that any desire whatsoever can influence objects, the belief in the obedience of external things. Magic and autism are therefore two different sides of one and the same phenomenon—that confusion between the self and the world. . . .

preoperational (magic and magic-mythic)

If all goes relatively well, the infant transcends the early archaic fusion state and emerges or hatches as a grounded physical self. But if the infant's physical body is now separated from the environment, its emotional body is not. The infant's emotional self still exists in a state of indissociation from other emotional objects, in particular the mothering one. But then, around eighteen months or so, the infant learns to differentiate its feelings from the feelings of others (this is the second major differentiation, or "second fulcrum"). Its own biosphere is differentiated from the biosphere of those around it—in other words, it transcends its embeddedness in the undifferentiated biosphere. Once again, as with every holon, it manifests not just a capacity for self-preservation and self-adaptation, but also for self-transcendence.
Mahler refers to this crucial transformation (the second fulcrum) as the "separation-individuation phase," or the differentiation-and-integration of a stable emotional self (whereas the previous fulcrum, as we saw, was the differentiation/integration of the physical self). Mahler actually calls this fulcrum "the psychological birth of the infant," because the infant emerges from its emotional fusion with the (m)other.
A developmental miscarriage at this critical fulcrum (according to Mahler, Kernberg, and others) results in the narcissistic and borderline pathologies, because if the infant does not differentiate-separate its feelings from the feelings of those around it, then it is open to being "flooded" and "swept away" by its emotional environment, on the one hand (the borderline syndromes), or it can treat the entire world as a mere extension of its own feelings (the narcissistic condition)—both of which result from a failure to transcend an embeddedness in the undifferentiated biosphere. One remains in indissociation with, or "merged" with, the biosphere, stuck in the biosphere, just as with the previous psychoses one remains merged with or stuck in the physiosphere.
By around age three, if all has gone relatively well, the young child has a stable and coherent physical self and emotional self; it has differentiated and integrated, transcended and preserved, its own physiosphere and biosphere. By this time language has begun to emerge, and development in the noosphere begins in earnest.
Thus, the intensity of the early archaic-magic declines with the differentiation of emotional self and emotional other (24-36 months)—but, according to Piaget, magical cognitions continue to dominate the entire early preoperational period (2-4 years), the period I simply call "magic."
In other words, the first major layer of the noosphere is magical. During this period, the newly emerging images and symbols do not merely represent objects; they are thought to be concretely part of the things they represent, and thus "word magic" abounds:

Up to the age of 4-5, [the child] thinks that he is "forcing" or compelling the moon to move; the relation takes on an aspect of dynamic participation or of magic. From 4 to 5 he is more inclined to think that the moon is trying to follow him: the relation is animistic.
Closely akin to this participation is magical causality, magic being in many respects simply participation: the subject regards his gestures, his thoughts, or the objects he handles, as charged with efficacy, thanks to the very participations which he establishes between those gestures, etc., and the things around him ["adherences"]. Thus a certain word acts upon a certain thing; a certain gesture will protect one from a certain danger; a certain white pebble will bring about the growth of water lilies, and so on. . . .

Piaget refers to such magical cognitions as a form of "participation"— that is, the subject and the object, and various objects themselves, are "linked" by certain types of adherences, or felt connections, connections that nonetheless violate the rich fabric of relations actually constituting the object.
This is very much what Freud referred to as the primary process, which is governed by two general laws, that of displacement and that of condensation. In displacement, two different objects are equated or "linked" because they share similar parts or predicates (a relation of similarity: if one Asian person is bad, all Asians must be bad). In condensation, different objects are related because they exist in the same space (a relation of contiguity: a lock of hair of a great warrior "contains" in condensed form the power of the warrior).
(There is another way to categorize this. Each holon is an agency-in-communion. Displacement confuses different holons because they share similar agency. Condensation confuses different holons because they share similar communions. The former is metaphor, the latter is metonym. This leads to a host of interesting correlations, which I will reserve for a note).
Put simply, such primary process or magical cognition is not yet capable of grasping the notion of a holon. It does not set whole and part in a rich network of mutual relationships, but short-circuits the process by merely collapsing or confusing various wholes and parts—what Piaget calls syncretism and juxtaposition (again, similarity and contiguity). Magical cognition, then, is of fused and confused wholes and parts, and not mutually related wholes and parts. These "fused networks" of "sycretic wholes" appear very holistic (or "holographic"), but are actually not very coherent and do not even match the already available sensorimotor evidence.

[This] type of relation is participation. This type is more frequent than would at first appear to be the case, but it disappears after the age of 5-6. Its principle is the following: two things between which there subsist relations either of resemblance [similarity; metaphor] or of general affinity [contiguity; metonym], are conceived as having something in common which enables them to act upon one another at a distance, or more precisely, to be regarded one as a source of emanations, the other as the emanation of the first. Thus air or shadows in a room emanate from the air and shadows out of doors. Thus also dreams, which are sent to us by birds "who like the wind."
[The child] begins, indeed, as we do, by feeling the analogy of the shadow cast by the book with the shadows of trees, houses, etc. But this analogy does not lead him to any [mutual] relation: it simply leads him to identify the particular cases with one another. So that we have here, not analogy proper, but syncretism. The child argues as follows: "This book makes a shadow; trees, houses, etc., make shadows. The book's shadow (therefore) conies from the trees and the houses." Thus, from the point of view of the cause or of the structure of the object, there is participation, syncretistic schemas resulting from the fusion of singular terms. . . ,

the shift from magic to mythic

As we move from early preoperational (2-4 years; "magic") to late preop-erational (4-7 years; "magic-mythic"), similar types of adherences continue to dominate awareness. But one crucial difference comes to the fore: magic proper—the belief that the subject can magically alter the object— diminishes rapidly. Continued interaction with the world eventually leads the subject to realize that his or her thoughts do not egocentrically control, create, or govern the world. The "hidden linkages" don't hold up in reality.
Magic proper thus diminishes, or rather, the omnipotent magic of the individual subject—a magic that no longer "works"—is simply transferred to other subjects. Maybe I can't order the world around, but Daddy (or God or the volcano spirit) can.
And thus onto the scene come crashing a hundred gods and goddesses, all capable of doing what I can no longer do: miraculously alter the patterns of nature in order to cater to my wants. Whereas in the earlier magical stages proper, the secret of the universe was to learn the right type of word magic that would directly alter the world, the focus now is to learn the right rituals and prayers that will make the gods and goddesses intervene and alter the world for me. Piaget:

The possibility of miracles is, of course, admitted, or rather, miracles form part of the child's conception of the world, since law [at this stage] is a moral thing with the possibility of numerous exceptions ["suspended by God" or a powerful other]. Children have been quoted who asked their parents to stop the rain, to turn spinach into potatoes, etc.

Thus the shift from magic to magic-mythic. Piaget: "The first stage is magical: we make the clouds move by walking. The clouds obey us at a distance. The average age of this stage is 5. The second stage [magic-mythic] is both artificialist and animistic. Clouds move because God or [other] men make them move. The average age of this stage is 6."
It is from this magic-mythic structure that so many of the world's classical mythologies seem in large part to issue. As Philip Cowan points out, "During the [late preop or magic-mythic] stage, there is still a confusion between physical and personal causality; the physical world appears to operate much the way people do. All of these examples [show that late preop] children have already developed elaborate mythologies about cosmic questions such as the nature of life (and death) and the cause of wind [and so forth]. Further, these mythologies show many similarities from child to child across cultures and do not seem to have been directly taught by adults."

myth and archetype

This directly brings us, of course, to the work of Carl Jung and his conclusion that the essential forms and motifs of the world's great mythologies—the "archaic forms" or "archetypes"—are collectively inherited in the individual psyche of each of us.
It is not often realized that Freud was in complete agreement with Jung about the existence of this archaic heritage. Freud was struck by the fact that individuals in therapy kept reproducing essentially similar "phantasies," phantasies that seemed therefore somehow to be collectively inherited. "Whence comes the necessity for these phantasies and the material for them?" he asks. "How is it to be explained that the same phantasies are always formed with the same content? I have an answer to this which I know will seem to you very daring. I believe that these primal phantasies are a phylogenetic possession. In them the individual stretches out to the experiences of past ages."
This phylogenetic or "archaic heritage" includes, according to Freud, "abbreviated repetitions of the evolution undergone by the whole human race through long-drawn-out periods and from pre-historic ages." Although, as we will see, Freud and Jung differed profoundly over the actual nature of this archaic heritage, Freud nevertheless made it very clear that "I fully agree with Jung in recognizing the existence of this phylogenetic heritage."
Piaget has also written extensively on his essential agreement with and appreciation of Jung's work. But he differs slightly with Jung in that he does not see the archetypes themselves as being directly inherited from past ages, but rather as being the secondary by-products of cognitive structures which themselves are similar wherever they appear and which, in interpreting a common physical world, generate common motifs (so that the cognitive structures themselves are the phylogenetic heritage).
But whether we follow Freud, Jung, or Piaget, the conclusion is essentially the same: all the world's great mythologies exist today in each of us, in me and in you. They are produced, and can at any time be produced, by the archaic, the magic, and the mythic structures of our own compound individuality (and classically by the magic-mythic structure).
The question then centers—and here Freud and Jung bitterly parted ways—on the nature and function of these mythic motifs, these archetypes. Are they merely infantile and regressive (Freud), or do they also contain a rich source of spiritual wisdom (Jung) ? Piaget, needless to say, sided with Freud on this particular issue. I have already suggested that I do not see these particular "archetypes" as being quite the high source of transpersonal wisdom that Jung believed; but the situation is very subtle and complex, and we will return to it later in this chapter, in connection with Joseph Campbell, and discuss it more fully.
Campbell, we will see, believes that in certain circumstances (which we will explore), the early mythic archetypes can carry profound religious and spiritual meaning and power. But even Campbell clearly acknowledges (and indeed stresses) that the early and late preoperational stages themselves are both marked by a great deal of egocentrism, anthropocentrism, and geocentrism.
Put differently, still lying "close to the body," preoperational cognition does not easily take the role of other, nor does it still clearly differentiate the noosphere and the biosphere. Even in late preoperational thinking, the child firmly believes that names are a part of, or actually exist in, the objects that are named. "What are names for?" a child of five was asked. "They are what you see when you look at things." "Where is the name of the sun?" "Inside the sun." As one child summarized it: "If there weren't any words it would be very bad. You couldn't make anything. How could things have been made?" Joseph Campbell comments:

In the cosmologies of archaic man, as in those of infancy, the main concern of the creator was in the weal and woe of man. Light was made so that we should see; night so that we might sleep; stars to foretell the weather; clouds to warn of rain. The child's view of the world is not only geocentric, but egocentric. And if we add to this simple structure the tendency recognized by Freud, to experience all things in association with the subjective formula of the family romance [Oedipus/Electra], we have a rather tight and very slight vocabulary of elementary ideas, which we may expect to see variously inflected and applied in the mythologies of the world.

repression

The emergence of the noosphere: First images (at around 7 months), then symbols (the first full-fledged symbol probably being the word "no!"), then concepts (around 3-4 years), all aided immeasurably by the emergence of language.
I mentioned the word "no!" as being the first symbol, and that word summarizes all the strengths—and all the weaknesses—of the newly emerging noosphere.
"No" is the first form of specifically mental transcendence. Images begin this mental transcendence, but images are tied to their sensory referents. With "no" I can for the first time decline to act on my bodily impulses or on your desires (which every parent discovers in the child during the "terrible twos"). For the first time in development, the child can begin to transcend its merely biological or biocentric or ecocentric embed-dedness, begin to exert control over bodily desires and bodily discharges and bodily instincts, while also "separating-individuating" itself from the will of others. The Freudian fuss over "toilet training" and the "anal phase" simply refers to the fact that a mental-linguistic self is beginning to emerge and beginning to exert some type of conscious will and conscious control over its spontaneous biospheric productions, and over its being "controlled" by others as well.
In short, it is only with language that the child can differentiate its mind and body, differentiate its mental will and its bodily impulses, and then begin to integrate its mind and body. This is the third major differentiation, or the third fulcrum. The failure to differentiate mind and body—the failure to transcend at this stage—is another way to say "remains stuck in the body or the biosphere," which, we saw, is the primary developmental lesion underlying the narcissistic/borderline pathologies.
But "no!" can go too far, and therein lies all the horrors of the noosphere. For if it is indeed with language that the child can differentiate mind and body, differentiate the noosphere and the biosphere, that differentiation (as always) can go too far and result in dissociation. The mind does not just transcend and include the body, it represses the body, represses its sensuality, represses its sexuality, represses its rich roots in the biosphere. Repression, in the Freudian (and Jungian) sense, comes into existence only with the "language barrier," with a "no!" carried to extremes. And the result of this extreme "no!" is technically called "neurosis" or "psychoneurosis."
Every neurosis, in other words, is a miniature ecological crisis. It is a refusal to include in the compound individual some aspect of organic life, emotional-sexual life, reproductive life, sensuous life, libidinal life, biospheric life. It is a denial of our roots and our foundation. Neurosis, in this sense, is an assault on the biosphere by the noosphere, an attempt to render extinct some aspects of our own organic holons. But these biospheric holons do not thereby merely disappear (nor could they without killing the individual). Rather, the repressed holons return in disguised forms known as "neurotic symptoms"—anxieties and depressions and obsessions—painful symptoms of a biosphere ignored, a biosphere now forcing itself into consciousness in hidden forms, attempts to throw the noosphere off its back.
And the neurotic symptoms disappear, or are healed, only as consciousness relaxes its repression, recontacts and befriends the biosphere that exists in its own being, and then integrates that biosphere with the newly emergent noosphere in its own case. This is called "uncovering the shadow," and the shadow is ... the biosphere.
Thus, if remaining stuck in the biosphere results in the borderline/narcissistic conditions, going to the other extreme and alienating the biosphere results directly in the psychoneuroses. It follows that our present-day worldwide ecological crisis is, in the very strictest sense of the term, a worldwide collective neurosis—and is about to result in a worldwide nervous breakdown.
This crisis, I repeat, is in no way going to "destroy the biosphere"—the biosphere will survive, in some form or another (even if just viral and bacterial), no matter what we do to it. What we are doing, rather, is altering the biosphere in a way that will not support higher life forms and especially will not support the noosphere. That "alteration" is in fact a repression, an alienation, a denial of our common ancestry, a denial of our relational existence with all of life. It is not a destruction of the biosphere but a denial of the biosphere, and that is the precise definition of psychoneurosis.
What Freud found his patients doing on a couch in Vienna, we have now collectively managed to do to the world at large. And who shall be our doctor?

concrete operational (mythic and mythic-rational)

Assuming development goes relatively smoothly, then with the first significant differentiation of the mind and body (the third fulcrum), the mind can transcend its embeddedness in a merely bodily orientation—absorbed in itself (egocentric)—and begin to enter the world of other minds. But to do so it must learn to take the role of other—a new, emergent, and very difficult task.
In other words, the self has gone from a physiocentric identity (first fulcrum) to a biocentric identity (second fulcrum) to a noospheric identity (third fulcrum), the first form of which is still thoroughly egocentric and anthropocentric (magic and magic-mythic all centered on the self and oriented exclusively to the self, however "otherworldly" or "sacred" it might all appear).
If the sensorimotor and preoperational world is egocentric and geocentric, the concrete operational world is sociocentric (centered not so much on a bodily identity as on a role identity, as we will see). It still contains "mythic" and "anthropocentric" elements because, as Cowan puts it, "there are still various colorings of the previous stages" (which is why I call early and late conop, respectively, mythic and mythic-rational). A more differentiated causation by "five elements" (water, wind, earth, fire, ether) tends to replace more syncretic explanations, and there often emerges a belief in causation by "preformation" (the acorn contains a fully formed but miniature oak tree).
But by far the most famous transformation or transcendence occurs in the capacity to take the role of other—not just to realize that others have a different perspective, but to be able to mentally reconstruct that perspective, to put oneself in the other's shoes.
In what became known as the Three Mountains Task, Piaget and Barbel Inhelder exposed children from four to twelve years old to a play set that contained three clay mountains, each of a different color, and a toy doll. The questions were simple: what do you see, and what does the doll see?
The typical response of the preoperational child is that the doll sees the same thing that the child is looking at, even if the doll is facing only, say, the green mountain. The child does not understand that there are different perspectives involved. At a later stage of preop, the child will correctly indicate that the doll has a different perspective, but the child cannot say exactly what that is.
But with the emergence of concrete operational, the child will easily and readily describe the true perspective of the doll (e.g., "I am looking at all three mountains, but the doll is only looking at the green mountain").
Investigation of these and similar tasks (by Robert Selman, John Flavell, and others) has confirmed the general conclusion: only with the emergence of concrete operational thought can the child transcend his or her egocentric perspective and take the role of other. As Habermas would put it, a role identity supplements a natural (or bodily) identity (the body cannot take the role of other). The child learns his or her role in a society of other roles, and must now learn to differentiate that role from the role of others and then integrate that role in the newly emergent worldspace (this is the fourth major fulcrum, the fourth major differentiation/integration of self-development). The fundamental locus of self-identity thus switches from egocentric to sociocentric.
Initially the child is indissociated from his or her role, is embedded or "stuck" in it (just as he or she was initially stuck in the physiosphere and then stuck in the biosphere). This unavoidable (and initially necessary) "sociocentric embeddedness" leads to what is variously known as the conventional stages of morality (Kohlberg/Gilligan), the belongingness needs (Maslow), the conformist mode (Loevinger).
Which is why pathology at this stage is known generally as "script pathology." One is having trouble, not with the physiosphere (psychoses), not with the biosphere (borderline and neuroses)—rather, one is stuck in the early roles and scripts given by one's parents, one's society, one's peers: scripts that are not, and initially cannot be, checked against further evidence, and therefore scripts that are often outmoded, wrong, even cruel ("I'm no good, I'm rotten to the core, I can't do anything right," etc.; these do not so much concern bodily impulses, as in the psychoneuroses, but rather social judgments about one's social standing, one's role).
Therapy here involves digging up these scripts and exposing these myths to the light of more mature reason and more accurate information, thus "rewriting the script." (This is, for example, the primary approach of cognitive therapy and interpersonal therapy; not so much the digging up of buried and alienated bodily impulses, as important as that may be, but digging up false and distorting cognitive maps and exposing them to more reasonable judgments).
Equally important to the taking of roles is the capacity of conop to work with mental rules. We saw that preop works with images (pictorial representation), symbols (nonpictorial representation), and concepts (which represent an entire class of things). Rules go one step further and operate upon concrete classes, and thus these rules (like multiplication, class inclusion, hierarchization) begin to grasp the incredibly rich relationships between various wholes and parts.
That is, concrete operational is the first structure that can clearly grasp the nature of a holon, of that which in one relationship is a whole and at the same time in another relationship is merely a part (which is why value holarchies start to emerge spontaneously in children at this point; they switch from the rather strong "either-or" desires of preop to a continuum of preferences). All of this, of course, depends upon the capacity of conop to begin to take different perspectives and relate those perspectives to each other.
Because of its capacity to operate with both rules and roles, I also call this structure the rule/role mind. In relation to the previous stage(s), it represents a greater transcendence, a greater autonomy, a greater interiority, a higher and wider identity, a greater consciousness, but one that, as in all previous stages, is initially "captured" by the self and the objects— now a social self and now social objects (roles)—that dominate this stage.
And thus a self now open to new and higher pathologies, which demand new and different therapies. No longer stuck in the physiosphere, stuck in the biosphere, or stuck in the early "egosphere," the pathological self is here stuck in the sociosphere, embedded in a particular society's rules and myths and dogmas, with no way to transcend that mythic-membership, and thus destined to play out the roles and rules of a particular and isolated society.
Mythic-membership is sociocentric and thus ethnocentric: one is in the culture (a member of the culture) if one accepts the prevailing mythology, and one is excommunicated from the culture if the belief system is not embraced. There is no way a global or planetary culture can even be conceived unless it involves the imposing of one's particular mythology on all peoples: which is just what we saw with the mythic-imperialism of the great Empires, from the Greek and Roman to the Khans and Sargons to the Incas and Aztecs. These great Empires all overcame the egocentrism of local and warring tribes by subsuming their regimes into that of the Empire (thus negating and preserving them in a larger reach or communion), and this was accomplished in part, as we saw, by the umbrella of a mythology that unified different tribes, not by blood or kinship (for that is impossible, since each tribe has a different lineage), but rather by a common mythological origin that could unite the various roles (as the twelve Tribes of Israel were united by a common Yahweh).
And as appropriate and unavoidable as all of that seems to have been, that entire structure is deconstructed with the emergence of egoic-rationality (and formal operational cognition).

the ego

We saw that Habermas referred to the transcendence from conop to formop as a transformation from a role identity to an ego identity. "Ego"
here doesn't mean "egocentric"; on the contrary, it means moving from a sociocentric to a worldcentric capacity, a capacity to distance oneself from one's egocentric and ethnocentric embeddedness and consider what would be fair for all peoples and not merely one's own.
It would be helpful, then, to discuss the meaning of the word ego. Particularly in transpersonal circles, no word has caused more confusion. Ego, along with rationality, is generally the dirty word in mystical, transpersonal, and New Age circles, but few researchers seem even to define it, and those who do, do so differently.
We can, of course, define ego any way we like as long as we are consistent. Most New Age writers use the term very loosely to mean a separate-self sense, isolated from others and from a spiritual Ground. Unfortunately, these writers do not clearly distinguish states that are pre-egoic from those that are transegoic, and thus half of their recommendations for salvation are actually recommendations for various ways to regress, and this rightly sends alarms through orthodox researchers. Nonetheless, their general conclusion is that all truly spiritual states are "beyond ego," which is true enough as far as it goes, but which terribly confuses the picture unless it is carefully qualified.
In most psychoanalytically oriented writers, the ego has come to mean "the process of organizing the psyche," and in this regard many researchers, such as Heinz Kohut, now prefer the more general term self. The ego (or self), as the principle that gives unity to the mind, is thus a crucial and fundamental organizing pattern, and to try to go "beyond ego" would mean not transcendence but disaster, and so these orthodox theorists are utterly perplexed by what "beyond ego" could possibly mean, and who could possibly desire it—and, as far as that definition goes, they too are quite right. (We'll return to this in a moment.)
In philosophy a general distinction is made between the empirical ego, which is the self insofar as it can be an object of awareness and introspection, and the Pure Ego or transcendental Ego (Kant, Fichte, Husserl), which is pure subjectivity (or the observing Self), which can never be seen as an object of any sort. In this regard, the pure Ego or pure Self is virtually identical with what the Hindus call Atman (or the pure Witness that itself is never witnessed—is never an object—but contains all objects in itself).
Furthermore, according to such philosophers as Fichte, this pure Ego is one with absolute Spirit, which is precisely the Hindu formula Atman = Brahman. To hear Spirit described as pure Ego totally confuses New Agers, who are generally unaware of the historical uses of the term and who want ego to mean only "the devil" (even though they heartily embrace the identical notion Atman = Brahman).
They are equally confused when someone like Jack Engler, a theorist studying the interface of psychiatry and meditation, states that "meditation increases ego strength," which it most certainly does, because "ego strength" in the psychiatric sense means "capacity for disinterested witnessing." But the New Agers think that meditation means "beyond ego," and thus anything that strengthens the ego is simply more of the devil. And so the confusions go.
Ego is simply Latin for "I." Freud, for example, never used the term ego; he used the German pronoun das Ich, or "the I," which Strachey unfortunately translated as the "ego." And contrasted to "the I" was what Freud called the Es, which is German for "it," and which, also unfortunately, was translated as the "id" (Latin for "it"), a term Freud never used. Thus Freud's great book The Ego and the Id was really called "The I and the It." Freud's point was that people have a sense of I-ness or selfness, but sometimes part of their own self appears foreign, alien, separate from them—appears, that is, as an "it" (we say, "The anxiety, it makes me uncomfortable," or "The desire to eat, it's stronger than me!" and so forth, thus relinquishing responsibility for our own states). When parts of the I are split off or repressed, they appear as symptoms or "its" over which we have no control.
Freud's basic aim in therapy was therefore to reunite the I and the it and thus heal the split between them. His most famous statement of the goal of therapy—"Where id was, there ego shall be"—actually reads, "Where it was, there I shall be." Whether one is a Freudian or not, this is still the most accurate and succinct summary of all forms of uncovering psychotherapy, and it simply points to an expansion of ego, an expansion of I-ness, into a higher and wider identity that integrates previously alienated processes.
The term ego can obviously be used in a large number of quite different ways, from the very broad to the very narrow, and it is altogether necessary to specify which usage one intends, or else interminable arguments arise that are generated only by an arbitrary semantic choice.
In the broadest sense, ego means "self" or "subject," and thus when Piaget speaks of the earliest stages being "egocentric," he does not mean that there is a clearly differentiated self or ego set apart from the world. He means just the opposite: the self is not differentiated from the world, there is no strong ego, and thus the world is treated as an extension of the self, "egocentrically." Only with the emergence of a strong and differentiated ego (which occurs from the third to the fifth fulcrums, culminating in formop, or rational perspectivism)—only with the emergence of the mature ego does egocentrism die down! The "pre-egoic" stages are the most egocentric!
Thus, it is only at the level of formal operational thought (as we will see in a moment) that a truly strong and differentiated self or ego emerges from its embeddedness in bodily impulses and pre-given social roles; and that, indeed, is what Habermas refers to as an ego identity, a fully separated-individuated sense of self.
To repeat: the "ego," as used by psychoanalysis, Piaget, and Habermas (and others), is thus less egocentric than its pre-egoic predecessors!
I will most often use the term ego in this narrower sense, similar to Freud, Piaget, Habermas, and others—a rational, individuated sense of self, differentiated from the external world, from its social roles (and the superego), and from its internal nature (id).
In this usage, there are pre-egoic realms (particularly the archaic and the magic), where the self is poorly differentiated from the internal and external world (there are only "ego nuclei," as psychoanalysis puts it). These pre-egoic realms are, to repeat, the most egocentric (because the infant or child doesn't have a strong ego, it thinks that the world feels what it feels, wants what it wants, caters to its every desire: it does not clearly separate self and other, and thus treats the other as an extension of the self).
The ego begins more stably to emerge in the mythic stage (as a persona or role) and finally emerges in the formal operational stage, as a self clearly differentiated from the external world and from its various roles (personae). These are the overall egoic realms. Higher developments into more spiritual realms are then referred to as being transegoic, with the clear understanding that the ego is being negated but also preserved (as a functional self in conventional reality). The self in these higher stages I will refer to as the Self (and not the pure Ego, unless otherwise indicated, because this confuses everybody), and I will explain all of that in more detail as we proceed.
These three large realms are also referred to, in very general terms, as the subconscious (pre-egoic), the self-conscious (egoic), and the superconscious (transegoic); or as the prepersonal, the personal, and the transpersonal; or as the prerational, the rational, and the transrational.
The point is that each of those stages is a lessening of egocentrism as one moves closer to the pure Self. The maximum of egocentrism, as Piaget demonstrated, occurs in the primary or physical indissociation (the first fulcrum, where self-identity is physiocentric), because the entire material world is absorbed in the self-sense and cannot even be considered apart from the self-sense. This archaic-autistic stage is not "one with the world in bliss and joy," as so many Romantics think, but a swallowing of the world into the self: the child is all mouth, and everything else is merely food.
As identity switches from physiocentric to biocentric or ecocentric (ful-crum-2), there is a lessening of "pure autism" ("self-only!") but a blossoming of emotional narcissism or emotional egocentrism (fulcrum-2), which Mahler summarized as "narcissism at its peak!" (She also summarized it as "the world is the infant's oyster": grandiose-omnipotent fantasies). The emergence of the preop mind (fulcrum-3) is a lessening of that emotional egocentrism, but a blossoming of egocentric (and geocentric) magic—less primitive than the previous stage, but still shot through with egocentric adherences: the world exists centered on humans.
The emergence of the conop mind (fulcrum-4) is a lessening of that egocentric magic (where the self is central to the cosmos), but it is replaced with an ethnocentrism, where one's particular group, culture, race is supreme. Nonetheless, at the same time this allows the beginning of what Piaget calls a decentering, where one can decenter or stand aside from the egocentrism of the early mind and instead take the role of other, and this comes to a fruition with a further decentering, a further lessening of egocentrism, in formal operational (where one can take the perspective, not just of others in one's group, but of others in other groups: worldcentric or non-ethnocentric).
In other words, each stage transcends its predecessor and is therefore less egocentric, less caught in the narrower and shallower perspective, but instead reaches out more and more to embrace deeper and wider occasions. The self becomes less and less egocentric, and thus embraces more and more holons as worthy of equal respect.
As we will see when we follow evolution into the transpersonal domain, these developments converge on an intuition of the very Divine as one's very Self, common in and to all peoples (in fact, all sentient beings), a Self that is the great omega point of this entire series of decreasing egocentrism, of decentering from the small self in order to find the big Self—a Self common in and to all beings and thus escaping the egocentrism (and ethnocentrism) of each. The completely decentered self is the all-embracing Self (as Zen would say, the Self that is no-self).
What else could evolution as decreasing egocentrism possibly mean? Embracing identities that include more and more beings, both deeper and wider—what is the chaotic Attractor here? Where else does it look like this series is going? Where else could it possibly go?

formal operational

At this point, we are tracing the emergence of a strong rational ego out of its embeddedness in mythic-membership, and this brings us to Piaget's formal operational stage.
Formal operational awareness transcends but includes concrete operational thought, and thus formop can operate upon the holons that constitute conop—and that, in fact, is the primary definition of formal operational. Where concrete operational uses rules of thought to transcend and operate on the concrete world, formal operational uses a new interiority to transcend and operate on the rules of thought themselves. It is a new differentiation allowing a new integration (and a deeper and wider identity).
Again this sounds terribly dry and abstract, but the results are not. First and foremost, formal operational awareness brings with it a new world of feelings, of dreams, of wild passions and idealistic strivings. It is true that rationality introduces a new and more abstract understanding of mathematics, logic, and philosophy, but those are all quite secondary to the primary and defining mark of reason: reason is a space of possibilities, possibilities not tied to the obvious, the given, the mundane, the profane. Reason, we said earlier, is the great gateway to the unseen, the beginning of the invisible worlds, which is usually the last way people think of rationality.
But think of the great mystics such as Plato and Pythagoras, who saw rational Forms or Ideas as the grand patterns upon which all of manifestation was based, patterns that were utterly invisible to the eye of flesh and could only be seen interiorly, with the eye of mind. Or think of the great physicists such as Heisenberg and Jeans, who maintained that the ultimate building blocks of the universe are mathematical Forms, also seen only with the mind's eye. Or of the great Vedantin and Mahayana sages, who maintained that the entire visible world is just a precipitate of the mind's interior Forms or "seed-syllables." For all of these theorists (and many more like them), Reason was not an abstraction from the concrete physical world; rather, the concrete world was a reduction or condensation of the great mental Forms lying beyond the grasp of the senses, Forms which contained en potentia all possible manifest worlds.
Piaget approaches this whole topic by showing that, whereas the concrete operational child can indeed operate upon the concrete world, the child at that stage ultimately remains tied to the obvious and the given and the phenomenal, whereas the formal operational adolescent will mentally see various and different possible arrangements of the given. Again, a typical Piagetian experiment sounds very dry and abstract and far removed from ordinary events, but what it actually indicates is the power of the creative imagination. I'll simplify considerably:
A child is presented with five glasses which contain colorless liquids. Three of the glasses contain liquids that, if mixed together, will produce a yellow color. The child is asked to produce a yellow color.
The preop child will randomly combine a few glasses, then give up. If she accidentally hits upon the right solution, she will give a magical explanation ("The sun made it happen"; "It came from the clouds").
The conop child will eagerly begin by combining the various glasses, three at a time. She does this concretely; she will simply continue the concrete mixing until she hits upon the right solution or eventually gets tired and quits.
The formop adolescent will begin by telling you that you have to try all the possible combinations of three glasses. She has a mental plan or formal operation that lets her see, however vaguely, that all possible combinations have to be tried. She doesn't have to stumble through the actual concrete operations to understand this. Rather, she sees, with the mind's eye, that all possibilities must be taken into account.
In other words, this is a very relational type of awareness: all the possible relations that things can have with each other need to be held in awareness—and this is radically new. This is not the "wholeness" of syncretic fusion, where the integrity of wholes and parts is violated in a magical fusion, but rather a relationship of mutual interaction and mutual interpenetration, where wholes and parts, while remaining perfectly discrete and intact, are also seen to be what they are by virtue of their relationships to each other. The preop child, and to a lesser extent the conop child, thinks that the color yellow is a simple property of the liquids; the formop adolescent understands that the color is a relationship of various liquids.
Formal operational awareness, then, is the first truly ecological mode of awareness, in the sense of grasping mutual interrelationships. It is not embedded in ecology (that would be biocentric or borderline psychosis); it transcends ecology and thus can reflect on the web of relationships constituting it. As various researchers have pointed out, to use Cowan's particular phrasing: "Again the emphasis in formal [operational] schemes is on the coordination of [various] systems. Not only can adolescents [at this stage] observe and reason about changes in the interior of [an individual], they can also be concerned with reciprocal changes in the surrounding environment. Only then, for example, will they be able to conceptualize an ecological system in which changes in one aspect may lead to a whole system of changes in the balance between other aspects of nature."
So the first equation we need is: formal operational = ecological.
The fact that formop is also strong enough, as we have seen, to potentially repress the biosphere, resulting in ecological catastrophe, indicates merely that ecological catastrophe is an unfortunate possibility, but not an inherent component, of rationality. As always, we want to tease apart the pathological manifestations of any stage from its authentic achievements, and celebrate the latter even as we try to redress the former. The fact that ecological awareness becomes even greater at the next stage, the centauric, should not detract from the fact that it begins here, with the formal operational understanding of mutual relationships, and it does not begin prior to this at all (prior to this are syncretic wholes, which sound "ecological" but actually constitute a certain violence to the integrity of whole/parts).
The second equation we need is: formal operational = understanding of relativity.
The capacity to take different perspectives, we saw, begins in earnest with conop. But with the emergence of formop, all the various perspectives can be held in mind, however loosely, and thus all of them become relative to each other. "In a set of experiments, a snail moves along a board, which itself is moving along a table. Only children at the formal operations stage can understand the distance which the snail travels relative to the board and to the table. Here we find the intellectual equipment necessary for conceptions of relativity—that time taken or space travelled cannot be absolute, but must be measured relative to some arbitrary point."
The third equation that we need is: formal operational = non-anthropocentric.
The egocentric, geocentric, anthropocentric notions of reality, so prevalent in the earlier magic and mythic stages, and so defining of those stages, finally begin to wind down and lose their grip on awareness, and humans take their rightful place in the great holarchy of being as one set of wholes that are parts in all sorts of other wholes, with no whole and no part being finally privileged.
And not merely egocentrism but sociocentrism or ethnocentrism begins to wind down. With the coming of formop, the rules and norms of any given society can themselves be reflected upon and judged by more universal principles, principles that apply not just to this or that culture, or this or that tribe, but to the multiculturalism of universal perspectivism. Not "My country right or wrong," but "Is my country actually right?" Not concrete moral rules such as the Ten Commandments ("Thou shalt have no other gods before me"—intertribal squabbling), but more universal statements, principles of justice and mercy and compassion, of reciprocity and equality, based on mutual respect for individuals and the dictates of conscience based on rights (as an autonomous whole) and responsibilities (as a part of a larger whole—agency and communion, rights and responsibilities).
Thus Kohlberg, Gilligan, and Habermas (to name a few) all refer to this general stage as postconventional (which doesn't mean postcultural or postsocial, but simply postconformist in some significant ways). Socrates versus Athens. Martin Luther King, Jr., versus segregation, Gandhi versus cultural imperialism.
Thus, we have seen moral development move from a preconventional orientation, which is strongly egocentric, geocentric, biocentric, narcissistic, bound to the body's separate feelings and nature's impulses (the first three fulcrums), to a conventional or sociocentric or ethnocentric orientation, bound to one's society, culture, tribe, or race, to a postconventional or worldcentric orientation, operating in the space of universal pluralism and global grasp (these stages have been elaborated by Piaget, Baldwin, Kohlberg, Gilligan, Habermas, Loevinger, Broughton, Selman, etc.).
For all these reasons, the individual at this stage, who can no longer rely on society's given roles in order to establish an identity, is thus thrown back on his or her own inner resources. "Who am I?" becomes, for the first time, a burning question, and the self-esteem needs emerge from the belongingness needs (Maslow), or a "conscientious" self emerges from a "conformist" mode (Loevinger).
A failure to negotiate this painfully self-conscious phase ("fulcrum 5")—a differentiation from ethnocentrism and sociocentrism—results in the characteristic pathology of this stage, which Erikson called an "identity crisis." This is not a problem of merely finding an appropriate role in society (that would be script pathology); it is one of finding a self that may or may not fit with society at all (Thoreau on civil disobedience comes to mind).
In addition to formal operational awareness being ecological, relational, and nonanthropocentric, we have already mentioned several of its other properties: it is the first structure that is highly reflexive and highly introspective; it is experimental (or hypothetico-deductive) and relies on evidence to settle issues; it is universal as pluralism or perspectivism; and it is propositional (can understand "what if" and "as if" statements). But all of these are just variations on the central theme: reason is a space of possibilities.
No wonder adolescence and the emergence of formop is a time of wild passions and explosive idealisms, of fantastic dreaming and heroic urges, of Utopian yells and revolutionary upsurge, of desires to change the entire world and idealistically straighten it all out, of feelings and emotions unleashed from the merely given and offered instead the space of all possibilities, a space through which they roam and rampage with love and passion and wildest terror. And all of this, all of it, comes from being able to see the possibilities of what might be, possibilities seen only with the mind's eye, possibilities that point toward worlds not yet in existence and worlds not yet really seen, the great, great doorway to the invisible and the beyond, as Plato, and Pythagoras, and Shankara, and every mystic worth his or her salt has always, always known.
The higher developments do indeed lie beyond reason, but never, never, beneath it.

joseph campbell

There is no greater friend of mythology than Joseph Campbell, and I mean that in a good sense. In a series of articulate and extremely well-researched books, Campbell has done more than any other person, with the possible exceptions of Mircea Eliade and Carl Jung, to champion the position that mythological thought is the primary carrier of spiritual and mystical awareness. I and countless researchers have drawn on his works time and again, and his meticulous scholarship and detailed analyses never fail to inspire. And, among many other things, it is Joseph Campbell, via Robert Ely, who is responsible for much of the "men's movement" and the "mythopoetic" movement in general.
And yet his position, I believe, is finally untenable, and can be demonstrated to be so using his own assumptions and his own conclusions. For his position is, in the last analysis, a form of elevationism, and it is necessary to face this directly if we are ever to make sense of the truly deeper or higher developments of genuine spiritual and mystical experience. For, as we said earlier, one of the best ways to know what authentic mystical experience is, is to know what it is not.
To begin with, Campbell openly accepts the essentials of the Piagetian system. That is, he accepts the fact that the basic motifs of mythological thought are produced by the infantile and childhood structures of preop and early conop, and he explicitly says so using Piagetian terms. As just one of hundreds of instances:

The two orders—the infantile and the religious—are at least analogous, and it may well be that the latter is simply a translation of the former to a sphere out of range of critical observation [reason]. Piaget has pointed out that although the little myths of genesis invented by children to explain the origins of themselves and of things may differ, the basic assumption underlying all is the same: namely, that things have been made by someone, and that they are alive and responsive to the commands of their creators. The origin myths of the world's mythological systems differ too; but in all [of them] the conviction is held (as in childhood), without proof, that the living universe is the handiwork ... of some father-mother or mother-father God [artificialism/anthropocentrism]. These three principles [magical participation, animism, and anthropocentrism] may be said to constitute the axiomatic, spontaneously supposed frame of reference of all childhood experience, no matter what the local details of this experience happen to be. And these three principles, it is no less apparent, are precisely those most generally represented in the mythologies and religious systems of the whole world.

Campbell cheerfully and even enthusiastically acknowledges all of this, and he does so because he has a plan. He has a plan, that is, to salvage mythology, to prove that mythology is "really" religious and genuinely spiritual, and is not, in fact, merely a device of childhood.
The plan is this: The mythological productions of preop and conop, he says, are always taken very literally and concretely, a point I have also been at pains to emphasize. But, Campbell says, in a very few individuals, the myths are not taken literally, but are rather taken in an "as if" fashion (his terms), in a playful fashion that releases one from the concrete myth and ushers one into more transcendental realms.
And this, he says, is the real function of myth, and therefore this is how all myths have to be judged. For the masses it remains true that myth is an illusion, a distortion, an infantile and childish approach to reality (all his phrases), but for the very few who can see through them, myths become the gateway to the genuinely mystical. And he belabors the point that myths, not reason, alone can do this, and this is their wonderful function. And here he starts running into grave difficulties.
When myths are taken concretely and literally, Campbell says, they serve the mundane function of integrating individuals into the society and worldview of a given culture, and in that ordinary function, he says, they serve no spiritually transcendental or mystical purpose at all, which is true enough. I myself see that mundane integration as the central, enduring, and extremely important function of myths at that stage of development—simple cultural meaning and correlative social integration (at a preop and conop level).
Campbell acknowledges that function, but since he is looking for a way to elevate myths to a transpersonal status, those functions become quite secondary to him. In fact, he says, when people take myths literally— which, he says, 99.9 percent of mythic believers do—then those myths become distorted. He is very emphatic about this: "It must be conceded, as a basic principle of our natural history of the gods and heroes, that whenever a myth has been taken literally its sense has been perverted."Let us ignore, for the moment, that this implies that 99.9 percent of mythic believers are perverted (instead of stage-specifically quite adequate), and look instead to those very, very few individuals who do not take myth literally but rather in an "as if" fashion. By "as if" Campbell explicitly means the use given to it by Kant in his Prolegomena to Every Future System of Metaphysics, where Kant says that we can only hold our knowledge of the world in an "as if" or "possible realities" fashion. Campbell then drives to the heart of his argument:

I am willing to accept the word of Kant, as representing the view of a considerable metaphysician. And applying it to the range of festival games and attitudes just reviewed [by which he means the attitude that does not take myth seriously or literally]—from the mask of the consecrated host and temple image, transubstantiated worshiper and transubstantiated world—I can see, or believe I can see, that a principle of release operates throughout the series by way of an "as if"; and that, through this, the impact of all so-called "reality" upon the psyche is transubstantiated.

In other words, a myth is being a "real myth" when it is not being taken as true, when it is being held in an "as if" fashion. And Campbell knows perfectly well that an "as if" stance is possible only with formal operational awareness. Thus, according to his own conclusions, a myth offers its "release" only when it is transcended by, and held firmly in, the space of possibilities and as-ifs offered by rationality. It is reason, and reason alone, that can release myth from its concrete literalness and hold it in a playful, as-if, what-if fashion, using it as an analogy of what higher states might be like, which is something that myth, by itself, could never do (as Campbell bizarrely concedes).
It is people such as Campbell and Jung and Eliade, operating from a widespread access to rationality—something the originators of myth did not have—who then read deeply symbolic "as ifs" into them, and who like to play with myths and use them as analogies and have great good fun with them, whereas the actual mythic-believers do not play with the myths at all, but take them deadly seriously and refuse in the least to open them to reasonable discourse or any sort of "as if" at all.
In short, a myth serves Campbell's main function only when it ceases to be a myth and is released into the space of reason, into the space of alternatives and possibilities and as-ifs. What structure does he think Kant is operating from?
Thus, in all of Campbell's presentations, he takes two tacks: he first lays out the concrete and literal way that 99.9 percent of believers take the myth. And here he is not often kind. He clearly despises concrete mythic-beliefs ("On the popular side, in their popular cults, the Indians [i.e., from India] are, of course, as positivistic in their readings of their myths as any farmer in Tennessee, rabbi in the Bronx, or pope in Rome. Krishna actually danced in manifold rapture with the gopis, and the Buddha walked on water").
Instead of seeing the concrete myth as the only way that myth can be believed at that stage of development, and thus as being perfectly adequate and noble (if partial and limited) for that stage, he takes the concrete belief in magic and myth as a "perversion," as if this structure actually had a choice for which it could be condemned. He is in fact denigrating an entire series of developmental stages that represented extraordinary advances in their own ways, and were no more a perversion of spiritual development than an acorn is a perversion of an oak. But he must condemn these stages per se because he judges them against his elevated version of "real mythology," whereas I am not condemning these stages per se because they were themselves the real McCoy, the genuine item: they were doing exactly what is appropriate and definitive and stage-specific for mythology.
Second, Campbell then suggests the ways that those very few (who do not take the myth literally) have used to transcend the myth (and are therefore, I would like to point out, no longer doing anything that could remotely be called mythology). This involves first and foremost, for Campbell, holding the myth in the space of "as if"; that is, holding it in the space of reason (with the possibility of then going further and transcending reason as well).
And here Campbell commits the classic pre/trans fallacy. Since the pre-rational realms are definitely mythological, then Campbell wants to call the transrational realms "mythological" as well, since they too are nonrational (and since he wants to salvage mythology with a field promotion). So on the one side he lumps together all nonrational endeavors (from primitive mythology to highly developed contemplative encounters), and on the other side—the "bad" side—he dumps poor reason, even as he himself is in fact (and rather hypocritically) using the space of reason to salvage his myths. "Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason." There is indeed a "beyond reason," but how much more so is it "beyond mythology."
And, in fact, it is not "in praise of mythology," but rather "beyond mythology," to which the entire corpus of Campbell's work inexorably points. In surveying his truly magnificent, four-volume masterpiece, The Masks of God, Campbell leaves us with one final message:

As any ethnologist, archaeologist, or historian would observe, the myths of the differing civilizations have sensibly varied throughout the centuries and broad reaches of mankind's residence in the world, indeed to such a degree that the "virtue" of one mythology has often been the "vice" of another, and the heaven of the one the other's hell. Moreover, with the old horizons now gone that formerly separated and protected the various culture worlds and their pantheons, a veritable Gotterdämtnerung has flung its flames across the universe. Communities that were once comfortable in the consciousness of their own mythologically guaranteed godliness find, abruptly, that they are devils in the eyes of their neighbors.

The ethnocentric and divisive nature of mythology is fully conceded. Lamenting this state of affairs (even though it is inherent in mythology as mythic-imperialism), Campbell concludes that some more global understanding "of a broader, deeper kind than anything envisioned anywhere in the past is now required." The hope, indeed, lies beyond parochial and provincial mythology. And beyond mythology is global and universal reason (and then beyond reason, which is . . .).
Nowhere is Campbell's pre/trans confusion more painfully and embarrassingly obvious than in his attempt to displace or deconstruct rational science (and thus simultaneously elevate mythology). And again, the embarrassment is established by his own premises and his own logical conclusions, which a mind as fine as Campbell's can ignore only by extreme prejudice.
Since Campbell's prejudged aim is to prove that reason and science are in no sense "higher" than "real" mythology, he begins first by pointing out that even the worldview of science is actually a mythology. He does this by outlining four factors (or four functions) that all mythologies have in common. The first he calls "metaphysical," whose function is "to reconcile waking consciousness to ... this universe as it is." The second function is to provide "an interpretative total image of the same," an interpretive cosmology. The third is sociocultural, "the validation and maintenance of a social order." And the fourth is psychological, or individual orientation and integration (in other words, his four functions are the Big Three with an integrating overview).
And, of course, defined in that way, science (or the scientific worldview) does indeed perform all four functions of mythology. But then, adds Campbell, science of course does some other things that mythology per se does not, such as its spectacular discoveries in evolution, medicine, engineering, and so forth.
In other words, rationality/science does everything myth does, plus something extra.
That, of course, is the definition of a higher stage. Campbell recognizes that mythology originates from a particular stage of human development (which he happily concedes is the childhood of men and women), and then he also defines it as what all stages have in common (namely, his four functions, which are simply a variation on the four quadrants and thus are present at all stages of human development). By this sneaky dual definition he hopes to be able both to concede mythology's childishness and run it through all higher stages, thus allowing him not only to salvage mythology (since it is now what all stages have in common) but also to push it all the way to infinity, all the way to transpersonal Spirit.
But the four functions (the four quadrants) are not a definition of mythology's functions; they are a definition of evolution's functions. They are a definition of human holons functioning at each and every stage of development, no more (and no less) present in mythology than in magic or in science or in centauric unfoldings. Mythology has no special claim whatsoever on the four quadrants; mythology is simply one particular instance of the four quadrants (mythology is the four quadrants as conceived by conop, just as science is the four quadrants as conceived by formop). Which only leaves Campbell's other definition: mythology can rightly lay claim only to the childhood of men and women.
And running that definition to infinity simply results in the infantilization of Spirit. Campbell's dual definitions actually undo each other, and point instead to the inexorable conclusion: beyond mythology is reason, and beyond both is Spirit.

the romantic view of mythic-membership

Mythic-membership does indeed provide, or can provide, an intensely cohesive social order, principally because it can export disorder and excommunicate unbelievers. Nothing so wonderfully concentrates a community as the prospect of being burned at the stake for disagreeing with its worldview.
And, on the other hand, reason can be disruptive of societies, can lack the "social glue" of some mythic-membership cultures, precisely because the omega point of rationality is not sociocentric or ethnocentric but worldcentric (or global or universal): short of that it stops unhappily (as in a Gandhi or a Socrates or a Thoreau or a Martin Luther King, Jr.).
And if the ethnocentrically disruptive capacity of universal reason is, without further ado, compared with the happy ethnocentrism of mythology, it will appear that the emergence of rationality was somehow a massive loss of cultural meaning and social integration, whereas this is only true from an ethnocentric (or mythic-membership) bias.
New integrations are being sought by evolution on a now-global level, and this requires, as in all past transformations, the deconstruction of more limited and provincial perspectives. Mythology has tried to go global for the past ten thousand years and failed in every single attempt (attempts which, as we have seen, because they lacked the depth of genuinely universal reason, had to be pressed always in a military-imperialistic fashion). Reason has the global capacity and global intent, but is still developing and evolving the means, and in this endeavor it is resisted by every mythology which feels its god and goddess threatened.
Further, even within nation-states, reason provides a deeper form of integration (even if occasionally shaky)—namely, through the relational exchange of self-esteem, and not the relational exchange of conformist roles in the preestablished dominator hierarchy. Mythic members are happy if they fit snugly into the mythological hierarchy, for all are then sharing a similar depth.
But rational citizens are happy only if they coexist in relational exchange with other citizens at that new depth, that is, with other equally free citizens—legally, morally, and politically free subjects (as a worldcentric standard, regardless of race, color, creed, gender). For somebody genuinely at the egoic-rational level, the very thought of other humans not having access to these freedoms is very painful (whereas for those at the mythic-membership level, the painful thought is the idea of other human beings not embracing their particular God and thus not being "saved": that others would not buy their God sends agonies of proselytizing fury through their souls; infidels are intolerable, and can actually be killed in order to save them).
The rational structure can tolerate mythic-believers because it is a deeper and wider embrace (whereas mythic-believers cannot and will not tolerate rational attacks). And that rational transformation is more culturally meaningful and socially integrating on a deeper (and therefore wider) level, even if it appears less head-knockingly solid than that of the shallower and narrower engagement of mythic-membership.
That reason then introduces its own inherent problems and runs up against its own inherent limitations (and can be released only in the transrational domains)—that is no cause to board the Regress Express and set the Way Back Machine to medieval or horticultural or foraging or whatnot: they all had their chance. They all failed—each in their own special and wonderful and spectacular fashion.

the battle of worldviews

We have seen that each stage of development transcends and includes, negates and preserves, its predecessor(s), and this shows up in a particularly interesting fashion when it comes to the various worldviews themselves.
When we only have access to preoperational awareness, then the Kosmos appears as magical. When we have access to concrete operational awareness, then the Kosmos appears as mythical. When we have access to formal operational, the Kosmos appears rational-scientific (and it can, as a secondary issue, then be reduced to the flatland cosmos; this flatland then makes the previous magic and mythic structures look all that more appealing, a fact exploited by the Romantics—but that's another part of our story). With even higher structures, we will see, the Kosmos appears in other and quite different forms.
In each of these transformations or supersessions, notice what is preserved and what is negated. As magic gives way to mythic, the preoperational structures themselves are preserved. That is, the capacity to form images, symbols, and concepts (the components or holons of preop) are all taken up and enfolded in the concrete operational mind (as subholons or necessary components). None of these capacities are lost, but are now simply operated upon by the higher mind.
But the magical worldview is lost, or negated, or dropped altogether (at least as a dominant focus of awareness). That is, the preop basic structures are taken up and preserved in the new basic structures of conop (in a very "friendly" manner as components or subholons of its own being), but the magical worldview is negated and replaced by the mythic worldview. Indeed, since they are now mutually exclusive, they become steadfast enemies (they are mutually exclusive because each was constituted by being the exclusive structure; I will return to this in a moment with some examples).
Thus, the mythic worldviews—which always situate miraculous power in a great Other (gods or goddesses), around which social cohesion can then be built beyond mere blood and kinship ties—these mythic world-views are constantly at war with magic, because magic situates miraculous power in a human individual (sorcerer, witch, wizard), and this regression from sociocentric to egocentric power rightly alarms the mythic worldviews: it is taken, not altogether incorrectly, as a moral regression, for which mythic worldviews have historically devised many ingenious and unpleasant solutions.
Likewise, when formal operational awareness emerges, it incorporates and includes the basic structures of conop (its capacity to form rules, take roles, and so on), but it actively negates the mythic worldview that is generated when you only have concrete operations. Rationality preserves, as part of its own being, in a "friendly" way, the conop structures (as subholons of its new and higher regime), but it replaces the mythic world-view with the rational worldview, and once again, the two become steadfast enemies. This is why the Church, beginning around the sixteenth century, was involved in a war on two fronts: fighting regression to magic, and fighting supersession by science. The Galileos and the sorcerers were both introduced to the Inquisitor.
And this is why, conversely, science is not only always attempting to further its research, but also constantly battling myths, with their inherent tendencies to dominator-hierarchies, and always under the battle cry of Voltaire: "Remember the cruelties!"
(There are few or no dominator hierarchies in the magical structure or in magical cultures, because preop cannot construct a hierarchy in the first place, let alone a dominator hierarchy. With the emergence of conop, hierarchies are indeed created—not only mentally, but socially, politically, and religiously—a mania for caste systems and dominator hierarchies spring up wherever magic gives way to myth; and precisely because conop cannot reach into postconventional modes, these hierarchies are always rigidly and concretely set, as are the literal myths that prop them up: to change the social hierarchy is to damage the god/goddess/ruler and thus bring catastrophic retribution to the society itself. With rationality, these dominator hierarchies are deconstructed because they are not based on worldcentric or postconventional standards, and rationality is not happy short of that omega point. This is one of the main topics of volume 2, and I mention it now as simply another instance of the tensions inherent between the various worldviews.)
In each case, the basic structures of the previous stage are taken up and preserved in the new and wider holon, but the worldview, which was generated when there was only or exclusively the previous and lower stage—that is negated and replaced by a new worldview (which will in turn fade if development continues).
Thus, in the same fashion, if development does proceed into the higher or transpersonal domains, the basic structures of rationality are all embraced and incorporated, in a friendly way, as subholons in the new awareness, but the merely scientific worldview, built by exclusive rationality—built when all you have is rationality—that worldview is replaced with a spiritual orientation (as we will see).
This is an example of what in chapter 2 was called basic structures and exclusivity structures, since development "includes the being but negates the partiality," and I gave Hawaii's statehood as an example. I want to give another example here, because a general grasp of this fundamental developmental process is crucial, I believe, to understanding any of the genuinely deeper or higher stages of growth and development.
If we use the crude ladder analogy the relationship can more easily be seen. The actual rungs in the ladder are the basic structures. Each higher rung rests on the lower rungs, and no matter how high up the ladder you climb, all the rungs are necessary. Pull out a lower rung and the whole ladder collapses. Each rung is a basic structure (or basic holon—such as images, symbols, concepts, rules), and each is preserved in the overall ladder.
But as you climb the ladder, you get a different perspective on the world around you: each rung has a different worldview, and the higher rungs can see more of the world (they have a higher worldview). And although each of the rungs remains in existence as you climb (your climb actually depends upon them), the various worldviews are replaced. You cannot be at, say, rung 7 and simultaneously see the world from the shallower rung 1, even though you are still standing in part on rung 1 itself. The being, the rungs, are preserved, but the partiality or exclusivity, the partial worldviews, are negated and replaced. (Until, of course, you stop climbing, at which point you have "the" worldview that will attempt to subsume all else.)
Thus, each transformation upward is a "paradigm war"—a battle royale over how to exclusively view the world. And we will see, as we continue our account of the higher stages of growth, that as myth historically defeated magic, and reason defeated myth, the future paradigm wars will be fought around reason itself and its potential successors.
And if history is any guide, the new paradigm wars will be equally unpleasant.

the value of the mythological approach

The value of including a properly interpreted mythological approach is that it can help us, of today's rational worldview, get in touch with aspects of our roots, our foundations, some of the archaeological layers of our own present awareness. From Freud to Jung to Piaget to Gebser, these roots are recognized. And that "getting in touch," that befriending of our roots, is empowering and enriching and energizing. There is a rush of energy released in reading Jung or Campbell or Eliade or even Bly—we are watering our roots, and they help send forth new branches.
But all of that happens precisely because they are lower holons in a now-higher awareness—they are more fundamental (and less significant)—and the real power comes precisely from touching their basic structures ("archetypal") while simultaneously robbing them of their worldview. If we were simply, merely, actually reactivating the lower worldview itself, this would be wholesale regression to de-differentiated structures (borderline and psychotic, which indeed sometimes occurs). And this, I believe, is behind Jung's dual stance toward the archetypes: it is altogether necessary to contact and befriend them, but it is finally necessary to differentiate and individuate from them, break them of their power over us. In other words, befriend the images, rob them of their worldview.
But as for the images and symbols and early concepts themselves, as for these "archetypes," they lie in the direction of downward, not upward (shallower, not deeper). This is why, I believe, however Jung variously defined the archetypes, he always maintained they were "next to the instincts," or the "instincts' image of themselves." That is, as Liliane Frey-Rohn explains, "The connection between instinct and archetypal image appeared to [Jung] so close that he drew the conclusion that the two were coupled. He saw the primordial image ['archetype'] as the self-portrait of the instinct—in other words, the instinct's perception of itself."
Instincts—the drives of the reptilian brain stem and paleomammalian limbic system—these are the structures "next to" the archetypes, which situates them perfectly on the spectrum of consciousness. Sensation, perception, impulse (instinct), image, symbol, concept, rule . . . the archetypes are, for the most part, collective, fundamental images lying next to impulse/instinct. And proceeding in the direction of the archetypes we therefore eventually run into, not Spirit, but atoms. Jung: "The deeper layers of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into darkness. 'Lower down' they become increasingly extinguished in the body's materiality, i.e., in chemical substances."
In other words, the Jungian archetypes are not the transcendental archetypes or Forms found in Plato, or Hegel, or Shankara, or Asanga and Vasubandhu. These latter Forms—the true archetypes, the ideal Forms— are the creative patterns said to underlie all manifestation and give pattern to chaos and form to Kosmos (which we will investigate in chapter 9).
The Jungian archetypes, on the other hand, are for the most part the magico-mythic motifs and "archaic images"—they should really be called "prototypes"—collectively inherited by you and by me from past stages of development, archaic holons now forming part of our own compound individuality (they come from below up, not from above down). And coming to terms with these archaic holons—befriending and making conscious and differentiating/integrating these prototypes—is a useful endeavor, not because they are our transrational future, but because they are our prerational past. I agree entirely with Jung on the necessity of differentiating and integrating this archaic heritage; I do not for one minute believe that this has anything to do with genuine mystical spirituality.
Keep in mind also that for Jung, the archetypes are collectively inherited archaic images; they arise from the common, day-to-day, normal and typical experiences of men and women everywhere, so that there is an archetype of the Mother, the Father, the trickster, the shadow, the uro-boros (serpent), and so on. These situations are encountered by virtually everybody everywhere, and so the "imprints" of these encounters over the millennia became engraved in the brain, so to speak (or, less Lamarckianly, those who were born with the guiding imprint, which helps a person orient toward typical situations, would be more likely to survive and reproduce and pass the image along).
But in any given past era (and today as well), the number of individuals who actually transcended into profoundly mystical occasions was very, very small (as we saw Campbell point out). In other words, even under the best of circumstances, there simply weren't enough mystics to imprint the entire or collective human race: profound mystical experience is not a common, typical, everyday occurrence that could be swept up and included in past collective evolutionary imprints. And in no way is today's profound mystical awareness an experience of yesterday's ordinary, collective, typical experiences. Excellence in any era is not an experience of yesterday's collective normality, made to sound "spiritual" by calling it "collective," as if a whole bunch more of average could equal extraordinary, as if multiplying mediocrity would equal excellence.
Thus, to give only one example, in Jean Bolen's books, such as Goddesses in Every woman and Gods in Everyman, there is a wonderful presentation of all the "archetypal" gods and goddesses that are collectively inherited by men and women (from the steadiness and patience of Hestia to the sexuality and sensuality of Aphrodite to the strength and independence of Artemis). But these gods and goddesses are not transpersonal modes of awareness, or genuinely mystical luminosities, but simply a collection of typical and everyday self-images (and personae) available to men and women. Collective typical is not transpersonal.
Now I believe that there are indeed mystical "archetypes" (in the transcendental sense I mentioned above, and to which we will return), but these archetypes cannot be explained as an inheritance from the past; they are strange Attractors lying in our future, omega points that have not been collectively manifested anywhere in the past, but are nonetheless available to each and every individual as structural potentials, as future structures attempting to come down, not past structures struggling to come up.

the men's movement

In retreating to the wilderness, and banging drums, and contacting the archaic images of man as warrior, hunter, king, wild man, and so forth, many modern men are helped to recontact these archaic holons and be thereby enriched and energized and given roots. Our modern culture has too often negated these holons while failing to also preserve them in an integrated and acceptable fashion, and thus a "return to roots" is altogether appropriate and benign.
But the point, notice, is that these are men who, in the plentiful space of reason, play out these myths in an as-if fashion, thus transcending them in the very process of playing with them (and those who don't transcend them, those who take these myths seriously, get into a great deal of emotional trouble—the "wild man" as a myth is one thing, as a literal role model, quite another).
But I have been struck by the fact that virtually every woman I know, and every woman who has written about the men's movement, is completely alarmed by it. They think it is either disgusting, or preposterous, or silly, or obscene. The liberal feminists are outraged by it, because they maintain that men, being essentially oppressors, have no right to complain about anything; and they see a "gathering of men" as nothing but a chance for jailors to fine-tune the art of oppression. The radical feminists, who otherwise so straightforwardly champion the differences between the sexes, appear never to have had exactly this difference in mind, and react with a very uneasy queasiness to the whole affair.
But under all these reactions there seems to be a pervasive fear. A gathering of wild men is frightening to most women, of whatever ideological persuasion, and I think with good reason. The archaic images, still lying "close to the body," close to the instincts, close to the biosphere, are under sway of those biological universals, strong universals, in which and by which biospheric men have always dominated women (whether or not intentionally). Only in the noosphere can equality be conceived and found and enforced. The wild man is the merely biospheric male, the instinctual male, where the physical body rules, where intersexual mutuality is suspended, where communication is a grunt and a groan and a "Ho!"
And in the sound of the drums pounding from the forest, today's woman hears, I believe, a million years of physical dominance rumbling from the depths, and not one of them likes what she hears.

reason releases myth

We already saw that in Campbell's opinion the "really real" (or most important) function of a myth occurs when it is taken in an as-if fashion. In other words, the "hidden power" of myth is released when it is taken up in the open space created by rationality. And now we can see why: when reason takes up myth, it befriends the being but negates its partialness, and thus frees the mythic structure from its imprisonment in a shallower occasion. It is reason, and reason alone, that frees the luminosity trapped in myth.
Thus reason frees whatever spirit manages to reside in myth—a spirit struggling from within, to get out. Whether rationality appears "spiritual" or not is utterly beside the point. It certainly does not appear "mythological," and if that is what one means by "spiritual," then reason is not that.
But genuine spirituality, we will see, is primarily a measure of depth and a disclosure of depth. There is more spirituality in reason's denial of God than there is in myth's affirmation of God, precisely because there is more depth. (And the transrational, in turn, discloses yet more depth, yet more Spirit, than either myth or reason).
But the very depth of reason, its capacity for universal-pluralism, its insistence on universal tolerance, its grasp of globalplanetary perspectivism, its insistence on universal benevolence and compassion: these are the manifestations of its genuine depth, its genuine spirituality. These capacities are not revealed to reason from without (by a mythic source); they issue from within its own structure, its own inherent depth (which is why it does not need recourse to a mythic god to implement its agenda of universal benevolence, why even an "atheist" acting from rational-universal compassion is more spiritual than a fundamentalist acting to convert the universe in the name of a mythic-membership god). That the Spirit of reason does not fly through the sky hurling thunderbolts and otherwise spend its time turning spinach into potatoes speaks more, not less, on its behalf.

mythology today

So perhaps we can begin to see that the uses of mythology in today's world are many and varied. For one thing, literal-fundamental mythological motifs are the main social cement in many cultures (including a very large segment of our own), and as divisive and imperialistic as those mythologies are, their particular ethnocentric and social-integrative power has to be reckoned with carefully. One cannot simply challenge or deconstruct the myths of such societies (or segments of societies) and expect them to survive (or expect them to acquiesce without a fight).
Moreover, even in societies organized around a rational-pluralistic worldview, each and every individual nonetheless begins life at the archaic, then the magic, then the mythic, before (and if) arriving at the rational. One of the great problems with the Enlightenment was that Reason was simply supposed to replace all of that right down to the roots, so that every child would be born, more or less, an enlightened and tolerant rationalist. Since the tabula was rasa, all we had to do was write R-E-A-S-O-N across the clean slate, and all would follow wonderfully.
Needless to say, it doesn't work like that. Every child still has to negotiate the archaic worldview, then deconstruct that with the magical world-view, then deconstruct that with the mythic, then deconstruct that with the rational (on the way to the transrational). Each of these transformations is a series of painful deaths and rebirths, and the typical individual attempts to stop the pain by stopping the transformation.
Gone is the time (in the developed East and West) when one could settle comfortably in the magic or even the mythic mode. The center of gravity of the "world soul," so to speak, has moved into rational modes of universal pluralism, and thus the earliest that an individual can abort transformation (and "stop" the pain), without social censure, is somewhere around the mythic-rational (that is, even if one clings to myth, it has to be propped up with rationalizations, because everywhere rationality impinges on it). And, indeed, the majority of individuals in rational societies still settle in somewhere around the mythic-rational, using all the formidable powers of rationality to prop up a particular, divisive, imperialistic mythology and an aggressively fundamentalistic program of systematic intolerance. As such, they are constantly at war with magic, with other myths, and with reason, all of which they view simply as the devil's work.
The modern solution to this developmental nightmare is that the rationality structure of the democratic state tolerates magic and mythic subholons, but it has, via the all-important separation of church and state, removed the worldviews of those subholons from the organizing regime of the society, which itself is defined by a rational tolerance of everything but intolerance. Because these subholons are robbed of their power to govern exclusively, they are robbed of pushing their mythic-imperialistic expansionism via national-military means, though this doesn't prevent them from always agitating to tilt the state toward their own fundamentalistic values. (And, of course, for those nations where the mythic holons are the governing regime, military expansionism is still the rule; and, in these cases, as usual, it isn't whether one can actually win and coerce others to the faith, but whether one can earn the right to die trying.)
But even for those who have developed beyond a concrete mythological approach to the world, the mythological structures themselves, as we just saw, are now junior holons in the person's own compound individuality, and should be honored as a rich source of one's own being and one's own roots. And therein, as I indicated, lies the real value of the Jungian/ Campbell/ mythopoetic approach (divested of its elevationism).
But if genuine spirituality is not, as I maintain, a product of the past (or of past archetypes), then what about the great spiritual figures, East and West, who definitely existed in the past? What about the Buddhas, the Christs, the Krishnas? Are they not expressing some past capacity, some past archetypal wisdom that we have lost touch with? And in contacting our own spirituality, aren't we contacting some past potential that we have lost or denied or forgotten?
Lost, perhaps; but not from the past. Let me repeat what I said above about the "true archetypes," the transcendental and transpersonal structures, as a reminder: they cannot be explained as an inheritance from the past; they are strange Attractors lying in our future, omega points that have not been collectively manifested anywhere in the past, but are nonetheless available to each and every individual as structural potentials, as future structures attempting to come down, not past structures struggling to come up.
The great and rare mystics of the past (from Buddha to Christ, from al-Hallaj to Lady Tsogyal, from Hui-neng to Hildegard) were, in fact, ahead of their time, and are still ahead of ours. In other words, they most definitely are not figures of the past. They are figures of the future.
In their spirituality, they did not tap into yesterday, they tapped into tomorrow. In their profound awareness, we do not see the setting sun, but the new dawn. They absolutely did not inherit the past, they inherited the future.
It is to that future we can now turn.

7

The Further Reaches of Human Nature

This one being and consciousness is involved here in matter. Evolution is the process by which it liberates itself; consciousness appears in what seems to be inconscient [i.e., matter, the physiosphere], and once having appeared is self-impelled ["self-organizing"] to grow higher and higher and at the same time to enlarge and develop toward a greater and greater perfection. Life is the first step of this release of consciousness; mind is the second. But the evolution does not finish with mind; it awaits release into something greater, a consciousness which is spiritual and supramental. There is therefore no reason to put a limit to evolutionary possibility by taking our present organization or status of existence as final.                                                    —sri aurobindo

WE ARE yet the bastard sons and daughters of an evolution not yet done with us, caught always between the fragments of yesterday and the unions of tomorrow, unions apparently destined to carry us far beyond anything we can possibly recognize today, and unions that, like all such births, are exquisitely painful and unbearably ecstatic. And with yet just the slightest look—once again, within— new marriages unfold, and the drama carries on.

the interior castle

I have been constantly emphasizing that each stage of evolution, in whatever domain, involves a new emergence and therefore a new depth, or a new interiority, whether that applies to molecules or to birds or to dolphins; and that each new within is also a going beyond, a transcendence, a higher and wider identity with a greater total embrace. The formula is: going within = going beyond = greater embrace. And I want to make very clear exactly what that means.
This is extremely important, I think, because the higher stages of development, the transrational and transpersonal and mystical stages, all involve a new going within, a new interiorness. And the charge has been circulating, for quite some time now, that endeavors such as meditation are somehow narcissistic and withdrawn. Environmentalists, in particular, claim that meditation is somehow "escapist" or "egocentric," and that this "going within" simply ignores the "real" problems in the "real" world "out there."
Precisely the opposite. Far from being some sort of narcissistic withdrawal or inward isolation, meditation (or transpersonal development in general) is a simple and natural continuation of the evolutionary process, where every going within is also a going beyond to a wider embrace.
Recall that two of our tenets (8 and I2d) stated that increasing evolution means increasing depth and increasing relative autonomy. In the realm of human development, this particularly shows up in the fact that, according to developmental psychology (as we will see), increasing growth and development always involve increasing internalization (or increasing interiorization). And as paradoxical as it initially sounds, the more interiorized a person is, the less narcissistic his or her awareness becomes. So we need to understand why, for all schools of developmental psychology, this equation is true: increasing development = increasing interiorization = decreasing narcissism (or decreasing egocentrism).
In short, we need to understand why the more interior a person is, the less egocentric he or she becomes.
Begin with interiorization. "Evolution, to Hartmann [founder of psychoanalytic developmental psychology], is a process of progressive internalization, for, in the development of the species, the organism achieves increased independence from its environment, the result of which is that 'reactions which originally occurred in relation to the external world are increasingly displaced into the interior of the organism.' The more independent the organism becomes, the greater its independence from the stimulation of the immediate environment." This applies to the infant, for example, when it no longer dissolves in tears if food is not immediately forthcoming. By interiorizing its awareness, it is no longer merely buffeted by the immediate fluctuations in the environment: its relative autonomy—its capacity to stay inwardly focused—increases. This progressive internalization is a cornerstone of psychoanalytic developmental psychology (from Hartmann to Blanck and Blanck to Kernberg to Kohut). It is implicit in Jung's notion of individuation. Likewise, Piaget described thought as "internalized action," the capacity to internally plan an action and anticipate its course without being merely a reactive automaton—and so forth.
In other words, for developmental psychology, increasing development = increasing interiorization = increasing relative autonomy. This, of course, is simply tenet 12d as it shows up in humans.
The second link in the equation concerns narcissism, which is roughly synonymous with egocentrism, about which we have already said much. We need only recall that increasing development involves precisely the capacity to transcend one's isolated and subjective point of view, and thus to find higher and wider perspectives and identities. Piaget referred to the entire developmental process as one of decreasing egocentrism, or what he also called "decentering."
Putting these all together, we have: increasing development = increasing interiorization = increasing autonomy = decreasing narcissism (decentering).
In other words, the more one can go within, or the more one can introspect and reflect on one's self, then the more detached from that self one can become, the more one can rise above that self's limited perspective, and so the less narcissistic or less egocentric one becomes (or the more decentered one becomes). This is why Piaget is always saying things that sound paradoxical, such as: "Finally, as the child becomes conscious of his subjectivity, he rids himself of his egocentricity."
The more he can subjectively reflect on his self, the more he can transcend it—his subjectivity, his interiority, rids him of his egocentricity. Howard Gardner does a masterful job of summarizing development as being the two processes of decreasing egocentrism and increasing interiority. "The first is the decline of egocentrism. The young child is, in Piaget's terms, totally egocentric—meaning not that he thinks selfishly only about himself, but to the contrary, that he is incapable of thinking about himself. The egocentric child is unable to differentiate himself from the rest of the world; he has not separated himself out from others or from objects. Thus he feels that others share his pain or his pleasure, that his mumblings will inevitably be understood, that his perspective is shared by all persons, that even animals and plants partake of his consciousness. In playing hide-and-seek he will 'hide' in broad view of other persons, because his egocentrism prevents him from recognizing that others are aware of his location. The whole course of human development can be viewed as a continuing decline in egocentrism. . . ."
And this decreasing narcissism is directly connected with the "second trend in mental growth," namely, "the tendency toward internalization or interiorization. The infant either solves problems by his activity upon the world or he does not solve them at all. The older child, on the other hand, can achieve many intellectual breakthroughs without overt physical actions. He is able to realize these actions interiorly, through concrete and formal operations." By acting on the self interiorly, that self is decentered, and this allows, among many other things, the continuing expansion (decentering) of moral response from egocentric to sociocentric to worldcentric (integral-aperspectival).
In short, the more one goes within, the more one goes beyond, and the more one can thus embrace a deeper identity with a wider perspective.
Meditation, then, as we will see in detail, involves yet a further going within, and thus a further going beyond, the discovery of a new and higher awareness with a new and wider identity—and thus meditation is one of the single strongest antidotes to egocentrism and narcissism (and geocentrism and anthropocentrism and sociocentrism).
And let us remember Piaget's central point about egocentrism, namely, that "egocentrism obscures the truth." It follows that meditation, as an antidote to egocentrism, would involve a substantial increase in capacity for truth disclosure, a clearing of the cobwebs of selfcentric perception and an opening in which the Kosmos could more clearly manifest, and be seen, and be appreciated—for what it is and not for what it can do for me.
In short, every within turns us out into more of the Kosmos. This is what seems to so confuse the flatland holists (and the ecological critics of contemplation), because in their flatland world of self and cosmos, the more attention you place on one, the less attention you have for the other (and they want everyone's eyes riveted on exterior nature), whereas in the pluridimensional and holoarchic Kosmos, the more the depths of the self are disclosed, the more the corresponding depths of the Kosmos reveal themselves. (We will see where all that leads in a moment.)
This general movement of within-and-beyond is nothing new with humans: it is a simple continuation of the Kosmic evolutionary process, which is "self-development through self-transcendence," the same process at work in atoms and molecules and cells, a process that, in the human domains, continues naturally into the superconscious, with precisely nothing occult or mysterious about it.

vision-logic

The capacity to go within and look at rationality results in a going beyond rationality, and the first stage of that going-beyond is vision-logic. If you are aware of being rational, what is the nature of that awareness, since it is now bigger than rationality? To be aware of rationality is no longer to have only rationality, yes?
Numerous psychologists (Bruner, Flavell, Arieti, Cowan, Arlin, etc.) have pointed out that there is much evidence for a stage beyond Piaget's formal operational. It has been called "dialectical," "integrative," "creative synthetic," "integral-aperspectival," and so forth. I, of course, am using the terms vision-logic or network-logic. But the conclusions are all essentially the same: "Piaget's formal operational is considered to be a problem-solving stage. But beyond this stage are the truly creative scientists and thinkers who define important problems and ask important questions. While Piaget's formal model is adequate to describe the cognitive structures of adolescents and competent adults, it is not adequate to describe the towering intellect of Nobel laureates, great statesmen and stateswomen, poets, and so on."
True enough. But I would like to give a strongly different emphasis to this structure, for while very few people might actually gain the "towering status of a Nobel laureate," the space of vision-logic (its worldspace or worldview) is available for any who wish to continue their growth and development. In other words, to progress through the various stages of growth does not mean that one has to extraordinarily master each and every stage, and demonstrate a genius comprehension at that stage before one can progress beyond it. This would be like saying that no individuals can move beyond the oral stage until they become gourmet cooks.
It is not even necessary to be able to articulate the characteristics of a particular stage (children progress beyond preop without ever being able to define it). It is merely necessary to develop an adequate competence at that stage, in order for it to serve just fine as a platform for the transcendence to the next stage. In order to transcend the verbal, it is not necessary to first become Shakespeare.
Likewise, in order to develop formal rationality, it is not necessary to learn calculus and propositional logic. Every time you imagine different outcomes, every time you see a possible future different from today's, every time you dream the dream of what might be, you are using formal operational awareness. And from that platform you can enter vision-logic, which means not that you have to become a Hegel or a Whitehead in order to advance, but only that you have to think globally, which is not so hard at all. Those who will master this stage, or any stage for that matter, will always be relatively few; but all are invited to pass through.
Because vision-logic transcends but includes formal operational, it completes and brings to fruition many of the trends begun with universal rationality itself (which is why many writers refer to vision-logic as "mature reason" or "dialectical reason" or "synthetic reason," and so on). And some theorists simply subdivide formal operational awareness into several substages, with the highest of those stages being what we are calling vision-logic. James Fowler, for example, divides formop into early formop, dichotomizing formop, dialectical formop, and synthetic formop (the first three being what I am calling rationality, and the last being vision-logic, although all four are "reason" in the very broadest sense). Incidentally, Fowler's extremely important work on the "stages of faith" (whose details I will reserve for a note) is yet another clear account of the evolution from magic to mythic-literal to the universal "commonwealth of being."
In other words, rationality is global, vision-logic is more global. Take Habermas, for example (in Communication and the Evolution of Society). Formal operational rationality establishes the postconventional stages of, first, "civil liberties" or "legal freedom" for "all those bound by law," and then, in a more developed stage, it demands not just legal freedom but also "moral freedom" for "all humans as private persons." But even further, mature or communicative reason (our vision-logic) demands both "moral and political freedom" for "all human beings as members of a world society." Thus, where rationality began the world-centric orientation of universal pluralism, vision-logic brings it to a mature fruition by demanding not just legal and moral freedom, but legal and moral and political freedom (includes the previous stage and adds something crucial: transcends and includes).
In just the same way, ecological and relational awareness, which started to emerge with formal operational, comes to a major fruition with vision-logic and the centauric worldview. For, in beginning to differentiate from rationality (look at it, operate upon it), vision-logic can, for the first time, integrate reason with its predecessors, including life and matter, all as junior holons in its own compound individuality.
In other words, and I intend to emphasize this heavily, centauric vision-logic can integrate physiosphere, biosphere, and noosphere in its own compound individuality (and this is, as I suggested in chapter 5, the next major stage of leading-edge global transformation, even though most of the "work yet to be done" is still getting the globe up to decentered universal-rational pluralism in the first place).
This overall integration (physiosphere, biosphere, and noosphere, or matter, body, mind) is borne out, for example, by the researches of Broughton, Loevinger, Selman, Maslow, and others. As only one example, but an important one, we can take the work of John Broughton.
As usual, this new centauric stage possesses not just a new cognitive capacity (vision-logic)—it also involves a new sense of identity (centauric), with new desires, new drives, new needs, new perceptions (new terrors and new pathologies): it is a new and higher self in a new and wider world of others. And Broughton has very carefully mapped out the developmental stages of self and knowing that lead up to this new centauric mode of being-in-the-world.
To simplify considerably, Broughton asked individuals from preschool age to early adulthood: what or where is your self?
Since this was a verbal study, Broughton began with the late preop child (magic-mythic), which he calls level zero. At this stage, children uniformly reply that self is "inside" and reality is "outside." Thoughts are not distinguished from their objects (still magical adherences; the child has not completed fulcrum three).
At level one, still in the late preop stage, children believe that the self is identified with the physical body, but the mind controls the self and can tell it what to do, so it is the mind that moves the body. The relation of mind to body is one of authority: the mind is a big person and the body is a little person (i.e., mind and body are slowly differentiating). Likewise, thoughts are distinguished from objects, but there is no distinction between reality and appearance ("naive realism").
Level two occurs at about ages seven to twelve years (conop). Mind and body are initially differentiated at this level (completion of fulcrum three), and the child speaks of the self as being, not a body, but a person (a social role or persona, fulcrum four), and the person includes both mind and body. Although thoughts and things are distinguished, there is still a strong personalistic flavor to knowledge (remnants of egocentrism), so facts and personal opinions are not easily differentiated.
At level three, occurring around eleven to seventeen years (early for-mop), "the social personality or role is seen as a false outer appearance, different from the true inner self." Here we see very clearly the differentiation of the self (the rational ego) from its embeddedness in sociocentric roles—the emergence of a new interiority or relative autonomy which is aware of, and thus transcends or dìsidentifies from, overt social roles. "The self is what the person's nature normally is; it is a kind of essence and remains itself over changes in mental contents."
Likewise, and for precisely the same reasons, "reflective self-awareness appears at this level." (This is fulcrum five, the rational and reflexive ego differentiating from, and thus transcending, sociocentric or mythic-membership roles, with the correlative possible pathology of "identity crisis." Notice also that the new ego-self is beginning to remain as witness to the stream of mental events, and is not merely carried away by any passing thoughts; the adolescent at this stage reports that something "remains itself over changes in mental contents.")
At level four, or late formop, the person becomes capable of hypothetico-deductive awareness (what if, as if), and reality is conceived in terms of relativity and interrelationships (ecology and relativity, in the broadest sense, as we have seen). The self is viewed as a postulate "lending unity and integrity to personality, experience, and behavior" (this is the "mature ego").
But, and this is very telling, development can take a cynical turn at this stage. Instead of being the principle lending unity and integrity to experience and behavior, the self is simply identified with experience and behavior. In the cynical behavioristic turn of this stage, "the person is a cybernetic system guided to fulfillment of its material wants. At this level, radical emphasis on seeing everything within a relativistic or subjective frame of reference leaves the person close to a solipsistic position."
The world is seen as a great relativistic cybernetic system, so relativistic and "holistic" that it leaves no room for the actual subject in the objective network. The self therefore hovers above reality, disengaged, disenchanted, disembodied. It is "close to a solipsistic position": hyperagency cut off from all communions. And this is precisely, as we have seen, the fundamental Enlightenment paradigm: a perfectly holistic world that leaves a perfectly atomistic self.
A transcendental self can bond with other transcendental selves, whereas a merely empirical self disappears into the empirical web and interlocking order, never to be heard from again. (No strand in the web is ever or can ever be aware of the whole web; if it could, then it would cease to be merely a strand. This is not allowed by systems theory, which is why, as Habermas demonstrated, systems theory always ends up isolationist and egocentric, or "solipsistic.")
But for a more transcendental self to emerge, it has first to differentiate from the merely empirical self, and thus we find, with Broughton: "At level five the self as observer is distinguished from the self-concept as known." In other words, something resembling a pure observing Self (a transcendental Witness or Atman, which we will investigate in a moment) is beginning to be clearly distinguished from the empirical ego or objective self—it is a new interiority, a new going within that goes beyond, a new emergence that transcends but includes the empirical ego. This beginning transcendence of the ego we are, of course, calling the centaur (the beginning of fulcrum six, or the sixth major differentiation that we have seen so far in the development of the self). This is the realm of vision-logic leading to centauric integration, which is why at this stage, Broughton found that "reality is defined by the coherence of the interpretive framework."
This integrative stage comes to fruition at Broughton's last major level (late centauric), where "mind and body are both experiences of an integrated self" which is the phrase I have most often used to define the centauric or bodymind-integrated self. Precisely because awareness has differentiated from (or disidentified from, or transcended) an exclusive identification with body, persona, ego, and mind, it can now integrate them in a unified fashion, in a new and higher holon with each of them as junior partners. Physiosphere, biosphere, noosphere—exclusively identified with none of them, therefore capable of integrating each of them.
But all is not sweetness and light with the centaur. As always, new and higher capacities bring with them the potential for new and higher pathologies. As vision-logic adds up all the possibilities given to the mind's eye, it eventually reaches a dismal conclusion: personal life is a brief spark in the cosmic void. No matter how wonderful it all might be now, we are still going to die: dread, as Heidegger said, is the authentic response of the existential (centauric) being, a dread that calls us back from self-forgetting to self-presence, a dread that seizes not this or that part of me (body or persona or ego or mind), but rather the totality of my being-in-the-world. When I authentically see my life, I see its ending, I see its death; and I see that my "other selves," my ego, my personas, were all sustained by inauthenticity, by an avoidance of the awareness of lonely death.
A profound existential malaise can set in—the characteristic pathology of this stage (fulcrum six). No longer protected by anthropocentric gods and goddesses, reason gone flat in its happy capacity to explain away the Mystery, not yet delivered into the hands of the superconscious—we stare out blankly into that dark and gloomy night, which will very shortly swallow us up as surely as it once spat us forth. Tolstoy:

The question, which in my fiftieth year had brought me to the notion of suicide, was the simplest of all questions, lying in the soul of every man: "What will come from what I am doing now, and may do tomorrow? What will come from my whole life?" Otherwise expressed— "Why should I live? Why should I wish for anything?" Again, in other words, "Is there any meaning in my life which will not be destroyed by the inevitable death awaiting me?"

That question would never arise to the magical structure; such structure has abundant, even exorbitant meaning because the universe centers always on it, was made for it, caters to it daily: every raindrop soothes its soul because every confirming drop reassures it of its cosmocentricity: the great spirit wraps it in the wind and whispers to it always, I exist for you.
That question would never arise to a mythic-believer: this soul exists only for its God, a God that, by a happy coincidence, will save this soul eternally if it professes belief in this God: a mutual admiration society destined for a bad infinity. A crisis of faith and meaning is impossible from within this circle (a crisis occurs only when this soul suspects this God).
That question would never beset the happy rationalist, who long ago became a happy rationalist by deciding never to ask such questions again, and then forgetting, rendering unconscious, this question, and sustaining the unconsciousness by ridiculing those who ask it.
No, that question arises from a self that knows too much, sees to much, feels too much. The consolations are gone; the skull will grin in at the banquet; it can no longer tranquilize itself with the trivial. From the depths, it cries out to gods no longer there, searches for a meaning not yet disclosed, still to be incarnated. Its very agony is worth a trillion happy magics and a million believing myths, and yet its only consolation is its unrelenting pain—a pain, a dread, an emptiness that feels beyond the comforts and distractions of the body, the persona, the ego, looks bravely into the face of the Void, and can no longer explain away either the Mystery or the Terror. It is a soul that is much too awake. It is a soul on the brink of the transpersonal.

the transpersonal domains

We have repeatedly seen that the problems of one stage are only "defused" at the next stage, and thus the only cure for existential angst is the transcendence of the existential condition, that is, the transcendence of the centaur, negating and preserving it in a yet higher and wider awareness. For we are here beginning to pass out of the noosphere and into the theosphere, into the transpersonal domains, the domains not just of the self-conscious but of the superconscious.
A great number of issues need to be clarified as we follow evolution (and the twenty tenets) into the higher or deeper forms of transpersonal unfolding.
First and foremost, if this higher unfolding is to be called "religious" or "spiritual," it is a very far cry from what is ordinarily meant by those terms. We have spent several chapters painstakingly reviewing the earlier developments of the archaic, magic, and mythic structures (which are usually associated with the world's great religions), precisely because those structures are what transpersonal and contemplative development is not. And here we can definitely agree with Campbell: if 99.9 percent of people want to call magic and mythic "real religion," then so be it for them (that is a legitimate use); but that is absolutely not what the world's greatest yogis, saints, and sages mean by mystical or "really religious" development, and in any event is not what I have in mind.
Campbell, however, is quite right that a very, very few individuals, during the magic and mythic and rational eras, were indeed able to go beyond magic, beyond mythic, and beyond rational—into the transrational and transpersonal domains. And even if their teachings (such as those of Buddha and Christ and Patanjali and Padmasambhava and Rumi and Chih-i) were snapped up by the masses and translated downward into magic and mythic and egoic terms—"the salvation of the individual soul"—that is not what their teachings clearly and even blatantly stated, nor did they intentionally lend any support to such endeavors at all. Their teachings were about the release from individuality, and not about its everlasting perpetuation, a grotesque notion that was equated flat-out with hell or samsara.
Their teachings, and their contemplative endeavors, were (and are) transrational through and through. That is, although all of the contemplative traditions aim at going within and beyond reason, they all start with reason, start with the notion that truth is to be established by evidence, that truth is the result of experimental methods, that truth is to be tested in the laboratory of personal experience, that these truths are open to all those who wish to try the experiment and thus disclose for themselves the truth or falsity of the spiritual claims—and that dogmas or given beliefs are precisely what hinder the emergence of deeper truths and wider visions.
Thus, each of these spiritual or transpersonal endeavors (which we will carefully examine) claims that there exist higher domains of awareness, embrace, love, identity, reality, self, and truth. But these claims are not dogmatic; they are not believed in merely because an authority proclaimed them, or because sociocentric tradition hands them down, or because salvation depends upon being a "true believer." Rather, the claims about these higher domains are a conclusion based on hundreds of years of experimental introspection and communal verification. False claims are rejected on the basis of consensual evidence, and further evidence is used to adjust and fine-tune the experimental conclusions.
These spiritual endeavors, in other words, are purely scientific in any meaningful sense of the word, and the systematic presentations of these endeavors follow precisely those of any reconstructive science.

objections to the transpersonal

The common objections to these contemplative sciences are not very compelling. The most typical objection is that these mystical states are private and interior and cannot be publicly validated; they are "merely subjective."
This is simply not true; or rather, if it is true, then it applies to any and all nonempirical endeavors, from mathematics to literature to linguistics to psychoanalysis to historical interpretation. Nobody has ever seen, "out there" in the "sensory world," the square root of a negative one. That is a mathematical symbol seen only inwardly, "privately," with the mind's eye. Yet a community of trained mathematicians know exactly what that symbol means, and they can share that symbol easily in intersubjective awareness, and they can confirm or reject the proper and consistent uses of that symbol. Just so, the "private" experiences of contemplative scientists can be shared with a community of trained contemplatives, grounded in a common and shared experience, and open to confirmation or rebuttal based on public evidence.
Recall that the Right-Hand path is open to empirical verification, which means that the Right-Hand dimension of holons, their form or exteriors, can indeed be "seen" with the senses or their extensions. But the Left-Hand dimension—the interior side—cannot be seen empirically "out there," although it can be internally experienced (and although it has empirical correlates: my interior thoughts register on an EEG but cannot be determined or interpreted or known from that evidence). Everything on the Left Hand, from sensations to impulses to images and concepts and so on, is an interior experience known to me directly by acquaintance (which can indeed be "objectively described," but only through an intersubjective community at the same depth, where it relies on interpretation from the same depth). Direct spiritual experience is simply the higher reaches of the Upper-Left quadrant, and those experiences are as real as any other direct experiences, and they can be as easily shared (or distorted) as any other experiential knowledge.
(The only way to deny the validity of direct interior experiential knowledge—whether it be mathematical knowledge, introspective knowledge, or spiritual knowledge—is to take the behaviorist stance and identify interior experience with exterior behavior. Should somebody mention that this is the cynical twist or pathological agency of Broughton's level four?)
There is, of course, one proviso: the experimenter must, in his or her own case, have developed the requisite cognitive tools. If, for example, we want to investigate concrete operational thought, a community of those who have only developed to the preoperational level will not do. If you take a preop child, and in front of the child pour the water from a short fat glass into a tall thin glass, the child will tell you that the tall glass has more water. If you say, no, there is the same amount of water in both glasses, because you just saw me pour the same water from one glass to the other, the child will have no idea what you're talking about. "No, the tall glass has more water." No matter how many times you pour the water back and forth between the two glasses, the child will deny they have the same amount of water. (Interestingly, if you videotape the child at this stage, and then wait a few years until the child has developed conop—at which point it will seem utterly obvious to him that the glasses have the same amount of water—and then show the child the earlier videotape, he will deny that it's him. He thinks you've doctored the videotape; he cannot imagine anybody being that stupid.) The preop child is immersed in a world that includes conop realities, is drenched in those realities, and yet cannot "see" them: they are all "otherworldly."
At every stage of development, in fact, the next higher stage always appears to be a completely "other world," an "invisible world"—it has literally no existence for the individual, even though the individual is in fact saturated with a reality that contains the "other" world. The individual's "this-worldly" existence simply cannot comprehend the "otherworldly" characteristics lying all around it.
At the same time, these higher or deeper worldspaces (whether of conop or formop or anything higher) are not located elsewhere in physical space-time. They are located here, in deeper perceptions of this world. Other worlds become this world with increasing development and evolution. The worldspace of conop is a completely other world to the preop child (even though he or she is often staring directly at it), another world that nonetheless becomes perfectly obvious, present, seen, and "this-worldly" at the conop stage, and what was the fuss all about? But prior to the increased development and evolution, there is nothing from the present this-world that will allow the child to adequately grasp the other world (or else the other world would have already become a real this-world).
Just so with the higher or transpersonaí developments. Explain them to someone at the rational level, and all you get, at best, is that deer-caught-in-the-headlights blank stare (at worst, you get something like, "And did we forget to take our Prozac today?").
So the first thing I would like to emphasize is that the higher stages of transpersonal development are stages that are taken from those who have actually developed into those stages and who display palpable, discernible, and repeatable characteristics of that development. The stages themselves can be rationally reconstructed (explained in a rational manner), but they cannot be rationally experienced. They can be experienced only by a transrational contemplative development, whose stages unfold in the same manner as any other developmental stages, and whose experiences are every bit as real as any others.
But one must be adequate to the experience, or it remains an invisible other world. When the yogis and sages and contemplatives make a statement like, "The entire world is a manifestation of one Self," that is not a merely rational statement that we are to think about and see if it makes logical sense. It is rather a description, often poetic, of a direct apprehension or a direct experience, and we are to test this direct experience, not by mulling it over philosophically, but by taking up the experimental method of contemplative awareness, developing the requisite cognitive tools, and then directly looking for ourselves.
As Emerson put it, "What we are, that only can we see."

language and mysticism

In this regard, another common objection is that mystical or contemplative experiences, because they cannot be put into plain language, or into any language for that matter, are therefore not epistemologically grounded, are not "real knowledge." But this simply bypasses the problem of what linguistically situated knowledge means in the first place.
Saussure, as I mentioned earlier, maintained that all linguistic signs have two components, the signifier and the signified, often represented as S/S. The signifier is the written or spoken symbol or sound, the material component of the sign (such as the physical ink forms written on this page, or the physical air vibrations as you speak). The signified is what comes to your mind when you see or hear the signifier.
Thus, I physically write the word dog on this page—that is the signifier.
You read the word, and you understand that I mean something like a furry animal with four legs that goes wuff-wuff—that is the signified, that is what comes to your mind. A sign is a combination of these two components, and these two components are, of course, the Right-Hand dimension of the sign (the physical exterior) and the Left-Hand dimension of the sign (the interior awareness or meaning).
And both of those are distinguished from the actual referent, or whatever it is that the sign is "pointing" to, whether interior or exterior. Thus, the signifier is the word dog, the referent is the real dog, and the signified is what comes to your mind when you read or hear the signifier dog. Saussure's genius was to point out that the signified is not merely or simply the same as the referent, because "what comes to mind" depends on a whole host of factors other than the real dog, and this is what makes linguistic reality so fascinating.
Saussure's point—and this is what actually ignited the whole movement of structuralism—is that the sign cannot be understood as an isolated entity, because in and by itself the sign is meaningless (which is why different words can represent the same thing in different languages, and why "meaning" is never a simple matter of a word pointing to a thing, because how could different words represent the same thing?). Rather, signs must be understood as part of a holarchy of differences integrated into meaningful structures. Both the signifiers and the signifieds exist as holons, or whole/parts in a chain of whole/parts, and, as Saussure made clear, it is their relational standing that confers meaning on each (language is a meaningful system of meaningless elements: as always, the regime or structure of the superholon confers meaning on the subholons, meaning which the subholons do not and cannot possess on their own).
In other words, the signifiers and the signifieds exist as a structure of contexts within contexts within contexts, and meaning itself is context-bound. Meaning is found not in the word but in the context: the bark of a dog is not the same as the bark of a tree, and the difference is not in the word, because the word bark is the same in both phrases—it is the relational context that determines its meaning: the entire structure of language is involved in the meaning of each and every term—this was Saussure's great insight.
And this, as usual, contributed to a split between Right- and Left-Hand theorists. The Right-Hand theorists, or the pure structuralists, wanted to study only the exterior structure of the system of signifiers in language and in culture (an approach which in turn gave way to the poststructuralists, who wanted to free the signifier from any grounding at all—as in Foucault's archaeology or Derrida's grammatology—and see it as free-floating or sliding, and anchored only by power or prejudice: meaning is indeed context-dependent, but contexts are boundless, and thus meaning is arbitrarily imposed by power or prejudice—the so-called "poststructural revolution" of "free-floating signifiers").
The Left-Hand theorists wanted to study the contexts within contexts of interior meaning, the signifieds that can only be interpreted, not seen, and interpreted only in a context of background social practices (the hermeneuticists, from Heidegger to Kuhn and Taylor and Searle and aspects of Wittgenstein).
But both the hermeneutical Left-Hand path and the structuralist Right-Hand path agreed that signs can only be understood contextually (whether in the context of shared social practices that provide the foreknowledge or background or context for common interpretation, or in the context of shared nonindividual linguistic structures. I argued in chapter 4 that both of these approaches are equally important—they represent the interior and the exterior of the linguistic holon—and indeed even Foucault came to this understanding).
All of which relates to mysticism in this way: the word dog has a shared meaning to you and to me because that sign exists in a shared linguistic structure and a shared cultural background of social and interpretive practices. But what if you had never seen a real dog? What then?
I could of course describe one to you, but the word will be meaningless unless there are some points of shared experience that will allow you to "call up" in your mind the same signified that I mean with the signifier "dog." (Substitute the word Buddha-nature for dog and you can see the importance of this line of thought for mystical experience, which we will explore in a minute.) The hermeneuticists are quite right in that regard: the same linguistic structures that you and I share are not enough, in themselves, to give you the proper signified. You and I have to share a common lived experience in order to assume identical signification.
Further, the actual experience of seeing a dog is not itself a merely linguistic experience. The signifier, the word dog, is not the actual dog, not the actual referent. Obviously, the total experience of the real dog cannot itself be put into words, put into signifiers. But the fact that the real dog can't be put into words does not mean that the real dog doesn't exist or isn't real. It means only that the signifier has sense only if you and I have had a similar experience, a common shared lifeworld experience, and then I will know what you mean when you say, "That dog scared me."
In short, no direct experience can be put into words without remainder. Sex can't be put into words; you've either had the experience or you haven't, and no amount of poetry will take its place. Sunsets, eating cake, listening to Bach, riding a bike, getting drunk and throwing up—believe me, none of those are captured in words.
And thus, so what if spiritual experiences can't be captured in words either? They are no more and no less handicapped in this regard than any other experience. If I say "dog" and you've had the experience, you know exactly what I mean. If a Zen master says "Emptiness," and you've had that experience, you will know exactly what is meant. If you haven't had the experience "dog" or the experience "Emptiness," merely adding more and more words will never, under any circumstances, convey it.
Thus, if we are going to level that charge at mysticism, then we must level it at dogginess and sunsetness and every other experience that happens to come our way. (This is really the cheapest of the cheap shots fired at mysticism.)
Conversely, words do just fine as signifiers for experience, whether mundane or spiritual, if we both, you and I, have had similar experiences in a context of shared background practices. Zen masters talk about Emptiness all the time! And they know exactly what they mean by the words, and the words are perfectly adequate to convey what they mean, if you have had the experience (for what they mean can only be disclosed in the shared praxis of zazen, or meditation practice).
Go one step further. If I say to a conop child, "It is as if I were elsewhere," the child might nod her head as if she actually understood all the meanings of that statement. The conop child already possesses the shared linguistic structure (and grammar) to decipher the words. But, as we have seen, since the conop child cannot fully grasp the implications of as-if statements, she doesn't really understand what is signified by my statement. Once the higher structure of formop emerges, however, this will usher the child into a worldspace where "as-if" is not just a signifier but a signified that has an existing referent in that formop worldspace: not just a word, but a direct understanding that more or less spontaneously jumps to mind whenever we hear or see the word, and which refers to a genuinely existing entity in the rational worldspace.
In other words, all signs exist in a continuum of developmental referents and developmental signifieds. The referent of a sign is not just lying around in "the" world waiting for any and all to simply look at it; the referent exists only in a worldspace that is itself only disclosed in the process of development, and the signified exists only in the interior perception of those who have developed to that worldspace (which structures the background interpretive meaning that allows the signified to emerge). No amount of experience by the conop child will ever show her the meaning of an "as-if" dog, because the as-if dog does not exist anywhere in the conop worldspace; it exists only in the formop worldspace, and thus it is a referent that demands a developmental signified to even be perceived in the first place.
To take it a point at a time: the signifiers of signs are always and only physical, they are always material components, in which no meaning resides at all (Saussure's point); and because the signifiers are always physical, even my dog can see them (and, of course, sees no meaning in them; or rather, sees them from a sensorimotor level, as something to eat, perhaps). That is because the actual referent of a sign exists only in a world-space (sensorimotor, magical, mythical, mental, etc.) that is itself disclosed only at a particular level of depth (preop, conop, formop, etc.). And in the same way, the corresponding signified of the sign exists only in the interior perception of those who have developed the requisite depth (in a context of cultural and social practices, or an inter subjective community of the same-depthed).
Both the conop child and my dog can see the physical words "as-if"; neither of them can understand it. The empirical markings are meaningless. They do not possess the developmental signified, and thus they cannot see the actual referent.
Just so, the words Buddha-nature and Atman and Spirit and Dharmakaya are signifiers whose referents exist only in the transpersonal or spiritual worldspace, and they therefore require, for their understanding, a developmental signified, an appropriately developed interior or Left-Hand dimension corresponding with the exterior word, or else they remain only words, like the unseen dog, this unseen Spirit. And without the developmental signified, words will capture neither the dog nor the Spirit.
And note: I can run around until I find a dog and show you the dog, because we both exist in the sensorimotor worldspace and there is no developmental reason why you can't spot a dog. Or, in the other example, there is no reason you can't understand an as-if dog, whose referent exists in the rational worldspace. We already share that worldspace. We have already transformed to that level of depth: an entire and shared world of referents are therefore lying around for us to apprehend (because we have already created the worldspace or the opening in which they can manifest).
But I can't run around and find Buddha and show you that, unless you have developed the requisite cognitions that will allow you to resonate with the signifier whose referent exists only in the spiritual worldspace and whose signified exists only in the interior heart of those who have awakened to that space.

validity claims of mysticism

If I want to know whether it is raining or not, I go to the window and look out, and sure enough, rain. But perhaps I am mistaken, or perhaps my eyesight is poor. Would you check? You go to the window and yes, rain.
That is a very simplified form of the three strands of any valid knowledge quest (whether of the Left- or Right-Hand path). The first is injunction, which is always of the form, "If you want to know this, do this." If you want to know if a cell has a nucleus, then get a microscope, learn to take histological sections, stain the cell, put it under the microscope, and look. If you want to know the meaning of Hamlet, then learn English, get the book, and read. If you want to know whether 2 + 2 is really 4, then learn arithmetic theory, take the theorems, run them through your mind, and check the results.
The various injunctions, in other words, lead to or disclose or open up the possibility of an illumination, an apprehension, an intuition, or a direct experiencing of the domain addressed by the injunction. You "see" the meaning of Hamlet, or whether it is raining, or why 2 + 2 really is 4. This is the second strand, the illumination or apprehension. You see or apprehend, via a direct experience, the disclosed data of the domain.
But you could be mistaken, and thus you check your results, your data, with others who have completed the first two strands, with others who have performed the injunctions and obtained the data. In this community of peers, you compare and confirm—or reject—your original data. And this is the third strand, communal confirmation (or refutation).
These three strands—injunction, illumination, confirmation—are the major components in any valid knowledge quest. One of the great values of Thomas Kuhn's work (and that of the pragmatists before him, and in particular Heidegger's "analytic-pragmatic" side) was to draw attention to the importance of injunctions or actual practices in generating knowledge, and further, in generating the type of knowledge that could be articulated in a given worldspace.
That is, social practices, or social injunctions, are crucial in creating and disclosing the types of worldspace in which types of subjects and objects appear (and thus the types of knowledge that can unfold). The referents of knowledge, as we saw above, exist only in specific world-spaces, and those worldspaces are not simply given empirically, lying around for all and sundry to perceive. Rather, these worldspaces are disclosed/created by cognitive transformations in the context of background injunctions or social practices.
Put simply, the first strand of knowledge accumulation is never simply "Look"; it is "Do this, then look."
Kuhn, in one of the great misunderstood concepts of our era, pointed out that normal science proceeds by way of exemplary injunctions—that is, shared practices and methods that scientists agree disclose and address the important issues of their field. Kuhn called such an agreed-upon injunction an "exemplar" or a "paradigm"—an exemplary practice or technique or methodology that all agreed was central to furthering the knowledge quest. And it was the paradigm, the exemplary injunction, that disclosed a type of data, so that the paradigm itself was a matter of consensus, not merely correspondence.
In the academic world of the two cultures, many theorists in the underfunded humanities (and virtually everybody in the New Age movement) seized upon the notion of "paradigm" as a way to undercut the authority of normal science, bolster their own departments, reduce empirical facts to arbitrary social conventions—and then propose their own, new and improved "paradigm." In all of these, "paradigm" was mistaken as some sort of overall theory or concept or notion, the idea being that if you came up with a new and better theory, the factual evidence could be ignored because that was just "old paradigm."
Among other things, this meant that empirical science didn't really show any "progress," but was merely a shifting of opinions ("paradigms") that had no referent except in the arbitrary conventions of scientists (and these conventions were always charged with some sort of "ism" that the new paradigm would overcome).
All of this ignored Kuhn's repeated insistence that "later scientific theories are better than earlier ones for solving puzzles in the quite often different environments to which they are applied. This is not a relativist's position, and it displays the sense in which I am a convinced believer in scientific progress."
But by collapsing "paradigm" into a mere theory (itself unanchored), the scientific enterprise could be collapsed into various forms of literary chitchat (and the new masters of the universe were therefore . . . the literary critics). And likewise, on the New Age front, a flurry of "new paradigms" could then step in and redress the ugliness of the old paradigm.
But paradigms are first and foremost injunctions, actual practices (all of which have nondiscursive components that never are entered in the theories they support)—they are methods for disclosing new data in an addressed domain, and the paradigms work because they are true in any meaningful sense of the word. Science makes real progress, as Kuhn said, because successive paradigms cumulatively disclose more and more interesting data. Even Foucault acknowledged that the natural sciences, even if they had started as structures of power, had separated from power (it was the pseudosciences of biopower that remained shot through with power masquerading as knowledge).
Neither the New Agers nor the "new paradigmers" had anything resembling a new paradigm, because all they offered was more talk-talk. They had no new techniques, no new methodologies, no new exemplars, no new injunctions—and therefore no new data. All they possessed, through a misreading of Kuhn, was a pseudo-attempt to trump normal science and replace it with their ideologically favorite reading of the Kosmos.
The contemplative traditions, on the other hand, have always come first and foremost with a set of injunctions in hand. They are, above all else, a set of practices, practices that require years to master (much longer than the training of the average scientist). These injunctions (zazen, shi-kan-taza, vipassana, contemplative introspection, satsang, darshan—all of which we will discuss)—these are not things to think, they are things to do.
Once one masters the exemplar or the paradigmatic practice (strand one), then one is ushered into a worldspace in which new data disclose themselves (strand two). These are direct apprehensions or illuminations—in a word, direct spiritual experiences (safari, kensho, shaktipat, nada, shabd, etc.). These data are rigorously checked (strand three) in the community of those who have also completed the first two strands (injunction and illumination). Bad data are rebuffed by the community (the sangha) of those whose cognitive eyes are adequate to the addressed domain.
In short, the contemplative disclosures are open to the fallibilist criteria of all genuine knowledge, because the contemplative path follows all three strands of valid knowledge accumulation.

the reconstruction of the contemplative path

Of course, this does not prevent the various contemplative traditions from possessing their own particular and culture-bound trappings, contexts, and interpretations. But to the extent that the contemplative endeavor discloses universal aspects of the Kosmos, then the deep structures of the contemplative traditions (but not their surface structures) would be expected to show cross-cultural similarities at the various levels of depth created/disclosed by the meditative injunctions and paradigms.
In other words, the deep structures of worldspaces (archaic, magic, mythic, rational, and transpersonal) show cross-cultural and largely invariant features at a deep level of abstraction, whereas the surface structures (the actual subjects and objects in the various worldspaces) are naturally and appropriately quite different from culture to culture. Just as the human mind universally grows images and symbols and concepts (even though the actual contents of those structures vary considerably), so the human spirit universally grows intuitions of the Divine, and those developmental signifieds unfold in an evolutionary and reconstructible fashion, just like any other holon in the Kosmos (and their referents are just as real as any other similarly disclosed data).
In the past few decades there has been a concerted effort on the part of many researchers (such as Stanislav Grof, Roger Walsh, Frances Vaughan, Daniel Brown, Jack Engler, Daniel Goleman, Charles Tart, Donald Rothberg, Michael Zimmerman, Seymour Boorstein, Mark Epstein, David Lukoff, Michael Washburn, Joel Funk, John Nelson, John Chirban, Robert Forman, Francis Lu, Michael Murphy, Mark Waldman, James Fadiman, myself, and others) to rationally reconstruct the higher stages of transpersonal or contemplative development—stages that continue naturally or normally beyond the ego and centaur if arrest or fixation does not occur.
Much of this work has been summarized in Transformations of Consciousness: Conventional and Contemplative Perspectives on Development (Wilber, Engler, and Brown), and I will not repeat its contents. But the conclusion is straightforward. As Brown and Engler summarize it:

The major [contemplative] traditions we have studied in their original languages present an unfolding of meditation experience in terms of a stage model: for example, the Mahamudra from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition; the Visuddhimagga from the Pali Theravada tradition; and the Yoga Sutras from the Sanskrit Hindu tradition. The models are sufficiently similar to suggest an underlying common invariant sequence of stages, despite vast cultural and linguistic differences as well as styles of practice.

This developmental model has also been found to be consistent with the stages of mystical or interior prayer found in the Jewish (Kabbalist), Islamic (Sufi), and Christian mystical traditions (see, for example, Chirban's chapter in Transformations), and Brown has also found it in the Chinese contemplative traditions. Theorists such as Da Avabhasha have given extensive hermeneutic and developmental readings from what now appears to be at least a representative sampling from every known and available contemplative tradition (see, for example, The Basket of Tolerance), and they are in fundamental and extensive agreement with this overall developmental model.
The evidence, though still preliminary, strongly suggests that, at a minimum, there are four general stages of transpersonal development, each with at least two substages (and some with many more). These four stages I call the psychic, the subtle, the causal, and the nondual.
Each of these stages follows the same patterns and shows the same developmental characteristics as all the other stages of consciousness evolution: each is a holon following the twenty tenets (a new differentiation/ integration, a new emergence with a new depth, a new interiority, etc.); each possesses a new and higher sense of self existing in a new and wider world of others, with new drives, new cognitions, new moral stances, and so forth; each possesses a deep structure (basic defining pattern) that is culturally invariant but with surface structures (manifestations) that are culturally conditioned and molded; and each has a new and higher form of possible pathology (with the exception of the unmanifest "end" point, although even that is not without certain possible complications in its manifestation).
I have elsewhere given preliminary descriptions of the deep structures (and pathologies) of each of these four major stages. Instead of repeating myself, I have for this presentation simply chosen four individuals who are especially representative of these stages, and will let them speak for us. They are (respectively) Ralph Waldo Emerson, Saint Teresa of Avila, Meister Eckhart, and Sri Ramana Maharshi. Each also represents the type of mysticism typical at each stage: nature mysticism, deity mysticism, formless mysticism, and nondual mysticism (each of which we will discuss).
And each represents a form of tomorrow, a shape of our destiny yet to come. Each rode time's arrow ahead of us, as geniuses always do, and thus, even though looming out of our past, they call to us from our future.

8

The Depths of the Divine

Holy breath divinely streams through the luminous form when the feast comes to life, and floods of love are in motion, and, watered by heaven, the living stream roars when it resounds beneath, and the night renders her treasures, and up out of brooks the buried gold gleams.— And, friendly spirit, just as from your serenely contemplative brow your ray descends, securely blessing, among mortals, so you witness to me, and tell me, that I might repeat it to others, for others too do not believe it....      —friedrich  holderlin

THE  CONTINUING  evolutionary process of within-and-beyond brings new withins . . . and new beyonds.

the psychic level

We left off with the emergence of the centaur, which is, so to speak, on the border between the personal and the transpersonal. If the first three general domains were those of matter, life, and mind, the next general domain (that of the psychic and subtle) is the domain of the soul, as I will use the term. And the first rule of the soul is: it is transpersonal.
The word transpersonal is somewhat awkward and confuses many people. But the point is simply, as Emerson put it, ''The soul knows no persons." He explains (and note: Emerson throughout these quotes uses the masculine, as was the custom of the time; were he alive today he would use feminine and masculine, for the whole point of his notion of the Over-Soul was that it was neither male nor female, which is why it could anchor a true liberation from any and all restrictive roles: "The soul knows no persons"):

Persons are supplementary to the primary teaching of the soul. In youth we are mad for persons. Childhood and youth see all the world in them. But the larger experience of man discovers the identical nature [the same self or soul] appearing through them all. In all conversation between two persons tacit reference is made, as to a third party, to a common nature. That third party or common nature is not social; it is impersonal; is God.

The soul is without persons, and the soul is grounded in God. "Impersonal," however, is not quite right, because it tends to imply a complete negation of the personal, whereas in higher development the personal is negated and preserved, or transcended and included: hence, "transpersonal." So I think it's very important, in all subsequent discussion, for us to remember that transpersonal means "personal plus" not "personal minus."
But what could an actual "transpersonal" experience really mean? It's not nearly as mysterious as it sounds. Recall that at the centaur, according to the research of Broughton (and many others), the self is already beginning to transcend the empirical ego or the empirical person ("the observer is distinguished from the self-concept as known"). You yourself can, right now, be aware of your objective self, you can observe your individual ego or person, you are aware of yourself generally.
But who, then, is doing the observing? What is it that is observing or witnessing your individual self? That therefore transcends your individual self in some important ways? Who or what is that? The noble Emerson:

All goes to show that the soul in man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs; is not a function, like the power of memory, of calculation, of comparison, but uses these as hands and feet; is not a faculty, but a light; is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect and the will; is the background of our being, in which they lie,—an immensity not possessed and that cannot be possessed. From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.

The observer in you, the Witness in you, transcends the isolated person in you and opens instead—from within or from behind, as Emerson said—onto a vast expanse of awareness no longer obsessed with the individual bodymind, no longer a respecter or abuser of persons, no longer fascinated by the passing joys and set-apart sorrows of the lonely self, but standing still in silence as an opening or clearing through which light shines, not from the world but into it—"a light shines through us upon things." That which observes or witnesses the self, the person, is precisely to that degree free of the self, the person, and through that opening comes pouring the light and power of a Self, a Soul, that, as Emerson puts it, "would make our knees bend."

A man is the facade of a temple wherein all wisdom and all good abide. What we commonly call man [as an "individual person" or ego], the eating, drinking, counting man, does not, as we know him, represent himself, but misrepresents himself. Him we do not respect, but the soul, whose organ he is, if he would let it appear through his action, would make our knees bend. When it breathes through his intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affection, it is love. And the blindness of the intellect begins when it would be something of itself [be its "own person"]. The weakness of the will begins when the individual would be something of himself. All reform aims in some one particular to let the soul have its way through us. . . .

And those persons through whom the soul shines, through whom the "soul has its way," are not therefore weak characters, timid personalities, meek presences among us. They are personal plus, not personal minus. Precisely because they are no longer exclusively identified with the individual personality, and yet because they still preserve the personality, then through that personality flows the force and fire of the soul. They may be soft-spoken and often remain in silence, but it is a thunderous silence that veritably drowns out the egos chattering loudly all around them. Or they may be animated and very outgoing, but their dynamism is magnetic, and people are drawn somehow to the presence, fascinated. Make no mistake: these are strong characters, these souls, sometimes wildly exaggerated characters, sometimes world-historical, precisely because their personalities are plugged into a universal source that rumbles through their veins and rudely rattles those around them.
I believe, for example, that it was precisely this fire and force that allowed Emerson, more than any other person in American history, to actually define the intellectual character of America itself. One of his essays, "The American Scholar," had, as one historian put it, "an influence greater than that of any single work in the nineteenth century." Oliver Wendell Holmes called it "our intellectual Declaration of Independence." James Russell Lowell explained: "The Puritan revolt had made us ecclesiastically, and the Revolution politically independent, but we were still socially and intellectually moored to English thought, till Emerson cut the cable and gave us a chance at the dangers and the glories of blue water. ..."
And the message, this ringing Declaration of Independence? The Soul is tied to no individual, no culture, no tradition, but rises fresh in every person, beyond every person, and grounds itself in a truth and glory that bows to nothing in the world of time and place and history. We all must be, and can only be, "a light unto ourselves."
And then in a phrase that, as Holmes indicated, rattled all of America, Emerson announced: "All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do"—because it is the same Soul in each of us. Why bow to past heroes, he asks, when all we are bowing to is our own Soul? "Suppose they were virtuous; did they wear out virtue?" The magnetism of the great heroes is only the call from our own Self, he says. Why this groveling to the past when the same Soul shines now and only now and always now? And then Emerson swiftly and irrevocably cut the cable and set us all— not just Americans—afloat on the dangers and the glories of blue water:

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust. Who is the Trustee? What is the aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded? The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life. In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin.
For the sense of being which in calm hour arises, we know not how, in the Soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them and proceeds obviously from the same source whence their life and being also proceed. Here is the fountain of action and of thought. Here are the lungs of that inspiration which giveth man wisdom. We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams.
The relations of the Soul to the divine spirit are so pure that it is profane to seek to interpose helps. It must be that when God speaketh he should communicate, not one thing, but all things; should fill the world with his voice; should scatter forth light, nature, time, souls, from the center of the present thought; and new date and new create the whole. Whenever a mind is simple and receives a divine wisdom, old things pass away—means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now and absorbs past and future into the present hour. All things are made sacred by relation to it—one as much as another. All things are dissolved to their center by their cause, and in the universal miracle petty and particular miracles disappear.
If therefore a man claims to know and speak of God and carries you backward to the phraseology of some old mouldered nation in another country, in another world, believe him not. Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fullness and completion? Whence then this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the Soul. Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye makes, but the Soul is light: where it is, is day; where it was, is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury if it be any thing more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming.

To emphasize that the Soul, the "aboriginal Self," is common in and to all beings, Emerson often refers to it as the "Over-Soul," one and the same in all of us, in all beings as such. The overall number of Souls is but one:

The only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we rest as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-Soul, within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart of which all sincere conversation is the worship, to which all right action is submission; that over-powering reality which confutes our tricks and talents, and constrains every one to pass for what he is, and to speak from his character [soul] and not from his tongue [ego], and which evermore tends to pass into our thought and hand and become wisdom and virtue and power and beauty.
And this because the heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly an endless circulation through all men, as the water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one. It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men.
We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the Soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related.

And so once again we see that a new and deeper within has brought us to a new and wider beyond, a beyond that "is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them and proceeds obviously from the same source whence their life and being also proceed." This new within-and-beyond is not just beyond a sociocentric identity to a worldcentric identity with all human beings (which the rational-ego/centaur assumes in its global or universal postconventional awareness), but to an identity, a conscious union, with all of manifestation itself: not just with all humans, but with all nature, and with the physical cosmos, with all beings "great and small."
We could say: from the worldcentric centaur to direct Kosmic consciousness. (When you consider the remarkable achievement that decentered worldcentric awareness is, it's not that far of a jump).
Thus, the centaur could integrate the physiosphere and the biosphere and the noosphere, but the Over-Soul becomes, or is directly one with, the physiosphere and biosphere and noosphere. It is simple continuation of the deepening and widening of identity, grounded in an awareness very much within, and very much beyond, me.
And Emerson means this literally! According to Emerson, this Kosmic consciousness is not poetry (though he often expresses it with unmatched poetic beauty) —rather, it is a direct realization, a direct apprehension, and "in that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin. It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all."
For the Over-Soul is also experienced as the World Soul, since self and world are here finding a "common fountain, common source." The Over-Soul (or World Soul) is an initial apprehension of the pure Witness or aboriginal Self, which starts to emerge, however haltingly, as an experiential reality at this psychic stage. (We will see how Emerson treats this Witness in a moment.)
With the Over-Soul, the World Soul, it is not that individuality disappears, but that—once again—it is negated and preserved in a deeper and wider ground, a ground that conspicuously includes all of nature and its glories. This Kosmic consciousness is sometimes referred to as "nature mysticism," but that is a somewhat misleading term. For this psychic-level mysticism embraces not just nature but also culture, and calling it "nature mysticism" confuses it with a merely biocentric regression, an ecocentric indissociation, and this is not at all what Emerson has in mind (as we will see).
But since the Over-Soul is an experienced identity with all manifestation, it is an identity that most definitely and exuberantly embraces nature; and, to that degree, it begins to undercut the subject/object dualism. Emerson explains:

We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul [the Over-Soul, the World Soul]. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one.

In his famous "transparent eyeball" section from the essay Nature, Emerson speaks movingly of the union of the Soul and nature, and of the capacity of nature, when rightly approached, to elicit this Kosmic consciousness. The "transparent eyeball" is, of course, an intimation of the pure Witness in the form of the Over-Soul, wherein "all mean egotism vanishes; I am nothing; I see all":

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. . . . Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,—no disgrace, no calamity, which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.

What distinguishes this profound "nature mysticism" from a simple nature indissociation or ecocentric immersion or biospheric regression (which would be egocentric and anthropocentric, as we have seen) is the realization that nature is not Spirit but an expression of Spirit, radiant and glorious and perfect in its own way, but an expression nonetheless. Emerson is not regressing to fulcrum-2 (biocentric immersion and nondifferentiation)! Emerson is very clear on this distinction between nature regression, on the one hand, and a mysticism that also embraces nature, on the other—and this distinction rather upsets his environmentalist fans, who seem to want to equate a finite and temporal nature with an infinite and eternal Spirit:

Beauty in nature is not ultimate. It is the herald of inward and eternal beauty, and is not alone a solid and satisfactory good. . . .
Nature is a symbol of spirit. Before the revelations of the Soul, time, space and nature shrink away. In the hour of vision there is nothing that can be called gratitude, nor properly joy. The Soul raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causation, perceives the self-existence of Truth and Right, and calms itself with knowing that all things go well. Vast spaces of nature, the Atlantic Ocean, the South Sea; long intervals of time, years, centuries, are of no account.
Let us stun and astonish the intruding rabble of men and books and institutions by a simple declaration of the divine fact. Bid the intruders take the shoes from off their feet, for God is here within. Let our simplicity judge them, and our docility to our own law demonstrate the poverty of Nature beside our native riches.

It is, in fact, according to Emerson, an allegiance to the senses and nature, in itself, that blinds us to the interior intuition of the Over-Soul and the God within and beyond:

To the senses and the unrenewed understanding, belongs a sort of instinctive belief in the absolute existence of nature. In their view man and nature are indissolubly joined. Things are ultimates, and they never look beyond their sphere [Piaget's egocentric "realism"]. His mind is imbruted, and he is a selfish savage.
The presence of intuition mars this faith [in nature]. The first effort of thought tends to relax this despotism of the senses which binds us to nature as if we were a part of it. Until this higher agency intervened [intuition], the animal eye sees, with wonderful accuracy, sharp outlines and colored surfaces. When the eye of intuition opens, to outline and surface are at once added grace and expression. These proceed from imagination and affection, and abate somewhat of the angular distinctions of objects. If the intuition be stimulated to more earnest vision, outlines of surfaces become transparent, and are no longer seen. . . . The best moments of life are these delicious awakenings of the higher powers, and the reverential withdrawing of nature before its God.

At the same time, as Emerson points out, this does not mean that nature is apart from Spirit or divorced from Spirit or alien to Spirit—that is a common belief in the mythic structure (Campbell called it "mythic dissociation"), but it finds no place in genuine psychic mysticism. All of nature, every nook and cranny, is in Spirit, bathed by Spirit, awash in Spirit; there is no point in nature that is not totally permeated and enveloped by Spirit.
These distinctions are crucial, because they allow us to distinguish carefully and clearly between three quite different worldviews on the relation between nature and spirit:

•   The first is magical indissociation, where spirit is simply equated with nature (nature = spirit); predifferentiated; very "this-worldly."
•    The second is mythic dissociation, where nature and spirit are ontologically separate or divorced; very "otherworldly."
•    The third is psychic mysticism: nature is a perfect expression of spirit (or as Spinoza put it, nature is a subset of spirit); "otherworldly" and "this-worldly" are united and conjoined.

With reference to the third: One of the major and defining characteristics of psychic-level mysticism is that it is a conscious identity with physiosphere and biosphere and noosphere—it does not simply privilege the biosphere; it is no mere geocentric/egocentric indissociation and regression. Even though this mysticism often takes its glorious exultation in the wonders of nature, nonetheless, as Emerson constantly emphasizes, this is "the Self of nation and of nature"—that is, the mystical union of matter, life, and culture, not merely a biospheric immersion. Were it only the Self of nature and not also of nation (culture and morality), then it would be a perfectly regressive, dualistic, and amoralist stance, glorifying merely an egocentric joy in finding oneself vitally reflected in the biosphere (and the rain whispers in its ear, I am here for you).
Rather, it is the union of the human moral endeavor with the display of nature as given that so distinguishes "nation-nature" mysticism from the narcissistic "nature worship" of mere sentimentalism (the technical points of this argument are given in note 16). This is most definitely not an ecological self; it is an Eco-Noetic Self, "The Self of nation and of nature," the Over-Soul that is the World Soul.
Indeed, if nature means the biosphere, and Nature (or Spirit) means the All, means the physiosphere and the biosphere and the noosphere and their Ground, then Emerson's point is very simple: the worshipers of nature are the destroyers of Nature.
Emerson, then, is singing songs to Nature, not nature. And that is why he maintains that nature immersion and nature worship prevent the realization of Nature, or the Spirit within and beyond, which transcends all, embraces all. And this is what he means by "nature-nation" mysticism: the biosphere and the noosphere united in the theosphere, or the Over-Soul that is simultaneously the World Soul.
And so he arrives at the very true conclusion: nature worshipers are the destroyers of Nature, the destroyers of Spirit; they would, he says, never look within long enough to find the true beyond, the Over-Soul out of which both culture and nature emerge (and which therefore lovingly embraces both); they would never look within for Nature, they only stare without at nature, and thus, as he puts it, their minds are imbruted, they remain a selfish savage—geocentric, egocentric.
Just as all of the lower is in the higher but not all the higher is in the lower (but rather "permeates" the lower), so all of nature is in Spirit but not all of Spirit is to be found in nature. Rather, Spirit permeates nature through and through, itself remaining behind nature, beyond nature, not confined to nature and not identified with nature, but never, at any point, divorced from nature or set apart from nature. Emerson is precise:

But when, following the invisible steps of thought, we come to inquire, Whence is matter? and Whereto? many truths arise to us out of the recesses of consciousness. We learn that the highest is present to the soul of man; that the dread universal essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or beauty, or power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all things exist, and that by which they are; that spirit creates; that behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present; one and not compound it does not act upon us from without, that is, in space and time, but spiritually, or through ourselves: therefore, that spirit does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old.

That Spirit does not build up nature around us, but puts forth nature through us: there is the profound difference between nature/nation mysticism and mere biocentric immersion; there is the telling difference between the Eco-Noetic Self and the merely ecological self; there is the difference between transcendence and regression.
In concluding this brief survey of the psychic level and the Kosmic consciousness of nature-nation mysticism, there are two points I would like to emphasize. The first is that, as I think is now obvious, this new going within has resulted in a new going beyond: a new and higher interior identity (Over-Soul) accompanied by a new and wider embrace of others (World Soul)—a single Soul embracing the physiosphere, biosphere, and noosphere in one loving caress.
Once again we go within and fall without to find this time . . . the entire Kosmos. And thus an actual Kosmic consciousness as well. But this movement itself is in no way any different from all the previous stages that we have examined, all of which were "self-development through self-transcendence," a new going within to a deeper and wider beyond.
And this Over-Soul recognition dawns precisely and only as the separate self, the ego or centaur, is transcended. Schopenhauer would agree entirely with Emerson (and so many others) on that crucial point. In Schopenhauer's words:

When one is no longer concerned with the Where, the When, the Why and the What-for of things, but only and alone with the What, and lets go even of all abstract thoughts about them, intellectual concepts and consciousness, but instead of all that, gives over the whole force of one's spirit to the act of perceiving, becomes absorbed in it and lets every bit of one's consciousness be filled in the quiet contemplation of the natural object immediately present—be it a landscape, a tree, a rock, a building, or anything else at all; actually and fully losing oneself in the object: forgetting one's individuality, one's will, and remaining there only as a pure subject, a clear mirror to the object—so that it is as though the object alone were there, without anyone regarding it, and to such a degree that one might no longer distinguish the beholder from the act of beholding, [then] the two have become one. . . .

Schopenhauer's "clear mirror to the object" is, of course, Emerson's "transparent eyeball," which is perfectly transpersonal, or no longer merely individual. Schopenhauer: "The person absorbed in this mode of seeing is no longer an individual—the individual has lost himself in the perception—but is a pure, willless, painless, timeless, Subject of Apprehension." The Over-Soul as intimation of the pure and timeless Witness. . . .
The second thing I would like to emphasize is the relation of the global Self or Over-Soul to the whole notion of morality and moral development itself. This is a connection, it seems to me, overlooked by most of today's moral theorists, but utterly obvious to Emerson and Schopenhauer (and not them alone).
We have seen the development of the moral sense evolve from physiocentric to biocentric to egocentric to sociocentric to worldcentric ("world-centric" being the global or planetary or universalizing reach of rationality and then vision-logic). And here, at the psychic level, the worldcentric conception gives way to a direct worldcentric experience, a direct experience of the global Self/World, the Eco-Noetic Self, where each individual is seen as an expression of the same Self or Over-Soul.
And what has that to do with morality? Everything, according to Emerson and Schopenhauer, for in seeing that all sentient beings are expressions of one Self, then all beings are treated as one's Self. And that realization—a profound fruition of the decentering thrust of evolution—is the only source of true compassion, a compassion that does not put self first (egocentric) or a particular society first (sociocentric) or humans first (anthropocentric), nor does it try merely in thought to act as if we are all united (worldcentric), but directly and immediately breathes the common air and beats the common blood of a Heart and Body that is one in all beings.
The whole point of the moral sequence, its very ground and its very goal, its omega point, its chaotic Attractor, is the drive toward the Over-Soul, where treating others as one's Self is not a moral imperative that has to be enforced as an ought or a should or a difficult imposition, but comes as easily and as naturally as the rising of the sun or the shining of the moon.
This moral oneness intensifies in the subtle and causal (as we will see), but it first becomes directly obvious here, in the psychic, and issues naturally in the spontaneous compassion inherent in the Over-Soul, a compassion on which all previous moral endeavors depended, but a compassion of which all previous endeavors were but mere and partial glimmers.
In the light of the Over-Soul, it becomes perfectly obvious: all previous ethics were tried and found wanting, all previous struggles for the life Good and True were too partial and too limited and much too narrow to satisfy—all wanted to taste this, the universal compassion through universal identity with the commonwealth of all beings: that I would see in an Other my own Self, with love driving the embrace, and compassion issuing in the tenderest of mercies.
Schopenhauer:

The sort of act that I am here discussing is ... compassion, which is to say: immediate participation, released from all other considerations, first, in the pain of another, and then, in the alleviation or termination of that pain, which alone is the true ground of all autonomous righteousness and of all true human love. An act can be said to have genuine moral worth only in so far as it stems from this source [the common Self]; and conversely, an act from any other source has none. The weal and woe of another comes to lie directly in my heart in exactly the same way—though not always to the same degree—as otherwise only my own would lie, as soon as this sentiment of compassion is aroused, and therewith, the difference between him and me is no longer absolute. And this really is amazing—even mysterious.

The mystery, of course, is the mystery of the Over-Soul allowing us to recognize ourselves in each other, beyond the illusions of separation and duality. Schopenhauer:

For if plurality and distinction ["separate selves"] belong only to this world of appearances, and if one and the same Being is what is beheld in all these living things, well then, the experience that dissolves the distinction between the I and the Not-I cannot be false. On the contrary: its opposite must be false. The former experience underlies the mystery of compassion, and stands, in fact, for the reality of which compassion is the prime expression. That experience, therefore, must be the metaphysical ground of ethics and consist simply in this: that one individual should recognize in another, himself in his own true being.

the subtle level

At the psychic level, the universalizing and global tendencies of reason and vision-logic come to fruition in a direct experience—initial, preliminary, but unmistakable—of a truly universal Self, common in and to all beings; in a direct experience of the unity of the physiosphere, biosphere, and noosphere, as an expression and embrace of that Self or Soul; so much so that this Self is understood to be prior to, within, and beyond matter, life, and mind, so that, for all the glorious radiance of a Spirit embodied, nonetheless matter and nature and civilization all "withdraw before their God."
At the same time, this is no mere solipsism. It is a higher Self or I, most assuredly, but also a higher Truth (or It) and a wider Community (or We)—the Over-Soul as the World Soul in the commonwealth of all beings as an objective State of Affairs. The Big Three in yet deeper unfoldings, higher reaches, wider communities, stronger affirmations. . . .
At the subtle level, this process of "interiorization" or "within-and-beyond" intensifies—a new transcendence with a new depth, a new embrace, a higher consciousness, a wider identity—and the soul and God enter an even deeper interior marriage, which discloses at its summit a divine union of Soul and Spirit, a union prior to any of its manifestations as matter or life or mind, a union that outshines any conceivable nature, here or anywhere else. Nature-nation mysticism gives way to Deity mysticism, and the God within announces itself in terms undreamt of in gross manifestation, with a Light that blinds the sun and a Song that thunders nature and culture into stunned and awestruck silence.
Nature lovers here scream "Foul!," as if beyond the glories of nature there should be no other glory, as if the visible and tangible scene exhausted the wonders of the Kosmos, as if in all the worlds and possible worlds through all eternity, their beloved nature alone should be allowed to shine.
But nature, dear sweet nature, is mortal and finite. It was born, it will remain a bit, and it will pass. It was created, it will be undone. And in all cases, it is bounded, and limited, and doomed to the decay that marks all manifest worlds. "I am somehow receptive of the great soul, and thereby I do overlook the sun and the stars and feel them to be the fair accidents and effects which change and pass," as Emerson said.
We are, of course, perfectly free to identify with nature, and to find a geocentric earth-religion that consoles us in our passing miseries. We are free to identify with a finite, limited, mortal Earth; we are not free to call it infinite, unlimited, immortal, eternal.
That Spirit which is within and beyond the Earth, which is prior to the Earth but not other to the Earth, that Spirit which is source and support and goal of all—that Spirit is intuited at the psychic and comes to the fore in the subtle stage of consciousness evolution, utterly including the previous stages, utterly outshining them. Let the Earth and Cosmos and Worlds dissolve, and see Spirit still shining in the Emptiness, never arising, never dissolving, never blinking once in the worlds of created time. "That joy," says Teresa, "is greater than all the joys of earth, and greater than all its delights, and all its satisfactions; and they are apprehended, too, very differently, as I have learned by experience."
In the Interior Castle, one of the truly great texts of subtle-level development, Teresa describes very clearly the stages of evolution of the "little butterfly," as she calls her soul, to its union with the very Divine, and she does so in terms of "seven mansions," or seven stages of growth.
The first three stages deal with the ordinary mind or ego, "unregener-ate" in the gross, manifest world of thought and sense. In the first Mansion, that of Humility, the ego is still in love with the creatures and comforts outside the Castle, and must begin a long and searching discipline in order to turn within. In the second Mansion (the Practice of Prayer), intellectual study, edification, and good company strengthen the desire and capacity to interiorize and not merely scatter and disperse the self in exterior distractions. In the Mansion of Exemplary Life, the third stage, discipline and ethics are firmly set as a foundation of all that is to follow (very similar to the Buddhist notion that sila, or moral discipline, is the foundation of dhyana, or meditation, and prajna, or spiritual insight). These are all natural (or personal) developments.
In the fourth mansion, a supernatural (or transpersonal) grace enters the scene with the Prayer of Recollection and the Prayer of Quiet (which Teresa differentiates by their bodily effects). In both, there is a calming and slowing of gross-oriented faculties (memory, thoughts, senses) and a consequent opening to deeper, more interior spaces with correlative "graces," which Teresa calls, at this stage, "spiritual consolations" (because they are consoling to the self, not yet transcending of the self). On the other hand, it is also as if the soul itself is actually beginning to emerge at this stage: "The senses and all external things seem gradually to lose their hold, while the soul, on the other hand, regains its lost control." And this carries a glimmer of the truth to come, "namely, that God is within us."
In the fifth mansion, via the Prayer of Union, a Spiritual Betrothal occurs, where the soul first directly emerges and intuits Spirit residing in the deepest interior of its own heart (the psychic). I say "emerge," because even if the soul was previously hidden in the depths, it now comes to the fore.
And this occurs in one particularly significant transformation, according to Teresa. The individual experiences, for the first time, a complete cessation of all faculties, and in that pure absorption, the self tastes its primordial union with God (or what Teresa also calls Uncreated Spirit). "For as long as such a soul is in this state, it can neither see nor hear nor understand: the period is always short [at this early stage]. God implants Himself in the interior of that soul in such a way that, when it returns to itself, it cannot possibly doubt that God has been in it and it has been in God."
And here Teresa uses perhaps her most famous metaphor. Prior to this transformative absorption, the unregenerate self (or ego) is, says Teresa, like a silkworm. But one taste of union (literally, just a single experience of this, she says, however brief), and the self is changed forever. One taste of absorption in Uncreate Spirit, and the worm emerges a butterfly. As we might put it, the ego dies and the soul emerges. ("All mean egotism vanishes; the currents of Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.") Teresa:

And now let us see what becomes of this silkworm. When it is in this state of [cessation/absorption], and quite dead to the world, it comes out a little white butterfly. Oh, greatness of God, that a soul should come out like this after being closely united for so short a time—never, I think, for as long as half an hour [in cessation]. For think of the difference between an ugly worm and a white butterfly; it is just the same here. The soul cannot think how it can have merited such a blessing—whence such a blessing could have come to it, I meant to say, for it knows quite well that it has not merited it at all.

One taste, and the butterfly is born, the soul is born (or emerges from its slumber in ego, its lostness in the exterior cocoon of form; and, of course, the butterfly is the omega point of the silkworm). The rest of Interior Castle describes the extraordinary journey of this little butterfly toward that primordial Flame in which, at last, it will happily die (to be, once again, reborn on yet a deeper level, that of union with Uncreate Spirit).
In the sixth mansion, Lover and Beloved, butterfly and God, soul and Uncreate Spirit, "see each other" for extended periods of time. Whereas the absorption of the Fifth Mansion might last up to a half-hour, various types of absorption here last a day or several days, she says (even if the cessation itself is still shortlived). The soul is "so completely absorbed and the understanding so completely transported—for as long as a day, or even for several days—that the soul seems incapable of grasping anything that does not awaken the will to love; to this it is fully awake, while asleep as regards all attachment... ."
But each new stage of growth, we have seen, introduces new types of possible pathology, and so it is with the little butterfly. Many people think that the famous "Dark Night of the Soul," a phrase introduced by Teresa's friend and collaborator Saint John of the Cross, is that terrible dark period before one finds Uncreate Spirit. But not so; the Dark Night occurs in that period after one has tasted Universal Being but before one is established in it, for one has now seen Paradise . . . and seen it fade.
The torment is now agonizing. The little butterfly suffers much, much more "torture" (Teresa's term) than anything the ego suffers or even could suffer. "This is a much greater trial," the little butterfly reports, "especially if the pains are severe; in some ways, when they are very acute, I think they are the greatest trial that exists. For they affect the soul both outwardly and inwardly, till it becomes so much oppressed as not to know what to do with itself. There are many things which assault her soul with an interior oppression so keenly felt and so intolerable that I do not know to what it can be compared. . . ."

She is conscious of a strange solitude, since there is not a creature on the whole earth who can be a companion to her—in fact, I do not believe she would find any in Heaven, save Him Whom she loves: on the contrary, all earthly companionship is torment to her. She thinks of herself as of a person suspended aloft, unable either to come down and rest anywhere on earth or to ascend into Heaven. She is parched with thirst, yet cannot reach the water; and the thirst is not a tolerable one but a kind that nothing can quench. . . ,

The dialectic of progress, here unleashed in its most subtle yet agonizing form.
On the more positive side, it is here in the Sixth Mansion that all sorts of subtle-level phenomena begin to emerge in consciousness, and Teresa chronicles them with astonishing clarity: the interior illuminations, the raptures, the subtle sounds and visions, the types of tranquillity and recollection, "ecstasy, rapture, or trance (for I think these are all the same)." Most of these visions (late psychic and early subtle) are in themselves transverbal ("the revelations are communicated to it without words," "in a way that involves no clear utterance of speech"). But the central event remains, in each of them, the possibility of the absorption in Uncreate Spirit. "When the soul is thus cleansed, God unites it with Himself. The soul becomes one with God."
All of which culminates in the Seventh Mansion, where actual Spiritual Marriage occurs, and vision gives way to direct apprehension or direct experience—"the union of the whole soul with God." Once this union is apprehended, it seems so obvious, says Teresa, that we can't even find a "doorway" through which it occurred (which is very reminiscent of Zen's "gateless gate"), and, in trying to describe this secret yet perfectly obvious union, words, of course, miserably fail her (but only because she cannot assume that we have had the experience):

This secret union takes place in the deepest center of the soul, which is where God dwells, and I do not think there is any need of a door by which to enter it. I say there is no need of a door because all that has so far been described [the earlier six stages or mansions] seems to have come through the medium of the senses and [mental] faculties. But what passes in the union of the Spiritual Marriage, in the center of the soul, is very different. This instantaneous [union] of God to the soul is so great a secret and sublime a favor, and such delight is felt by the soul, that I do not know with what to compare it. . . .

In the sixth mansion, Teresa says, this divine union is indeed apprehended, but only briefly and sporadically. She likens this preliminary union to two candles joined at the ends: they then give one light, but the two candles can be broken apart again. Not so the true Spiritual Marriage:

But here it is like rain falling from the heavens into a river or spring; there is nothing but water there and it is impossible to divide or separate the water belonging to the river from that which fell from the heavens. Or it is as if a tiny streamlet enters the sea, from which it will find no way of separating itself, or as if in a room there were two large windows through which the light streamed in: it enters in different places but it all becomes one.

In this brief sketch, I have mentioned, but have not dwelled on the details of, the possible pathologies that beset the transpersonal stages (four different stages, four very different types of possible pathologies).
Suffice it to say that they each involve (as always) problems of differentiation and integration at the new level, problems of agency and communion—too much of one or the other, and a failure of balance: problems of inflating the self at that stage or losing the self in the others of that stage (too much agency or too much communion).
It is crucially important, then, to distinguish these new and higher pathologies—of fulcrums seven (psychic), eight (subtle), and nine (causal)— from the lower and primitive pathologies (particularly fulcrums one, two, and three). Teresa is positively brilliant in distinguishing the agonies of the soul in its higher mansions or stages from those emotional problems that characterize the lower faculties. She clearly distinguishes, for example, three types of "inner voices"—those of "the fancy" or "imagination," which can be hallucinatory and "diseased," she says; those that are verbal, and may or may not represent true wisdom (for they may also be deceptive and "diseased"); and those that are transverbal altogether, representing direct interior apprehension. She has an exquisite and precise discriminating awareness between "fancies" and "hallucinations" and direct intuitive apprehensions, and she explains the differences at length. She gives clear and classic phenomenological descriptions of so many of the subtle-level apprehensions: interior illumination, sound, bliss, and understanding beyond ordinary time and place; genuine archetypal Form as creative pattern (not mythic motif); and psychic vision giving way to pure nonverbal, transverbal, subtle intuition; all summating in the "union of the whole soul with uncreated Spirit."
As for the use of the term "supernatural" by certain contemplatives (both East and West), care should be taken to differentiate what they mean by that term and what, for example, the mythic or religious literalist means by it. Literal or mythic Christianity, for example, originating from the magic-mythic and mythic stages of development, and beset by "mythic dissociation," imagines God as a Cosmic Father set above and apart from nature (ontologically divorced), and thus any action on God's part is and must be "supernatural"—a "miraculous" suspension of the laws of nature on behalf of "His children," activities that are all nonetheless variations on turning spinach into potatoes.
This dissociation of "natural" and "supernatural," and a praying, a begging, for the latter to miraculously intervene in the former, Emerson calls "meanness and theft," a vicious craving for commodities:

In what prayers do men allow themselves! Prayer looks abroad and asks for some foreign addition to come through some foreign virtue, and loses itself in endless mazes of natural and supernatural, and mediatorial and miraculous. Prayer that craves a particular commodity is vicious. [True] Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. But prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and not a unity in nature and consciousness.

God's "supernatural" intervention in "nature": this bears no relation to the contemplative view of the psychic and subtle stages. God or Spirit is not set apart from nature, but rather is the Ground of nature, and indeed of all manifestation—as Teresa puts it, "God is in all things by presence and power and essence." "Supernatural," in this usage, simply means that the natural union of Spirit with all things becomes a conscious realization in some, and that conscious realization is called supernatural, not because the union is present only in them and not in nature, but because they are directly realizing it. Teresa's spiritual friend and collaborator, the extraordinary John of the Cross, explains it thus:

This union between God and creatures always exists. By it He conserves their being so that if the union would end they would cease to exist [Spirit as Ground of Being]. Consequently, in discussing union with God, we are not discussing the substantial union which is always existing, but the union and transformation of the soul in God. This transformation is supernatural, the other natural.

As for this inner transformation, this interior realization, Teresa speaks movingly to her sister nuns, and to us, from the direct experience of the contemplative heart:

It becomes evident that there is "someone" in the interior of the soul who sends forth these arrows and thus gives life to this life, and that there is a sun whence this great light proceeds, which is transmitted in the interior part of the soul. The soul, as I said, neither moves from that center nor loses its peace; [it] leaves the soul in a state of pure spirituality, so that it might be joined with Uncreated Spirit.
Oh, God help me! What a difference there is between hearing and believing these words and being led in this way to realize how true they are! Each day this soul wonders more, for she feels that they have never left her, and perceives quite clearly, in the way I have described, that They [the "true words"] are in the interior of her heart—in the most interior place of all and in its greatest depths.

This new depth, this new within, which is a new beyond, utterly transcends nature, utterly embraces nature, and is thus embodied in nature, as perhaps Aurobindo explained most forcefully:

Its first effect has been the liberation of life and mind out of Matter; its last effect has been to assist the emergence of a spiritual consciousness, a spiritual will and spiritual sense of existence in the terrestrial being so that he is no longer solely preoccupied with his outermost life or with mental pursuits and interests, but has learned to look within, to discover his inner being, his spiritual self, to aspire to overpass [negate and preserve] earth and her limitations. As he grows more and more inward, his boundaries mental [noospheric], vital [biospheric], and spiritual begin to broaden, the bonds that held life, mind, soul to their first limitations loosen or snap, and man the mental being begins to have a glimpse of a larger kingdom of self and world closed to the first earth-life.
If he makes the inward movement which his own highest vision has held up before him as his greatest spiritual necessity, then he will find there in his inner being a larger consciousness, a larger life. An action from within and an action from above can overcome the predominance of the material formula, diminish and finally put an end to the power of the Inconscience, substitute Spirit for Matter as his conscious foundation of being and liberate its higher powers to their complete and characteristic expression in the life of the soul embodied in Nature.

Which is why Teresa sings of embracing all creatures from the center of the love and joy that now overflows from her innermost being: "These are very unskillful comparisons to represent so precious a thing, but I am not clever enough to think out any more: the real truth is that this joy makes the soul so forgetful of itself, and of everything, that it is conscious of nothing, and able to speak of nothing, save of that which proceeds from its joy. . . . Let us join with this soul, my daughters all. Why should we want to be more sensible than she? What can give us greater pleasure than to do as she does? And may all the creatures join with us for ever and ever. Amen, amen, amen."
And the little butterfly? What has become of her? As the ego (silkworm) died and was reborn as the soul (butterfly), so now the soul, after traversing the psychic and subtle domains and serving its purpose well, enters finally into its Spiritual Marriage, its own omega point, its deeper and greater context, and thus dies to its lesser being, dies as a separate self. "For it is here," she says softly, "that the little butterfly dies, and with the greatest joy, because Christ is now its life."
Which brings us to the causal.

the causal

In the subtle level, the Soul and God unite; in the causal level, the Soul and God are both transcended in the prior identity of Godhead, or pure formless awareness, pure consciousness as such, the pure Self as pure Spirit (Atman = Brahman). No longer the "Supreme Union" of God and Soul, but the "Supreme Identity" of Godhead. As Meister Eckhart put it, "I find in this breakthrough that God and I are one and the same."
As we will see, this pure formless Spirit is said to be the Goal and Summit and Source of all manifestation. And that is the causal.
Going within and beyond even this pure Source and pure Spirit—which is totally formless, boundless, unmanifest—the Self/Spirit awakens to an identity with, and as, all Form, all manifestation (gross, subtle, and causal), whether high or low, ascending or descending, sacred or profane, manifest or unmanifest, finite or infinite, temporal or eternal. This is not a particular stage among other stages—not their Goal, not their Source, not their Summit—but rather the Ground or Suchness or Isness of all stages, at all times, in all dimensions: the Being of all beings, the Condition of all conditions, the Nature of all natures. And that is the Nondual.
I have chosen Meister Eckhart and Sri Ramana Maharshi to illustrate both of these "stages" (causal and nondual), since we find in both of them not only a breakthrough to the causal, but also through the causal to the ultimate or Nondual, and as inadequate and misleading as words here invariably are, at least an indication of these two "movements" can be clearly and unmistakably discerned in both of these extraordinary sages. Sri Ramana Maharshi (echoing Shankara) summarizes the "viewpoint" of the ultimate or Nondual realization:

The world is illusory; 
Brahman alone is Real; 
Brahman is the world.

The first two lines represent pure causal-level awareness, or unmanifest absorption in pure or formless Spirit; line three represents the ultimate or nondual completion (the union of the Formless with the entire world of Form). The Godhead completely transcends all worlds and thus completely includes all worlds. It is the final within, leading to a final beyond—a beyond that, confined to absolutely nothing, embraces absolutely everything.
Eckhart begins by pointing to the need, first and foremost, for a transcendence or a "breakthrough" (a word he coined in German) from the finite and created realm to the infinite and uncreated source or origin (the causal), a direct and formless awareness that is without self, without other, and without God.

In the breakthrough, where I stand free of my own will and of the will of God and of all his works and of God himself, there I am above all creatures and am neither God nor creature. Rather, I am what I was and what I shall remain now and forever. Then I receive an impulse [awareness] which shall bring me above all the angels. In this impulse I receive wealth so vast that God cannot be enough for me in all that makes him God, and with all his divine works. For in this breakthrough I discover that I and God are one. There I am what I was, and I grow neither smaller nor bigger, for I am an immovable cause that moves all things.
Therefore also I am unborn, and following the way of my unborn [unmanifest] being I can never die. Following the way of my unborn being I have always been, I am now, and shall remain eternally.
In order for God and the Soul to exist, there must be duality or separation between them, and this duality, says Eckhart, obscures the primordial Godhead:

When I still stood in my first cause, there I had no God and was cause of myself. There I willed nothing, I desired nothing, for I was a pure Being in delight of the truth. There I stood, free of God and of all things. But when I took leave from this state and received my created being, then I had a God.

This Godhead (or what Eckhart also calls "God beyond God") is radically free of any finite or created thing, whether of matter or nature or mind or visions or Soul or God. Eckhart refers to this completely transcendental, free, or unmanifest state by words such as "Abyss," "unborn," "formless," "primordial origin," "emptiness," "nothingness."

Empty yourself of everything. That is to say, empty yourself of your ego [or any sort of separate-self sense, soul, or oversoul] and empty yourself of all things and of all that you are in yourself and consider yourself as what you are in God. God is a being beyond being and a nothingness beyond being. Therefore, be still and do not flinch from this emptiness.

This "emptiness" is not a theory. Even less is it "poetry" (which I have often heard). Nor is it a philosophical suggestion. It is a direct apprehension (direct "experience" is not quite right, since it is free of the duality of subject and object, and since it never enters the stream of time and thus is never "experiential" in any typical sense)—free of thoughts, free of dualities, free of time and temporal succession:

I speak therefore of a Godhead from which as yet nothing emanates and nothing moves or is thought about. Even if the soul were to see God insofar as he is God or insofar as God can be imagined or insofar as he is a thought, this same insufficiency would be there. But when all images of the soul are taken away and the soul [is] only the single One, then the pure being of the soul finds resting in itself the pure, formless Being of the divine. . . . Neither space nor time touch this place. Nothing so much hinders the soul's understanding of God as time and space. Time and space are parts of the whole, but God is one. So if the soul is to recognize God, it must do so beyond space and time. For God is neither this nor that ["neti, net?'] in the way of the manifold things of earth, since God is one. If the soul wants to know God, it cannot do so in time. For so long as the soul is conscious of time or space or any other [object], it cannot know God.
Know then that all our perfection and all our bliss depend on the fact that the individual goes through and beyond all creation and all temporality and all being, and enters the foundation that is without foundation. They must arrive at forgetfulness [of objects] and no-self consciousness—and there must be absolute silence there and stillness.

In this state of formless and silent awareness, one does not see the Godhead, for one is the Godhead, and knows it from within, self-felt, and not from without, as an object. The pure Witness (which Eckhart calls "the essence of the Subject") cannot be seen, for the simple reason that it is the Seer (and the Seer itself is pure Emptiness, the pure opening or clearing in which all objects, experiences, things and events arise, but which itself merely abides). Anything seen is just more objects, more finite things, more creatures, more images or concepts or visions, which is exactly what we are not.

It is free of all names and barren of all forms, totally free and void, just as God is void and free in himself. It is totally one and simple, just as God is one and simple, so that we can in no manner gaze upon it [see it as an object; it is the Seer, not anything seen; and the Seer is pure Emptiness, out of which seen objects emerge].
There the "means" is silent, for neither a creature nor an image can enter there. The soul knows in that place neither action nor knowledge. It is not aware in that place of any kind of image, either from itself or from any other creature.
You should love him as he is, a not-God, not-mind, not-person, not-image—even more, as he is a pure, clear One, separate from all two-ness. You should love God mindlessly, that is, so that your soul is without mind and free from all mental activities, for as long as your soul is operating like a mind, so long does it have images and representations. But as long as it has images, it has intermediaries, and as long as it has intermediaries, it has neither oneness nor simplicity. And therefore your soul should be bare of all mind and should stay there without mind.

Following Saint Dionysius, Eckhart refers to this "mindless" or "unknowing presence," or pure formless awareness without mental intermediaries, as "Divine Ignorance."

Whoever does not leave all external aspects of creatures can neither be received into this divine birth nor be born. The more you are able to bring all your powers to a unity and a forgetfulness of all the objects and images you have absorbed, and the more you depart from creatures and their images, the nearer and more receptive you are. If you were able to become completely unaware of all things, attain a forgetfulness of things and of self, the more [there is] the silent darkness where you will come to a recognition of the unknown, transbegotten God. For this ignorance draws you away from all knowledge about things, and beyond this it draws you away from yourself.

Like Eckhart, Sri Ramana Maharshi, India's greatest modern sage, begins by merely giving us some verbal pointers and information about the Self and its relation to God (and Godhead). But he will soon, we will see, go beyond mere chatter and point directly to the unknown and unknowing Source. So here he speaks in "positive" terms, before drawing us into Divine Ignorance.

The Self is known to everyone but not clearly. The Being is the Self. "I am" is the name of God. Of all the definitions of God, none is indeed so well put as the Biblical statement i am that i am. The Absolute Being is what is—It is the Self. It is God. Knowing the Self, God is known. In fact, God is none other than the Self.
And here Ramana clearly means "Godhead," as he himself often pointed out: "Creation is by the entire Godhead breaking into God and Nature."

As for the pure Self/Spirit or Godhead, Ramana constantly repeats, in words virtually identical to Eckhart's (and to the sages of this level the world over) that the Self is not body, not mind, not thought; it is not feelings, not sensations, not perceptions; it is radically free of all objects, all subjects, all dualities; it cannot be seen, cannot be known, cannot be thought. "In that state there is Being alone. There is no you, nor I, nor he; no present, nor past, nor future. It is beyond time and space, beyond expression. It is ever there."
The Self is "not this, not that," which in Sanskrit is the "neti, neti"  I bracketed in Eckhart's quotation. The Self is not this, not that, precisely because it is the pure Witness of this or that, and thus in all cases transcends any this and any that. The Self cannot even be said to be "One," for that is just another quality, another object that is perceived or witnessed. The Self is not "Spirit"; rather, it is that which, right now, is witnessing that concept. The Self is not the "Witness"—that is just another word or concept, and the Self is that which is witnessing that concept. The Self is not Emptiness, the Self is not a pure Self—and so on.

There are neither good nor bad qualities in the Self. The Self is free from all qualities. Qualities pertain to the mind only. It is beyond quality. If there is unity, there will also be duality. The numerical one gives rise to other numbers. The truth is neither one nor two. It is as it is.
People want to see the Self as something. They desire to see it as a blazing light, etc. But how could that be? The Self is not light, not darkness, not any observed thing. The Self is ever the Witness. It is eternal and remains the same all along.

Ramana often refers to the Self by the name "I-I," since the Self is the simple Witness of even the ordinary "I." We are all, says Ramana, perfectly aware of the I-I, for we are all aware of our capacity to witness in the present moment. But we mistake the pure I-I or pure Seer with some sort of object that can be seen and is thus precisely not the Seer or the true Self, but is merely some sort of memory or image or identity or self-concept, all of which are objects, none of which is the Witness of objects. We identify the I-I with this or that I, and thus identified with a mere finite and temporal object, we suffer the slings and arrows of all finite objects, whereas the Self remains ever as it is, timeless, eternal, unborn, unwavering, undying, ever and always present.

The I-I is always there. There is no knowing it [as an object]. It is not a new knowledge acquired. The I-I is always there.
There is no one who even for a trice fails to experience the Self. In deep sleep you exist; awake, you remain. The same Self is in both states. The difference is only in the awareness and the non-awareness of the world. The world rises with the mind and sets with the mind. That which rises and sets is not the Self.
The individual is miserable because he confounds the mind and body with the Self. It is the nature of the mind to wander. But you are not the mind. The mind springs up and sinks down. It is impermanent, transitory, whereas you are eternal. There is nothing but the Self. To abide as the Self is the thing. Never mind the mind. If the mind's source is sought, the mind will vanish leaving the Self unaffected.

The "mind vanished" is, of course, Eckhart's "mindless awareness" (and Zen's "no-mind," etc.). Ramana therefore counsels us to seek the source of the mind, to look for that which is aware of the mental or personal "I," for that is the transpersonal "I-I," unchanged by the fluctuations of any particular states, particular objects, particular circumstances, particular births, particular deaths.

Tracing the source of "I," the primal I-I alone remains over, and it is inexpressible. The seat of Realization is within and the seeker cannot find it as an object outside him. That seat is bliss and is the core [the ultimate depth] of all beings. Hence it is called the Heart. The mind now sees itself diversified as the universe. If the diversity is not manifest it remains in its own essence, its original state, and that is the Heart. Entering the Heart means remaining without distractions [objects]. The Heart is the only Reality. The mind is only a transient phase. To remain as one's Self is to enter the Heart.
The Self is not born nor does it die. The sages see everything in the Self. There is no diversity in it. If a man thinks that he is born and cannot avoid the fear of death, let him find out if the Self has any birth. He will discover that the Self always exists, that the body which is born resolves itself into thought and that the emergence of thought is the root of all mischief. Find the source of thoughts. Then you will abide in the ever-present inmost Self and be free from the idea of birth and the fear of death.

As one pursues this "self-inquiry" into the source of thoughts, into the source of "I" and the "world," one enters a state of pure empty awareness, free of all objects whatsoever—precisely Eckhart's "completely unaware of all things"—which in Vedanta is known as nirvikalpa samadhi (nirvikalpa means "without any qualities or objects"). In awareness, there is perfect clarity, perfect consciousness, but the entire manifest world (up to and including the subtle) simply ceases to arise, and one is directly introduced to what Eckhart called "the naked existence of Godhead." Sri Ramana:

If you hold to the Self [remain as Witness in all circumstances], there is no second. When you see the world you have lost hold of the Self. On the contrary, hold the Self and the world will not appear.
By unswerving vigilant constancy in the Self, ceaseless like the unbroken flow of water, is generated the natural or changeless state of nirvikalpa samadhi, which readily and spontaneously yields that direct, immediate, unobstructed and universal perception of Brahman, which transcends all time and space.

For Ramana and Eckhart (and not them alone), the causal is a type of ultimate omega point (but it is not, as we will see, the end of the story). As the Source of all manifestation, it the Goal of all development. Ramana: "This is Self-Realization; and thereby is cut asunder the Knot of the Heart [the separate-self sense]; this is the limitless bliss of liberation, beyond doubt and duality. To realize this state of freedom from duality is the summum bonum of life: and he alone that has won it is a jivanmukta (the liberated one while yet alive), and not he who has merely a theoretical understanding of the Self or the desired end and aim of all human behavior. The disciple is then enjoined to remain in the beatitude of Aham-Brahman—'I-I' is the Absolute."

the nondual

Such is the formless causal. But the causal is not, as Eckhart put it, the "final Word." When one breaks through the causal absorption in pure unmanifest and unborn Spirit, the entire manifest world (or worlds) arises once again, but this time as a perfect expression of Spirit and as Spirit. The Formless and the entire world of manifest Form—pure Emptiness and the whole Kosmos—are seen to be not-two (or nondual). The Witness is seen to be everything that is witnessed, so that, as Ramana puts it, "The object to be witnessed and the Witness finally merge together [and disappear as separate entities] and Absolute consciousness alone reigns supreme." But this nondual consciousness is not other to the world: "Brahman is the World."
This move from causal unmanifest to nondual embrace, Ramana refers to as the development from nirvikalpa to sahaj samadhi, which means "unbroken and spontaneously so," a "state" in which "the whole cosmos [Kosmos] is contained in the Heart, with perfect equality of all, for grace is all-pervading and there is nothing that is not the Self. All this world is Brahman."
Meister Eckhart explains both of these movements (utterly transcending the world, utterly embracing it):

First, "Be asleep to all things": that means ignore time, creatures, images [causal]. And then you could perceive what God works in you. That is why the soul says in the Song of Songs, "I sleep but my Heart watches." Therefore, if all creatures are asleep in you, you can perceive what God works in you [as Godhead].
Second: "Concern yourself with all things." This has three meanings. That means, first, seize God in all things, for God is in all things.
The second meaning is: "Love your neighbor as yourself." If you love one human being more than another, that is wrong. If you love your father and mother and yourself more than another human being, that is wrong. And if you love your own happiness more than another's, that is also wrong.
The third meaning is this: Love God in all things equally. For God is equally near to all creatures. And among all these creatures God does not love any one more than any other. God is all and is one. All things become nothing but God [Nondual].

When all things are nothing but God, there are then no things, and no God, but only this.
No objects, no subjects, only this. No entering this state, no leaving it; it is absolutely and eternally and always already the case: the simple feeling of being, the basic and simple immediacy of any and all states, prior to the four quadrants, prior to the split between inside and outside, prior to seer and seen, prior to the rise of worlds, ever-present as pure Presence, the simple feeling of being: empty awareness as the opening or clearing in which all worlds arise, ceaselessly: I-I is the box the universe comes in.
Abiding as I-I, the world arises as before, but now there is no one to witness it. I-I is not "in here" looking "out there": there is no in here, no out there, only this. It is the radical end to all egocentrism, all geocentrism, all biocentrism, all sociocentrism, all theocentrism, because it is the radical end of all centrisms, period. It is the final decentering of all manifest realms, in all domains, at all times, in all places. As Dzogchen Buddhism would put it, because all phenomena are primordially empty, all phenomena, just as they are, are self-liberated as they arise.
In that pure empty awareness, I-I am the rise and fall of all worlds, ceaselessly, endlessly. I-I swallow the Kosmos and span the centuries, untouched by time or turmoil, embracing each with primordial purity, fierce compassion. It has never started, this nightmare of evolution, and therefore it will never end.
It is as it is, self-liberated at the moment of its very arising. And it is only this.
The All is I-I. I-I is Emptiness. Emptiness is freely manifesting. Freely manifesting is self-liberating.
Zen, of course, would put it all much more simply, and point directly to just this.

Still pond
A frog jumps in
Plop!

the end of history

Does history, then, have a final omega point, the Omega of all previous and lesser omegas? Is there an actual End to History as we know it? Where all beings unite in their conscious realization of Godhead? Are we all being drawn to that "one, far-off Divine Event" that dissolves its own trail?
Many mystically inclined writers have made this assumption; it does make a certain amount of first-blush sense. From the "Aquarian Conspiracy" to Teilhard's "final Omega-point," from the dawn of a "New Age" to "Timewave Zero"—the millenarian End of History has been exuberantly announced. Such theorists as Terence McKenna and Jose Arguelles have even been good enough to calculate the actual date of this final omega point, and it is December 2012—"Timewave Zero."
Nor, of course, is this the first time we have seen such "End of History" notions, and in chapter 2 we saw why such notions actually make a certain amount of sense and have some degree of truth to them. To summarize that discussion:
Every senior dimension acts as a transformative omega point for its junior dimension, exerting a palpable pull of the deeper and wider on the shallower and narrower. And short of reaching its immediately senior omega, that lesser dimension suffers the slings and arrows of an outrageous fortune of partialness, division, alienation. Each deeper and wider context condemns the lesser to suffering (or rather, the narrower suffers from the boundaries of its own lacerating limitations). And evolution, in the broadest sense, is a sensitive flight from the pain of partiality.
Each deeper and wider context in the Kosmos thus exerts an omega pull on the shallower and narrower contexts, and when that particular wider depth is reached, that particular omega pull subsides, with the new depth finding that it now exists in a yet-wider and yet-deeper context of its own, which now exerts an unrelenting omega force to once again transcend, to once again embrace more of the Kosmos with care and consciousness.
In short, no holon rests happy short of finding its own immediately deeper context, its own omega point, which means that each holon rushes to the End of its own History.
In the West, since the time of the Enlightenment, the great omega point or End of History has generally been pictured as some form of rationality (either formop, as in the classical Enlightenment, or vision-logic, as with Hegel)—and modernity believed this to be the case because that was, indeed, its present state of development, to which all lesser occasions had pointed, and from which rationality had finally and triumphantly emerged. "Remember the cruelties!"—Voltaire's battle cry of the tortures that magic and mythic had inflicted on history, the tortures of lesser omega points brutally cutting into each other in search of ... reason.
This omega point of rationality can therefore be seen permeating the theories of virtually all developmentalists in the wake of modernity. We see it in Freud: magical and mythic primary-process cognition gives way, after much reluctance and turmoil, to the secondary (mature) process of rationality. We see it in Marx: rationality, as a worldcentric mode of cognition, will, with its economic developments, overcome egocentric and ethnocentric class divisions and usher in a true communion of equally free subjects. We see it in Piaget: preop to conop to formop, with each previous stage suffering the limitations of its own incapacities. Kohlberg and Gilligan: egocentric to sociocentric to worldcentric reason. Hegel: Self-positing Spirit returns to itself in the form of global Reason, the culmination of History itself. And Habermas: mutual understanding in unrestrained communicative action unfolded by rationality is the omega point of individual and social evolution itself.
The list is virtually endless. And, as we discussed earlier, they are all, as far as they go, essentially correct in many important ways, and they each can teach us much about expanding the circle and the context of care. (Previously, the mythic structure had said the same thing about itself in relation to archaic and magic: it had claimed that the coming of the mythic god was an end to all tribal history—and that was also true enough.)
Francis Fukuyama recently caused an international sensation with the publication of The End of History, in which he asks "whether, at the end of the twentieth century, it makes sense for us to speak of a coherent and directional History of humankind? The answer I arrive at is yes, for two separate reasons. One has to do with economics, and the other has to do with what is termed the 'struggle for recognition.' "
The "struggle for recognition" is simply the theme, developed from Hegel to Habermas, that mutual recognition—what we have also been calling the free exchange of mutual self-esteem among all peoples (the emergence of the rational-egoic self-esteem needs)—is an omega point that pulls history and communication forward toward the free emergence of that mutual recognition. Short of that emergence, history is a brutalization of one self or group of selves trying to triumph over, dominate, or subjugate others.
When, on the other hand, human beings universally recognize each other "as beings with a certain worth or dignity," then history in that sense "comes to an end because the longing that had driven the historical process—the struggle for recognition—has been satisfied in a society characterized by universal and reciprocal recognition. No other arrangement of human social institutions is better able to satisfy this longing, and hence no further progressive historical change is possible." The End of History.
Echoing Hegel, Fukuyama notes that "this does not mean that the natural cycle of birth, life, and death would end, or that important events would no longer happen, or that newspapers reporting them would cease to be published. It means, rather, that there would be no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions, because all of the really big questions had been settled."
"The really big questions" would be settled in this sense: once we have arrived at the worldcentric rational structures that both allow and demand (1) free and equal subjects of civil law, (2) morally free subjects, and (3) politically free subjects as world citizens—once we have arrived at that, what more, specifically, could there be to do in that domain? In that domain, "the really big questions would have been settled." And I believe that is indeed true.
We would, of course, continue to fine-tune the ways to implement these freedoms, and help ensure their global equity. And we might, indeed, find new freedoms, and new ways to extend the old freedoms. But these three factors would surely form an important platform for any new developments. And to the extent that History up to that point has been the clash of factions that refused those three factors, then this would indeed mark the End of that History.
All of which, as I said, can be true (and is true, I think) and still leave open—and still demand—that further historical changes are indeed possible, however much they will build upon the platform of mutual egoic self-esteem and self-recognition—and for the simple reason that there are indeed structures of consciousness beyond the egoic, structures that, in their own turn, exert new and subtler omega pulls on the already actualized self-esteem needs. And these new omega pulls will most assuredly destabilize the apparently "secure" structure of universal egoic recognition (which will be preserved, for sure . . . but also painfully negated, in the future paradigm wars set to rock the globe).
In other words, there are indeed some more "really big questions" that would still need to be settled: History would not have ended, only Egoic History.
Which brings us to the topic of the yet deeper or higher structures (beyond the ego), and whether the whole developmental process will ever actually culminate in a genuine and utter End of all possible History. For that is what is implied in the millenarian themes of Timewave Zero: the absolute Omega of all omegas, the End of all ends, the evaporation of disunity, the disappearance of appearance into the utter Abyss, the restaurant at the end of the universe, where the truly Last Supper will finally be served. . . .
Recall that, in figure 5-1,1 included the developments in the four quadrants up to vision-logic/centauric/planetary, which is, as it were, the leading edge of the World Soul's evolution at this point in time (or so I would maintain). And thus, at this point, any higher developments, in all four quadrants, have to occur through an individual's own efforts (UL), evidenced in individual bodily transformations (UR), practiced in a micro-community or sangha of the similarly depthed (LL), with its own microsocial structure (LR).
As these higher potentials begin to emerge collectively—in the decades, centuries, millennia ahead—we can only guess at what the actual surface structures will be like, for none of that is predetermined. These higher structures (psychic, subtle, causal, nondual) are simply potential world-spaces, pre-ontological worldspaces, that are given only in deep form, not in surface manifestation.
But we do know that they are structural potentials of the human bodymind, because since its emergence in its present form (around fifty thousand years ago), that bodymind has indeed supported realizations across the spectrum (has supported the realizations of a Buddha, a Gaudapada, a Dame Julian, a Lady Tsogyal). In other words, that bodymind has already supported psychic, subtle, causal, and nondual realizations; and thus, by a reconstructive science, we know those potentials are already available. This is not an a priori Hegelian deduction; it is an a posteriori conclusion.
The structural potentials are therefore available; but how they unfold will depend upon the mutual interaction and interplay between all four quadrants—intentional, behavioral, cultural, and social—as all four continue to evolve in history, and none of that is predetermined in any strong sense. Just as, for example, when the human bodymind with its complex triune brain emerged in its present form (again, around fifty thousand years ago), that brain already possessed the potential (or the hard-wiring) for symbolic logic, but that potential would have to await cultural, social, and intentional developments before it could display its form and function, just so with the higher potentials: how they will unfold remains to be seen. But the fact that they are there is demonstrated by the fact that they have already unfolded in some individuals (Buddha to Krishna), and they are thus already available to any individual, at any time, who chooses to continue his or her own evolution within and beyond.
And so the question remains: given all of that, is there still any sense in which a collective humanity would eventually evolve into an Absolute Omega Point, a pure Christ Consciousness (or whatever) for all beings? Are we heading for the Ultimate End of History, the Omega of all omegas? Does It even exist?
And the answer is that It does exist, and we are not heading toward it. Or away from It. Or around It. Uncreate Spirit, the causal unmanifest, is the nature and condition, the source and support, of this and every moment of evolution. It does not enter the stream of time at a beginning or exit at the end. It upholds all times and supports all places, with no partiality at all, and thus exerts neither push nor pull on history.
As the utterly Formless, it does not enter the stream of form at any point. And yet, as Ramana said, there is a sense in which it is indeed the summum bonum, the ultimate Omega Point, in the sense that no finite thing will rest short of release into this Infinity. The Formless, in other words, is indeed an ultimate Omega, an ultimate End, but an End that is never reached in the world of form. Forms continue endlessly, ceaselessly, holarchically forever (unless the universe collapses in on itself, retreating back along the path it came—to start anew, one presumes).
Forms continue endlessly, holarchically—holons all the way up, all the way down—the universe as a self-reflexively infinite hall of mirrors. This is why the subtle level, which does indeed act as a manifest omega pull to its lesser and junior dimensions, is said nonetheless to contain literally an infinite number of subtle levels within subtle levels within subtle levels—in billions and billions of other universes!
Thus, in the world of Form, the ultimate Omega appears as an ever-receding horizon of fulfillment (the ever-receding horizon of the totality of manifestation), forever pulling us forward, forever retreating itself, thus always conferring wholeness and partialness in the same breath: the wholeness of this moment is part of the whole of the next moment: the world is always complete and incomplete in any moment, and thus condemned to a fulfillment that is never fulfilled: the forms rush and run forward to a reward that retreats with the run itself.
But at any sufficiently developed point in an individual's development, a radical leap (Eckhart's "breakthrough") into the Formless can occur. The higher the development, the easier and more likely the jump will occur. Yet the Formless itself is not the result of that jump, nor does it then come to be. It is there, from the start, as one's own Original Face, the Face one had before the Big Bang, the Face that looks out from each and every sentient being in each and every universe, calling out to each and all for mutual Self-, and not just self-, recognition.
Abide as Emptiness, embrace all Form: the liberation is in the Emptiness, never finally in the Form (though never apart from it). And thus even if I realize the summum bonum, even if I cut abruptly off the path of endless form and find myself in the Formless, still, still, and still the world of form goes on—into the psychic, into the subtle, into the billions and billions of universes of form available and available and available, endlessly, ceaselessly, dramatically.
Evolution seeks only this Formless summum bonum—it wants only this ultimate Omega—it rushes forward always and solely in search of this—and it will never find it, because evolution unfolds in the world of form. The Kosmos is driven forward endlessly, searching in the world of time for that which is altogether timeless. And since it will never find it, it will never cease the search. Samsara circles endlessly, and that is always the brutal nightmare hidden in its heart.
And the twenty tenets are the form and function, the structure and the pattern, of this endless dream.

BOOK  TWO

Among the cultural inventions of mankind there is a treasury of devices, techniques, ideas, procedures, and so on, that cannot exactly be reactivated, but at least constitute, or help constitute, a certain point of view which can be very useful as a tool for analyzing what's going on now—and to change it.
—michel foucault

Some have declared that it lies within our choice to gaze upon a world of even greater wonder and beauty. It is said by these that the experiments of the mystics are related to the transmutation of the entire Universe. This method, or art, or science, or whatever we choose to call it (supposing it to exist, or to have existed), is simply concerned to restore the delights of Paradise; to enable men and women, if they will, to inhabit a world of joy and splendour. It is perhaps possible that there is such an experiment, and that there are some who have made it.                            — HAMPOLE

9

The Way Up Is the Way Down

The safest general characterization of the whole Western philosophic tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
—alfred north whitehead

But this much at any rate I can affirm about any present or future writers who pretend to knowledge of the matters with which I concern myself [mystical knowledge of the One]; in my judgement it is impossible that they should have any understanding of the subject. It is not something that can be put into words like other branches of learning; only after long partnership in a common life [contemplative community] devoted to this very thing does truth flash upon the soul, like a flame kindled by a leaping spark. No treatise by me concerning it exists or ever will exist.
— plato,  Seventh Epistle

it HAS always struck me as odd that so much of our Western tradition is supposed to be a series of footnotes to Plato, and yet the crucial book to which we are all footnotes . . . was never written. "No treatise by me concerning it exists or ever will exist."
Scholars generally agree that Plato was here referring to the mystical knowledge of the One, the Good "beyond Being" (as Plato also calls it).
There, apparently, was the heart of the Platonic message, and yet that he never committed to print (whereas he had no trouble writing volumes on ethics, on the archetypal Forms, epistemology, politics, love, and so forth).
But on that central point, Plato was silent, as silent he could only be. That "knowledge" or "divine ignorance" is not verbal but transverbal; it is not of the mind but of "no-mind"; it is not part of a "discursive philosophy" or merely "talking religion" but a "contemplative flash of truth in the soul." And while this truth or sudden illumination can be directly and injunctively shown (by long contemplative practice in community, as Plato put it), it cannot be fully said or verbally passed on (without the corresponding developmental signified in any individual). The true footnotes on that knowledge would be merely a series of empty circles and fingers pointing to the moon.
I would like to pursue this legacy of Plato for several reasons. One is that, if Western civilization is a series of footnotes to Plato, the footnotes are fractured.
Another is that we see in Plato one of the first clear descriptions of two movements related to the unspoken One, or two "movements" related to Spirit itself (to the extent it can be verbalized at all). The first movement is a descent of the One into the world of the Many, a movement that actually creates the world of the Many, blesses the Many and confers Goodness on all of it: Spirit immanent in the world. The other is the movement of return or ascent from the Many to the One, a process of remembering or recollecting the Good: Spirit transcendent to the world.
For, as we will see, while Plato emphasized both movements, Western civilization has been a battle royale between these two movements, between those who wanted only to live in "this world" of Manyness and those who wanted to live only in the "other world" of transcendent Oneness—both of them equally and catastrophically forgetting the unifying Heart, the unspoken Word, that integrates both Ascent and Descent and finds Spirit both transcending the Many and embracing the Many.
In Plato, as we will see in a moment, the two movements are given equal emphasis and equal importance, because both were grounded in the unspoken One of sudden illumination. But when that unifying One is forgotten, then the two movements fall apart into warring opposites, into ascetic and repressive and puritanical Ascenders, on the one hand, who will virtually destroy "this world" (of nature, body, senses) in favor of anything they imagine as an "other world"; and, on the other hand, the shadow-hugging Descenders, troglodytes each and all, who fuss about in the world of time looking for the Timeless, and who, in trying to turn the finite realm into an infinite value, end up distorting "this world" as horribly as do the Ascenders, precisely because they want—and force—from "this world" something that it could never deliver: salvation.
These two strategies—denying creation, seeing only creation, the Ascenders and the Descenders—have been the two main forms of fractured footnotes to Plato that have plagued Western civilization for two thousand years, and it is with these fractured footnotes that the West (and not it alone) has deeply and cruelly carved its initials on the innocent face of Heaven and of Earth.
And finally, I want to examine Plato's legacy because it is in these two movements—the One descending into the Many, the Many ascending back to the One—that we will find some of the last clues we need to understand the masculine and feminine faces of God, if such indeed exist.

the TWO legacies of plato

Arthur Lovejoy, in his highly acclaimed book The Great Chain of Being, has brilliantly traced out these two opposite and conflicting legacies of Plato—the Descending and the Ascending—which we may also call the "manyness strategy" and the "oneness strategy." The former emphasizes the created world of manyness, the latter the uncreated source or origin— and both, taken in and by themselves, are dualistic through and through, no matter how much they might call themselves monistic, nondual, all-encompassing, holistic, and whatnot.
Drawing on Lovejoy, but not confined to his interpretations, I would like to trace out the history of this dualism, the dualism of which all other Western dualisms are merely an incidental subset, and the dualism that, in just recent times, is showing signs of being overcome (as we will see).
Most people tend to remember "Plato the Ascender," striving for the "other world" of eternal oneness, and "ignoring" the temporal world of the created many, the mere shadows in the Cave. And, indeed, Plato clearly maps out the Ascending path from the Many to the One. In treatises such as The Republic and The Symposium, Plato traces the journey of the soul from its infatuation with the material realm of the immediate senses, through the mental realm of higher Forms, to a spiritual immersion in the eternal and unspoken One.
In this Ascent, it certainly appears that Plato is describing—and it is quite certain that his Neoplatonic successors were describing—the general movement that we have called the evolution or development from matter to body to mind to soul to spirit, culminating in the Good "beyond Being" disclosed in "sudden illumination," which is both the summit and the goal of the soul's journey in time. As Lovejoy puts it, "The Good is the universal object of desire, that which draws all souls toward itself [ultimate Omega]; and the chief good for man even in this life is nothing but the contemplation of this absolute or essential Good."
This Good transcends all possible manifestation—Plato even says "it actually transcends existence. . . . The whole soul must be wheeled round from that which is subject to becoming [the entire world of time and manifestation] until it is able to endure the contemplation of that which is . . ." (The Republic).
Plato refers to this "contemplation of that which is" as being "the Spectator of all time and existence"—a pure Spectator which is itself "not this, not that." Whatever metaphoric or mythic or positive attributes Plato occasionally assigned to the Absolute, there can be little doubt that what he finally had in mind was "neti, neti," or pure transcendental (formless) awareness, the summit and source of all being, and about which, strictly speaking, not even that could be said, as Lovejoy makes very clear:

The interpreters of Plato in both ancient and modern times have endlessly disputed over the question whether the absolute Good was for him identical with the conception of God. If [God] be taken for the ens perfectissimum, the summit of the hierarchy of being, the ultimate and only completely satisfying object of contemplation, there can be little doubt that the Idea of the Good was the God of Plato; and there can be none that it became the God of Aristotle, and of most of the philosophic theologies of the Middle Ages, and of nearly all the modern Platonizing poets and philosophers.
The attributes of God were, in strictness, expressible only in negations of the attributes of this world. You could take, one after another, any quality or relation or kind of object presented in natural experience, and say, with the Sage in the Upanishad: "The true reality is not this, it is not that. . . ."
Lovejoy, to his great credit, states clearly that Plato's unspoken One is  not primarily a philosophical theory or argument; it is not poetry or myth; and it is not, in the last analysis, a rational argument for Forms—it is a direct mystical experience (Lovejoy calls it a "natural religious experience"), cultivated in contemplation among the like-spirited and transmitted directly from teacher to student "like a flame kindled by a leaping spark," as Plato said.
Taken in and by itself, this Ascending side of Plato deals, I have suggested, with a mystical or transcendent awareness "beyond Being," beyond manifestation, beyond all qualities (causal/formless), and next to which the entire manifest world appears a shadow, a copy, an illusion. And, indeed, Plato saw the entire manifest world as a pale image of a Reality and Light beyond the Cave of Shadows, the Cave in which the troglodytes are chained, the Cave of fleeting sensory impressions and fluctuating mental opinions.
All Truth, all Goodness, all Beauty was to be found, finally and fully, only in the contemplative absorption in the eternal and unspoken One. No other release is possible; no other release can be desired; and those without this sudden illumination, Plato tells us, are forever lost in the suffering and turmoil of the fleeting and finite and temporal world. No matter how much "beauty" or "joy" or "wonderment" we might find in the manifest realm, it remains only a shadow (Emerson's "symbol") of the Beauty beyond, which is revealed in direct contemplative experience and confirmed by all who have the eyes to see.
This Ascending aspect of Plato, in other words, can be fairly well indicated in the standard realization of causal-level awareness wherever it is found: "The world is illusory (shadowy); Brahman alone is real." Put otherwise: flee the Many, find the One.
And thus was set the standard Ascending Goal of Western civilization. It would become the God of Aristotle and of Augustine, and therefore of virtually all of Christianity, both in popular and esoteric forms (Eastern, Roman, and Protestant). It would become the Goal of the Gnostics and Manichaeists, so much so that any trace of the finite and shadowy world was equated flat-out with evil. And when religion itself became passe, the same Goal simply jumped to the Age of Enlightenment, and continued in unabated and undented fashion its ever-ascending yearnings for the light. And for those who found Reason obnoxious, it would nevertheless equally and just as intensely fire every poetic and artistic imagination that found life as given unbearable and eternity a release.
We will return to this history in a moment, but such have been the Ascenders, in just a few of their many guises.
But the absolutely crucial point is that that was only half of what Plato set in motion. "Now if Plato had stopped here," says Lovejoy, "the subsequent history of Western thought would, it can hardly be doubted, have been profoundly different from what it has been." Indeed, most of Plato's critics—or rather, those who see him merely as an Ascender, and those who decry his "otherworldliness"—seem to think that he actually did stop here. "But," Lovejoy points out, "the most notable—and the less noted—fact about his historic influence is that he did not merely give to European otherworldliness its characteristic form and phraseology and dialectic, but that he also gave the characteristic form and phraseology and dialectic to precisely the contrary tendency—to a peculiarly exuberant kind of this-worldliness."
This "exuberant this-worldliness" is what so many (I would say all) of Plato's "ecological critics" have missed. They set up a straw Plato and then manfully, triumphantly, boisterously knock it down, and all congratulate themselves on their this-worldly victory. But Plato is not so easily manhandled.

For his own philosophy no sooner reaches its climax in what we may call the otherworldly direction [Ascending] than it reverses course. Having arrived at the conception [the "natural religious experience"] of a pure perfection alien to all the categories of ordinary thought and in need of nothing external to itself [causal awareness], he forthwith finds in just this transcendent and absolute Being the necessitating ground of this world; and he does not stop short of the assertion of the necessity and worth of the existence of all conceivable kinds of finite, temporal, imperfect, and corporeal beings.

The manifest realm, far from being a world of shadows in the Cave, is now seen as the realm and very embodiment of the Radiance of Spirit itself, suffused with Goodness and with Love. "The world of sense could no longer be adequately described as an idle flickering of insubstantial shadow-shapes, at two removes from both the Good and the Real. Not only did the Sun itself [the causal One] produce cave, and fire, and moving shapes, and the shadows, and their beholders, but in doing so it manifested a property of its own nature not less essential—and, as might well appear, even more excellent—than that pure radiance upon which no earthly eye could steadfastly gaze. The shadows were as needful to the Sun as the Sun to the shadows; their existence was the very consummation of its perfection."
And thus their existence was cause for an exuberant this-worldly celebration and embrace!
And so, after establishing an ascending "return to the One," Plato then sets forth a genuinely creation-centered spirituality, an effulgence and embrace of the radiant splendor of the Many. The purely Ascended One, far from being a complete Perfection in itself, is viewed as decidedly inferior to a One that also flows out of itself and into all manifestation, into all creation. Indeed, for Plato, an Absolute that cannot create is no Absolute at all, and thus true Perfection means a Perfection whose superabundance flows out and into all beings without exception.
In the Timaeus—the book that would have such a singular impact on all subsequent Western cosmologies—Plato traces out the creative superabundance and overflowing of the One through a creator God and world of archetypal Forms into humans (mind) and then other living creatures (body) and the world of physical existence (matter).
Thus, as the Neoplatonists would spell it out: from spirit to soul to mind to body to matter—each level is said to be an outflowing of its senior dimension, so that the One Source and Ground of all is reflected in each, to its own degree. The entire universe Plato therefore likens to a giant "superorganism," with all parts interwoven with one another and with their eternal Ground (Plato being an articulate spokesman for Gaia). The entire manifest world—this world—Plato calls a "visible, sensible God."
Thus, Plato's Self-Sufficing Perfection is also, and at the same time, a Self-Emptying Fecundity. It is not only the summit and goal of ascent, it is the source and origin and fundamental reality of all descent, of all manifestation, of all creation. As Lovejoy puts it, "A timeless and incorporeal One became the ground as well as the dynamic source of the existence of a temporal and material and extremely multiple and variegated universe."
And, Plato leaves no doubt whatsoever, this Spirit-in-Creation (or One-in-Many) is much more complete and full and perfect, as it were, than unmanifest Spirit alone. He implies, and on occasion actually states, that the merely unmanifest Spirit (causal) is in a type of tension or "envy"
with manifestation, and that this tension is overcome only as it is seen that all of manifestation, of every possible type and degree in every possible world—all of it is the Radiance of Spirit.
So there is Plato's final stance, and he means it in a very strong way: Spirit is more perfect in the world than out of it. Thus the completion, the all-necessary third line of Nondual realization: "Brahman is the world" (or again, "Nirvana and samsara are not two").
And so it was that Plato at this point united or integrated the path of Ascent with the path of Descent, giving an equal emphasis to the One and to the Many, to nirvana and to samsara. Or, as Lovejoy puts it, "the two originally distinct strains in Plato's thought are here fused."
We can therefore summarize Plato's overall position in words that would apply to any Nondual stance wherever it appears (as we have already seen it apply to Eckhart and Ramana): flee the Many, find the One; having found the One, embrace the Many as the One.
Or, in short: Return to One, embrace Many. The exuberant and loving and unconditional embrace of the Many is the fruition and consummation of the Perfection of the One, and without which the One remains dualistic, fractured, "envious."
This integration may be thought of (very crudely and, as always, somewhat misleadingly) as a Great Circle. The descending or manifesting or creative path moves from the top of the circle to the bottom, and the ascending or returning path from the bottom to the top—both arcs traversing the same dimensions—which is why, as we will see, "The way up is the way down."
Thus, Descent is not bad, unless taken in and by itself; on the contrary, it is the Creative Source and Matrix of all that is and the fruition of Perfection itself. Likewise, Ascent is not bad, unless taken in and by itself; on the contrary, it is the realization of the Summit and Goal of all that is. The point, we might say, is that the circle of Ascending and Descending energies must always be unbroken: "this world" and the "other world" united in one ongoing, everlasting, exuberant embrace.

wisdom and compassion

The Platonic and Neoplatoníc traditions (and similar Nondual traditions in the East) therefore maintained that the "Good" or Perfect One is expressed in and as the "Goodness" of all creation. Those two terms—the "Good" and "Goodness"—are extremely important, because we will see these actual terms repeated again and again in subsequent history: The path of Ascent is the path of the Good; the path of Descent is the path of Goodness.
Indeed, wherever the Nondual traditions would appear—traditions uniting and integrating the Ascending and Descending paths, in the East and in the West—we find a similar set of themes expressed so constantly as to border on mathematical precision. From Tantra to Zen, from the Neoplatonists to Sufism, from Shaivism to Kegon, stated in a thousands different ways and in a hundred different contexts, nonetheless the same essential word would ring out from the Nondual Heart: the Many returning to and embracing the One is Good, and is known as wisdom; the One returning to and embracing the Many is Goodness, and is known as compassion.
Wisdom knows that behind the Many is the One. Wisdom sees through the confusion of shifting shapes and passing forms to the groundless Ground of all being. Wisdom sees beyond the shadows to the timeless and formless Light (in Tantra, the self-luminosity of Being). Wisdom, in short, sees that the Many is One. Or, as in Zen, wisdom or prajna sees that Form is Emptiness (the "solid" and "substantial" world of phenomena is really fleeting, impermanent, insubstantial—"like a bubble, a dream, a shadow," as The Diamond Sutra puts it). Wisdom sees that "this world is illusory; Brahman alone is real."
But if wisdom sees that the Many is One, compassion knows that the One is the Many; that the One is expressed equally in each and every being, and so each is to be treated with compassion and care, not in any condescending fashion, but rather because each being, exactly as it is, is a perfect manifestation of Spirit. Thus, compassion sees that the One is the Many. Or, as in Zen, compassion or karuna sees that Emptiness is Form (the ultimate empty Dharmakaya is not other to the entire world of Form, so that prajna or wisdom is the birth of the Bodhisattva and karuna or compassion is the motivation of the Bodhisattva). Compassion sees that "Brahman is the world," and that, as Plato put it, the entire world is a "visible, sensible God."
And it was further maintained, in East and West alike, that the integration of Ascent and Descent is the union of wisdom (which sees that Many is One) and compassion (which sees that One is Many). The love we have for the One is extended equally to the Many, since they are ultimately not-two, thus uniting wisdom with compassion in every moment of perception. (This is the secret of all tantric spirituality, whether of the East or of the West, as we will see in volume 2.)
We will be going over these details as we proceed; for now, the essential point is simply that either the Ascending or Descending path, taken in and by itself, is catastrophic. Start with Descent or Outflow or Effulgence: creation is not a sin, creation is not evil (as the Ascenders, the Gnostics, the Manichaeists, the Theravadins would all maintain)—creation is not a sin, getting lost in creation is. For at that point, the creatures that express the final perfection of Spirit now become merely the shadows in the Cave obscuring Spirit.
In Plato's version: the soul, once having been grounded in the radiant glories of the unspoken One, "falls away" from the One, through the mental Forms or archetypes and into the material and bodily realm of the senses, and finds itself there, so to speak, lost and confused. In the Phaedrus, Socrates speaks of the soul ("uncreate and immortal") as a "winged charioteer" that "taken as a whole . . . traverses the entire universe [Kosmos]; when it is winged and perfect it moves on high and governs all creation." "The region of which I speak," he says, "is the abode of the reality with which true knowledge is concerned, a reality without color or shape, intangible but utterly real, apprehensible only by the pilot of the soul." Here souls can make the "circular revolution" through all of manifestation and "back to the starting point" without being caught in it, lost in it, bound by it. And the "two horses" of the chariot—vitality and appetite (representing the body)—are given "ambrosia" and "nectar" to drink—these horses (the body) are no impediment to salvation at all.
But some souls get "carried away," not by the body or the two horses, but by an imbalance or unruliness between the horses and the charioteer (the soul), and the fault lies squarely with the charioteer. They begin to "see parts, but not the whole," Socrates says. "Great is the confusion and struggle and sweat, and many souls are lamed and many have their wings all broken through the feebleness of their charioteers." If the soul can retain its vision of eternal Truth, then, Socrates says, "it can remain unscathed, and if it can continue thus for ever shall be for ever free from hurt"—free, we might say, from the suffering of the round of birth and death, which Socrates speaks of at length ("the great circuit of past lives").
"But when a soul fails to follow and misses the vision, [it] sinks beneath the burden offor get fulness. . . ." And it is this forgetfulness of the Origin, and not the existence of manifestation, that constitutes the Fall. "Every human soul by its very nature has beheld true Being. . . . Beauty was once ours to see in all its brightness. Whole were we who celebrated that festival, and whole and unspotted and serene were the objects [creation itself] revealed to us in the light of that mystic vision. Pure was the light and pure were we. . . ,"
The Fall is reversed, then, not by erasing creation, but by reversing our forgetfulness, of both the Good of the pure One and the Goodness of the unstained Many. Recollection (or remembrance of Source) is thus the path of Return, the path of Ascent. "But," says Socrates, "it is not every soul that finds it easy to use its present experience [which is a direct radiance of Spirit] as a means of recollecting the world of reality. It is only by the right use of such aids to recollection, which form a continual initiation into the perfect mystic vision, that a man can become perfect in the true sense of the word." Not only is creation not the cause of the Fall, it is the continual initiation into the perfect Redemption.
In other words, this world is not a sin; forgetting that "this world" is the radiance and Goodness of Spirit—there is the sin.
It is not my intention in these sections to give extensive cross-cultural references to the same themes, but perhaps we should at least notice that, in the East "recollection" or smriti, "mindfulness," is the beginning of virtually all paths of contemplation, the aim of which is the remembering that one's true nature is Buddha-nature, that Atman is Brahman. And this is most definitely said to be a remembering or a recognition or a recollection of that which one already is, but has simply forgotten or ignored (avidya — "ignorance," "forgetting"). Enlightenment or awakening (bodhi, moksha) is not a bringing into being of that which was not, but a realizing of that which always already is. ("Do not pretend that by meditation you are going to become Buddha," says Huang Po. "You have always been Buddha but have forgotten that simple fact. Hard is the meaning of this saying!") Likewise, Christ's injunction, "Do this in remembrance of me," is a remembrance that "not I but Christ liveth in me" (yet another version of Atman = Brahman).
As Philosophia said to Boethius in his distress, "You have forgotten who you are."

eros and thanatos

That which was dis-membered must be re-membered. This re-membering or re-collecting or re-uniting is the Path of Ascent, which, Socrates says, is driven by Eros, by Love, by the finding of greater and greater union—a higher and wider identity, as we have been putting it. By means of Eros, says Socrates, the lovers are taken out of themselves and into a larger union with the beloved, and this Eros continues from the objects of the body to the mind to the soul, until the final Union is re-collected and remembered.
Eros, as Socrates (Plato) uses the term, is essentially what we have been calling self-transcendence, the very motor of Ascent or development or evolution: the finding of ever-higher self-identity with ever-wider embrace of others. And the opposite of that was regression or dissolution, a move downward to less unity, more fragmentation (what we called the self-dissolution factor, tenet 2d).
And here I will give one last comparison: Freud, it is well known, finally came to see all psychic life governed by two opposing "forces"—Eros and Thanatos, which are usually referred to as sex and aggression, although that is not the final way that Freud defined them. In An Outline of Psychoanalysis Freud gives his final statement: "After long hesitancies and vacillations, we have decided to assume the existence of only two basic instincts, Eros and the destructive instinct. The aim of the first of these basic instincts is to establish ever greater unities—in short, to bind together." There is no mistaking the meaning of that: it is pure Eros. "The aim of the second is, on the contrary, to undo connections and so to destroy things. In the case of the destructive instinct we may suppose that its final aim is to lead what is living into an inorganic state [matter]. For this reason we also call it the death instinct.''
Freud, of course, was severely criticized by virtually everybody, including his own followers, for proposing the death instinct (thanatos), but clearly it is exactly what we have in mind with the self-dissolution factor. It is simply the impulse to move to a lower level in the holarchy, and its final aim is therefore insentient matter, exactly as Freud said.
But the only point that I wish to emphasize is that even Freud—one of the West's greatest psychologists, and certainly its arch-antimystic— found that human misery could be reduced to a battle and disharmony between the Path of Ascent and the Path of Descent, as it appears in each of us. As is well known, Freud found no solution to the discontent, and remained profoundly pessimistic about the human condition.
Precisely because Freud did not, like Plato, carry Ascent to its conclusion in the One, he had no way whatsoever to unite it with a radiant Descent into the Many. No way, that is, to unite Eros and Thanatos—to unite the way up and the way down—to overcome their eternal strife.Freud clearly and accurately saw Eros; he clearly and accurately saw Thanatos; and perhaps more clearly than anybody in history, he saw that so much human misery is and always will be a battle between the two, and that the only solution to our suffering is a union of Eros and Thanatos—and yet there is precisely nothing Freud could do about it. There he was stranded, and there he left us stranded.
Lacking the unifying Heart, the unspoken One, that joins Ascent and Descent in the everlasting Circle of Redemption and Embrace, Freud simply remained as one of the many, and certainly one of the greatest, of the fractured footnotes to Plato.

plotinus

From Plato the torch of nonduality, the integrative vision, still intact, passed most notably to Plotinus (205-270 ce), who gave it one of the most complete, most compelling, most powerful statements to be found anywhere, at any time, in any form, ancient or modern, East or West. "No other mystical thinker," says William Inge, "even approaches Plotinus in power and insight and profound spiritual penetration." Even Saint Augustine stood back in awe: "The utterance of Plato, the most pure and bright in all philosophy, scattering the clouds of error, has shone forth most of all in Plotinus, who has been deemed so like his master that one might think them contemporaries, if the length of time between them did not compel us to say that in Plotinus Plato lived again."
Whereas other Platonic teachers were often referred to as "divine," the superlative "most divine" was always reserved for Plotinus. And even if we are one of the many moderns to whom "divine" is meaningless, then we still have to come to terms with the fact that, as Whittaker put it, Plotinus is "the greatest individual thinker between Aristotle and Descartes," and that, according to Benn, "no other thinker has ever accompushed a revolution so immediate, so comprehensive, and of such prolonged duration."
Besides being a profoundly original philosopher and contemplative sage, Plotinus was a synthesizing genius of unparalleled proportion, and therein lies much of his importance. Born in Egypt at the beginning of the third century (nobody knows where, exactly, and he never said), he spent much of his formative years in Alexandria, studying with his main teacher, the remarkable Ammonius Saccas ("This is the man I was looking for," he exclaimed after hearing his first lecture; he stayed with him for ten years). From there he went to Rome, where the emperor Gallienus and his wife, Salonina, showed him great favor, and there he taught for the rest of life, attracting such disciples as Amelius and Porphyry (the great Proclus would eventually carry on the lineage). "Simple in his habits," says Porphyry, "though without any harsh asceticism, he won all hearts by his gentle and affectionate nature [this apparently is no exaggeration, for during his entire time in Rome, he made no known enemies, an almost impossible feat], and his sympathy with all that is good and beautiful in the world. His countenance, naturally handsome, seemed to radiate light and love when he discoursed with his friends."
Plotinus, by his own account, had numerous profound experiences of the "all-transcending, all-pervading Godhead," and this, of course, was the central pillar of his teaching, along with specific contemplative practices (injunctions) to actualize this realization in one's own case. In addition to recollection or contemplation (going within and beyond), he describes what amounts to a type of karma yoga like that of the Bhagavad Gita: grounded in Unity, do your duty, and do so in a thoroughly "this-worldly" fashion. Karl Jaspers writes that "he was called upon as an arbiter in quarrels, but never had an enemy. Distinguished men and women on the point of death brought him their children to educate and entrusted him with their fortunes to administer. Consequently, his house was full of boys and girls."
A house full of orphaned children? And this is the man about whom Jaspers says, very accurately and with much admiration, "No philosopher has lived more in the One than Plotinus"! Clearly, when Plotinus said that the true One embraces the Many, he meant it.
While Plotinus was visiting a country house in Campania, fatal symptoms appeared, and his friend and physician Eustochius was sent for, which apparently took a bit of time, for when Eustochius finally arrived, Plotinus said only, "I was waiting for you, before the Divine-in-us departs to the Divine-in-All" (he would never say "the Divine-in-me"), whereupon he closed his eyes and ceased breathing.
Alexandria of the third century was extraordinary for the cross-currents of intellectual, philosophical, and spiritual teachings that poured in, literally, from all over the world—there has probably been nothing else quite like it in the history of the West. Clement and Origen (arguably the two most important of the early Church Fathers) were fellow townsmen of Plotinus. In Alexandria, one had direct access to at least the following teachers or their schools: the Goddess cult of Isis, Mithra worship, Plutarch (eclectic Platonism), the Neo-Pythagoreans, the Orphic-Dionysian mysteries, Apollonius of Tyana, the extraordinary Jewish mystic Philo, Manichaeanism, the all-important Stoics, Numenius, the great African novelist Apuleius, much of the Hermetic writings, the Magi, Brahmanic Hinduism, early Buddhism, and virtually every variety of Gnosticism (which had originated in Syria, and eventually found its greatest proponent in Valentinus)—not to mention two of the most important founders of Christianity.
It is only a slight exaggeration to say that Plotinus took the best elements from each school and jettisoned the rest (in fact, at age thirty-nine, he deliberately joined Emperor Gordianus's Eastern campaign in order to familiarize himself with whatever wisdom traditions he might find); and, based on his own profound contemplative experiences, fashioned the whole thing into what can only be called an awesome vision, as coherent as it is beautifully compelling.
(Even Bertrand Russell, fairly jaded in all things spiritual, maintained that we could judge a philosopher according to the True, or the Good, or the Beautiful. The True belonged, presumably, to Bertrand; the Good belonged, he said, to Spinoza. But the Beautiful. . . ah, the Beautiful, that belonged to Plotinus.)
It is with Plotinus that the Great Holarchy of Being receives its first comprehensive presentation, although the notion itself, of course, goes back directly to Plato and Aristotle (and earlier). In this chapter I have been using the simple matter-body-mind-soul-spirit, but figure 9-1 is a more complete version of the holarchy as given by Plotinus. All of the words used in figure 9-1, including those in parentheses (but not in brackets), are taken directly from William Inge. And let me repeat that although we have to write these "levels" down in a "linear" fashion, a better representation might be a series of concentric spheres, expanding and enveloping, and that development through the "expanding spheres" is not a linear or unidirectional affair, but may best be represented as, say, a spiral staircase, with all sorts of ups and downs, but an overall and unmistakable direction: transcend and embrace. All of these ideas, we will see, are strongly emphasized in Plotinus.

Absolute One (Godhead)                  Satchitananda/Supermind (Godhead) 
Nous (Intuitive Mind) [subtle]        Intuitive Mind/Overmind 
Soul/World-Soul [psychic]                Illumined World-Mind 
Creative Reason [vision-logic]         Higher-mind/Network-mind 
Logical Faculty [formop]                  Logical mind 
Concepts and Opinions                   Concrete mind [conop] 
Images                                               Lower mind [preop] 
Pleasure/pain (emotions)                 Vital-emotional; impulse 
Perception                                           Perception 
Sensation                                             Sensation 
Vegetative life function                    Vegetative 
Matter                                               Matter (physical)
plotinus                                           aurobindo	
Figure 9-1.  The Great Holarchy according to Plotinus and Aurobindo

For comparison, I have included the developmental holarchy as given by Sri Aurobindo, generally regarded as the greatest synthesizer of the philosophies and psychologies of India (all of the words are Aurobindo's, including those in parentheses but not brackets). That the greatest synthesizers of the West and the East are in such fundamental agreement is, I think, no massive surprise.
The higher stages (psychic, subtle, and causal/ultimate) in both Plotinus and Aurobindo are essentially as I described them in the previous chapter. We might simply note, for Plotinus, that in the subtle level (Nous or God), "In knowing God, spirit knows itself" and we find "ourselves and the whole one with God." But that union only finds its ground in the causal Godhead "beyond existence and beyond knowledge." To reach this formless state, says Plotinus, "Strip thyself of everything. We must not be surprised that that which excites the keenest of longings is without any form, even spiritual form."
This emptying of self and objects (and even of spiritual form) results, once again, in formless (nirvikalpa) samadhi, as Inge words it, "the mystical experience of formless intuition." "The Soul," as Plotinus puts it, "will not allow itself to be distracted by anything external [any object], but will ignore them all, as at first by not [getting lost in] them, and then at last by not even seeing them [unmanifest absorption]; it will not even know itself; and so it will abide as the One."
But this "divine darkness" or "unknowingness" is not a blank state or trance, not a loss of consciousness but an intensification of it. "The One in Plotinus," says Inge, "is not unconscious, but superconscious; not infra-rational but supra-rational." Plotinus himself seems to have clearly in mind (or in no-mind) that ever-wakeful awareness or Witness that is present even in dream and deep sleep: he says that all objects, even spiritual Beauty, "parade by in front of it," but that it itself remains a "wakefulness beyond Being," a "sleepless light" which "is inborn and present to us even when we sleep," and "directed not on the future but on the present, or rather, on the eternal Now and the always present." We cannot see it as an object because there is no duality here—"it is not an object but an atmosphere."
The One is not a numerical one, as so many of Plotinus's interpreters imagine. As he patiently but dryly puts it, "the One is not one of the units that make up the number two." To say that "the whole world is one and undivided" would be to miss the point entirely, for that itself is merely a concept, and a dualistic concept at that. The "real" One is the ever-present Wakefulness that is aware of any concept, including "One," but is not itself that or any other image, thought, or object, but embraces all, equally and fully, with ever-present Wakefulness.
And thus (to lapse back into language) this "One," being Nothing in itself, can be, and is, the Ground of all that arises. Plotinus speaks of it (metaphorically) as "the fountain of life and the fountain of God, the source of Being, the cause of the Good, the root of Soul. These flow out of the One, but not in such a way as to diminish it." Wakefulness is wakefulness, no matter what "parades by," and so Wakefulness is never diminished by any object that it witnesses, and yet is never apart from what it witnesses either, just as the reflections on an empty mirror are never apart from it.
And thus Plotinus can easily make the nondual leap: "Spirit not only engenders all things; it is all things" (the all-important third line of the Nondual realization: the Many are illusory; the One alone is Real; the One is the Many—Brahman is the World). Which brings him right back to the unconditional embrace of this and any world, and a houseful of wayward orphans.
Scholars usually take Plotinus's system (and Aurobindo's and all such similar transpersonal holarchies) to be primarily a form of philosophy or "metaphysics": the various levels, particularly the higher ones, are imagined to be some sort of theoretical construct that is deduced, logically, or postulated, speculatively, to account for existence and manifestation.
It dawns on few interpreters that these systems are, through and through, from top to bottom, the results of actual contemplative apprehensions and direct developmental phenomenology. The higher levels of these systems cannot be experienced or deduced rationally, and nobody from Plotinus to Aurobindo thinks they can. However, after the fact of direct and repeated experiential disclosures, they can be rationally reconstructed and presented as a "system." But the "system," so called, has been discovered, not deduced, and checked against direct experience in a community of the like-minded and like-spirited (it is no accident that Inge refers to Plotinus's spirituality as being based on "experimental verification"—"faith begins as an experiment and ends as an experience").
Not a single component of these systems is hidden to experience or nestled safely away in a "metaphysical" domain that cannot be checked cognitively with the appropriate tools. There is absolutely nothing "metaphysical" about these systems: they are empirical-phenomenological developmental psychology at its most rigorous and most comprehensive, carried straightforwardly and openly into the transpersonal domains via the experimental instrument of contemplation.
In short, they follow all three strands of valid knowledge accumulation—injunction, apprehension, confirmation/refutation. And one can "dismiss" these higher levels of development only on the same grounds that the Churchmen refused to look through Galileo's telescope: dogmatic stubbornness tells me that there's nothing to see.

the way up IS the way down

For Plotinus (and Aurobindo), we find that on the Path of Ascent—or what Plotinus calls Reflux (return)—each successive level goes beyond and yet subsumes or "envelops," as Plotinus says, its predecessors—the familiar concept of development as successive holons. All of the lower is in the higher, he says, but not all of the higher is in the lower (for in essence it transcends the lower). But all of the higher "pervades" or "permeates" the lower ("there is nothing transcendent that is not also immanent"). For Plotinus, all development is envelopment.
Thus, a typical Plotinian statement is (to use Inge's phrasing), "The World-Soul is not in the world; rather, the World is in it, embraced by it and moulded by it." Or again, "The Soul is not in the Body, but the Body is [in the Soul,] enveloped and penetrated by the Soul which created it." Plotinus means this for each level, and this is, of course, the standard asymmetry of emergence that we have seen at every stage of development. But the net result is that, as Inge puts it:

Nature presents us with a living chain of being [holarchy], an unbroken series of ascending or descending values. The whole constitutes a harmony, in which each grade is "in" the next above. Each existence is thus vitally connected with all the others, a conception that asserts the right of [all] existences to be what and where they are.

The Path of Ascent or Reflux thus traces, in reverse order, the Path of Creation or Descent or Efflux, for, as Heraclitus had pointed out, "The way up is the way down, the way down is the way up." As we said earlier, both paths traverse the same dimensions. But if that is so, then when did the Path of Descent occur?
Plotinus would answer, it is occurring right now. In this timeless moment, all things issue forth from the Absolute One, ceaselessly. Each grade or dimension of being is a stepped-down version of its senior dimension; each has its ground, its reality, and its explanation in the level above it (thus, in Efflux, destroy any higher dimension and all lower dimensions would lose their ground, but not vice versa; the higher is "in" the lower as its ground, not as its component).
And yet men and women, according to Plotinus, are unconscious of any of the levels or potentials that are right now available above their own level of development. All of those italicized words are given prominence in Plotinus. Indeed, historians have traced the first clear conception of the unconscious to Plotinus. Although we have a lower unconscious that contains mainly images and fantasies, says Plotinus, all of the higher levels of being are for most people merely potentials waiting to be actualized in their own case and manifested in their own being.
Thus "sin," for Plotinus, is not a "no" but a "not yet"—we have "not yet" realized our true potentials, and so we are given to "sin." Sin is thus overcome not by a new belief but a new growth. An acorn is not a sin; it is simply not yet an oak. And this growth or actualization occurs precisely through a process of development, namely, the Path of Ascent, because "the self is not given to start with."

A kosmos of eros and agape

Most significantly, at each stage of Ascent, according to Plotinus, the lower has to be "embraced" and "permeated," so that Descent and embrace should, if all goes well, occur with each stage of Ascent and development (up to one's present level). In Christian terms, Eros or transcendental wisdom (the lower reaching up to the higher) has to be balanced with compassion or Agape (the higher reaching down and embracing the lower)—at each and every stage.
This general notion—of a multidimensional Kosmos interwoven by Ascending and Descending patterns of Love (Eros and Agape)—would become a dominant theme of all Neoplatonic schools, and exert a profound influence on virtually all currents of subsequent thought, up to (and beyond) the Enlightenment. Through Augustine and Dionysius, it would permeate all of Christianity, in one form or another, from Boethius to Jakob Boehme, from the great Victorine mystics (Hugh and Richard) to Saint Catherine and Dame Julian, from Saint Teresa and Saint John of the Cross to Tauler and Eckhart. Through Nicholas Cusanus and Giordano Bruno it would help jolt the Middle Ages into the Renaissance. Through Novalis and Schelling, it would be the roots of the Romantic and Idealist Rebellion against the flatland aspects of the Enlightenment. It would find its way into Leibniz and Spinoza and Schopenhauer, and make its way to Emerson and James and Jung. Even Locke would operate within its broad framework, though he would collapse the frame almost beyond recognition. Indeed, when Lovejoy traces the influence of the Great Chain, and refers to it as "the dominant official philosophy of the greater part of civilized mankind through most of its history," the hand of Plotinus lurks, virtually without exception, there in the background.
Thus, to give only a quick example now, the Cambridge Platonists, who would have such an interesting hand in the molding of modernity, had "their roots in the Platonism of the Renaissance, as developed in the fourteenth century by Ficino and Pico. This was a Platonism very influenced by Plotinus. It was a doctrine in which love played a central part; not only the ascending love of the lower for the higher, Plato's Eros, but also a love of the higher which expressed itself in care for the lower, which could easily be identified with Christian Agape. The two together make a vast circle of love through the universe." The Great Circle, that is, of refluxing Eros (the Many returning to the One: wisdom and the Good) and effluxing Agape (the One becoming Many: Goodness and compassion).
In this general conception (which is how I will use the terms from now on), Eros is the love of the lower reaching up to the higher (Ascent); Agape is the love of the higher reaching down to the lower (Descent). In individual development, one ascends via Eros (or expanding to a higher and wider identity), and then integrates via Agape (or reaching down to embrace with care all lower holons), so that balanced development transcends but includes—it is negation and preservation, ascent and descent, Eros and Agape.
Likewise, the love of the Kosmos reaching down to us from a higher level than our present stage of development is also Agape (compassion), helping us to respond with Eros until the source of that Agape is our own developmental level, our own self. The Agape of a higher dimension is the omega pull for our own Eros, inviting us to ascend, via wisdom, and thus expand the circle of our own compassion for more and more beings.
(And not just in the West is Agape stressed. Many tantric and yogic schools—Aurobindo's for example—put prime emphasis on "the descent of the supermind," the agape of the supermind that "comes down" in order to pull us up to an identity with it, so that we then express that agape or compassion for all beings now "in" us; as usual, Agape and Eros are united only in the nondual Heart.)

phobos and thanatos

As we will eventually see in much detail, when Eros and Agape are not integrated in the individual, then Eros appears as Phobos and Agape appears as Thanatos.
That is, unintegrated Eros does not just reach up to the higher levels and transcend the lower; it alienates the lower, represses the lower—and does so out of fear (Phobos), fear that the lower will "drag it down"— always it is the fear that the lower will "contaminate it," "dirty it," "pull it down." Phobos is Eros in flight from the lower instead of embracing the lower. Phobos is Ascent divorced from Descent. And Phobos, we can see, is the ultimate force of all repression (a rancid transcendence).
Or, to say the same thing, Phobos is Eros without Agape (transcendence without embrace, negation without preservation).
And Phobos drives the mere Ascenders.
In their frantic wish for an "other world," their ascending Eros strivings, otherwise so appropriate, are shot through with Phobos, with ascetic repression, with a denial and a fear and a hatred of anything "this-worldly," a denial of vital life, of sexuality, of sensuality, of nature, of body (and always of woman).
They are dangerous people, these Ascenders, for the violent hand of Phobos lurks always behind the "love" of the higher that they profess to all and sundry. With tears streaming down the face and upward-turned eyes, these Ascenders are ready to destroy this world—or at the very least, neglect it to death—in order to get to the Promised Land, a land that, however vaguely it might actually be conceived, is clearly enough understood to be anything but this land, definitely not this world, which is shadows to the core, deceptions in depth, illusions at best, demonic at worse. The Ascenders are destroying this world, because it is the one world they are all certain that they thoroughly despise.
Thanatos, on the other hand, is Descent divorced from Ascent. It is the lower in flight from the higher, compassion gone mad: not just embracing the lower but regressing to the lower, not just caressing but remaining stuck in it (fixation, arrest)—cosmic reductionism run amok. And the end game of that reductionistic drive is death and matter, with no connection to Source. Thanatos is Agape in flight from the higher instead of expressing the higher. It preserves the lower but refuses to negate it (and thus remains stuck in it). And as Phobos is the source of repression and dissociation, Thanatos is the source of regression and reduction, fixation and arrest. It attempts to save the lower by killing the higher.
In other words, Thanatos is Agape without Eros.
And Thanatos drives the mere Descenders.
"Away with all other worlds," they joyously proclaim, as their downward-turned eyes rivet on the wonders of multiplicity, and their infinite joy begins the gruesome task of fitting itself into a finite receptacle. "Away with all other worlds," as they match their joy to the shadows, kiss and hug the spokes in samsara's grinding wheel, marry the source of their misery. And their failure to find final release in the Cave, their rage at the finite cage, is turned merely on any of their poor fellows who happen to disagree with them and their love of shadows.
The higher doesn't embrace the lower; the higher is killed in the name of the lower: not Agape, but Thanatos, and the hand of death touches every love that the Descenders profess for all and sundry, tears also streaming down the face with "compassion" written all over it.
They are dangerous people, these Descenders, for in the name of Agape and compassion, otherwise so appropriate, they mistakenly destroy all higher in a frantic attempt to embrace the lower. And more dangerous still: in their attempt to make this poor finite world into a world of infinite value—and every Descender does exactly that in a thousand different ways—they slowly, painfully, inevitably, destroy this very world, by placing on it a burden the poor beast could never carry. The Descenders are destroying this world, because this world is the only world they have.

plotinus's attack on the gnostics

The need to balance and unite Ascent and Descent, Eros and Agape, wisdom and compassion, transcendence and immanence—this Nondual integration is the great and enduring contribution of Plotinus, and it will stand always, I believe, as a luminous beacon to all those who tire of the violence and brutality of the merely Ascending or merely Descending trails.
Plotinus was uncompromising with those who wanted to glorify either this world or the other world—they were both missing the point entirely. Each expansion of the self, Plotinus says, brings more and more of the "external world" into ourselves; it doesn't shut more and more of it out. World denial—the denial of any existent, for that matter—is for Plotinus the perfect sign of sickness.
Nowhere is this more forcefully seen than in Plotinus's extraordinary attack on the Gnostics, who were archetypal Ascenders, viewing all of manifestation as nothing but shadows, and evil shadows at that. The Gnostics had indeed achieved a causal-level intuition ("The world is illusory, Brahman alone is real"), but they had not broken through to the Nondual ("Brahman is the world"). They thus taught that the world is evil, the body is a tomb, the senses are to be despised. This apparently infuriated the usually even-tempered Plotinus, and he eloquently responded in a passage that justly became world-famous:

Do not suppose that a man becomes good by despising the world and all the beauties that are in it. They [the Gnostics] have no right to profess respect for the gods of the world above. When we love a person, we love all that belongs to him; we extend to the children the affection we feel for the parent. Now every Soul is a daughter of the [Godhead]. How can this world be separated from the spiritual world? Those who despise what is so nearly akin to the spiritual world, prove that they know nothing of the spiritual world, except in name. . . .
Let it [any individual soul] make itself worthy to contemplate the Great Soul by ridding itself, through quiet recollection, of deceit and of all that bewitches vulgar souls. For it let all be quiet; let all its environment be at peace. Let the earth be quiet and the sea and air, and the heaven itself waiting. Let it observe how the Soul flows in from all sides into the resting world, pours itself into it, penetrates it and illumines it. Even as the bright beams of the sun enlighten a dark cloud and give it a golden border, so the Soul when it enters into the body of the heaven gives it life and timeless beauty and awakens it from sleep. So the world, grounded in a timeless movement by the Soul which suffuses it with intelligence, becomes a living and blessed being.
It [Spirit/Soul] gives itself to every point in this vast body, and vouchsafes its being to every part, great and small, though these parts are divided in space and manner of disposition, and though some are opposed to each other, others dependent on each other. But the Soul is not divided, nor does it split up in order to give life to each individual. All things live by the Soul in its entirety [i.e., ultimately there are no degrees, no levels, but simply pure Presence]; it is all present everywhere. The heaven, vast and various as it is, is one by the power of the Soul, and by it is this universe of ours Divine. The sun too is Divine, and so are the stars; and we ourselves, if we are worth anything, are so on account of the Soul. Be persuaded that by it thou can attain to God. And know that thou wilt not have to go far afield....

Plotinus goes on to point out that those who would find an "other world" apart from "this world" have missed the whole point. There is no "this world" or "other world"—it is all a matter of one's perception. There is not even any "going up" or "coming down." No movement in space takes place. "Spirit and Soul are everywhere and nowhere." We are in "Heaven" whenever "we in heart and mind remember God"; we are "immersed in Matter" whenever we forget God. Same place, different perception. Plotinus explicitly and often states that we "will arrive at the All without change of place." Those who talk of "this world" or an "other world" have both missed the point—they are the Descenders or the Ascenders, not the Whole-Hearted.
William Inge gives an altogether extraordinary summary of the world-view of Plotinus, and it is worth quoting at length (all italics are mine):

Plotinus conceives the universe as a living chain of being, an unbroken series of ascending and descending values and existences. The whole constitutes a harmony; each grade is "in" the next above; each existence is vitally connected with all others. But those grades which are inferior in value are also imperfectly real, so long as we look at them in disconnexion [the "imperfection" and the "inferior value" appear only when we disconnect them from Spirit and thus fail to see that each is a perfect expression of the Divine—again, in a nonanthropocentric or "decentered" fashion]. They are characterized by impermanence and inner discord, until we see them in their true relations. Then we perceive them to be integral parts of the eternal systole and diastole [efflux and reflux] in which the life of the universe consists, a life in which there is nothing arbitrary or irregular, seeing that all ... act in accord with their own nature.
The perfect and timeless life of the Divine Spirit overflows in an incessant stream of creative activity, which spends itself only when it has reached the lowest confines of being [matter], so that every possible manifestation of Divine energy, every hue of the Divine Radiance, every variety in degree as well as in kind, is realized somewhere and somehow.
And by the side of this outward flow of creative energy [Agape and Efflux] there is another current which carries all the creatures back toward the source of their being. It is this centripetal movement [Eros and Reflux] that directs the active life of all creatures. This aspiration, which slumbers even in unconscious beings [is in all holons as the self-transcending drive], is the mainspring [also] of the moral, intellectual, and esthetic life of humankind.

As we will see in chapter 11, this is the Kosmos of Eros and Agape that would meet the Enlightenment, where the empirical/representational version of rationality (monological or Right-Hand reason) would collapse the Kosmos into a flatland interlocking order of holistic elements, with the embarrassed subject dangling over the flatland holistic world with absolutely no idea how it got there.
Because all of the Kosmos does indeed have some sort of correlates in the Right-Hand dimension, it thus understandably appeared that scientific positivism and naturalism could and would cover all possible bases, because science does indeed register so many significant alterations in the Right-Hand world. In this collapse of the Kosmos (subtle reductionism), the rich vertical and horizontal Holarchy, driven by Eros and Agape, across both depth and span, was reduced to a merely horizontal holarchy, driven by functional span alone.
The necessary collective evolution from mythic to rational was the Enlightenment's great achievement; the unnecessary collapse of the Kosmos to the holistic flatland was its great and enduring crime.
For it was precisely this nondual Kosmos that broke in two, crippled and fallen, in the coming nightmare of Western spirituality and philosophy and science. The fractured footnotes to Plato began to litter the landscape with their partialities and favored dualisms, and it is now, just now, only now, that we have begun to pick up the pieces.

10

This-Worldly, Otherworldly

There is thus an incessant multiplication of the inexhaustible One and unification of the indefinitely Many. Such are the beginnings and endings of worlds and of individual beings: expanded from a point without position or dimensions and a now without date or duration.
— A.   K.   COOMARASWAMY, summarizing the essence of both Hinduism and Buddhism

the  great  dualism  of all dualisms, I have suggested, is between "this world" and an "other world." It has infected our spirituality, our philosophy, our science; it runs as equally through the repressive Ascenders who wish only the "other world" of eternal release, as through the shadow-hugging Descenders, proper troglodytes each and all, who want salvation solely in the passing glories of "this world." It slices through every Age of Enlightenment with its upward-yearning Reason and every Romantic reaction that seeks instead to explore every downward-turning darkness and depth. It governs where we seek our salvation, and which "world" we will ignore or destroy in order to get it. It is the cause of bitter, bitter acrimony between the two camps, with each formally accusing the other of being the epitome and essence of evil (literally): The Ascenders accuse the Descenders of being lost in the Cave of Shadows, of being materialists, hedonists, pantheists, reductionists, and "nothing-morists" (they believe in "nothing more" than can be grasped with the senses). To the Ascenders, "this world" is, in form and function, illusory at best, evil at worst—and the Descenders are the primary representatives of that evil.
The Descenders accuse the Ascenders of being repressive, puritanical, life-denying, sex-denying, earth-destroying, and body-ignoring. In their attempts to rise above "this world," the Ascenders have in fact done more to destroy this world and introduce evil into this world than any other force, so it is precisely the "otherworldly" stance, according to the Descenders, that spews evil into this world, and the Ascenders are the primary representatives of that evil.
And they are both right. Or, we might say, they are both half right and half wrong—the fractured footnotes to Plato. I can make this clearer by restating the conclusions of the last chapter and introducing our new topics:
According to the Nondual schools (Plato/Plotinus, Vedanta, Mahayana Buddhism, Tantra, etc.), reality—the "real world"—is neither this world nor the other world; although it cannot easily or accurately be described, it can directly be shown, or directly apprehended in immediate awareness through contemplative practice in community. And if we must speak about it, then we must include at the least the following three points, not because these points actually describe Reality, but because they act as a curb and restraint to our always-inadequate theorizing.
1.  The One is the Good to which all things aspire. The Absolute is the Summit and Goal of all evolution, all ascent, all manifestation. It provides the motive, the action, the "pull" of all things to actualize their own highest potential, whatever that potential might be. According to White-head, this is the God that acts "through gentle persuasion" for all creative emergence. As Aristotle would put it, the Good is the final cause toward which all beings, however imperfect, are pulled. The One as the Good is the final omega point of all ascent and all wisdom. It is the return of the Many to the One. (Taken in and by itself, this, of course, is the God of the Ascenders.)
2. The One is the Goodness from which all things flow. It is the Origin and the Source of all manifestation, at all times, in all places. There is a timeless creativity or overflow of the One into the Many. All things, high or low, sacred or profane, yesterday or tomorrow, issue forth from the divine Fountainhead, the Source of all, the Origin of all. The One as Goodness is the first cause of all causes; it is the alpha point of all worlds; and as such, all worlds express the Goodness, the compassion, the love and superabundance of the Divine. This creative superabundance of the One (as alpha point) is an uncontainable outflowing that results in the Plenitude and variety and multiplicity of this world, so that this world is itself a "visible God," expressing compassion and Goodness through and through, and this world is to be fully embraced as such. It is God as the Many. (Taken in and by itself, this is the God of the Descenders.)
3. The Absolute is the Nondual Ground of both the One and the Many. It is equally and both Good and Goodness, One and Many, Ascent and Descent, Alpha and Omega, Wisdom and Compassion. Both Ascending and Descending Paths express profound truths—neither of their truths is denied (in fact, both are strongly asserted). But neither path alone expresses the whole Truth, and neither path alone imbibes fully of Reality. Reality is not just Summit (omega) and not just Source (alpha), but is Suchness—the timeless and ever-present Ground which is equally and fully present in and as every single being, high or low, ascending or descending, effluxing or refluxing.
In the Great Circle of Descent and Ascent, the Nondual can be represented as the paper on which the entire circle is drawn; or again, it can be represented as the center of the circle itself, which is equidistant to all points on the circumference ("the center which is everywhere, the circumference, nowhere"). Beings can be said to be closer to or farther from the Summit or the Source (that is the meaning of the Great Chain of Being); but no being is closer to or farther from Suchness; there is no "up" or "down." Each individual being is, fully and completely, just as it is, precisely just as it is, the One and the All.
This is why, in nondual Suchness, it is absolutely not that each being is a part of the One, or participates in the One, or is an aspect of the One. In other words, it is not, as in pantheism, that each is merely a piece of the "One," a slice of the pie, or a strand in the Big Web. "As Plotinus tells us repeatedly, individual spirits are not part of the One Spirit." An individual holon is not part of the One Spirit because each individual holon is the One Spirit in its entirety—the Infinite, being radically dimensionless, is fully present at each and every point of spacetime (or, as Zen would have it, Emptiness "in its entirety" is completely present in each and every Form: Emptiness is not the sum total of Form, it is the essence of Form; it is therefore present in the sum total as well, but nothing has been added by the totality that was not present in each individuality).
We remember Plotinus saying, "It [infinite Soul/Spirit] gives itself to every point in this vast body, and vouchsafes its being to every part, great and small, though these parts are divided in space and manner of disposition, and though some are opposed to each other, others dependent on each other. But the Soul is not divided, nor does it split up in order to give life to each individual. All things live by the Soul in its entirety; it is all present everywhere." The One is fully present in Each. We don't have to add up each finite thing to get a "systems spirit"—each individual thing, just as it is, is fully expressive of Spirit.
This is why the Nondual traditions are so radically noninstrumental in their value orientations: individual holons do not have value merely because they are parts of a great web; they have value because, just as they are, they are perfect manifestations of the primordial Purity of Spirit. In the systems web-of-life "spirituality," all things derive their value secondarily, derive their value extrinsically and instrumentally as strands in the wonderful web, which alone is supposed to be finally "real."
On the contrary, as Plotinus puts it, "Each part of the All is Infinite." Notice three very different things here: the One, the Each, and the All. Each finite thing exists as part of All finite things, but the "spirituality" is not found in the All, but in the One that is fully present in both Each and All. (The web-of-life systems theorists get the All but miss the One.) But because the One is indeed fully present in both Each and All, then additionally, as Plotinus says, "All is each, and each is all, and infinite the glory"—the web of life is there, it's just very partial, and very secondary to the infinite empty Ground that is the Source and Suchness of every part and every whole, regardless of how much we add up the never-ending series of whole/parts (a series that in itself is just Hegel's "bad infinity").
To finish our summary: Reality is Summit (omega), and Source (alpha), and their common ground as Suchness (Nondual). It is in the integration of the Ascending and Descending paths that the Nondual awareness flashes: "The world is illusory; Brahman alone is real; Brahman is the world."
Anything short of that realization degenerates into just the Ascenders (Brahman alone is real) or just the Descenders (Brahman is the world). And I am suggesting that that is not just a theoretical nicety or an esoteric contemplative concern. I am suggesting that that is precisely what happened in the ensuing series of fractured footnotes to Plato that is called Western civilization.

earth in the balance

It is often said that Plato was the otherworldly philosopher and Aristotle was the this-worldly philosopher. And yet once again, as Lovejoy demonstrates, this is exactly backward.
It is true that Aristotle spent much of his time in this-worldly analysis and thought, but the God of Aristotle, unlike Plato's, is a purely Ascending God. Aristotle's God was the summit and highest goal of all creation (omega), but was not the source or origin or fountainhead of creation (alpha). In fact, Aristotle's God was not in creation at all, except as the final cause of all beings, which means as the goal which they would always strive toward and never reach. Things did not come from Aristotle's God, they are only going toward it. In other words, Aristotle understood very well and very accurately the Perfect One as the Good, but not at all the manifestation of that One as Goodness or creative Plenitude. Lovejoy:

The reverse process [that of creative Efflux, described by Plato and extended by Plotinus] finds no place in the system of Aristotle. His God generates nothing. Except for a few lapses into the common fashions of speech, Aristotle adheres consistently to the notion of self-sufficiency as the essential attribute of Deity [causal]; and he sees that it precludes any [relationship to finite beings that would be implied by its creating them]. It is true that this Unmoved Perfection is for Aristotle the cause of all motion and of all the activity of imperfect beings; but it is their final cause only. The bliss which God unchangingly enjoys in his never-ending self-contemplation is the Good after which all other things yearn and, in their various measures and manners, strive. But the Unmoved Mover is no world-ground; his nature and existence do not explain why the other things exist, why there are so many of them, why the modes and degrees of their declension from the divine perfection are so various. He therefore cannot provide a basis for the principle of Plenitude.

Aristotle, then, quite apart from his extraordinary contributions to "this-worldly" understanding, was at root the West's archetypal Ascender. And thus the first great fractured footnote to Plato. Plato, we have seen, championed both Ascent and Descent, Summit and Source. These two currents—Plato's God both in the world and beyond it, Aristotle's God only beyond it—would enter the currents of Western civilization with two diametrically opposed agendas: befriend the world, begrudge the world.
A fractured Plato could be called on to support either view, Aristotle could be called on only for the latter. The weight of opinion, then, was already precariously tipped in favor of the Ascenders. If the whole Plato was not evoked, there was precious little left to hold anybody on earth.
And such precisely was the platform—wobbling now between this world and the other world—upon which Western culture was about to be built.

the unearthly trinity

Plotinus had held the Ascending and Descending currents together admirably, expressing and polishing the original Platonic nonduality. And the nondual school of Plato/Plotinus would have almost certainly carried the day—as the essentially similar Nondual systems of Shankara and Nagarjuna would do for Hinduism and Buddhism, respectively—were it not for one overwhelming and utterly decisive factor: the entrance on the scene of mythic-literal Christianity.
With its mythic-dissociated God ontologically divorced from nature and human nature—what Tillich called "the strict dualism of a divine sphere in heaven and a human sphere on earth"—there was no way to finally ground God in this world. And thus no way that a human being's final destiny could be realized in this life, in this body, on this earth.Thus the other-worldly Ascenders, fractured through and through—and driven, as all exclusive Ascenders are, by Phobos (fear of earth, body, nature, woman, sex, and sense)—could and would dominate (although never exclusively rule) the Western scene for a millennium.
But the ironic point is that this mythically ascended God wasn't even a truly ascendent or transcendent God—it wasn't even a Gnostic or causal-level One (except for a very few realizers). It was, through and through, a mythic-level production: a geocentric, egocentric, anthropocentric local volcano god—Yahweh by name—whose true structural colors were shown precisely in the fact that He touched human history only by interfering with it, either to "reward" or "punish" His "chosen" peoples or, more often, to miraculously smite the enemies of His chosen people, or to otherwise spend His time turning spinach into potatoes.
There is simply no mistaking the structure of consciousness that authors such productions, and it has led to some very harsh judgments from the more profound thinkers of the Christian (and Judaic) tradition itself, starting with Clement and Origen (and Philo), all of whom would concur with Paul Tillich: "Things like miraculous interventions of God, special inspirations and revelations are beneath the level of real religious experience. Religion itself is immediacy [by which he means precisely the immediacy of basic Wakefulness or pure Presence, which is Spirit in us, as Tillich himself makes very clear]. The supernaturalistic heritage about the suspension of the laws of nature for the sake of miracles collapses completely."
But, as I have tried to make clear, it was not the simple existence of the Roman Christian mythic empire that was problematic. That mythic-rational structure acted as the basic principle of cultural meaning and social integration for virtually a thousand years; it was phase-specifically appropriate enough, bringing with it all the advances (and all the disasters) that we discussed in the mythic-rational section of chapter 5, particularly new forms of sociocentric morality and the beginning belief (post-conventional) in the equal status of all citizens under the (Roman) law and in the eyes of God—replete, of course, with all the empire-building and imperialism and military "globalizing" attempts inherent in the mythic-rational structure.
When we discuss the systems of Plato or Plotinus (or Nagarjuna or Shankara), we are speaking of the most advanced or leading edge of consciousness development for that period; I have no expectation that that would or could have become the average-mode consciousness at that point in time, nor do I judge the average-mode consciousness of that time with the standards of today's average mode. It was not the arrival of the Roman Christian mythic-military empire that was the particular problem; it was what the worldview of that average-mode development did to the leading-edge worldview: it pronounced it anathema, condemned it, and condemned it thoroughly, rigorously, even viciously at times (particularly in the Counter-Reformation), and in ways that (with very few exceptions) happened nowhere else in world history on quite that scale.
Every structure of consciousness is suspicious of all higher structures, structures lying within and beyond it, structures that are in fact its own inherent potential, but structures that require a frightening death and rebirth to unfold in each case. And societies, it seems, can be arranged along a continuum of tolerance for those structures that exist higher than the structure of its own principles of social organization and cohesion. The very success, and the constant threats, to the mythic-military Christian empire put tolerance—never a strong point in mythic structures— virtually out of the question. Any outspoken person who evidenced a structure of consciousness higher than the mythic-rational was, correctly enough, viewed as a political threat and condemned, in effect, for treason.
The condemnation was pandemic: the structures of Reason (and science) were condemned because they demanded evidence (reason was therefore allowed only in service of Dogma). The psychic level of nature-nation mysticism was condemned because it brought God "too much into" this world, it "dragged God down" from His celestial throne and the Heavenly City above. Subtle-level mysticism was condemned, or at best barely tolerated, because it brought the soul up too close to God. And the Church became absolutely apoplectic if anybody expressed a causal-level intuition of supreme identity with Godhead—the Inquisition would burn Giordano Bruno at the stake and condemn the theses of Meister Eckhart on such grounds.
But that was an old story for causal-level Realizers at the hands of mythic believers, starting with Jesus of Nazareth, whose own causal-level realization ("I and the Father are One") would not be treated kindly. "Why do you stone me?" Jesus asks. "Is it for good works?" The pious reply: "No, it is not for good works; it is because you, being a man, make yourself out God." His reply that "we are all sons (and daughters) of God" was lost on the crowd, and that realization led him, as it would al-Hallaj and Bruno and Origen and a long line of subsequent Realizers, to a grizzly death for both political and religious reasons—it was simultaneously a threat to the state and to the old religion.
Church dogma handled the case of the extraordinary Realizer from Nazareth in a very ingenious way, using all the powers of rationality to prop up the myth. It was true, they granted, that Jesus was one with God (or, as they would later put it, God is one substance with three Persons— Tertullian's trinitas—and the Person of Jesus has two Natures: Divine and Human). But let the causal-level Ascension stop there. No other person shall be allowed this Realization, even though, as everybody plainly knew at the time, Jesus never made a single remark suggesting that he alone had or could have this Realization, and he explicitly forbade his followers to use the term "Messiah" in reference to him.
But, as many commentators have pointed out, if the Nazarene had in fact realized a Godhead that belongs to all, equally and fully, then there was no way he could be made the sole property of an exclusive mythology. Put bluntly, there was no way to market him. So Jesus was made, not the suffering servant of all humankind, which is all he ever claimed, but the Sole Son of Jehovah, literally. In other words, he was tucked downward and seamlessly into the prevailing mythology, and seen as yet another (but much greater) instance of a miraculous and supernatural intervention in history to save a new group of chosen peoples: those who embraced the Church, the one true way and only salvation for all souls (which meant: the only way for imperial-political cohesion of the mythic empire).
The realization of the Nazarene was thus placed on a pedestal and made an utterly unique property of the Church (and not directly a property of the Soul). It should be remembered that at this stage in development, the moral and political spheres (church and state) had not yet been fully differentiated (which is true for all mythological structures—the head of state gains legitimacy, we saw, by claiming mythogenic status, by claiming to be specially connected to, descended from, or one with the gods/goddesses: Cleopatra is Isis). As Tillich explains, "This meant that the person who breaks the canonic law of doctrines is not only a heretic, one who disagrees with the fundamental doctrines of the church, but he is also a criminal against the state. Since the heretic undermines not only the church but also the state, he must be not only excommunicated but also delivered into the hands of the civil authorities to be punished as a criminal."
The Church would produce many great philosophers (reason), and many great psychic and subtle mystics, but no matter how much these realizers tried to downplay the myths, no matter how much they allegorized them or as-iffed them or interpreted them away, there was always the one fundamental dogma that hung like a weight around their attempts to transcend, that crashed down on their shoulders and pinned them to the ground and never but never budged an inch: the utterly unique and nonreproducible realization of Jesus.
The Ascension itself was immediately mythologized, following the very old mythic motif of the three-day-dead-and-resurrected lunar consort of the Earth goddess (in the pagan rituals, as well as in the Christianized version, one would "eat the flesh" and "drink the blood" of the consort, thus to participate in its resurrected powers). Individual Christians who shared the proper mythic belief (or faith) would therefore also be resurrected, after death, on Judgment Day, in another world, where their bodies would be reassembled ("Urn, excuse me, isn't that my fourth metacarpal you've got there?") to sit forever with Jehovah, His Son, and Company. There was no way for individuals to find enlightenment or ascension in this life, on this earth. Any and all who claimed otherwise were thus immediately both heretics and criminals.
Again, I have no quarrel with that phase-specific mythic-rational structure and the interpretation that it (necessarily) gave to the Realization of the Adept from Nazareth. It was a crucial component of social integration and cultural meaning at that point in development, and it apparently served its purposes quite well. The problem, rather, was the degree to which and the fury with which this Realization was so thoroughly reduced to mythic levels. Rarely has a causal-level realization been translated so dramatically downward. Rarely has such a powerful realization been allowed to produce so few same-level realizations in its followers.
Not Buddha, not Shankara, not Lao Tzu; not Valentinus, not Numenius, not Apollonius; not Dogen, not Fa-tsang, not Chih-i; not Garab Dorje, not Tsongkapa, not Padmasambhava—none would be so thoroughly reduced. It is simply astonishing. Myths would, of course, grow up around all of those realizers, precisely for those who relate to reality in that degree; but their final teaching, causal/nondual, was available to all who embraced the practice, engaged the injunctions, went beyond myth and reason and psychic and subtle, and discovered the Empty Ground in their own case. And to any student who awakened to discover that he or she was actually One with the infinite Ground, in formless identity, the reply came back, in all cases: "Congratulations! You finally discovered who you are!"
The reply that came back from the Church was: you shall now be toast.
The peculiar and net effect of all this was that, although the God of the Church was primarily an Ascending God—in this aspect, otherworldly to the core—there was no way to consummate the Ascension, not even for the leading-edge few; only Jesus had done that. And while we might to varying degrees "participate" in Christ's nature, there could be no true and whole-bodied Realization and Ascension until after death, at some other time, and certainly in some other world. This world is merely a runway for the real takeoff.
Precisely because there was no way to consummate the Ascension in this body, in this life, on this earth, there was no way whatsoever for the Way Up to spill over into the Way Down. No way, that is, for causal-level Oneness with the Good to issue forth in all-pervading, all-embracing Goodness, grounded thoroughly in this world, resplendent as the entire world. That extraordinary reversal that Plato (and all nondual realizers) had made—transcend this world, awaken as this world—could not be called upon as compass.
Precisely because the Ascension could not be consummated, the West was locked into a perpetually frustrated Ascendent yearning—a yearning for a Goal that would never be officially allowed, and therefore a perpetual yearning that could never be satisfied and let go of—the perpetual itch in the Western psyche that was never allowed to be scratched and then forgotten—the ascendent carrot on a very long stick held above and in front of the collective donkey that assured that the poor beast would always lurch forward and never be allowed to eat.
It was these frustrated Ascenders, these frozen Ascenders, who would call on (1) the other-worldly Aristotle, (2) the other-worldly half of Plato, and (3) the mythic other world of the Only Begotten and Only Ascended Son of God. And there was the true Holy Trinity, the unearthly Trinity, that carved out the next thousand years of Western culture, a Trinity that, if it never totally ruled the scene, always officially dominated it.

the TWO gods

Without direct access to the unifying and unspoken One, the two paths, Ascending and Descending, became logically incompatible and utterly irreconcilable. Since true and full Ascent was blocked (even theoretically), then true and full Descent could be neither directly experienced nor correctly formulated (even theoretically). The One World of Plato/Plotinus fractured into "this world" versus the "other world," and this dualism produced two diametrically opposed and absolutely incompatible World Stances, with two very different (and irreconcilable) views of the "good life," of men and women's ultimate place in the universe, of the object and nature of human destiny, of where self-fulfillment was to be found, of the very ideals that one ought to have in this life, and, most important, of the types of practical goals that one ought to strive to fulfill in this life.
It produced, in fact, two utterly irreconcilable Gods.
It was agreed, by both sides, that the final good for a human being was the imitatio Dei—the imitation or contemplation or absorption in God. But which God} The ascending God that takes all things back to the One, or the descending God that delights in the diversity of the Many? Without the unifying Heart, they seem utterly incompatible, and therefore do I shun the world and seek only the One, or do I follow the creative God and embrace the Goodness of all creation and find my God fully expressed there?
The Nondual answer has always been: do one, then the other, embracing finally both. As only one example, Aurobindo: "The spiritual transformation culminates in a permanent ascension from the lower consciousness to the higher consciousness, followed by an effective permanent descent of the higher nature into the lower." Likewise, in the Zen oxherding pictures, which express the ten "stages" to enlightenment, the first seven pictures depict an exclusive search for the One and a withdrawal from the world—the ascent to the Good. The eighth picture is an empty circle—pure formless Emptiness (causal). The final picture shows the person entering the marketplace "with open hands"—the embrace of the Many, the effulgent Path of Compassion and "creation-centered" spirituality.
The important point is that what perfectly unites the two paths—the way up and the way down—is the eighth picture, the empty circle, which is not merely a theory of nonduality but the direct realization of formless Emptiness (causal Spirit). Lacking access to that, the two paths have no direct experiential point of contact, and they therefore fall merely into theoretically disjointed affairs, one versus the other, and there is no way whatsoever to unite them in theory or in fact.
And that, we will see, is precisely what happened.

western vedanta

From Plotinus the One World vision, embracing fully both Ascent and Descent, had passed, virtually unscathed and intact, to the remarkable Saint Dionysius (who, because he or she was mistakenly thought to be Paul's first Athenian convert, had a profound impact on all subsequent Christian mysticism; the actual author remains unknown; hence the name "pseudo-Dionysius"). The mysticism of the pseudo-Dionysius is virtually identical to that of Plotinus, except now it is fitted quite seamlessly into Christian theology and Christian terminology: the same wine, slightly new casks. There is, of course, the perilous Ascent straight to the formless Godhead, and a perfect Descent to a loving embrace of the entire world of the Many—the standard message of all Nondual schools: transcend absolutely every single thing in the Kosmos, embrace absolutely every single thing in the Kosmos—with choiceless compassion or love. Dionysius:

Love which works good to all things, pre-existing overflowingly in the Good, moved itself to creation, as befits the superabundance by which all things are created. The Good by being extends its Goodness to all things [without exception!]. For as our sun, not by choosing or taking thought but by merely being, enlightens all things, so the Good by its mere existence sends forth upon all things the beams of its Goodness.

Saint Augustine (354-430 ce) brilliantly carried on much of the Plotinian tradition, with a few subtle twists and additions. There is much in Augustine's teaching that is clearly nondual and profound in its implications, particularly as concerns the union of Eros and Agape, the utter primacy of introspection for a knowledge of God, the creative power of Amor (love), and the central importance of a transformation of consciousness (a transformation of will) in order to awaken to the Divine.
Most important of all, I believe, is that with Augustine we see the first flowering of a Western form of Vedanta that would, perhaps, have a more profound impact on subsequent Western philosophy (and civilization) than any other single idea, bar none—and which I will try to summarize in a paragraph:
Plato's "Spectator" and Plotinus's "ever-present Wakefulness" are developed by Augustine into a full-fledged conception of the interior Witness (Augustine would say the Soul) as that which cannot, under any circumstances, be doubted. Start with general doubt, says Augustine, and doubt absolutely everything you can. You will find that you can doubt the reliability of logic (it might be wrong), you can even doubt the reality of sense impressions (they might be a hallucination). But even in the most intense doubt, you are aware of the doubt itself; in your immediate awareness there is certainty, even if it is only a certainty that you are doubting— and you can never shake that certainty. Any truth in the exterior world can be doubted, but always there is the certainty of interior immediate-ness or basic Wakefulness; and God, said Augustine, lies in and through that basic Wakefulness, whose certainty is never, and can never be, actually doubted.
Thus the existence of God, as the immediacy of self-presence (or basic Wakefulness), is an unshakable certainty. God is even the very presupposition, or actual ground, behind the doubt about God's existence. If you are aware of the thought "I don't believe in God," well, says Augustine, that is already God. Belief in God, and doubt in God, both presuppose God.
Further, in the intimacy and immediateness of presence, there is no subject-object duality. I do not stand back from this immediate presence and look at it; if I did, that would be merely another seen object, not the immediacy in which this seeing occurs. God is the ultimate prius of self and of world. "God is seen in the soul. God is in the center of humans, before the split into subjectivity and objectivity. God is not a strange being whose existence or nonexistence one might discuss. Rather, God is our own a priori. In God the split between the subject and object, and the desire of the subject to know the object, are overcome. There is no such gap. God is given to the subject as nearer to itself than it is to itself."God, for Augustine, is what you know before you know anything else, and upon which everything else depends, and something that can never actually be doubted.
God as the ground, not just of all being, but of our own immediate and primordial awareness—this is the call of Augustine. How similar to the Eastern traditions! "The ordinary mind, just that is the Tao." In Zen, the ordinary mind means the mind in its simple immediacy, before any effort or duality. In Tibetan Buddhism, the ultimate Dharmakaya is rigpa, the clarity of the immediacy of present awareness, prior to subject and object. And we already saw Ramana discourse on the impossibility of ever being without the Self: if you think you have not found or seen the primordial Self, the awareness of that lack is itself the supposedly lacking Self. These traditions are not saying that you have Buddha-nature but don't know it: you know it but won't admit it.
This Western Vedanta, as I have called it, passed, in its various forms, from Augustine to Descartes, Spinoza, Berkeley, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre, to mention a few. Basic Wakeful-ness, immediate consciousness, is what we have and all we have; everything else is phenomenal (Kant), or deductive (Descartes), or exterior (Spinoza), or twice-removed (Husserl, Sartre). Spirit, as basic Wakefulness, is not something that needs to be proven, but something that even the existence of doubt always presupposes as its own ground. And thus, Spirit (or consciousness or pure Ego or transcendental Self or basic openness) is not something hard to find but rather is impossible to avoid.
We have seen that each stage of development is a going within-and-beyond. This is clearly spotted by Augustine, and he states it in such a profound and persuasive form that, according to Taylor, this notion of "inwardness" would literally color an entire civilization. Careful and sober scholars (such as Tillich and Taylor) are simply astonished at what this man wrought. Tillich says Augustine is "the man who is more than anyone else the representative of the West; he is the foundation of everything the West had to say."
In regard to this going within-and-beyond, Augustine picks up the argument from Plotinus that the interior transcends and envelops the exterior, and the interior itself then dissolves in the One, so that, as Gilson summarizes it, Augustine's path is one "leading from the exterior to the interior and from the interior to the superior," which Taylor phrases as "Going within . . . takes me beyond."
This had a profound historical impact because it took the notion of interiority present in Plotinus (and hinted at in Plato) and put it fully center stage. The path to ultimate Reality is not outside; it is inside. Starting with reason, one goes within reason, to the basic immediacy at its base, and that immediacy takes me beyond reason to the Ground of the Kosmos itself. So that finally, and ultimately, the Truth is not in me or inside me or egoically locked up in me, but is rather beyond me altogether: the ground of intimate presence opens up beyond me to the timeless and eternal Being of all beings. Going within me, I am finally free of me: and that is a timeless liberation from the fetters of being only me.
Taylor calls this new emphasis on the within "radical reflexivity." And, he says, "it is hardly an exaggeration to say that it was Augustine who introduced the inwardness of radical reflexivity and bequeathed it to the West." Indeed, Taylor traces three main aspects of the "inwardness"
or "radical reflexivity" characteristic of Western civilization up through modernity and postmodernity (namely, self-control, self-expression, and self-commitment), and finds all three of those roads lead to ... Augustine (with roots in Plotinus).
This radical reflexivity would play a profound role in the West (as it did in the East) because even in its distorted forms it spoke a certain truth—the superior lies through the interior, the beyond lies through the within. The Enlightenment would continue to take the "turn within" . . . and then forget the beyond. The disengaged ego of the Enlightenment turned within . . . and got stuck there, dangling haplessly over a holistic flatland that had no room for it: not within and beyond, but within and withdrawn. "Knowledge closed in on itself," as Foucault put it, and there was no way to actually reconnect the self with a "holistic cosmos," since that cosmos of interlocking exteriors excluded the interior on its own terms (collapse of the Kosmos to the cosmos, or subtle reductionism).
But this enclosing of knowledge, within and withdrawn—going within, getting stuck there, and then describing the external world in interlocking system terms that left out the subject altogether—this is not truth for Augustine; this is precisely evil. "Evil is when this reflexivity is enclosed on itself"—within and withdrawn. There was no way to get to the superior because the interior was excluded from the interlocking order of exteriors, and thus all that remained was a system of harmonious shadows and a wonderful web that ground up all depth in endless span.
But Augustine's immediate impact was in precisely the opposite direction. If the Enlightenment got lost in the interior and was thus stuck with nothing but exteriors, the influence of Augustine up to the Renaissance was on reaching the superior and downplaying, forgetting, ignoring the exteriors altogether. "Since truth is something which we can find only in the interior of the human soul, physics is useless for ultimate truth."
Indeed so, in a sense, but here creeps in Augustine's dualistic legacy. For Plotinus the Descended world of physics and the Ascended world of the Soul were both integral components of the One World. True, we could never reach the Soul or Spirit through a study of physics (in fact, that would blind us to the Soul), but nonetheless physics was part of the visible, sensible God.
Augustine is no ontological dualist, but he does start to offer us a brutal choice: "Everyone becomes like what he loves. Dost thou love the earth?
Thou shalt be earth. Dost thou love God? Then I say, thou shalt be God."
And is there no way to be both?
For the Bhagavad Gita, as for Plotinus, "Even on earth the world is transformed by those whose minds are established in the vision of Oneness," as the Gita has it. For Plotinus (and most of the nondual Eastern traditions), one starts immersed in the Earth, immersed in Gaia, interlocked in exteriors (egocentric, biocentric, geocentric); one then finds the interior, transcends Gaia, and is immersed in Heaven (Soul, Spirit); which then dissolves the separate self altogether and embraces equally both Heaven and Earth as the glorious radiance of the Divine (this would be the tantric and Mahayana revolution that would overthrow the exclusively Ascending ideal of the yogic and Theravadin gnostics).
But this road Augustine cannot take. The dogmatic belief in the future resurrection of the body put an effective end to that vision. The future resurrection of the body, and the radically unique (and nonrepeatable, nonreproducible) realization of the Nazarene blocks the final liberation of the soul in this body, in this life, on this earth. No longer can the Ascending and Descending Paths be held together in the immediacy of this moment. There is a fracture in the face of Love, and a perplexed God now stares blankly in two diametrically opposed directions.
The net effect was: pick one—the way up or the way down. The two could no longer be united, and historically the Ascenders and the Descenders went virtually their separate ways.
In short, with Augustine the tension between the "two Gods" is becoming unbearable. Partly because of his ten years with the dualistic Manichaeans, partly because of his own Gnosticism, and overwhelmingly because of his unflinching embrace of the Church dogma of the "one and only begotten," Augustine feels that no true Ascent can occur in this life, in this body, on this earth—the mystical awareness of God, yes; final liberation in this body, on this earth, no.
For Plotinus, "Ascent" does not mean a change of place or a change in location or a change from "this world" to an "other world." It means a change in perception so that more and more of this world is perceived as the other world—more and more of this world is perceived as Perfectly Divine, until there is only the Perfectly Divine in all perception, "this world" and "that world" being utterly irrelevant, and the way up and the way down meeting in every single act of loving and choiceless and non-dual awareness.
For all of Augustine's undoubted brilliance—for all of that, he cannot shake his dualistic dogma that this world is merely a preparation for the next world; he is locked into the myth of the future resurrection of the body, not its present divinization by a change in perception; and thus even such an ardent devotee of Augustine as Paul Tillich can summarize his view as: "On the one hand, there is the city of God, on the other the city of earth or the devil." This is no spiritual ontology; this is mythic dissociation.
I do not mean to pin this dualism solely on Augustine; it is a mythic dissociation inherent in the worldview which, for other reasons, he felt compelled to embrace. Augustine, I am tempted to say, is actually the very best one can possibly do with the Plotinian system if it must be strained into a mythic worldview. But both Augustine's fans and detractors have pointed to this unstable dualism in this system, and to his "otherworldly" bent, the stamp of frustrated Ascent (and therefore crippled Descent).
And if "Augustine is the foundation of everything the West had to say," well then, everything the West had to say was: frustrated Ascent, spiritus interruptus. And thus no true Descent, no true divinization of this Earth, of this body, or of this life.

the schizoid god

Love joy, who does not understand the contemplative and experiential nature of this split (between Descended this-worldly and Ascended otherworldly), nonetheless is again the perfect reporter of what did in fact happen, which is that the West was saddled with two absolutely incompatible Gods:

The one God was the goal of the "way up," of that ascending process by which the finite soul, turning from all created things, took its way back to the immutable Perfection in which alone it could find rest. The other God was the source and the informing energy of that descending process by which Being flows through all levels of possibility down to the very lowest. . . .
There was no way in which the flight from the Many to the One, the quest of a perfection defined wholly in terms of contrast with the created world, could be effectively harmonized with the imitation of a Goodness that delights in diversity and manifests itself in the emanation of the Many out of the One.

Once true Ascent was denied, true Descent was likewise lost, and their secret marriage remained deeply a secret. The pessimistic Ascenders dourly pursued an otherworldly Goal they were assured of never reaching, and the optimistic Descenders giddily embraced a this-worldly creation whose Source they celebrated but never experienced.
And this produced, as I said, two Gods and two World Stances that were different in every conceivable way. It was not just a difference in "theoretical" orientations (although that was constantly debated); it was through and through a difference in paradigmatic injunctions and exemplars, in practical lifestyles, in the very goal of what it meant to be human and to lead "the good life."
The Ascending program demanded a withdrawal from all "attachment to creatures." It recommended ascetic, sometimes harsh discipline, always oriented toward a withdrawal of attention from the senses, from the body, from the earth, and above all from sexuality (and therefore woman)—all of which were looked upon as temptations or much worse (even though all were "theoretically" creations of the Good). That is, they all became objects of Phobos, not Eros.
This "oneness strategy" was introspective and highly introverted; and wherever it appeared it brought a thoroughgoing worldly pessimism (one of its key features, whether in religion or philosophy) and a contemptus mundi. "My Kingdom is not of this world" and "Lay not your fortune upon this earth" were its earmarks. Worldly pursuits were ultimately for the deluded, who could "participate" in the Good through the sacraments, but were otherwise lost in the Cave of Shadows. The "cloistered life" was the only good life, and the only life that could lead to a true imitatio Dei.
The Descending program led in precisely the opposite direction, following precisely the opposite God. It summoned men and women to participate, in some finite measure, in the creative passion of God, and to collaborate consciously in the processes by which the diversity of things, the Plenitude and Fullness of the universe, is achieved. It found its beatific vision in the joy of beholding the splendor of creation; or in excitedly tracing out the detail of its infinite variety. It placed the active life above contemplation. It was altogether extroverted, and brought always in its wake an optimism that would over and over again be codified in the phrase "This is the best of all possible worlds" (meaning that it all comes straight from God and expresses Goodness).
And as for its imitatio Dei, it often viewed the activity of the creative artist (in its many forms) as the mode of human life most like the Divine, because the artist participates in the creative process, a process that is similar to, or even one with, the Superabundance and Effulgence of Spirit that brings forth the glories of the Many from the One. And yet, so driven was this path to go outward and outward that it fell constantly into the clutches of downward and downward: not Agape, but Thanatos; not an embrace of the lower by the higher, but a simple embrace of the lower, period—with all height and all depth reduced, flattened, leveled, extinguished.
These two Gods wrestled for the soul of Western humanity for the next thousand years (and, in fact, have done so right up to today, as we will see). Since these Gods were, at this point, utterly incompatible, the Church officially had to choose one. Under sway of the unearthly Trinity, it chose, of course, the former, the path of (frustrated) Ascent.

It was the Idea of the Good [Ascending], not the conception of a generative Goodness [Descending], that determined the ethical teaching of the Church (at least in her counsels of perfection) and shaped the assumptions concerning man's chief end which dominated European thought down to the Renaissance, and in orthodox theology, Protestant as well as Catholic, beyond it. The "way up" alone was the direction in which man was to look for the good. . . .

Such was the thousand-year reign of the mythically Ascended God, about which, in this short survey, we need say not much more. I have wished only to suggest its origin and its internal structure, what it accomplished (which was much to the good), and what it tore asunder (which was equally far-reaching).
Because then, most interesting of all: starting with the Renaissance and running through the Enlightenment, there occurred what we might call "the great reversal." Suddenly, very suddenly, the Ascenders were out, the Descenders were in—and the transition was bloody, arguably the bloodiest cognitive transformation in European history.

the great plenitude

In order to understand the coming dominance of the Descenders, it is necessary to understand how the nondual system of Plato/Plotinus viewed the Descending Path of Efflux or Plenitude, which was only half of the equation, but which may be summarized in the modern phrase "Biodiversity is good."
And not just biodiversity. Diversity per se was the direct evidence of the extraordinary Superabundance and Goodness of the One, and therefore the more diversity, the greater the Goodness.
I emphasize that phrase because it is, we will abundantly see, the key to the God of the Descenders (which itself was "half" of the God of Plotinus, very crucial but very partial).
In the Timaeus (the intellectual West's Bible of Effulgence), Plato had already maintained that we must not suppose that "the world was made in the likeness of any Idea that is merely partial; for nothing incomplete is beautiful. We must suppose rather that it is the perfect image of the whole of which all animals—both individuals and species—are parts. For the pattern of the universe contains within itself the intelligible forms of all beings just as this world comprehends us and all other visible creatures." Thus, creative Effulgence resulted in "this world like the most fairest and most perfect of intelligible beings—one visible living being containing within itself all other living beings of like nature"—which is exactly why Plato referred to the entire manifest universe as "a visible, sensible God" and a "superorganism." In order, he says, "that the Whole may be really All, the universe was filled completely" and thereby became "a visible God—the greatest, the best, the fairest, the most perfect."
Thus, in this view, the existence of all possible kinds of beings, no matter whether we judge them to be good or bad, higher or lower, better or worse—all are an integral and necessary part of the Kosmos, and thus each has intrinsic worth just as it is. Put bluntly, the world is better, the more things it contains.
Plotinus, carrying on this nondual vision, says that we are like people who do not understand art and would thus like to eliminate certain colors from a painting simply because we judge them "the less beautiful," not realizing that that would destroy the whole painting at the same time. "To eliminate any characters," says Plotinus, "would be to spoil the beauty of the whole; and it is by means of them that it becomes complete." Thus, he says, those who would "eliminate from the universe" what they think of as "inferior beings" would simply "eliminate Providence itself," whose nature it is to "produce all things and to diversify all in the manner of their existence."
Love joy demonstrates that wherever the Descending current was acknowledged—under the general name of the principle of Plenitude—it was always of the form: the Goodness of the One is reflected in the "variety of its parts"; the greater the diversity, the greater the Goodness. Maximization of diversity is, so to speak, what Plenitude seeks.
We will see, in the next chapter, what an extraordinary influence this doctrine of Plenitude had in the rise of modernity, from its sciences to its politics to its ethics (and, of course, it is still loudly echoed by theorists from multiculturalists to ecophilosophers, most of whom evidence no idea of its original source).
Again, the easiest way to summarize Plenitude (or Efflux) is to say, not just that diversity is good for us humans—a very geocentric, anthropocentric, egocentric stance—but that diversity is the very Goodness of the One itself, quite apart from what it may or may not have to do with humans. This was part of Plotinus's devastating attack on the Gnostics, who, viewing humans as the top of the scale of being, in effect ignored and devalued the rest of the scale itself, and thus could not see "that the sun is Divine, and the earth Divine, and all manner of beings Divine."
This realization came, as I said, directly from Plotinus's radically decentered and nonanthropocentric stance. He does not develop biodiversity because it is good for humans, or because human existence depends upon it (although he recognizes that), or because it's nice to go out and have a "wilderness experience"—all of those, for Plotinus, are anthropo-centric to the core, and serve only the ego in men and women, not the Divine in each and all.
On the Ascending side, according to Plotinus: as long as we are still Ascending and have not yet actually discovered the formless One, which is equally present in all beings—then the world indeed appears as a great hierarchy of beings, from the lowest to the highest, a scale kept in place by our own ignorance (but a scale or ladder that must first be completely climbed before we can throw it away; those who throw it away without climbing it are merely the Descenders, the troglodytes who worship the Shadows without seeing the Light).
And the central point of this Great Holarchy or Great Chain of (Apparent) Being was summarized in the phrase: there are no gaps in nature. Although there were indeed (apparent) grades of existence, from the lowest to the highest, each shaded into the other with "the least degree of possible difference" (Aristotle). No "links" in the Great Chain could be left empty, or the universe would not be "Full," would not express the plenum formarum that delights in diversity.
And thus, precisely because the universe was a great holarchy, completely "Full" as an expression of the Goodness of Spirit, each "level" or "grade" was perfectly continuous with both its senior and junior dimensions (Aristotle: "Things are said to be continuous whenever there is one and the same limit of both wherein they overlap and which they possess in common")—there were no gaps, no holes, no missing links in the universe: the Kosmos was one tightly woven fabric of Goodness.
"If there is between two given natural species a theoretically possible intermediate type, that type must be realized—and so on ad indefinitum; otherwise, there would be gaps in the universe, the creation would not be as 'full' as it might be, and this would imply that its Source was not 'good,' in the sense of the Timaeus." This was not primarily a logical deduction, as Lovejoy supposes, but a contemplative experience of a superabundance that, like water, would overflow into any and every nook and cranny, leaving nothing dry—hence, "there are no gaps in nature."
At the same time, this did not prevent Plotinus (and his nondual descendents) from also seeing that "nature makes leaps everywhere." A higher level, recall, was defined (by Aristotle) as one that had the essentials of the lower plus an extra something (an emergent) that defined the new level and was not present in the junior dimension. But the idea was that, at some point, they shared a common boundary, so that nothing was radically disjointed in the universe, even though it was everywhere shaded or graded. Either point taken alone—"no gaps" versus "leaps everywhere"—would lead to an unbalanced view.
The upshot of all this was that the manifest universe was viewed as a huge organic Totality, graded in terms of levels of diversity, but with each and all an integral link in the Kosmos, and "the perfection of the universe is attained essentially in proportion to the diversity of natures in it" (Saint Thomas). Precisely because of the Great Holarchy, the manifest world was one and unbroken. Nicholas Cusanus (one of the great representatives of the nondual during the late Middle Ages):

All things, however different, are linked together. There is in the genera of things such a connection between the higher and the lower that they meet in a common point; such an order obtains among species that the highest species of one genus coincides with the lowest of the next higher genus, in order that the universe may be one, perfect, continuous.

Plenitude expresses itself in apparent gradation—everything can't burst on the scene all at once!—but a gradation that is "full" and continuous and unbroken, with humans occupying one slot among an infinite number of slots. Far from placing men and women at the center of the Kosmos—as is obnoxiously supposed by many ecological critics—this conception made them acutely aware of how insignificant their actual position was. Already Maimonides in the twelfth century had written (in The Guide for the Perplexed, the same title that Schumacher deliberately used in his book extolling the Great Holarchy):

And if the earth is thus no bigger than a point relatively to the sphere of the fixed stars, what must be the ratio of the human species to the created universe as a whole? And how then can any of us think that these things exist for his sake, and that they are meant to serve his uses?

All of this radical nonanthropocentrism came, as we saw, precisely because of the radically decentered nature of Nondual mysticism. Thus Giordano Bruno would state flat out, "Thou canst not more nearly approach to a likeness of the Infinite by being a man than by being an ant; not more nearly by being a star than by being a man." This would likewise allow Bruno to realize that "because of the countless grades of perfection in which the incorporeal divine Excellence must needs manifest itself in a corporeal manner, there must be countless individuals such as are those great living beings of which our divine mother, the Earth, is one."
This did not sit well with the Church, which did not take kindly to a God who was equidistant from an ant and a man, and who had already situated Motherhood quite elsewhere. But the crucial point, as Love joy expertly summarizes it, was that:

No creature's existence was merely instrumental to the well-being of those above it in the scale [the great holarchy]. Each had its own independent reason for being; in the final account, none was more important than any other [ultimately, as Plotinus said, each was fully the One; gradation is apparent]; and each, therefore, had its own claim to respect and consideration, its own right to live its own life and to possess all that might be needful to enable it to fulfill the functions and enjoy the "privileges and perquisites" of its station. Each link in the Chain of Being exists, not merely and not primarily for the benefit of any other link, but for its own sake; and therefore the true raison d'etre of one species of being was never to be sought in its utility to any other.

And thus, all of the following were present in the Descending Side of the Plato/Plotinus system (balanced and integrated, of course, with its counterpart on the Ascending Side): a radically decentered vision, nonanthropocentric to the core; an apparent gradation of being with no missing links, no gaps, but emergents at a common boundary; a necessity for biodiversity and a delight in the manifold nature of the creative process; a desire to participate fully in the passion of Spirit's creative Goodness; an exuberant embrace of diversity as "the Goodness of the One"; and a celebration of the earth and all its creatures as "a visible, sensible God" and our "divine Mother."
That is the half of the equation that had been downplayed, even repressed, under the rule of the unearthly Trinity—from the time, roughly, of Augustine to Copernicus. All of those ideas were thus present, simmering, hidden under the weight of the rather exclusively Ascending Ideal of the age.
And whereas the Ascenders had dominated the scene up to the Renaissance, all it took was a decisive shift in consciousness to unleash the Descending Path, a path which, bursting forth from its thousand-year confinement, exploded on the scene with a creative fury that would, in the span of a mere few centuries, remake the entire Western world—and in the process substitute, more or less permanently, one broken God for the other.

11

Brave New World

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.              —karl marx,  on modernity

modernity":   all that is solid melts into air. We are still living in its shadow, still under the sway of powerful currents unleashed three centuries ago, still trying to situate ourselves in a Kosmos profoundly shaken by the events of the Enlightenment, still wondering exactly what it all meant.
But this much seems certain: from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (to today): the Ascenders were out, the Descenders were in.
And the catalyst was the widespread emergence of Reason (formal operational), not just in a few individuals (which had often happened in the past), but as a basic organizing principle of society itself (which had never happened in the past)—a Reason that was in fact an actual ascending or transcending of myth, but a Reason that, fed up with a millennium of (frustrated) upward-looking, turned its eyes instead to the glories of this manifest world, and followed that descending God who finds its passion and delight—and its perfect consummation—in the marvels and the wonders of diversity.

modernity: good news, bad news

The movement of modernity (from the Enlightenment to today) contained, and contains, two very different trends. And in trying to situate ourselves in relation to modernity—and in trying to decide whether modernity was "good news" or "bad news"—both of these trends, I believe, need to be kept firmly in mind.
The first trend that defined modernity was "No more myths!" (and the Enlightenment philosophers would use exactly that phrase in describing their own endeavors). The Enlightenment mentality, with its rational demand for evidence, burst asunder the closed circle of the mythological world and deconstructed its cultural worldspace in no uncertain terms—-and did so by asking, in each and every case, "How do you know Moses parted the Red Sea?" "Because it says so in the Bible"—where for a thousand years that would have been an irrefutable and unchallengeable answer, it now impressed no one (no one "in the know," that is).
And so some two thousand years after a mythic-membership society had forced the first great proponent of Reason to drink hemlock, the first Reason-oriented societies now turned on their mythic predecessors with a vengeance.
The mythic dominator hierarchies (God and Pope and King on top, with shades and grades of servitude stretching out beneath), and the politico-religious forms of social organization that went with them, were dismantled with frightening and often bloody speed. "Remember the cruelties!" cried Voltaire—"Liberty or death!" the American revolutionaries screamed—as the dominator hierarchies, often vicious and cruel, everywhere began to topple, precisely because they were top-heavy with a depth they did not earn or deserve or in fact possess (however much they did indeed serve their phase-specific task of social integration).
As we put it earlier, the relatively widespread emergence of an ego identity from a role identity (and the switch from a conventional/sociocentric to a postconventional/worldcentric morality) brought with it an eventual demand for (1) free and equal subjects of civil law, (2) morally free subjects, and (3) politically free subjects as citizens of the democratic state. And to say "free subjects" means only that the rational-ego possessed more relative autonomy (tenet 12d) compared with the tightly bound mythic-membership roles in dominator hierarchies (even if the rational-ego imagined its "autonomy" to be much more absolute). But all of that, with its own ups and downs, was part of the overall "good news" of modernity.
But "No more myths!" came also to mean—and here is the second major trend that defines modernity—"No more Ascent!" Since the myths were all upward-yearning, "No more myths!" seemed to demand no more upward-yearning, of any sort (frustrated or genuine or anything in between). Understandably fed up with a millennium or two of (frustrated) upward-yearning and "pie in the sky" aspirations, Reason threw overboard the transcendental baby with the mythic bathwater.
This jettisoning of higher Ascent was allowed, even demanded, by the positivism of the evidence now recognized by rationality. Since rational science could represent every event in the Kosmos as a Right-Handed, empirical, observable, natural phenomenon, no higher or "metaphysical" states were needed (and thus, Ockhamly, none were allowed). Since every holon in the Kosmos does indeed possess a Right-Hand component, empirical science could honestly, even decently, but nonetheless mistakenly, imagine that in registering the empirical component it had indeed covered all the bases.
Thus the Kosmos was collapsed into the Right-Hand path, and a flat-land empirical holism (with a few flatland atomistic cranks) replaced a multidimensional holarchy as the guiding paradigm (the fundamental Enlightenment paradigm, as we put it earlier). The same Reason that allowed the deconstruction of the dominator hierarchies inherent in the mythic structure could also, with the same tools, collapse the Kosmos in favor of the cosmos. This was, I will argue, the essence of the "bad news."
And these are the two major trends ("No more myths!" and "No more Ascent!") that gave modernity its "good news, bad news" character (or so I will try to show).
From the very beginning of modernity—from the beginning of the changes wrought from Descartes to Kant—there have been its many vocal critics (none more perceptive and brutal than Hegel, for whom the Enlightenment in general, and Kant in particular, was a "vanity of the understanding" and a "monster of arrested development"). From Nietzsche to Bataille to Foucault, from Heidegger to Derrida to Lyotard, the critics have continued their assault, with the postmodern poststructuralists being merely the most recent, although possibly the loudest and most gauche, of the long line of antimodernists.
But it's the "good news, bad news" nature of modernity that most of these critics all too often seem to miss, and they especially miss (or ignore) anything resembling "good news." But after all, the students in Tiananmen Square were screaming the names of Locke and Jefferson; they were not screaming the names of Foucault and Derrida.
Charles Taylor surely captures the essence of the situation when he says, "I find myself dissatisfied with the views on this subject [the nature of modernity] which are now current. Some are upbeat, and see us as having climbed to a higher plateau; others show a picture of decline, of loss, of forgetfulness. Neither sort seems to me right; both ignore massively important features of our situation. We have yet to capture, I think, the unique combination of greatness and danger, of grandeur et misère, which characterizes the modern age. To see the full complexity and richness of the modern identity is to see, first, how much we are all caught up in it, for all our attempts to repudiate it; and second, how shallow and partial are the one-sided judgements we bandy around about it."
This is, as Taylor indicates, an enormously rich and complex topic; so much so that the entire third volume of this series (The Spirit of Post/ Modernity) is devoted entirely to it. What I am doing in this chapter and the next is simply summarizing and condensing an enormous number of factors into these two broad trends, "No more myths!" (the good news), and "No more Ascent!" (the bad news).
The former was, so to speak, a step up, a shift in the center of gravity of society from mythic-membership to rational-egoic; it was a major step in Ascent, driven by Eros. It brought a differentiation of the Big Three (science, art, and morality), with the now-disclosed possibility of actually advancing each of their truth claims in a worldcentric and universal pluralism of tolerance and mutual recognition. And even though that was collectively an evolutionary advance, a moving forward of Eros, like every stage in development it nonetheless brought its own problems that could not be solved on its own level (the dialectic of progress).
But quite apart from all that, as a separate line of analysis, there was "No more Ascent!"—that is, "Ascend to Reason, but no further!"—and this brought nothing but bad news. It not only flattened the Kosmos to a one-dimensional, monological affair, it sealed out the possibility of deeper and wider developments that alone could defuse its own insoluble dilemmas. If, for example, rationality had finally differentiated the Big Three, so that art and science and morality could fortify and enrich their own pursuits without dogmatic interference, nonetheless, without a further ascent to vision-logic, there was no way that the Big Three could be integrated (as Schelling and Hegel would both point out). The differentiation of the Big Three thus degenerated, by the end of the eighteenth century, into the dissociation of the Big Three (a point made by Habermas)— which in turn allowed the Big Three to be rudely reduced to the Big One of it-language: the flatland, one-dimensional, monological systems theory of the representational and production paradigms, nightmares through and through, with all depth, whether in humans or animals or any sentient being, reduced to being merely a strand in the endlessly flat and faded system.
Thus the fundamental increase brought by rationality tended to be accompanied by a loss of significance. The average mode shifted up; the highest mode shifted down: and thus, I have some good news, and some bad news.

the age of reason

In this chapter, the good news.
From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, the names say it all: Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Raphael, Machiavelli, Alexander Pope, Erasmus, Francis Bacon, Jan van Eyck, Giotto, Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, John Locke, G. E. Lessing, Descartes, Spinoza, Voltaire, Leibniz, Rousseau, Diderot, Hume, Kant, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson.
What they all had in common (other than the fact that they were all men—that is part of the next, "bad news" chapter) was that they shared, in various degrees and in different ways, the space of possibilities disclosed and created by rationality. ("Reason," with a capital R, technically refers to vision-logic or dialectical-network reason, as opposed to simple formal-operational reasoning, or "the understanding." But when historians refer to the "Age of Reason," they mean formal operational as we have defined it. The context will make clear which usage is intended.)
The "emergence of Reason" and the "Age of Reason" do not mean that individuals prior to this time had no access to rationality. We saw that the space of rationality was accessible, to the few, even when the average or typical mode was magical; and some individuals—the Eckharts and Teresas and Platos—had access not only to rationality but beyond it to subtle and causal occasions.
Rather, the "Age of Reason" simply means that access to the space of reason was now common enough that the "center of social gravity"—the basic organizing principles of society—shifted from mythic-rational to rational structures (as evidenced legally, politically, institutionally), with, again, some people falling below the norm, others above it. Reason became both a basic principle of social organization and the highest expectable potential for the average individual.
And while we eventually want to move beyond rationality (and its own inherent limitations and grave problems), it is crucial to acknowledge what it did manage to accomplish, and what its evolutionarily phase-specific task was.
I believe it is a profound truth of human development that one can fully transcend any level only if one fully honors it first (thus allowing embrace/Agape). Otherwise one's "development" is simply a reaction to, a reaction against, the preceding level, and thus one remains stuck to it with the energy of disapproval—Phobos, not Eros.
Let us come to bury Caesar; let us come to praise him first. If we look at the above-mentioned list of names, virtually all of their works, and all of their accomplishments, can be read directly off the list of the characteristics of formal operational awareness that we have already discussed:
1. Rationality is hypothetico-deductive or experimental—Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Charcot, Kelvin. Rationality demanded evidence and reasons, not dogmas and myths, which is precisely why (as Whitehead pointed out for the West and Needham for the East) the mystics and the newly rising scientists joined hands against the Church (or exoteric religions), since both mysticism and science are experimental and evidential. It was the demand for evidence that, more than any other component of the Age of Reason, would shatter the closed world of mythology in an irreversible and irrevocable way: that toothpaste could never be put back in the tube.
But let us note the intricacy of what was actually involved: it wasn't simply that the mythic worldview had no recourse to evidence of any sort; its evidence, rather, was grounded in the obviousness (and "unchallenge-ableness") of its own worldspace, and was true enough in that worldspace. Within that mythic worldspace, there was evidence aplenty: the gods and goddesses exist ("How do you know they exist?" "Are you crazy? Where do you think the rain comes from? Look at the creation all around you! Can't you see? Are you blind?"). And the gods and goddesses have given us their words; the pharaoh/king/emperor is the descendant of the gods, and thus we owe our allegiance to this temporal representative of the gods/goddesses; the evidence for this is everywhere, you have simply to look!
Thus, to say that the mythic worldspace was not fallibilist misses the point. Any given interpretation within the mythic worldspace could indeed be rejected by a community of interpreters, and this happened all the time. It is true that the mythic worldspace was not fallibilist from the depth of rationality (i.e., was not fallibilist to the types of evidence that rationality would disclose): but that evidence simply could not be seen in the first place, and so didn't (and couldn't) enter the picture to dislodge any particular interpretations. But the bad interpretations within the mythic worldspace were indeed rebuffed by a community of competent interpreters in tune with the nuances of the mythic worldspace (and they were right more often than not, in that space). These structures weren't stupid (no structure is; and they all produced their own bona fide geniuses). Rather, each structure weighs carefully the evidence that it can see.
In other words, the hermeneutics of any worldspace is closed and perfectly evidential for that worldspace. No new interpretation will step outside the worldspace. Rather, a developmental supersession will suddenly, via emergence, disclose new depths and wider perceptions that themselves pass judgment on yesterday's relative blindness. It is transformation that negates the old translations, and not anything the translations themselves could see from within their own horizons (and bad interpretations within those relatively true horizons can be, and are, soundly rejected by the evidence that the eyes of that structure can see, and see quite clearly, as far as it goes).
Likewise, Reason also imagines that its evidence is simply the evidence, obvious and incontrovertible per se (i.e., its type of evidence is likewise stamped with "unchallengeableness"). Bad interpretations within its rational horizon (which also means within its structural worldspace) will be soundly rebuffed from within that horizon by the community of those whose eyes can see the depths disclosed by rationality. Interpretations from the transrational structures will not be rebuffed: they will simply not be seen in the first place, and thus will be met with the standard "What, are you crazy?" (which is not a rebuff but a retreat).
But the evidence disclosed by rationality will indeed be able to outcontextualize, and thus outtrump, the evidence disclosed within the horizons and the structures of mythic awareness (just as mythic masterfully out-trumped and outcontextualized magic). It is not that a greater and absolute truth overthrows a falsehood, so much as that a great truth supersedes a lesser truth (no epoch lives, or can live, simply on falsehoods). And this is what the Age of Enlightenment brought to bear upon the Age of Myth: a new horizon of evidence that outcontextualized the old.
And outcontextualize, it did indeed. We tend to forget the evidence that the mythic worldspace took to be perfectly obvious. Here is one of the widely accepted "refutations" of Galileo's discovery of the moons of Jupiter: "There are seven windows given to animals in the domicile of the head, through which the air is admitted to the tabernacle of the body, to enlighten, to warm and to nourish it. What are these parts of the microcosm? Two nostrils, two eyes, two ears, and a mouth. So in the heavens, as in a macrocosmos, there are two favorable stars, two unpropitious, two luminaries, and Mercury undecided and indifferent. From this and many other similarities in nature, such as the seven metals, etc., which it were tedious to enumerate, we gather that the number of planets is necessarily seven."
That is an excellent and very accurate description of the insides of the mythological worldspace, where syncretic wholes define the nature of interconnectivity in the Kosmos as disclosed at that depth. Rationality can explain the interconnectivity from a deeper dimension, and thus marshal more types of evidence, but rationality is not itself operating from the final Archimedian point of all possible worlds.
A thousand years from now, when atoms are understood to be pinpoint entries of a massive intelligence from the eighth dimension (or whatever the discoveries are that will shock and shake our present views, as shock they most certainly shall), we will look not so bright and gifted in our firm assurances of what the Kosmos is "actually" like. Atoms will still be atoms (no truths will be lost); but they will be set in deeper contexts that will render our narrower perspectives and interpretations as silly-sounding as the poor soul who lit into Galileo all self-assured and confident.
But my present point is simple enough: the types of evidence rationality could disclose had it all over the mythic structure; a shallower context gave way to a deeper disclosure; and the death rattle of an old and honorable worldspace released its last breath into the rising wind blowing now across a strange new landscape.
2.  Rationality is highly reflexive and introspective—as witness the constant introspective analyses of Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant (descendants each and all of Augustine's rational and radical reflexivity).
Take, as an example, the study of psychology, the study of an individual psyche. The word "psychology" itself wasn't even used until Freigius in 1575; but by the closing decade of the sixteenth century, it was common to treat anthropologia—the study of human nature—as composed of two parts: psychologia and somatologia, reflecting the ever-clearer differentiation of mind and body (typical of formop). The first widespread use of the term psychology was by Christian von Wolff, successor of Leibniz and predecessor of Kant, in such works as Psychologia Empirica (1731) and Psychologia Rationalis (1734). The term was picked up by Hartley in England (1748) and Bonnet in France (1755), and by the end of the eighteenth century it was in widespread use, reflecting, it appears, a newly emergent entity to be studied: the individual ego.
The first modern "school" of psychology was the associationist school of David Hartley, John Stuart Mill, and Alexander Bain (in England); and the first experimental approach was the great laboratory work of Weber, Fechner, Wundt (in Germany) and Titchener (in England)—the point being that all of this was made possible, in large measure, by the structural worldspace of rationality and its reflexive/introspective modes.
3.   Rationality grasps multiple perspectives (or is universal as pluralism). This perspectivism/pluralism showed up in everything from political theory to art. John Locke wrote three separate essays on tolerance (or the acceptance of different perspectives and points of view, except those that condemn others), concluding, among other things, that no one had a right to harm another in "life, health, liberty, or possessions"—the influence of which on subsequent history was simply incalculable.
In art, to give a very different but very related example, perspectivism began to be actually depicted, for the first time ever, in painting, beginning in fifteenth-century Florence and eventually associated with the names of Brunelleschi, Alberti, Donatello, Leonardo, Giotto. As Jean Gebser put it, "An entirely new spatial consciousness was beginning to break out of the soul into the world. By virtue of the perspective, not only is space made visible and brought out into the daylight of waking consciousness; man himself thereby attains visibility. The gradual possession of the perspective, which became the principal concern of Renaissance man, had the effect of expanding the world image. . . ." And this "visibility of man" is directly related to:
4.  Rationality brings forth an ego identity from the previous role identity. Morality is, or can now be, postconventional and worldcentric, not merely conventional and ethnocentric and sociocentric (or mythic-membership). Moral decisions thus rest with the individual, who must assume responsibility for his or her own relatively autonomous choices (and who may or may not choose to live up to rationality and act from a worldcentric space of universal pluralism—but the relatively autonomous choice is nonetheless present).
And, indeed, autonomy became one of the great and enduring themes of the Enlightenment. Kant would define it as the courage to think for oneself and not rely on socially given rules and dogmas. (That this would play into the disengaged subject of flatland holism is a point we will pursue in the next chapter.)
In political theory (and practice), this resulted, as we have seen, in the conception of men (and soon women) as autonomous agents, which meant free and equal subjects of civil law, morally free subjects, and politically free subjects or democratic citizens of the state.
And in art, this meant, for the first time, that there was an actual person (ego-bearer) to paint: the beginning of portraiture (such as by Jan van Eyck). And if there was now an ego to be painted, there was likewise a story to be told, a narrative of, by, and about egos: the novel was born.
5.  Rationality is ecological or relational. Along with autonomy, the great theme of the Enlightenment was systems harmony, which did not mean "peaceful" or "without conflict," but rather that the "whole system" of reality would balance itself out in spite of the particular conflicts and discords that individual components might undergo. As we have seen (and will see again in the next chapter), it was a thoroughgoing systems view of reality, where the totality "self-regulated itself" despite all the ups and downs of individuals. And this systems view, despite what misuses it might suffer, was nonetheless a great advance over mythology in understanding the interconnectivity of the Kosmos, for it replaced syncretic wholes (seven orifices mean seven planets) with holons, or whole/parts that are contextually situated in a way that does not do violence to individual wholes or parts.
(That this systems view would also involve the collapse of the Kosmos into the empirical holistic cosmos of monological flatland—this is a separate issue, part of the "bad news" of the next chapter; and that this holistic worldview would paradoxically be one of the greatest contributors to an ecological crisis: that, too, the topic of the next chapter.)
In the meantime, the relational mode of systems thinking was all the rage. It was literally everywhere, and was greeted with cries of Eureka across the Continent and the Isles. We see it in, for example, Adam Smith's "invisible hand," where, in spite of the fact that each individual might act in a greedy fashion, the overall result was good and beneficial for the whole (it was believed). We see it in Leibniz's "preestablished" harmony of all monads. We see it powerfully in John Locke's notion of "interlocking orders." In politics, it shows up most influentially in Rousseau's idea of the "general will" of the people, which supposed that if each individual follows his or her own reasons, a majority or consensus will emerge that will be to the benefit of all. This volonte generate was a direct precursor to the American and French revolutions. But the point is that "all the philosophers of the Enlightenment use this concept of harmony directly or indirectly, explicitly or implicitly," and all were given to exaltations of the "perfection of the great Universal System."
6. Rationality is nonanthropocentric. The shocking decentering that rationality/science brought is now notorious: Copernicus, Darwin, Freud—men and women are merely links in that vast, vast chain of existence. (This had always been obvious to the likes of Cusanus or Bruno or Plotinus; we are now discussing what rationality brought to the average-mode and what thus came to be very commonly accepted views outside of the mythic holdovers.)
As we will see in the next chapter, this anti-anthropocentric stance became so intense at times that ethics virtually stalled altogether, so paralyzed were people with the thought of their utter insignificance. To step outside of one's imperfection was viewed as pride, the great sin of the eighteenth century, and there emerged a moral atmosphere that "may be described as a counsel of imperfection—an ethics of prudent mediocrity." But all of this was a direct result of the fact that reason could set aside its own viewpoint, its own egocentricities, and see the world through the eyes of the other, and thus begin to honor the other in unprecedented ways, and, for better or worse, to profoundly question its own right to existence.
7. Rationality brings a new space of deeper feeling and greater passion—the explosive idealism of the true dreamer who can cognitively imagine all the possibilities. This new passion—coupled with reason's capacity for postconventional morality and its capacity to criticize the given state of affairs in light of a possible future—meant that this was not just the Age of Reason, it was the Age of Revolution.

We must understand what this reason was. It was not [just] a calculating reason which decides whether to do this or that, depending on which is more advantageous. Rather, it was a full, passionate, revolutionary emphasis on man's essential goodness in the name of the principle of justice [postconventional morality]. The revolutionary fought against feudalism and the authoritarian churches. He had a passionate belief in the [goodness or harmony] of reality and was convinced that the human mind is able to re-establish this structure by transforming society. We could therefore call it revolutionary reason as well as critical reason. Because of its depths this critical revolutionary reason overcame the prejudices of the feudal order, the heteronomous [socio-centric] subjection of people both by the state and the church. It could do so because it spoke in the name of [pluralistic or postconventional] truth and justice. The philosophers of the Enlightenment were extremely passionate. They were not positivists [merely one of the possibilities of reason]; they were not interested in merely collecting facts. They became martyrs for the passion. . . 

This was particularly a passion, we might say, for the equality found only in the noospheric space of reason. The result, of course, is the existence of today's pluralistic democracies, forged by a passion for tolerance—a tolerance that, since not all of its citizens can always live up to it, is therefore firmly embedded in legal institutions, and a tolerance that, from its inception, has always been driving toward the emergence of planetary vision-logic with its genuinely world-class citizens. And one can only stand in utter awe and admiration for the many men and women who fought and died, from America to France, under the slogan "I disagree with what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it."

the liberation movements

The widespread emergence of reason meant, as always, a new differentiation demanding a new integration. We have already seen that some of the new and important differentiations included a separation of church and state; the differentiation of the Big Three (an important point we will return to in a moment); and the increasingly clearer differentiation of the noosphere and the biosphere.
Most significantly, this differentiation of noosphere and biosphere meant, of course, that the differentiation could go too far into dissociation, and this dissociation would show up in an extraordinary number of guises. First and foremost, the stage was set for a possible ecological crisis, a possibility that of late has become an increasingly gruesome actuality. The ecological crisis, as we earlier put it, is a worldwide, collective psychoneurosis—a denial, alienation, dissociation of the biosphere by the noosphere.
The ecophilosophers maintain that the ecological crisis is the result of human beings not realizing that they are merely a part of a larger biosphere. But that, as we have seen, gets the picture exactly backward, and cannot even explain how a part can dominate the whole. No, we have seen quite clearly that the human compound individual is not a part of the biosphere. Rather, a part of the human compound individual is a part of the biosphere, and the biosphere itself is a part of the noosphere. And for just that reason, repression can set in; for just that reason, the noosphere can dissociate the biosphere; and for just that reason, the poisoning of our roots means the death of our branches as well.
But that is more of the "bad news" (next chapter). At this point, we should note instead that in the immediate wake of the differentiation of the noosphere and the biosphere, biological determinants were no longer the strong (and often overwhelming) factor they had been up to that point in history. In the biosphere, might makes right. In the biosphere, big fishes eat little fishes. In the biosphere, muscle rules. And in the biosphere, men dominate other men, and men dominate women.
Feminist and orthodox researchers both agree that, in virtually all known societies to date, power between the sexes has been asymmetrical in a very specific and very widespread (virtually universal) fashion. That is, all known societies can be arranged along a continuum from relatively "equalitarian" (males and females share power in the public sphere roughly equally) to male-dominant (males alone govern the public sphere), but never the other way around, never tending toward societies of female dominance of the public/productive domain.
In other words, the most feminine societies (such as early hoe/horticultural societies) were not ones dominated by females, but ones where females shared public/productive power roughly 50-50 with men; whereas the "most masculine" societies (such as the plow/agrarian) were ones where men possessed virtually 100 percent of public/productive power (with women relegated to the private/reproductive sphere).
As researchers from Janet Chafetz to Riane Eisler to Rae Blumberg to Joyce Nielsen have pointed out, there are virtually no known exceptions to this scheme—it goes from 50-50 male/female to 100 percent male, but never toward 100 percent female. There is obviously a set of very strong, universal factors that are tilting the scheme in one direction only (from balance to male dominance, never from balance to female dominance). What are these virtually universal factors?
"To answer the question 'Why are women nowhere superior to men in their access to scarce and valued societal resources?' one must look to the key sets of intervening variables," says Janet Chafetz. "As a category, men nowhere [in no known societies] specialize solely in the reproductive/ private sphere activities, nor do women as a group specialize solely in the productive/public sphere. Stated otherwise, women's activities are either specialized in nonproductive roles, which leads to inferior status, or divided between the two realms, which may afford them relatively equal status"—in other words, at best 50-50, and that against the odds.
"This pushes the question back one step: why do women as a category never specialize solely in productive/public sector roles? Since this is a constant [no known exceptions], logically it must be explained in terms of one or more constants. In this case, a set of biological constants helps to answer the question raised: the women carry babies in their bodies and lactate, which circumscribes their physical mobility. While this can be minimized [through low birth rates, etc.], it cannot be eliminated and, in fact, for most human societies throughout most of human history, such restriction due to pregnancy and nursing has been far from minimal."
This has far-reaching, even massive, consequences. "Given these biological facts, most societies find it more efficient if women also do the bulk of the caretaking of young children who are no longer nursing. That is, on the basis of expediency, the nurturance role is typically extended beyond the biologically based phenomenon of breast-feeding. And to the extent that these factors keep women in the proximity of the domicile more than men, it becomes more efficient to extend their domestic role to encompass other household tasks, such as food preparation and maintenance of family possessions. Since many societies have had a large share of their productive activities moved away from the homesite, these fetters on female mobility restrict women's opportunity to specialize in productive roles."
According to Chafetz, these biological givens, universal in nature, are part of the reason that societies universally do not drift toward 100 percent female dominance of the public/productive sphere, but, at best, allow a 50-50 sharing, and, at worst, allow a drift toward 100 percent male advantage.
And this drift toward male dominance of the public/productive sphere is aggravated by a universal or constant biological factor on the part of the males as well. "An additional biological constant is probably in force: male superiority in physical strength. In many societies, especially pre-industrial, some or many productive activities require—or at least are handled more efficiently by—greater strength. Again, females as a category find themselves somewhat disadvantaged in competing for such roles."
The conclusion, then, is rather straightforward: "In short, females are not found to have superior status to males because their relative disadvantage in mobility and/or strength makes it more efficient for men to monopolize some, many, or all productive roles and for women to assume at least some of the household labor. Thus, women as a category are never free to specialize in or monopolize productive/public sector roles. Where men do specialize in or monopolize such roles, they are vastly superior to women in status [100 percent male advantage]. Where the sexes more equally divide the two realms, their statuses approach equality [roughly 50-50]. Females as a group do not have vastly superior status to males [it never drifts in the other direction] because, in all the history of our species, women have never been able to divest themselves of some involvement in the reproductive/private sphere of activity."
Now, Chafetz's overall theory (which is very comprehensive, and which is examined in detail in volume 2) does not simply rest with these biological constants (or "strong universals in the sexual scheme"). These biological givens are simply the background constants against which numerous other factors play themselves out, variables such as modes of technology, environmental threats, family structures, types of productive activity, population density, nature of work organization, degree of separation of work- and homesites. In all, Chafetz isolates a dozen factors that are involved in the overall "gender status" of men and women in various societies.
But given the biological constants, all of these other factors affect whether the given society will be relatively equalitarian (50-50), or whether, for reasons of expediency and efficiency, it will drift toward a male dominance of the public/productive sphere (but never drift in the other direction).
And the conclusion, backed by extensive empirical data, is that whenever these other variables do indeed shift—whenever there are environmental threats or disasters, food scarcities, warfare, social threats, and intense stresses—whenever these factors occur, then the 50-50 balance is inevitably disrupted, a premium is placed on male physical strength/mobility, and the sexes polarize dramatically (with males dominating the public/productive sphere and females dominating the private/reproductive, but never the reverse).
And, most important, when the sexes polarize dramatically, a horrible stress is placed on both men and women. (In fact, according to Chafetz, men have it worse in "male-dominant" societies than do women, starting with the fact that they alone are conscripted for defense). Oppression as a causal explanation is deficient and inadequate in almost every respect, since, among other things, it simply does not fit the data curve. "These oppression theories," says Chafetz, "are based on vaguely defined concepts often ill suited to operationalization, such as 'patriarchy,' 'female subordination,' and 'sexism.' The use of such emotion-laden but unclear terms, combined typically with a heavily normative approach to the topic of sex inequality, results in a maximum of rhetoric but a minimum of clear insight."
No, this polarization of the sexes—with males dominating the public/ productive sphere and females dominating the private/reproductive, to the detriment of both—has virtually nothing to do with male oppression and female sheepdom/subjugation. It has everything to do with life in the biosphere.
Thus, with the differentiation of the noosphere and the biosphere, these biological constants are not eliminated, but they are subordinated (preserved and negated). They are no longer necessarily the major determinants of the form of social organization. Biology is no longer necessarily a certain destiny.
Even in the relatively "equalitarian" societies of the past (such as early horticultural and some foraging), the "equality" was kept in place, not by legal and moral (or noospheric) determinants, but by luck. The hoe placed public/productive power in women's hands, not by conscious and intentional design, but by sheer happenstance. It turns out that a simple hoe or digging stick can be physically handled as easily by a woman as by a man; and further, in hoe societies, the worksite is often right next to the homesite, so that pregnant women are not disadvantaged when it comes to physical mobility (they, like the men, can walk to work). And, indeed, in such societies, women produced about 80 percent of the foodstuff (the men still often hunted), and consequently the societies remained relatively close to that ideal 50-50 balance—but a balance entirely at the mercy of circumstances.
And thus, just as the hoe had placed power in women's hands, not by conscious design but by happenstance, so the plow would yank that power away, not by oppression or oppressive design, but by the same biological givens subjected now to entirely different (and equally nonintentional) circumstances. (Women who operated plows suffered devastating rates of miscarriage, as pointed out by Chafetz; further, the plowed fields were always at a considerable distance from the homesite, disadvan-taging a pregnant women from getting to work, as pointed out by Nielsen and others). The same biological constants that under one set of circumstances simply happened to advantage women, under different circumstances simply happened to disadvantage them.
There is neither oppression on the one hand, nor virtue on the other, operating here.
With the differentiation of the noosphere and the biosphere, these biological constants, although not eliminated, are no longer necessarily the major determinants in the public status of men and women. In the biosphere, might makes right, and status follows physical function. In the noosphere, right makes might, and status follows the rights of free agents in the worldcentric space of universal perspectivism. Whether or not a woman is producing foodstuffs in the public/productive sphere is irrelevant to her rights in that domain—and that idea was revolutionary and absolutely unprecedented.
With the differentiation of the noosphere and the biosphere, women could secure rights as cultural-noospheric agents, regardless of biospheric factors or functions or constants, which were judged, for the first time in history, to be irrelevant to one's public status as a citizen and a bearer, not just of children, but of rights. The noosphere, not the biosphere, would determine rights and responsibilities. And these rights were not previously repressed, they were previously meaningless.
To repeat what was said in chapter 5 (for now I think it will make more sense): in this way, and this way only, can we maintain the otherwise paradoxical and confusing truth—a paradoxical truth that has crippled feminism vis-à-vis "female liberation"—that women now stand open to and in need of liberation, but previously were not acting in an unliberated (or duped) fashion. The widespread emergence of the women's movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries occurred precisely because the noosphere and the biosphere were finally differentiated. And this inescapably means that the widespread emergence of the women's movement was not primarily the undoing of a nasty state of affairs that easily could have been different, but rather it marked the emergence of an altogether new state of affairs that was in significant ways unprecedented.
What had grounded both men and women in narrowly based biological roles was an evolutionary process that was itself, until fairly recently, grounded in the biosphere, and that only recently is now in the process of liberating both men and women from confinement to those particular roles—necessary at the time but now outmoded.
Historically, with the emergence of pluralistic rationality—with the differentiation of the noosphere and the biosphere—right slowly began to replace might. Wherever pluralistic rationality emerged, social relations based on physical power—particularly slavery and the polarization or dissociation of the sexes—were found intolerable to reason, to pluralism and perspectivism—put yourself in the slave's shoes (or lack of them) and see how it feels! This was all radically new. . . .
And thus, in the West and in the East, wherever rationality emerged, feminist movements and antislavery movements first emerged as well. As only one example from the East, the real revolution that Gautama Buddha brought to India lay not so much in his actual spiritual practices—his yoga was already afoot in India—as in the fact that he denied the caste system. Much more than a religious pioneer, he was a social revolutionary, and this rocked India profoundly—yet another example of the "revolutionary passion" brought by reason. Even though Gautama was transrational as well, his religion—one of the first "rational religions" in the world—was not based on mythic gods and goddesses. He denied all of that, and thus he simultaneously denied the dominator hierarchies, the caste system, inherent in the mythological worldview: this is what was so revolutionary about his system.
And my point is that it wasn't so much that these various liberation movements (of slaves, of women, of the untouchables) had tried to surface in the past but were rudely oppressed; it was mostly that they previously made no sense whatsoever, to men or women or slaves or masters, and so were for all intents and purposes nonexistent. Power was earned or taken; to share it was insanity, according to the evidence that these structures could see. Only where the noosphere began to emerge and differentiate itself from the biosphere—only where right began to bear down on might—did these "slave situations" come to be perceived as problems. Otherwise, the problem was how to exercise power strategically, not how to share it. For the warrior ethic, for the duty ethic, and for the ethnocentric ethic, universal compassion was a sign of weakness. The value of compassion was not suppressed or oppressed; it simply was not seen in the first place.
But with the differentiation of the noosphere and the biosphere, there could—and therefore would—arise a Mary Wollstonecraft, a John Stuart Mill, a Harriet Taylor (just as similar voices, although isolated, had arisen in Greece and Rome and India and China, wherever pluralistic reason had lifted up its universal head).
After the death of her first husband, Harriet Taylor married John Stuart Mill (he reports he had been in love with her for twenty years), and together they collaborated on the famous On Liberty (1859). The year it was published was the hundredth anniversary of the birth date of Mary Wollstonecraft, whose Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) is generally regarded as the first major feminist treatise anywhere in history.
"Feminism as a modern ideology did not emerge until the middle of the nineteenth century," points out Riane Eisler. "Although many of the philosophical foundations for feminism had been articulated earlier by women like Mary Wollstonecraft, Frances Wright, Ernestine Rose, George Sand, Sarah and Angelina Grimke, and Margaret Fuller, its formal birthday is July 19, 1848, at Seneca Falls, New York. Here, at the first convention in recorded history held for the express purpose of launching women's collective struggle, Elizabeth Cady Stanton made a pivotal statement. 'Among the many important questions which have been brought before the public,' Stanton said, 'there is none that more vitally affects the human family than that which is technically called 'Women's Rights.'' "
In the noosphere, right makes might. William Wilberforce, in a campaign forged with his lifelong friend William Pitt, spearheaded a movement that resulted, in 1807, in the abolition of the slave trade in the British empire. In the States, a war fought in part for antislavery motives would grind up as many men in single battles as were lost in all of Vietnam: 51,000 were killed in three days at Gettysburg alone. The president at the time would remind the world, in an address at that site, and in a mere 269 words, that this battle was fought because the nation was "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal," a proposition scorned by nature and by all societies embedded in it.
That proposition—that rational idea—very soon detached itself from remnants of biospheric power and extended to women as well. In less than a century from Harriet Taylor's death, women in democratic societies had secured the legal protection, institutionalized, of (1) free and equal subjects of civil law, (2) morally free subjects, and (3) politically free subjects as citizens of the democratic state. That these freedoms and protections still need to be extended and fortified does not denigrate the fact that they are structurally in place (and, anyway, as is now apparent to everybody, all men start out life as testosterone mutants and biospheric beasts and only gradually "get it" as they develop into the equal rights of the noosphere).
With the differentiation of the noosphere and the biosphere, women could still claim a rich heritage in the biospheric qualities (mostly, embodied communion) that differentiate them from men (mostly, hyperagency)—this is the claim of radical feminists. But likewise, they could also claim noospheric equality and demand that it be protected by law—this is the claim of liberal feminists.
I believe both are true, and can be true, now that the noosphere and biosphere have been differentiated and enfolded, embraced, in the same human compound individual. And this is part of the rich heritage of the various "liberation movements" (of women, of slaves, of untouchables) that emerged around the globe with the emergence of rational perspectivism and universal pluralism.
In the same way, the female value sphere, freed by evolution from its confinement via the biosphere, could now begin more readily to infuse the public domain with its own care and concerns. "For it was through the impact of the 'female ethos' embodied by women like Florence Nightingale, Jane Addams, Sojourner Truth, and Dorothea Dix, who were now beginning to enter the 'public world' en masse, that new professions like organized nursing and social work emerged, that the abolitionist movement to free slaves gained massive grass roots support, that the treatment of the insane and mentally deficient became more humane."
Not to mention that it was in the "salons"—in the atmosphere— created by women such as Ninon de Lenclos, Madame Geoffrin, Madame Rambouillet, and Madame du Chatelet, that so many of the ideas that we would recognize as "humanist" and "Enlightenment" arose and were nurtured, an atmosphere that can only be called "liberational."
All of which points unmistakably, as Riane Eisler puts it (and as Habermas has often argued): "What becomes evident is that the great transformation of Western society that began with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment did not fail but is merely incomplete."
(And the next "liberation movement"? Understanding that the real urgency is still to implement more fully the liberations brought by rationality and the ego/centaur, then next up is: the Eco-Noetic Self, the Over-Soul that is the World Soul, which demands a liberation not just of peoples but of life, of all sentient beings, not as having equal rights, but as worthy of care and respect and honor, cherished as manifestations of Spirit. We will return to this topic of "environmental ethics" in the last chapter. My point for now is simply that every Eros or Ascent brings a liberating force which can then, barring fixation or repression, be embodied in a wider Agape or compassion.)

the big three

I would like to point in particular to Immanuel Kant's three critiques (The Critique of Pure Reason, The Critique of Practical Reason, and The Critique of Judgment), because they demonstrate more clearly than anything else that the three spheres of science, morality, and art were now irrevocably differentiated. In mythic and mythic-rational syncretism, science and morality and art are still in significant ways globally fused; and far from being "holistic," this indicates, as in all syncretisms, that the individual whole/parts are distorted, or not taken at face value, in order that they may be bound and forced into the syncretic "whole." A scientific "truth" is true only if it fits the religious dogma, and all true art depicts some aspect of that mythic organization.
With Kant, each of these spheres is differentiated and set free to develop its own potentials without violence from a "forced fit" in a global indissociation. These three spheres, we have seen, refer in general to the dimensions of "it," of "we," and of "I." (These are the four quadrants— the exterior and the interior of the individual and the social—with the two Right-Hand quadrants treated as one since both of them are described in similar it-language; both deal with seen exteriors.)
The sphere of empirical science deals with those aspects of reality that can be investigated in a relatively "objective" fashion and described in an "it" language (descriptive, monological, prepositional truth, a state of affairs, the Right half); it always has recourse to the exteriors or the surfaces of holons, since these can be seen with the senses or their instrumental extensions. Practical reason or moral reason refers to the sphere of "we," of how you and I can pragmatically interact and interrelate in terms of something common that we can find between us, not as shared surfaces but as a common depth of mutual understanding ("we," justice, the good, the Lower Left). And the sphere of art or aesthetic judgment refers, in the broadest sense, to how I express myself and what I express of myself, the depth in the individual ("I," sincerity, expressivity, the Upper Left).
That Kant differentiates these realms means that "I" and "we" are differentiated (I need no longer automatically go along with society's rules and norms; I can norm the norms; what the church and state say are not necessarily the true or the good). It means that "I" and "it" are clearly differentiated (my subjective wishes do not constitute reality or its scientific study). It means that "we" and "it" are clearly differentiated (the state or church does not have the right to dictate what reality is).
Each of these three realms, then, can be fudged separately to see if it's telling "its kind of truth." In the realm of "itness" or empiric-scientific truths, we want to know if propositions more or less accurately match the facts as disclosed ("Is there life on Jupiter or not?"). In the realm of "I-ness," the criterion is sincerity: you want to know if I am telling the truth, if I am being sincere about how I feel, if I am being truthful about expressing my inner state (if I am reporting my depth sincerely). And in the realm of "we-ness" the criterion is goodness, or justness, or relational care and concern: we want to know if our actions with each other show kindness and non-egocentric caring, or at the very least, mutual understanding; we want to act with a worldcentric fairness (act as if the maxim of one's actions might be universal—the categorical imperative).
These differentiations of modernity are irreversible, irrevocable. Even those who intensely criticize them do so from within their space; seven human orifices will simply never again automatically mean there must be only seven planets: that doesn't even make any sense to someone in the modern worldspace. The differentiation of the Big Three can be criticized, but the criticism itself presupposes the differentiation.
What is required, of course, is not a retreat to a predifferentiated state (that's not even possible, although retro-Romantics never tire of making the recommendation); what is required is the integration of the Big Three. And that, indeed, is what might be called the central problem of postmodernity. now that science, art, and morality have been irreversibly differentiated, how does one integrate them?
In the Third Critique, Kant attempts to integrate prepositional and pragmatic truth via telos/organism and via the aesthetic dimension (by which he meant, in this case, the sensory-aesthetic apprehension). This attempt was immensely rich and suggestive, and theorists from Schiller to Schelling would, directly under Kant's influence, look to the aesthetic dimension for their attempted integration; and, indeed, modernity and postmodernity would henceforth find something immensely "healing" about the aesthetic/artistic dimension.
And yet, in the end, this attempt would fail. The sensory-aesthetic dimension is indeed a type of "connecting link" between the empirical phenomenon of sensorimotor cognition ("science") and practical ethics ("morality"); in the developmental spectrum, as a matter of fact, this aesthetic or "endoceptual" cognition lies between sensorimotor cognition and conventional moral structures. It is indeed their "missing link" or "connecting link"; but a connecting link is not an integration. It's like saying that the fourth grade lies between the third grade and the fifth grade and connects them, which it does; but the integration of the knowledge in those three grades is to be found in the sixth grade, not in the third. The merely intermediate or connecting link cannot be an integrating link, since that connecting link is a link between the lower and the higher, and is not itself the super-higher which would integrate them all.
In other words, the integration of the Big Three would await (and is still awaiting) the emergence of vision-logic. Kant would point out one of the connecting links between moral reason ("we") and reason tied to objective sensorimotor phenomena ("it"), namely, aesthetic apprehension (a lower portion of the "I" dimension). That would indeed show some of the connections between the Big Three, but that could not finally integrate them, an integration that would demand not an intermediate but a yet-higher level.
What rationality had put asunder, vision-logic would unite. Or that, at any rate, is the potential and the promise and the struggle of postmoder-nity. What modernity differentiated, postmodernity must integrate. And if rationality did the differentiation, then postrationality must do the healing (and postrationality, I have been maintaining, is preeminently vision-logic). This is the postmodern integrative vision we have mentioned often before, in connection with Gebser ("integral-aperspectival"), Habermas (whose theory of communicative action is specifically designed to integrate the Big Three), and Heidegger's centauric being-in-the-world (also an attempt to reweave the fragments); we see it in Foucault's systematic use of vision-logic to map the exteriors of epistemes (and then his including the interiors as well in dispositifs, looking at the dimensions of truth, of power, of ethics, and of self; even Foucault, a "Nietzschean," returned to Kant again and again, and, in a surprise move, finally identified himself broadly with Kant's lineage). We have mentioned this integration in terms of "mind and body are both experiences of an integrated self"; and we mentioned it in terms of the integration of the noosphere, the biosphere, and the physiosphere. We have seen it in connection with integrating male and female in the noosphere. And now we see it as an integration of science, morality, and art.
Those are all simply different aspects of the overall attempts to integrate the now irreversible differentiations of the Big Three. And whatever we might think of any of those theorists and their proposed solutions (or my proposed solutions), the point is that all of them came in the wake of the differentiation of the Big Three, and all were (and are) responding in various ways to that differentiation—it was an epochal development, a world-shaking, world-making emergence. Kant was well aware of this (particularly in his essay "What is Enlightenment?"), and his immediate successors, and critics, are all inescapably oriented now to a worldspace in which art, science, and morality are not only differentiated, but are in danger of flying apart completely.
It was Schelling, we will see in the next chapter, who first responded to this new world that was not only differentiating but rapidly dissociating. And Schelling was simply the first of many "doctors of modernity"—from Hegel to Marx to Schiller to Freud to Weber to Heidegger—who would try desperately, in their various ways, to heal the fragments that began to cascade around them. For not only does modernity (and postmodernity) have to worry about how to integrate what are now irrevocable differentiations in the growth process, it has to deal "therapeutically" with those differentiations that go too far into actual dissociation. We already saw, as only one example, that the differentiation of mind and body can go too far into a repression of the body by the mind, a repression that spews neurotic symptoms everywhere in its wake. Thus, at this particular point in history, if Freud did not exist, evolution would have had to invent him in order to doctor some of the pathological dissociations in its own processes of new and emergent growth.
But I am again drifting into the "bad news." All I would like to emphasize, at this point, is that I personally believe that the new integrations sought by modernity (and postmodernity)—the integrations particularly of I, we, and it; of the biosphere and noosphere; of male and female; of center and margin—are already being slowly effected by vision-logic. Science, values, and subjectivity are being approached as so many aspects of the centauric being-in-the-world.
Volume 3 is devoted to just this topic, but at this point we might simply note that evolution has never produced a differentiation that it could not eventually integrate (unless the differentiation goes utterly too far into dissociation, at which point simple extinction ensues). Extinction seems to be a genuine possibility for humans, particularly with reference to the threatening dissociation of the biosphere and the noosphere, the body and the mind. But assuming, as I do, that extinction is not altogether a foregone conclusion, it follows that integration is possible, and that possibility lies, I believe, in centauric vision-logic, the step beyond the rational-ego, the postmodern counterthrust to modernity (and, as I said, the burden of volume 3 is to render this thesis plausible).
I mention all of this now only to point out that, with reference to the differentiations that have defined modernity, the solution, if there is one, lies in the marriages of tomorrow, not in the syncretisms of yesterday.

the death of god

zeus: Orestes, I created you, and I created all things. Now see! Impudent spawn! So I am not your king? Who, then, made you?

O restes: You. But you blundered; you should not have made me free. You are God and I am free; each of us is alone, and anguish is akin. Human life begins on the far side of despair.

zeus: Well, Orestes, all this was foreknown. In the fullness of time a man was to come, to announce my decline. And you're that man, it seems.
—jean-paul sartre, The Flies

Before we look more closely at exactly why a Descending God replaced an Ascending God (and then "God" dropped or, finally, reduced altogether to monological nature), it is necessary, I think, to understand as clearly as possible the historical relation of the Age of Reason to the preceding Age of Mythology, for that is exactly how the philosophers of the Enlightenment viewed the situation. "No more myths!" was the philosophical battle cry of an entire age, and it soon came to be summarized in Nietzsche's famous dictum, "God is dead."
And my conclusion will be that in throwing out a prerational, anthropomorphic, mythic God figure, the "modern West" also tossed out any transrational, nonanthropomorphic, superconscient Godhead. Gone was a mass of bathwater; gone too a precious baby.
The problem, for the Church, from its inception, was how to deal with a complex of literal-concrete myths that it had inherited and to which it owed a certain allegiance. And in the life and figure of Origen (185-254 ce)—the Church's greatest theologian—we see encapsulated the entire "problem of mythology" and its subsequent influence on an entire civilization.
Origen, recall, was a fellow townsman of Plotinus in Alexandria, where he had attended lectures by Plotinus's teacher, Ammonius Saccas. He was steeped in a causal/nondual worldview and clearly sought to bring this worldview into line with the causal realization of the Nazarene, which would not be hard in the least—were it not for a set of concrete-literal mythologies in which the Nazarene's realization was quickly being clothed.
Recall also that this was during the early flowering of the rational structure (widespread glimmerings of which had begun, according to theorists from Gebser to Campbell, around the sixth century bce in Greece, although, as Habermas points out, formop was occasionally available to rare individuals much earlier). And even though the contemplative sages of the time had, in their own cases, explored even further into the transrational domain, there was a concerted effort to state the discoveries in rational terms. (This can be seen in a particularly clear case with Gautama Buddha, c. sixth-century-BCE India. Where most previous systems of Indian religion would begin with the gods and goddesses, and then prescribe rituals and incantations to appease and persuade them, Gautama radically dispenses with all of that, and recommends instead a direct and intensive introspection into the mind stream, into the subject, and he expresses this in eminently rational terms, even if the result of his injunctions and paradigms was the deconstruction of the rational stream and its supersession by transpersonal awareness.)
And wherever the contemplative philosopher-sages met mythology, either they dismissed it directly (which was an extremely delicate procedure; as Socrates discovered, the gods are not so easily tossed aside, especially when they serve the function of cultural "gluons"); or they began a long and slow process of rationally reinterpreting the myths. This allowed them to preserve the myth while negating its original meaning. This is surely one of the most fascinating features of this entire era, whether it was the Gnostics ("When you read the systems of the Gnostics, you have the feeling that they have rationalized mythology. And this feeling is accurate"); Philo ("He is an upholder of the verbal inspiration of the Old Testament, which nevertheless he turns into a moral and metaphysical romance by his theory of ... rational allegorism"); or Plato and Aristotle ("Plato had maintained strongly that religion must be mythological in its earlier stages ... a 'medicinal lie'; he warns us never to take them literally").
Origen was of the same mind. He openly derides the literal myths in the harshest of terms. "Origen speaks with contempt of those Christians who take literally the temporal promises and threats of the Old Testament." Origen does not believe in the survival of the individual soul or ego, or that salvation consists of anything like egoic perpetuity at all (that would in fact be hell; salvation, for Origen, consists in discovering that "God is all in all": Origen is, through and through, of a Neoplatonic mind).
Boldest of all, he does not believe in the future resurrection of the body. "He cannot restrain his impatience at the crude beliefs of traditionalists about the last day and the resurrection of the dead. The Gospels cannot [be taken] literally. How can material bodies be recompounded, every particle of which has passed into many other bodies? To which body do these molecules belong? So, he says scornfully, men fall into the lowest depths of absurdity, and take refuge in the pious assurance that 'everything is possible with God.' "
And yet, Origen was a Christian (by the age of eighteen he was already head of the Catechetical School in Alexandria), and thus constrained to some degree by Scripture. And so he hit upon a brilliant solution, a solution for which he is justly famous (with Philo) and justly regarded a genius, and a solution that would henceforth be used whenever mythology needed to be both negated and preserved: the allegorical method.
Any myth, he says (referring to the Old Testament) can be interpreted on three levels: literal, ethical, and allegorical, each successive reading being "higher." The literal is just what the myth says; the ethical is taking the myth and rationally reworking it to apply to a present ethical situation; the allegorical is using the myth to mean (virtually any) mystical or spiritual or transrational thing we want it to.
The brilliance of this scheme is that it takes a prerational myth (literal) and reworks it at both a rational (ethical) level and a transrational (mystical) level, so that "the myth" can be made to say whatever it is necessary to make it say, quite regardless of how its originators actually meant it. In other words, the interpretation takes the myth quite beyond itself—first into the space of reason, and then into the space of spirit. The myth is thoroughly preserved—and utterly negated.
This allows Origen to put into the myths whatever meanings from a higher level he wishes to put into them, so that he can both claim scriptural authority and basically ignore it at the same time. And every subsequent "mythologizer" in history, from the Catholic Church to Joseph Campbell, would use exactly this method whenever it was necessary to make the myths mean something other than what the myths themselves plainly said they meant.
Even though the Church would adopt this method without fail—what possible choice did it have?—it nevertheless found Origen's emphasis on the "higher" meanings to be very dangerous (Origen was busy pouring into the myths the entire corpus of the Neoplatonic outlook; Saint Jerome says he wrote eight hundred works). It was one thing to say that the myths also had higher meanings; quite another to basically deny any substantial reality to the lower or literal meanings. The Church suspected, rightly, that Origen had just blown a hole in their myths below the waterline. During the persecution of Decius (c. 250 ce), Origen was imprisoned, tortured, and pilloried; he was eventually condemned as a heretic by Justinian.
Origen referred to those who "took the myths literally" as possessing "mere faith," the "simple ones." And as harsh as he could be on the philosophers who believed in the "silliness," nonetheless "Origen extends to the popular, half mythological beliefs of the uneducated Christian [a great deal of] tolerance. The Logos teaches men in various manners, according to their capacities; some must be fed with milk, others with strong meat." His idea was to start people at one level of development and, using the transcendent or allegorical method, work them up to gnosis. At (causal) gnosis, both the myths (literal) and the rationality (ethical) would be transcended, having thus served their purpose.
The Church, in denying a pure Ascent to causal gnosis, denied that the myths could be transcended (for all the reasons that we discussed). Other meanings could be added to the literal myths, but the myths themselves could never be negated. It was a victory for the "simple ones." Transrational gnosis was, once again, caught and frozen in prerational forms—the literal myths.
And it is the literal myths that the philosophers of the Enlightenment railed against, as had Origen. Virtually every single "scientific claim" of the Bible (and thus the Church) could be demonstrated, by disclosed evidence at a deeper depth, to be woefully inadequate (which was taken to mean: simply and plainly wrong). "The chief affront of Copernicanism to theological orthodoxy lay, not in any fundamental discrepancy between it and the more philosophical parts of the traditional scheme of the universe, but in its apparent irreconcilability with certain details of that body of purely historical propositions [myths taken literally] which Christianity had, to an extent matched in no other religion, incorporated in its creed."
Church religion, across the board, became the laughingstock of the philosophers of the Age of Reason; it was met everywhere with scorn and derision. Are we, quipped Thomas Paine, "to suppose that every world in the boundless creation had an Eve, an apple, a serpent, and a Redeemer?"
The upshot of all this is that virtually the entire corpus of mythological belief was thrown overboard. And since, additionally, the great philosopher-sages (from Plotinus to Eckhart), who had themselves significantly transcended both myth and reason, were nevertheless speaking out from mythically situated cultures, virtually everything the great contemplatives had to say was jettisoned as well.
The baby with the bathwater. Reason could (and can) just as easily look up as it can look down. Reason—for Plato, for the Neoplatonists, and for the all-important Stoics—meant seeing one's place in the Kosmos; to be "rational" meant to see the great holarchy of existence and joyfully take one's proper place in it (quite apart from any further or transrational or mystical developments, where one directly identified with the Kosmos in toto). To be rational meant attunement with the Kosmos (as a preparation for identity with the Kosmos, with the All itself).
But with the rejection by modernity of the Ascendent God in virtually any form, there was only the Descended God left, the God of a marvelous and creative nature, a nature that was everywhere not to be denied, but a nature in which alone could salvation now be found. The doctrine of Plenitude and the Many completely eclipsed that of the Good and the One: God in any form was pronounced dead, and nature alone alive.
Reason, in reaction to myth, thus chose to look almost exclusively downward, and in that withering glance, the modern Western world was born.

plenitude as a research program

It is common knowledge that the early Renaissance scientists believed strongly that they were looking for the "laws of God"—that is, for the Logos (or archetypes) of a Creative and Effluxing and Descending God, archetypes that expressed themselves in the regular patterns of a harmonious nature. The "laws of nature" were in "the mind of God" (or the Ideas of God), and since that same Mind created us as well, we ought to be able to see and understand and formulate those laws.
That they believed that is true enough; but it is much more specific than that. Lovejoy demonstrates, quite convincingly I think, that virtually all of the "scientific discoveries" from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment were not originally empirical and "surprising" discoveries, but were in fact a priori assumptions derived directly (and consciously) from the two main tenets of the Platonic/Plotinian doctrine of Plenitude: nature is graded in a holarchy of being, and there are no missing links anywhere.
In other words, the Descending or Plenitude side of the originally Non-dual system—the side that had been previously suppressed in the Middle Ages—was now isolated and emphasized and pressed into service as an actual research agenda, and it was this agenda that then subsequently began to produce the scientific discoveries for which the age is now famous, and in whose "modern shadow" we all now stand.

In bringing about the change from the medieval to the modern conception, it was not the Copernican hypothesis, nor even the splendid achievements of scientific astronomy during the following two centuries, that played the most significant and decisive part.
In the cosmography that by the beginning of the eighteenth century had come to be commonly held among educated men, the features which differentiated the new from the old world-picture most widely—these features owed their introduction and, for the most part, their eventual general acceptance, not to the actual discoveries or the technical reasonings of astronomers, but to the influence of those originally Platonistic [conceptions] which had, though potent and persistent, been always repressed and abortive in medieval thought.
The more important features of the new conception of the world, then, owed little to any new hypotheses based upon the sort of observational grounds which we should nowadays call scientific. They were chiefly derivative from Platonistic premises [from the Descending side]. They were, in short, manifest corollaries of the principle of Plenitude.

If we look first at astronomy, the doctrine of Plenitude—the infinite creativity of an infinite Source—seemed to demand not just the existence of this Earth and this inhabited world, but a virtual infinity or plurality of other worlds (in the concrete sense of other solar systems, for example), and there was no reason those other worlds shouldn't be inhabited by conscious beings, some perhaps as or more intelligent than we.
This notion of an infinity or plurality of other worlds profoundly shook the medieval mind, and shook it much more catastrophically than the simpler Copernican revolution. In fact, the heliocentric theory of Copernicus/Kepler had been taken rather easily in stride. After all, even if that theory displaced the Earth from the center of the universe, the Earth was still held to be unique, and still held to be the sole arena of rational beings watched over by a loving God, and the sole theater of the descent and ascension of the One and Only Begotten. The heliocentric theory, to the late medieval mind, might have displaced Gaia from the center of the solar system, but it did not displace Gaia from the center of attention; and, as we would say today, it barely made the headlines.
But a plurality of other inhabited worlds, with the Earth but one of many? This moved Gaia (and the Nazarene) out of the picture almost totally, and it was this acentric notion, derived not from any scientific evidence at all (we still don't have any scientific evidence for life on other planets) but derived rather from the doctrine of infinite Plenitude, that more than any other conception jolted the medieval mind out of the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. "The change from a geocentric to a heliocentric system was far less momentous than the change from a heliocentric to an acentric one."
And its chief proponent? It is no surprise: Giordano Bruno. The notion of a plurality of worlds was implicit (and occasionally explicit) in the Plotinian system, and it had received its first "modern" expression by— again, no surprise—Nicolas Cusanus. But "it is Giordano Bruno who must be regarded as the principal representative of the doctrine of the decentralized, infinite, and infinitely populous universe." The Gaia-aggrandizing systems, whether geo- or heliocentric, were shattered (and with them, the always correlative egocentric, anthropocentric stance).
Cusanus and Bruno were thus the first to bring the Plenitude or Descending side (previously suppressed) into prominence in astronomy,and the astronomers of Bruno's own and succeeding generation—Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Galileo—then dutifully began looking for that which was already assumed to be the case. And it was the Brunonian revolution, not the Copernican, that jolted Europe into the modern age (and that, not incidentally, brought Bruno to the attention of the Inquisition, and he was eventually burned at the stake). From Bruno the conception passed most notably to Descartes, and by the end of the seventeenth century, the belief in a plurality of inhabited worlds was accepted by most educated men and women, and the Gaia-centric mythology of the Church never recovered (though it would often be reactivated, right down to today, with egocentric intent).
The point is that these ideas long antedated the discovery of the scientific evidence for any of them; they were "becoming familiar in very widely read writings before the middle of the eighteenth century; and their development seems to have been chiefly due to the influence of the principles of Plenitude and continuity."
If there could be no "gaps" or "missing links" in the heavens or macro-world, the same held for the micro-world. Quite before van Leeuwenhoek actually began peering down his microscopes, representatives of Plenitude were writing, as Leibniz did, that "I am convinced that there must be such creatures, and that natural history will perhaps some day become acquainted with them, when it has further studied that infinity of living things whose small size conceals them from ordinary observation and which are hidden in the bowels of the earth and the depths of the sea." Leeuwenhoek's discoveries came after the fact, so to speak, and were of little surprise to most, least of all to Leibniz.
But by far the most momentous, and certainly the most comical, search for "missing links" occurred in the "middle realm" of humans themselves: the search for the missing links between species, and particularly between humans and apes. This search was of crucial importance in the beginnings of the science of anthropology. Locke and Leibniz had already made it quite clear that what appeared to be gaps or missing links in nature were due solely to our ignorance, and thus yet another research agenda was set for the naturalist by the doctrine of Plenitude. As the great Bonnet would put it, "It is here above all that it is impossible to fail to recognize the graduated progression of beings; it is here above all that is verified the famous axiom of the German Plato [Leibniz], Nature makes no leaps. . . ."
Not only specialists but the general public was enthralled by the search, which looked for ever-earlier forms of human life and their linkages to higher forms of apes. Rousseau asserted (in 1753) that humans and higher apes were in fact members of the same species, since language was probably not originally natural to humans—a notion that closed the gap genetically. But who other than the notorious P. T. Barnum could put his finger on the pulse of an entire generation so accurately? In 1842 he advertised that among the exhibits in his museum were

the Ornithorhincus, or the connecting link between the seal and the duck; two distinct species of flying fish, which undoubtedly connect the bird and the fish; the Mud Iguana, a connecting link between reptiles and fish—with other animals forming connecting links in the great chain of Animated Nature.

And this was nearly two decades before the publication of the Origin of Species!
The doctrine of Plenitude as a research agenda: there was the Descending God of Infinite Efflux released from its confinement in the Middle Ages and set loose with all its delight in glorious diversity. "Every discovery of a new form could be regarded, not as the disclosure of an additional unrelated fact in nature, but as a step toward the completion of a systematic structure of which the general plan was known in advance."
Although this systems-theory research agenda had started, in the hands of Cusanus and Bruno, as but one half of the total picture of the Many to the One and the One to the Many, it soon became the entire picture (as we will see), and attention centered solely on the Many, the All, the manifest Whole as a harmonious system quite apart from its Source and Ground. The guiding agenda for this world was still the same—fill in the gaps in the Whole System—but with no mention of the Source, the Good, the One. It was to the manifest Whole, the Great System of Nature, that research was confined, and the research was indeed, through and through, a systems theory approach ("overall harmony of the whole"), whether in economics, political theory, or science.
"Everything in nature is linked together," began the Encyclopedic entry under the advancement of knowledge, and "the art of the philosopher consists in adding new links to the separated parts." Scientists and philosophers alike "were wont, when they reached the height of their argument, to discourse with eloquence on the perfection of the Universal System as a whole." As Pascal would put it, "Its parts all are so related and interlinked with one another that it is impossible to know the parts without knowing the whole or the whole without knowing all the parts." And Pope would memorialize the temperament of an entire age in search of "strong connections, nice dependencies":

He who through vast immensity can pierce,
See worlds on worlds compose one universe,
Observe how system into system runs,
What other planets circle other suns,
What vary'd being peoples every star,
May tell why Heaven has made us as we are.
But of this frame, the bearing and the ties,
The strong connections, nice dependencies,
Gradations just, has thy pervading soul
Look'd thro?

But in all of this, something very, very strange was occurring, and had in many cases already occurred. In the multidimensional Plotinian Kosmos, the One gives birth to the Many—to the All—and the All return to the One, with Each individual a perfect embodiment of the infinite One itself. The One underlies both Each and All.
However, in the new and truncated conception, since the infinite One was no longer admitted ("No more Ascent!"), then the Descending or finite or manifest All or Whole was the sole residence of Providence and Harmony. It was no longer the relation of Each and All to the One, but merely the relation of Each to the All.
Systems theory was born.
Put bluntly, the sum total of the shadows in the Cave was now confused with the Light beyond the Cave. And it was dearly felt and firmly believed that salvation—both individual and social—could be secured if only we could demonstrate with ever greater clarity that the shadows are not atomistic but rather holistic—that they hang together as a great harmonious system, that the universal invisible hand of holism draws Each to the All in functional perfection.
Salvation was no longer Each discovering that it is the One (and thus capable of embracing the All). Rather, salvation now demanded that Each somehow identify merely with the All (bypassing the One)—that Each would functionally fit with the All, that Each would take its instrumental place in the great and glorious web, whether that web be nature, the state, or the cosmos, the idea being that if shadows snuggle together tightly enough, Light will somehow be produced.
The research agenda was thus to demonstrate the interlocking order and holistic nature of the shadows (as if that would do anything to help one out of the Cave). It emphasized, as I said, the descending systems theory of Plenitude, which is correct as far as it goes, but is only half the story. But it was that half-story that would soon claim to be the alpha and omega of the universe (and that is the "bad news" of the next chapter). In the meantime, the Great Holarchy, in its Effluxing side, was the research agenda for the new and rising culture of modernity. And the Plenitude of Efflux would come to define, as it does to this day, the wondrous new world that had just unfolded, and whose God would be defined solely by the maxim: The greater the diversity, the greater the Goodness.

A new place in nature

Nothing shows more clearly that the Great Holarchy of Being was not a product of the medieval mind than the fact that, by the middle of the eighteenth century, although virtually every single aspect of mythic and mythic-bound Scholastic religion had been derisively rejected by the philosophers of the Enlightenment, virtually every single one of them embraced the Great Holarchy. It quite obviously, to them, had nothing to do with mythic religion or the medieval mind at all, or it would have been as thoroughly and as quickly abandoned.

There has been no period in which writers of all sorts—men of science and philosophers, poets and popular essayists, deists and orthodox divines—talked so much about the Chain of Being, or accepted more implicitly the general scheme of ideas connected with it, or more boldly drew from these their latent implications. Addison, King, Bolingbroke, Pope, Haller, Thomson, Akenside, Buffon, Bonnet, Goldsmith, Diderot, Kant, Lambert, Herder, Schiller—all these and a host of lesser writers not only expatiated upon the theme but drew from it new consequences. Next to the word "Nature," "the Great Chain of Being" was the sacred phrase of the eighteenth century.

The Great Chain of Being was palatable to the Age of Enlightenment, not just because it apparently expressed certain profound truths, but precisely because it was not a mythic-level production (even if it also, in various forms, was present there as well). The Church had appropriated the Great Chain straight from Plotinus via Origen and Dionysius, but had, as we saw, precisely by mythologizing it, put a limit on the upper reaches of Ascent and generally repressed Descent altogether. And the theme of this (and the next) chapter is that the Enlightenment would also appropriate the Great Chain, in an equally lopsided but reverse fashion. It is fascinating, though, that both the mythic and the rational mind, and the coming vision-logic, would all embrace the Great Chain; it clearly was one of the very few conceptions that could withstand the complaints of each.
Of course, the Enlightenment would not accept the complete Circle of Ascent and Descent, as we will further see in just a moment. But the net effect of the "virtually unanimous" acceptance of the Great Chain itself was a radically altered view of the place of men and women in the universe, a view almost diametrically opposed to that of the Middle Ages (where its mythologized version was in sociocentric service). In this particular regard, the "new" and "modern" view was precisely that held by Plotinus or Bruno or Cusanus or any other upholder of the doctrine of a radically decentered universe, and a view we have mentioned before: a radical nonanthropocentrism.
It is necessary to mention this point one last time, simply because of the obnoxious misinformation displayed by most ecological critics of the Great Holarchy. Let Lovejoy say it for us one last time: "It was implied by the principle of Plenitude that every link in the Chain of Being exists, not merely and not primarily for the benefit of any other link, but for its own sake; they all had an equal claim to existence; and therefore the true raison d'être of one species of being was never to be sought in its utility to any other."
It is true that all beings were held to be different degrees of manifestation, and could therefore be ranked according to degree, with the higher embracing the lower but not vice versa. But the reason that all beings were held to have ultimately equal claim to existence was that the ranking was apparent only; it was the product of a not-fully-awakened awareness. For, in the purely Nondual Ground, all points on the Great Circle, whether high or low, ascending or descending, were equidistant from the Center—equidistant from an ant, a star, or a human, as Bruno put it.
While this view still accepted a relative or apparent-only ranking, and thus allowed for pragmatic value judgments in the relative world (better to kill an apple than an ape), this was profoundly different from a mere ranking or an absolute ranking, which would hesitate not at all in making all "lower grades" only and always instrumental means. And it was exactly the medieval view—anthropocentric, geocentric—and its stubbornly persistent remnants that the philosophers of the Great Chain were so intent on fighting. A principal text of Scholastic religion/philosophy had stated:

As man is made for the sake of God, namely, that he may serve Him, so is the world made for the sake of man, that it may serve him.

From a Protestant theological text much admired at the time:

If we consider closely what constitutes the excellence of the fairest parts of the Universe, we shall find that they have value only in their relation to us, only in so far as our soul attaches value to them; that the esteem of men is what constitutes the chief dignity of rocks and metals, that man's use and pleasure gives their value to plants, trees and fruits.

It was precisely against this worldview "that the logic of the conception of the Chain of Being worked potently." And the chief opponent of anthropocentrism in all its forms was . . . Descartes. Leibniz and Spinoza (a dedicated Cartesian) picked up the fight, and Goethe represented them all in his poem Athroismos: "Every animal is an end in itself." Or, as Schiller would so clearly put it, every being "has an unchallengeable right of citizenship in this larger understanding of creation." But perhaps, once again, Pope said it best:

Man walk'd with beast, joint tenant of the shade; The same his table, and the same his bed; No murder cloath'd him and no murder fed. In the same temple, the resounding wood, All vocal beings hymn'd their equal God!

That, indeed, was good news.
And so it was that Reason rose up to greet the new dawn, unaware that its very strengths would soon turn on it. The sheer power of its capacity to represent the Kosmos empirically—a power unleashed by the differentiation of the Big Three—would allow it inadvertently to collapse the Kosmos merely to its monological, empirical, Right-Hand aspects, a collapse that would lock men and women into a purely Descended world, flatland to the core.
And strangest of all, the new Reason would appropriate even its own worst critics, take them up and hide them in itself, and thus ensure that even the newly rising proponents of Gaia would harbor the flatland ontology that is still destroying Gaia to this day.
For it would soon become obvious that the Descenders were destroying this world, because this world was the only world they had.

12

The Collapse of the Kosmos

Everything that from eternity has happened in heaven and earth, the life of God and all the deeds of time simply are the struggles for Spirit to know itself, to find itself, be for itself, and finally unite itself to itself; it is alienated and divided, but only so as to be able thus to find itself and return to itself. . . .
As existing in an individual form, this liberation is called "I"; as developed to its totality, it is free Spirit; as feeling, it is Love; and as enjoyment, it is Blessedness.                                    —hegel

IN the west,   from the time roughly of Augustine to Copernicus, the mythic-rational structure, for reasons I tried to suggest in the last two chapters, emphasized quite heavily the Ascending current, and theoretically held out the Goal of perfect Ascent in Christ (while at the same time officially prohibiting it). This combination locked the West into an almost exclusively Ascending Ideal for over a thousand years. With rare individual exceptions, the great omega point was promised always, delivered never: Ascendus interruptus at the heart of it all, leaving the West with a truly peculiar spiritual hunger, a hunger found nowhere else, really, with quite the same sort of desperate face. . . .
With the widespread emergence of Reason as the center of gravity of social organizing forces, the mythic-rational structure was itself transcended (in all the ways we discussed in chapter 5), which brought a step up in Ascent (Eros), with a correlative increase in the capacity for Embrace (Agape; evidenced, as only one example, in universal benevolence and worldcentric perspectivism).
The rational structure itself could then, depending on contingent and cultural factors, emphasize, as an ideal, the Ascending current, the Descending current, or both (preferably). And I have suggested that—owing almost entirely to a reaction to a millennium of (frustrated) Ascending Ideal—the Age of Reason, quite apart from the fact that it was itself a new step of Ascent, almost wholeheartedly threw itself over to the Path of Descent and the glories of Creation and Efflux, turned its back on its own Source and Origin, and pledged allegiance to a visible, sensible God. Unlike the Ascending God, that God could be bedded. That God could be had. That itch, scratched . . . indefinitely.
Instead of an infinite above, the West pitched its attention to an infinite ahead. The vertical dimension of depth/height was ditched in favor of a horizontal expansion, an emphasis not on depth but on span—and the standard God of the modern Western world was set. It would become the God of the bourgeois as well as of the dedicated scientist; the God of the materialist as well as of the social reformer; the God of the Greens and the "back to nature" movement wherever it appeared; the God of democracy as well as the God of the Marxists and Maoists—what they all had in common is the God of all that is visible, and all that can be seen, and all that can be grasped with the hands (grasped, that is, with the Right Hand).
An "other world" of any sort was thrown over; and the eyes of men and women settled steely on the horizons not above but in front of them, settled coldly on this world, and this world, and this world again. If salvation could not be found on this small Earth, it could not be found at all.

the collapse of the kosmos

Even though virtually all of the Renaissance and Enlightenment philosophers (and the Romantic philosophers, too, as we will see) subscribed to the Great Chain, something profound had happened to it, and especially to its "upper reaches." Most educated men and women assumed that humans were somewhere in the middle of the Great Chain, assumed that there were as many (or more) dimensions of "higher development" above them as there were below them. "We have reason to be persuaded," said John Locke, "that there are far more species of creatures above us, than there are beneath; we being in degrees of perfection much more remote from the infinite Being of God, than we are from the lowest state of being, and that which approaches nearest to nothing."
This nonanthropocentric arrangement contributed to a not altogether unhealthy diminution of human pride. Formey's lament was typical of the time:

How little cause have I to exalt myself above others, and whence can I derive motives for pride? Heretofore I used to conceit myself one of the most excellent of God's creatures, but I now perceive how great my delusion was. I find myself toward the lowest part of the Scale [of Being], and all I can boast of is, that I have a small preeminence above irrational creatures; and this is not always so, there being many things in which they possess advantages which I have not. On the contrary I see above me a multitude of superior intelligences.

Virtually every Renaissance and Enlightenment philosopher made that assumption. But quite apart from whatever salutary humility the whole notion might have imbued in men and women, it is quite apparent that, for them, the "upper reaches" of the Great Chain were simply being postulated to exist ("reason to believe"). The higher or deeper dimensions were assumed to exist, they were a rational hypothesis put forward to "fill in the gaps" between humans and Deity. Since, according to the principle of Plenitude, there could be no gaps in existence, and since there was definitely a gap between humans and the infinite Source, then that gap simply had to be filled by an almost infinite number of superior grades of intelligence, grades that, if they weren't exactly "creatures," were at least a series of infinitely receding higher Ideas and forever unattainable Perfections utterly beyond human reach.
In the Middle Ages, the average mode had mythologized these "higher grades" as angels, archangels, and various heavenly agents stretching from humans to the ultimate Divine. And now these "superior creatures" were instead being rationalized as superior grades of intelligence and virtue and wisdom, but none of which could be reached by the finite human mind. And however true that might be in a certain sense (they cannot be reached by the conventional mind), this is not at all the way these higher grades were viewed by the originators of the system itself.
For Plotinus, Dionysius, Eckhart, and company, these higher dimensions of existence are, above all else, potentials inherent or present in each and every being (since each and every being issues forth from them), and thus these higher potentials can be realized or consciously actualized for any being who can find the requisite height/depth in his or her own soul. These higher levels are not angels out there, or metaphysical notions merely postulated to exist somewhere, or philosophical and logical assumptions used to fill in any "gaps" in the world. They are potentials that can be directly experienced and directly realized. There is absolutely nothing other about them, except the otherness created by our own lack of inner awareness.
For a child who has not yet learned language, the world of symbols and concepts seems to float around all about it and above it; language is "over its head"; language is an "other world," full of powerful magic and populated with beings who seem to understand things that the child does not, beings who seem to possess a great deal of power incomprehensible to the child—there are gods and goddesses out there, angels out there, "creatures" out there, against which the child can feel only its own miserable impotence. But once language emerges as a developmental component of the child's own being: voilà\ the linguistic powers, the conceptual angels, are all within.
For Plotinus (and similar nondual sages everywhere), the higher grades of consciousness are not otherworldly or metaphysical in the least; they are not philosophical postulates; there is nothing about them that cannot be directly experienced and directly realized in one's own case, given the proper growth and development (following the proper paradigms, injunctions, and exemplars in a community of shared social practice).
And while the mythic mind and the rational mind will construe these higher dimensions—their own higher potentials—in terms that reflect their own stage of development (I have no quarrel with that), nonetheless to even theoretically turn these higher stages into merely metaphysical postulates is a disaster. It denies the very essence of these higher stages: they are all experimental, contemplative, experiential realities that are directly disclosed to immediate awareness under the proper laboratory conditions.
The Enlightenment mind was, I have suggested, following two very different but fused agendas. One was "No more myths!," which was phase-specifically appropriate enough. But since the myths were almost exclusively upward-looking (although frustrated), the second agenda, quite unnecessary, was "No more Ascent!" The upper reaches of the Great Chain were thus converted into mere metaphysical postulates—and subsequently dropped altogether.
The result was that Ascent—transcendence—of any higher sort was looked upon with gravest suspicion ("No more Ascent!" meant "Ascend to Reason, but no further!"). Incredibly, the higher stages of the Great Chain became exactly those virtues and powers that one could not reach and should not even try. The very attempt to reach them, in fact, was equated with pride, which, we will see, was the dreaded sin of the century.
The Great Chain, which was always supposed to be a map of one's own highest potentials—a map of the course that Eros would follow in the blossoming of a love that would embrace the entire Kosmos with Agape and caritas—that extraordinary map of liberation became instead a cage into which humans were locked with no possibility of higher/ deeper development. As Rousseau (in Emile) would exhort an entire generation: "O Man! confine thine existence within thyself, and thou wilt no longer be miserable. Remain in the place which Nature has assigned to thee in the chain of beings, and nothing can compel thee to depart from it. . ." (my italics).
Pride thus became any attempt to "rise above one's station," to "counterwork the Universal Cause," to "disturb the very system of the universe." The way up, in any form, in any variety, in any guise, was the arch-sin, the sin of horrid pride. Any hint of "otherworldliness" was openly scorned, severely derided—not to mention completely distorted and misunderstood. Pope again:

Go soar with Plato to the empyreal sphere,
To the first good, first perfect, and first fair,
Or to tread the mazy round his follow'rs trod,
And quitting sense call imitating God;
As Eastern priests in giddy circles run,
And turn their heads to imitate the sun.

So the way up—any form of Ascent beyond Reason—was viewed as not just a bad idea, but as a literal crime against nature, a crime against the Great Chain and its allotted spot for men and women.

In pride, in reas'ning pride, our error lies;
All quit their sphere and rush into the skies.
Pride still is aiming at the blest abodes. . . .

The theme of the modern age thus became, as Pope again would have it: "Trace Science then with modesty thy guide." Do not soar, do not look up, do not transform, but follow downward-looking Science with modesty thy guide.
The Deists—Toland, Tindal, Voltaire, Rousseau, Jefferson, Franklin— would try to salvage what they could of some sort of a God—a God that originally created the world, "wound it up," and then retired from the scene entirely. Unlike Aristotle's Pure Omega God, from which nothing issues but to which all aspires, the Deists' God was the pure Alpha Source, from which all issued but toward which nothing moves. The two paths of Ascent and Descent at this point had utterly and totally separated, dissociated, divorced, anemic and fractured, with no point of contact, no point even of discourse, let alone integration. And the Deists' God, it soon became obvious, served precisely no function whatsoever, either morally, practically, or even theoretically—and was understandably dropped altogether.
The wonderful world of Plenitude was no longer from God; Plenitude itself was God, the only God. In all directions there was only Descent. In all directions, only Shadows. In all directions, only Flatland. And the only real sin? To try to leave, to try to escape from the Cave, to try to see some reality more than the eye of flesh might manage to take in, to try to transform instead of merely translate. All of that was . . . pride.
The realm of the senses, guided by Reason: there was the foundational reality. The wonders of creation—who needs a source for them? The bigness of creation!—who could ask for more? Let me bask in the riches of the sensory world, and reason upon it where necessary, but why ask behind the scenes for more than this display? Let cosmic emotion and piety carry the day, and let me weep with joy at any passing sight in nature that strikes the slightest chord of egoic sentiment, and let me spend my days and nights suckling shadows that are dear enough to me. And let me never, never, never sin by asking beyond the shaded nooks and crannies. Let me always be known for saving and defending the wonderful appearances, and with eyes so modestly reverted from that all-embracing Source, let me never look up and never step out of my allotted spot on that great, great Chain.
And so, after more than two millennia, it had finally come to this: the path of liberation ended up the sin of pride. The Great Chain, the map of what we could become, became a map of what we should not even try. The Great Chain was used to deny the Great Chain. The way out of the Cave was used to imprison men and women in it. The Great Chain was no longer the map of escape, but the plan of the prison cell with a sentence of life.

the great interlocking order

With the collapse of the Kosmos into the merely and purely Descended world, all that was left of the Great Holarchy showed up as an empirical, flatland interlocking order of surfaces, or exteriors, or Right-Hand components. In place of the Kosmos, flatland systems theory.
I would like, in this section, to explore carefully this "great interlocking order" (as John Locke would have it)—how and why it arose, what it accomplished, and what it aggressively violated. Because, one way or another, in one guise or another, the only God the modern world would henceforth acknowledge, if it chose to acknowledge a God at all, would be the God of the great interlocking order.
And so let me say it one last time: for Plotinus or Aurobindo or Eckhart or Shankara, the great interlocking order was true but partial; it was only half the story (the "no gaps in Plenitude" half, the Descending or Effluxing aspect). It represented the mutual interpenetration of the Each and the All. But the ground of both the Each and the All was the nondual One, found not merely in the Descent of Goodness but in Ascent to the Good. But when this half-story became the "whole" story, there precisely was the birth of the nightmare known as modernity.
And modernity's collapse of the Kosmos occurred right alongside its genuine accomplishments, which, I believe, are not to be denied (the good news / bad news nature of modernity). We have seen that one of the great defining marks of modernity—what has been called its genuine dignity— was the clear differentiation of the Big Three, the differentiation of science (it), morals (we), and art (I), so that each could pursue its own course and establish its own truths without domination by the others. "Cultural modernity's specific dignity is constituted by what Max Weber called the differentiation of the value spheres in accord with their own logics." And "by the end of the eighteenth century, science, morality, and art were even institutionally differentiated as realms of activity in which questions of truth [science], of justice [morals], and of taste [art] were autonomously elaborated, that is, each of these spheres of knowing [was pursued] under its own specific aspect of validity."
But if the dignity of modernity was the differentiation of the Big Three, the disaster of modernity would be that it had not yet found a way to integrate them. Indeed, with no unifying center, the Big Three had already begun to move into dissociation—to exist as radically separate, "hyper-autonomous" realms, with nothing to say to each other, bound only by a thoroughgoing and mutual repugnance. "This separation and self-sufficiency, which, considered from the standpoint of philosophy of history, paved the way for emancipation from age-old dependencies [mythic-membership syncretisms], were experienced at the same time as abstraction, as alienation [dissociation] from the totality of an ethical context of life. Once religion had been the unbreakable seal upon this totality; it is not by chance that this seal has been broken."
In the absence of the as-yet-undisclosed integration, the three spheres went virtually their separate and lonely ways. In particular, the subjective and moral spheres—the Left-Hand path, the interior path—pursued its own logics rigorously, and the Right-Hand path, that of the study of the objective and empirical exteriors, pursued its own course in isolation as well. Both paths were making absolutely world-shaking discoveries, but discoveries that spoke to each other virtually not at all.
It was this dissociation of the Big Three that, more than anything else, allowed the sweeping advances of the natural sciences (the it-domain) to overwhelm the interior, subjective, moral, and cultural domains (I and we), and this is what I mean when I say the Big Three were reduced to the Big One, or reduced to the Right-Hand path alone, the path of objective it-language (the representation/reflection paradigm, and its converse, the production paradigm, and the overall validity claims only of prepositional truth and/or functional fit). The very power of monological reason (ever so important and ever so partial), which was released from mythic syncretism precisely by the differentiation of the Big Three, was allowed an overwhelming dominance because of the dissociation of the Big Three, and thus their subsequent reduction to the Big One, the flatland world of monological, empirical-analytic, positivistic "its," where only the entities studied by empirical-natural sciences are "real."
In subsequent volumes, I trace a large part of this dissociation and resultant emphasis on the Big One (of instrumental/objectivistic rationality) to the strong influence of the techno-economic base of industrialization and the machine mentality (which is similar to, but not quite the same as, the more common analysis that traces it to capitalism): the techno-economic base supported instrumental-purposive activities, and in a way all out of proportion to the instrumental-purposive rationality that did in fact build it: a positive feedback loop that sent calculative rationality spinning out of control, precisely in the avowed purpose of gaining control.
In the meantime, Donald Rothberg gives an excellent summary of these broad trends, which is quite consistent with my presentation: "For a variety of reasons, these emergent potentials of modernity, these three modes of knowing and acting [art, science, morality: the Big Three], were not evenly developed. Rather, as many of the main critical analysts of modernity have suggested, modernity as it actually unfolded (and still unfolds) was (and is) heavily weighted toward the knowing and manipulation of the first world [the it-world, Right Hand, objectivistic], of a 'disenchanted' and objectified world dominated by an 'instrumental' or 'technical' rationality (Berman, Habermas, Heidegger, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Merchant, MacIntyre)."
Thus, Rothberg points out, "The content of the other two worlds (the intersubjective [we] and subjective [I] worlds) was increasingly organized according to the structures of the empirical sciences and instrumental or calculative rationality; Habermas links this unbalanced development especially with the powerful influences of the forces of capitalism. Under the 'scientistic' influence of positivism and empiricism, there were claims of a unified empirical science that encompasses all 'real' knowledge, excluding the various attempts to claim an autonomous status for the emerging human sciences of cultural and subjective reality"—the Big Three reduced to the Big One.
The flattening, the leveling, the collapse of the Kosmos. The universe was pushed through a strainer of objectification, and the result was thin soup indeed. All that was left of a richly multidimensional Kosmos was simply the sensory/empirical exteriors and outlines and flatland forms, much as if a sphere had been projected onto a plane surface, producing only a series of flat circles—all span, no depth—at which point we say, "What sphere?"
The vertical and horizontal holarchies—the interior and exterior dimensions—which, we might say, "interlock" in a rich network of values, degrees of consciousness, and qualitative distinctions, none of which can be measured in terms of physical size or empirical inches or material span: these were reduced to their sensory/empirical and physical correlates, to the physical forms and positivistic exteriors that could be seen (the Left reduced to its correlates in the Right), and these indeed could be measured primarily by physical size or other extensional attributes (mass, velocity, momentum, number, span).
And where qualities and values are measured in terms of better and worse (compassion is usually better than murder), empirical sizes are not better or worse, only bigger or smaller (a star is not better than a planet, only bigger). And thus the great interlocking order of sensory surfaces and exterior forms—the final result of pushing the universe through the strainer of objectification—was inexorably the disqualified universe.
The Kosmos, literally, was a shadow of its former self. The vertical and horizontal holarchy of depth and span was ditched in favor of merely a horizontal holarchy of span alone. Qualitative distinctions were replaced merely with quantitative distinctions and technical measurements. "What does it mean?" was fundamentally replaced with "What does it do?" Intrinsic value disappeared into empirical action terms. "What worth?" was replaced with "How much?" Greater was replaced with bigger. Cultural meaning drifted into functional fit and holistic interaction of surfaces. Morals melted into systems theories. Eros was converted to instrumental-functional efficacy, and Agape melted down into an affirmation of ordinary Descended life.
In short, depths that required interpretation were largely ignored in favor of the interlocking surfaces that can simply be seen (empiric-analytic)—valueless surfaces that could be patiently, persistently, accurately mapped: on the other side of the objective strainer, the world appeared only as a great interlocking order of sensory surfaces, empirical forms.
The massive empirical mapping game—the epistemological game of modernity—was afoot.
We heard Taylor summarize this whole shift as: "The universe as a meaningful order of qualitatively differentiated levels [vertical holarchy] gave way first to a vision of mathematical order, and then finally to the 'modern' view of a world of ultimately contingent correlations, to be patiently mapped by empirical observation."
And, as we saw in chapter 1, it wasn't just that this empirical mapping game was partial: taken in and by itself, it was perfectly self-contradictory. On the other side of the objective strainer, there was simply no evidence whatsoever that this thin objective soup was the only evidence worth knowing. No, that assertion (Right-Hand data alone are real) was a Left-Hand judgment that denied all Left-Hand judgments. The objectivistic worldview could not account for its own status (the "view from nowhere"): it could prove objects but could not prove the exclusiveness of objects—could not prove itself—but rather was taken, literally, on blind faith, a faith blind to the entire Left half of the Kosmos, even as it surreptitiously dipped into that dimension for its own hidden judgments, judgments which it forcefully and vehemently made and then flat-out denied making. "Empirical knowledge alone is true knowledge"—and where is the empirical proof for that!
The net effect was that the Great Chain was tipped on its side, so to speak—an infinite within and beyond was ditched in favor of an infinite in front of and ahead, and the West began to scratch that itch in earnest.
I want to briefly interrupt the narrative at this point to mention a simple but crucial item. This will take us ahead of our story, but it's important, so let us at least briefly note the following before returning to the main narrative.
With the postmodern overthrow of the Big One—that is, with the return of an investigation of the Left-Hand dimensions, including multicultural interpretation and deep hermeneutics, psychoanalytic introspection and interior disclosures, the existence of intersubjective discursive formations and cognitive paradigms, chains of signification and depths of communication, the demand for qualitative distinctions and the search for worth and meaning—with, in short, the beginning return of the Big Three as opposed to merely the Big One, interest can once again turn (and has turned) to the depths of the subjective I and the intersubjective we: depths that range from Heidegger's clearing or opening (the pure transcendens), to hermeneutics's restless search for the depths, to the mystical openings found even in Nietzsche and Bataille and Derrida and, yes, in Foucault's intense search for limit experiences and the "mad mystical" poets. Depths that have sparked an explosion of interest in everything from humanistic and transpersonal psychology to Eastern mysticism and yoga. Depths that call out even to the postmodern poststructuralists, who, if nothing else, are quite certain that truth is not merely a clean game of surface and empirical mapping.
For all postmodern currents have at least one thing in common: mere empiricism is dead. The surfaces are shot. The flat and faded system is anemic to the core. The thin soup is causing malnutrition: epistemological, ontological, motivational.
The whole point is that once the weight of the Big One is lifted from the shoulders of awareness, the Big Three jump instantly back into focus, and interior depths once forbidden to serious discourse—depths forbidden with the shuddering collapse of the Kosmos—now unfurl before the mind's inward eye: the surfaces are not all, the shadows hide something else. The appearances don't just reveal, they conceal: something other is going on. There are nutritional supplements that this thin soup of shiny surfaces does not contain, secrets not apparent to the senses, items that are more . . . interesting.
And among those waiting for us in this renewed investigation of interior subjective and intersubjective depths are precisely the original pioneers in that endeavor: the great mystic philosopher/sages from Plotinus to Dionysius to Augustine to Teresa to Eckhart to Emerson, pioneers that struck out to investigate a vast and unchartered continent of consciousness, a voyage of interior discovery that continued right up to the historical point—this point in our narrative—where that particular continent was proclaimed nonexistent and all explorers were banned (by "cultural marginalization") from even discussing their findings. The interior dimensions were no longer considered serious discourse: all of that was part of the "merely mythic" past (no more myths, no more Ascent). As Foucault would put it of this entire period (of collapse), if something couldn't be laid out on a flat table of representation, then it didn't exist (and, said Foucault, it seemed not to bother the classical Enlightenment that the drawer of the table—subjective consciousness—could not itself be laid out on the table). So much for the extraordinary pioneers of the interior (from Plotinus to Ficino to Eckhart. . .).
But they left us their early maps, maps of the interiors of what now amounted to a New World awaiting (re)discovery. And most of these maps were of the general form: turn left at mind, cut straight into the formless, rest in Spirit, embrace the world; and all of the steps required for that extraordinary journey (maps such as figure 9-1).
But, indeed, many of the specific details of these maps are less than accurately drawn. These early maps are in many ways like the early maps of the Americas: Cuba is the size of Texas, Greenland extends forever, Florida is a huge continent. But the fact that some of these maps are crude or initial or outdated does not mean that Cuba and Florida and Greenland don't exist.
Thus, it is not necessary that we embrace every detail of their maps. Not only are some of them hastily drawn, the whole point of consciousness development is that it also creates territories as it goes, and doesn't simply discover totally pregiven landscapes. The fact that certain broad domains of interior consciousness are available to us (as deep structures) does not mean that the surface structures are given once and for all (which is why even excellent interior maps, such as Plotinus's, have to be refined and updated). Even if Columbus had drawn a perfectly accurate geographical map of Florida, it would still be woefully inadequate for most of today's uses (it wouldn't show the new cities, roads, towns, developments, etc. Where are all the subsequently created surface structures?). The major use of Columbus's map would be mainly for those individuals who keep insisting Florida doesn't exist.
Rather, these early maps are much along the lines of what Foucault suggested: "Among the cultural inventions of mankind there is a treasury of devices, techniques, ideas, procedures, and so on, that cannot exactly be reactivated, but at least constitute, or help constitute, a certain point of view which can be very useful as a tool for analyzing what's going on now—and to change it."
Thus, as we will see shortly, when the Idealists began the overthrow of the Big One, the overthrow of the collapsed and disqualified universe, they had recourse to precisely these early maps of the interior Worlds. And, as we will also see, if there was one person who could be said to be seminal to this entire movement, that person was . . . Plotinus.
But that, indeed, is quite ahead of our story. All I wish to emphasize here is that, with the postmodern possibility of the return of the Big Three, we do indeed have the early maps of the interior New World left by these extraordinary pioneers. And relying on those maps—at least initially—is not a regressive yearning for yesteryear, nor a mythic devolution, but rather the only sensible course of action for a new breed of pioneers trying once again to plumb the depths that were utterly disqualified with the modern collapse. Refine the maps, yes; redraw many of their outlines, surely; but thank the stars for the guts and glory of those who went before, and left a trail, clearly enough marked, for all those souls sensitive enough to follow.

To return to our narrative. With the collapse of the Big Three to the Big One: the collapsed and disqualified world was still a hierarchy, still a holarchy, but now played out strictly and only in the horizontal plane (any vertical move was the sin of pride). So of course the universe was still viewed as a massive interlocking order, a great net of systems theory, but a net that was now merely empirical and physical, that could be seen with senses or their extensions, a net of the Right-Hand path.
Thus, not also depths to be interpreted and interiors to be accessed, but simply exterior surfaces to be seen and "patiently mapped by empirical observation"—the so-called "reflection" or "representation paradigm," where a pregiven, unproblematic subject simply reflects on or represents the objects in the pregiven, empirical world (ignoring the Left-hand fact that types of objects and subjects exist only in types of worldspaces— nothing is simply "pregiven," a point we will return to).
The Upper-Right quadrant, for example, was still a holarchy—atoms to molecules to cells to organisms, and so on. This wasn't denied. What was denied was that the Left-Hand dimensions needed to be explained in any terms other than those found in the Right Hand. This is subtle reductionism. (A few ingenious cranks then went further—into gross reductionism—and claimed everything in the Right Hand could actually be reduced to atoms, the old Epicurean move.) But in both gross and subtle reductionism, reality is merely monological and empirical and representational (reflection on the empirically available), and thus no inner transformation, of any sort, is required in order to have access to "all the truth that is fit to know."
And this fit perfectly but perfectly with the arch-sin of the age. To attempt to rise above one's station—that was, of course, the dreaded pride. Well, the Right-Hand path doesn't require anybody to rise above anything: just look more carefully at the empirical world that is more or less available. Not arduous transformation, but simply much more careful and precise translation (mapping of the empirically accessible). The Great Chain tottered off into empirical observables, degrees of depth collapsed into degrees of span, interpretive dimensions disappeared into empirical action terms, and qualitative distinctions melted down into functional interrelations of span: the great interlocking order of empirical surfaces.
And after all, every event in the real Kosmos does indeed have its Right-Hand correlate, its empirical or sensorimaterial footprint (its exterior form), and so some sort of evidence for the empirical and positivistic course could always be supplied. Thoughts have their correlates in brain physiology. Intentions have their behavioral aspects. Culture has material social components. The Right-Hand path is never just simply wrong.
Just very partial. Plenitude without Spirit is systems theory. And systems theory, in its various guises, was now all the rage (from the Enlightenment down to today; in its various forms, the subtle reductionism of systems theory is the arch-paradigm of the Right-Hand path, where it does bitter battle with the gross reductionists—atomists, mechanists— neither of them having a clue as to the entire Left half of the Kosmos).
In the great systems paradigm, which swept through the Enlightenment like wildfire (based, as both were, on monological rationality): instead of the relation of Each to the One (and thus to the All), one's salvation depended upon how the Each fit functionally and instrumentally into the All, into the whole functional system. The holistic world was an instrumental world, to the core. Since all things were merely strands in the great empirical web, all things had merely extrinsic and instrumental value in the overall system.
Accordingly, quality (depth) was measured in terms of quantitative fit with the great interlocking order (span), and this was, incredibly, true for both the natural sciences and the religions of the time. The "great instrumentalization" was in motion. "It is interesting to note," says Taylor of this collapse, "that this conception itself had undergone the transformation which made the instrumental central. Our grasp of this [holistic] order was referred to by the term 'technologia,' and the unity of God's order was seen not as a structure to be contemplated but as an interlocking set of things calling for actions which formed a harmonious whole."
Taylor is discussing the central strands in religion from the Reformation to the Puritans to the Deists. How one's actions fit into the harmonious whole: this was crucial to salvation. "The harmony between the parts [of the harmonious whole] was captured in the term 'eupraxia'; it was more a matter of the coherence of the occasions for action than of the mutual reflection of things in an order of signs." In other words, a harmonious whole of surfaces and exteriors involved in action ("What does it do?") and not also interior contemplation and an order of signs ("What does it mean?").
This conversion of qualitative value to instrumental action, Taylor shows, marked the entire era. "This means that the instrumental stance toward the world has been given a new and important spiritual meaning. . . . Instrumentalizing things is the spiritually essential step. . . ." The ìnstrumentalìzing consisted precisely in converting all things into strands in the web of a now purely descended Plenitude, therein to take their instrumental place in the great universal system of sensory surfaces ("reflected on" by instrumental rationality).
No less than John Locke—"the teacher of the Enlightenment"—would stamp this holistic instrumentalizing with his seal of approval. "Instrumental rationality, properly conducted, is of the essence of our service to God. This is how we participate in God's purposes. Not through instinct, like the animals, but through conscious calculation, we take our place in the whole." As Taylor summarizes it, "Locke helped to define and give currency to the growing Deist picture, which will emerge fully in the eighteenth century, of the universe as a vast interlocking order of beings, mutually subserving each other's flourishing. . . ." And instrumental awareness was thus "our avenue of participation in God's will."
(It should be obvious by now that if we substitute "Gaia" for "God's will," we have the "new paradigm" of the ecophilosophers of today, who, apparently unknown to themselves, extend in an unbroken lineage to the originators of the collapse of the Kosmos. Far from being a new paradigm, it is a very old and shopworn religion, still following the fundamental Enlightenment paradigm, and still attempting to instrumentalize the world subservient to a web-of-life ideology, still caught in the nightmares of Foucault's biopower, still doing bitter battle with the gross reductionists, which is fine, but still missing the larger violence they have perpetrated on the Kosmos in the process of their own subtle reductionism—all topics we will investigate further below.)
Thus, the Great Holarchy (with "No more Ascent!" allowed) was converted, by a flatland monological and instrumental reasoning (techno-logia), into mutually interlocking and interpenetrating surfaces and exteriors, into a coherent and harmonious whole of mutually subserving strands in the great universal and objective system, a structural-functional system defined in procedural and action terms ("What does it do?")—in short, into a flatland web of life that lacked all interiority and degrees of depth—lacked, as Taylor puts it, all qualitative distinctions.
It was thus a short step to "the greatest good for the greatest numbers"—a calculus of interlocking exteriors and monosurfaces described in action terms (the great hallmark of the Right-Hand path). With no depths to be accessed, there are only surfaces to calculate: the more, the merrier. In a disqualified universe, "quality" is found by addition. And who can doubt, in such an atmosphere, that bigger must be better?
On the one hand, we can appreciate, I think, that "the greatest good for the greatest numbers" was a genuinely worldcentric notion (it often even included animals). And all of that was due in large measure to the positive emergence of postconventional and worldcentric rationality. So far, so good.
But with the collapse of the Kosmos from both Left and Right dimensions to merely Right-Hand empirical and sensory markers, there was no room left for, there was no way to register, differences in the types or qualities of the "good" that is supposed to be extended to all beings. There is only the functional fit of surfaces, and more or less of only that.
In other words, the flatland world means a homogenization of motives for all beings, and the ethical imperative then becomes to extend this homogenized mess to as many beings as possible. And this means as well that the homogenized motive would have to be the lowest common denominator for all beings: namely, sensory pleasure/pain, hedonic happiness. And this would be disastrous.
Already, by 1742, Hutcheson would declare that "that action is best which accomplishes the greatest Happiness for the greatest Numbers." And never mind that there might be different types or levels of happiness. In a flatland cosmos, all happiness is the same, all happiness is monohappiness, sensory happiness, hedonic happiness, and thus a flatland calculus simply says to extend the span of monohappiness in all directions, in accord with the great interlocking order: not also degrees of depth but simply endless addition of sensory span, a truly bad infinity in an expanding nightmare of the great interlocking order.
"The most important notion Hutcheson and Locke share is that of the great interlocking universe, in which the parts are so designed as to conduce to their mutual preservation and flourishing." Hutcheson himself would clearly explain that "our Affections were contrived for the whole; by them each Agent is made, in great measure, subservient to the good of the whole. [All] are thus linked together, and make one great System, by an invisible Union. He who voluntarily continues in this Union, makes himself happy: He who does not continue this Union freely, but affects to break it, makes himself wretched; nor yet can he break the Bonds of Nature."
Become anything other than an instrumental strand in the great interlocking order and System of Nature—look beneath the surfaces, look into the depths or heights—and you are not only guilty of pride but doomed to wretched unhappiness. You have broken the hedonic calculus, have subtracted from the Sum Total of what should be uniformly happy Egos fitting snug as a bug into sensory flatland: you have disrupted the cavalcade of smiley-faced Shadows.
For the Cambridge Platonists, who at the time were fighting a losing battle, the key to salvation was theiosis—one becomes the Divine, and thus participates in the depths of the All, embracing Each as a perfect manifestation of the One. Not just fitting into the System as a part, but discovering the Source of the System as the One. On the other hand, for the purely Descended worldview that was now developing, God's Goodness was found solely in the plenitude of benevolence shown in the interlocking order of beings—in the great System—each part of which was assumed to be pursuing essentially the same monohappiness of sensory pleasure (for Troglodytes in the sensory Cave, what other kind of happiness could there possibly be?).
This is why, as Taylor points out, the instrumental and interlocking-order theorists (from Locke to Bentham) always had recourse to a hedonistic theory of motivation. In an empirical-sensory world, there is only empirical-sensory motivation (what else could there be?). Since we are all strands in the great empirical web, we must all share something in common, and what all living beings have in common—the lowest common denominator, in fact—is the pursuit of physical pleasure and the avoidance of physical pain. The homogenization of motives, the reduction of all motives to the lowest common denominator.
In other words, the disqualified universe still needed some sort of quality to move it into action, it needed some sort of push for its action terms—it still needed some type of motivation to turn the gears, jiggle the web—and the lowest common denominator was all that was left. Hedonic pleasure, so to speak, was the furthest into the interior that would be ventured, and this "sole" quality—because it was essentially the "same" for all—could then be easily "quantitized" and thus "calculated." (Different qualities cannot easily be added precisely because they are different types of entities—we say, "It's apples and oranges." But if you can get rid of the differences in quality, if you can disqualify the universe by converting it into more or less of only one quality, convert it into nothing but apples—well, apples can be added.)
Of course, it is one thing to say that we are all linked at that fundamental level of pleasure/pain (for indeed we are, at the sensorimotor level, and for all holons that possess that level). It is quite another thing to say that we all have only that level of motivation. But already Helvetius would announce that "Physical pain and pleasure are the unknown principles of all human actions." Significance is here completely collapsed to fundamentalness, and the interlocking-utilitarians thus arrive at the common weakest-noodle motivation, and this weakest-noodle motivation then defines the single, sole, mono-happiness that we are supposed to extend throughout the flatland order as an ethical imperative: the more hedonic happiness for each, the better for all.
The idea seemed to be that if I can just extend my mediocrity to more and more beings, then a collective good and a great happiness would somehow result. But it was exactly the expansion of this weakest-noodle motivation, calculated by a monological and instrumental reason, that would allow me to take my rightful place in the great instrumental whole. Since it is only in reason that I can comprehend the great interlocking order, and since we are all strands in that order, then reason demands that I extend the same monohappiness throughout the entire monochrome system.
Even Aristotle had ranked motivations in a holarchy of deepening significance. Not everything we do is equally valuable, or equally good, or equally just. In Aristotle's version, there are several "goods" in life, but some of them are "more good" than others. Least significant was sensual pleasure, or hedonistic involvement. This was still a "good," and not to be condemned per se, but there were also other and more significant pursuits.
Deeper and wider than sensual pleasure was the life of ordinary production and consumption of material goods. Deeper and wider than production and consumption was the citizen life, the life of intersubjective relationship and interpersonal friendship. And deepest/highest of all, was the contemplation of the timeless (we approach the Divine most closely by contemplating the unchanging).
This is, of course, just another version of the Great Holarchy. For Aristotle and the Stoics, this hierarchy was an order of goals, and an order of motivation. For Plato and Plotinus, it was also the structure of the Kosmos (which is why Plato's "science" and his "ethics" are of a piece).
But in all cases, it meant that the ethical life involved significant transformations in consciousness (or in one's being). The deeper or higher motivations are not simply given from the start; one has to grow, develop, and unfold to effect these changes (just as in Maslow's needs hierarchy, which is precisely the same Great Holarchy in modern form). Above all, one had to change one's perceptions, because the deeper and wider and more encompassing motivations are not just lying around waiting to be seen by the senses or their extensions. Transformation was mandatory for a truly ethical life.
But with the collapse of the Kosmos to the empirical Right-Hand path and to the weakest-noodle motivation of pleasure/pain (the very shallowest motivation on Aristotle's and Plato's holarchy), a profound and altogether far-reaching shift has occurred: since the weakest-noodle motivation is already present in most adults (it is present, in fact, in most sentient beings, a true fundamental)—since it is already present in awareness, then one does not have to transform in order to live this "ethical" life: one simply extends one's present state to as many others as possible. One translates more widely; one does not have to transform more deeply. (It is interesting that, when Foucault switched his studies to ethics, the major criticism he had of modern ethical theories compared with the premodern ones was that, as he put it, the modern theories by and large had no ascesis, no transformative practice: one merely thought differently, one didn't have to transform.)
In fact, aiming for any deeper and transformative motivation (which is also actually much wider and more encompassing)—this is our old friend "pride." Seeking a deeper meaning and motivation must now be viewed as stepping outside of the great interlocking order of weakest-noodle motivation. It was literally labeled, as we saw, a "crime against nature" and a crime against "the great Universal System."
And thus, to come full circle, it was through weakest-noodle motivation, calculated by an instrumental-holistic rationality, that we could embrace the flatland whole. "The importance of instrumental reason then comes from its being the way that we are intended to play our part in the design ... of the great interlocking order of the universe." It is a concord of interlocking exteriors described in action terms, not an embrace of both interiors and exteriors demanding an inner transformation.
In this withering monological gaze, Agape is fast becoming Thanatos— not just a higher embracing a lower, but a higher regressing, being reduced to, a lower: the drive to dismantle the higher into its lowest common denominator parts (thus killing the higher in the process: Thanatos). There is no longer a deeper or higher happiness, only a wider happiness. No longer a vertical happiness that would embrace all beings as the One, but merely a horizontal happiness that would reduce Each to a sensory component in the All, and then attempt to ameliorate the devastating damage by an endless addition of broken parts, this bad infinity being the sole "happiness" of Each in the flattened All.
An old Catskills joke: Two elderly women, vacationing in the Catskills, are having dinner in the resort dining room. The food arrives, and one woman says, "This food is just awful." The other says, "Yes, and such small portions!"
The utilitarian ethic of this age was devoted to the proposition that bigger portions of bad food would somehow constitute the social good.
The instrumental-holistic and utilitarian atmosphere that dominated the age would simply level all moral distinctions whatsoever, and make it impossible to see that there are altogether different degrees of moral virtue, make it impossible to see why it is "better to be an unhappy Socrates than a contented pig." Rousseau and Kant would tear into this homogeni-zation of motives with a vengeance, and Hegel would tear into them for not being nearly nasty enough. But in the meantime, the mono-motives of flatland would make it impossible to see that deeper human happiness might reside in a profound transformation of consciousness, and not just in an expanding translation of one's present state.
The great advantage of the Descended God: I can already see that God clunking around in my visual field. Pleasure and pain already govern that world. They are given to me. That God is obvious, present, demands no work, no ascesis; the pleasure is there with each sunrise. And I shall extend the pleasure—and only that—indefinitely, thus never stepping out of the great interlocking system.
Accordingly, "sensuality was given a new value. Sensual fulfillment. . . seems to be one of the irreversible changes brought about by the radical Enlightenment. The promotion of ordinary life [nontranscendental], already transposed by Deists into an affirmation of the pursuit of happiness, now begins to turn into an exaltation of the sensual. Sensualism was what made Enlightenment naturalism radical."
Aristotle's lowest good is here the only good!—because it is the only good that fits the weakest-noodle net. For a merely empirical-sensory world, a merely empirical-sensory motivation. No deeper stages of growth, transformation, or development are necessary, and certainly none were allowed.
Heaps of sensual mono-happiness, not wholes of higher transformation: this would be a crucial ingredient in the newly forming Descended worldview—a world where there are no depths to be interpreted, only surfaces to be seen. Thus no inner transformation required, only exterior and empirical mapping. No qualitative distinctions to be forged, only quantative extensions to be measured. No better or worse inherent in the Kosmos, only bigger and smaller found in the cosmos. Not also an interlocking order of interpretive depth, but only a great interlocking order of empirical span. Not also degrees of value and motivation, but merely degrees of functional fit, driven by pleasure and survival. Not also "What does it mean?" but basically "What does it do?"
A Descended worldview where, to summarize bluntly, an expansion of span replaced a deepening of depth.

the ego and the Eco

We earlier noted the altogether extraordinary paradox of the Enlightenment paradigm: the holism of nature produced the atomism of the self. That is, so holistic was this great empirical interlocking order and interwoven net, so perfect was the "great Universal System," that the subject perceiving this net, the rational-ego, was left disengaged and dangling as its own "autonomous" and "self-defining" agency, with no way, in participatory terms, that the subject could actually fit into the interlocking world of objects it had so seamlessly described.
This massive rift in the holistic world, in the Système de la Nature, was rapidly becoming all too apparent. "The Enlightenment developed a conception of nature, including human nature,... as a harmonious whole whose parts meshed perfectly. But the rift was still there between nature, whether as plan or instrument, and the will which acted on this plan"— the will or agency which could not be described in the same terms as the net of communions in which it found itself, a subject that could not fit into the world of empirical objects.
Thus, the newly emergent rational-ego might simply say it was merely a strand in the great empirical web of nature, but that was to reduce the subjective sphere to an empirical dimension (reduce the Upper Left to a merely Right-Hand dimension: this is precisely what systems theorists continue to do to this day). But that did not explain the fit of the subject into the empirically holistic net; rather, that explained away the subject as being merely another object. It erased the very terms it was supposed to explain.
The holistic flatland world left no point of insertion for the subject with depth (no room for interiors, for Fs or we's, for genuine depth in any holons anywhere, animal, human, divine, or otherwise).
And thus arose what has been called the central problem of modernity: human subjectivity and its relation to the world. Not only was it the central problem of the Enlightenment and the Romantic-Idealist rebellion, it has continued to be a central, often the central, topic in theorists from Habermas to Foucault to Taylor. (Foucault, for example, said, "The goal of my work during the last twenty years . . . has not been to analyze the phenomena of power, nor to elaborate the foundations of such an analysis. It is not power, but the subject, which is the general theme of my research.")
What is of most interest to us now is that the two poles of the fundamental Enlightenment paradigm—namely, the autonomous subject (or the rational-ego) and the holistic world—were a mutual discord in essentially the same flatland ontology. Both poles accepted the collapse of the Kosmos into fundamentally empirical and naturalistic terms. It was no longer a battle between the Ascenders and the Descenders. The Descenders had fundamentally triumphed—in rejecting the bathwater of myth they had tossed out the baby of Ascent: no deeper or higher stages than the rational-ego and its empirical world were acknowledged. On this, all sides were in virtual agreement.
No, it was now a battle between what was left over: it was a battle, at the egoic-rational level, between the agency and the communion of that particular level: a battle of the ego-subject that was supposed to be self-defining, self-generating, and self-autonomous versus the objective/empirical world that was supposed to encompass and govern the ego-subject as well (as part of the great universal net)—and both of those assertions obviously cannot be unadulteratedly true.
Thus, this was not a battle of higher transformation (both sides had ruled that out), but a battle of translations, in the form: given the rational ego-subject, does the good life consist in (1) following the autonomous agency of the rational-ego in order to generate its own self-assured morals and aspirations, or in (2) connecting the ego with the wider ground of its shared communions in the natural world and thus finding something "larger" than the isolated ego?
This battle—it is still with us today—I will call the battle between the Ego and the Eco. Both were flatland to the core, which prevented their ever being synthesized in a higher union (they cannot be vertically integrated if both sides deny vertical holarchy). Rather, in a flatland world, the more there is of one, the less there must be of the other, and so the Ego camps and the Eco camps lined up as mortal enemies, each accusing the other, once again, of being the essence of Evil.
The battle: Did the good life reside in the Ego's agency or in its communions? In the Ego or the Eco?
Plotinus, of course, had a coherent way to say both (namely, the subjective agency of Each and the objective communions of the All are transcended and included in the nondual One). But since both sides had now thoroughly rejected holoarchic Ascent to the Nondual One, there was only the thorny question of how to relate the finite and supposedly autonomous subject (the Each) with finite and supposedly all-inclusive net of objects (the All), without reducing one to the other and thus violently and syncretically sabotaging the hard-won integrity of each.
The two camps, in other words, were completely and mutually incompatible (this they both happily—and aggressively—acknowledged). The more the Ego was emphasized as the true ground of a rational morality and an ethical will not found in nature, then the more the Eco was devalued, the more it came to be perceived as a source of heteronomy ("other-direction") opposed to the rational autonomy of the ego-subject. Nothing in the system of nature seeks universal compassion or mutual understanding or ethical restraint, the argument ran, and thus the task of the Ego is to free itself from the nasty, short, and brutish net of nature. The task of the Ego was to disengage from the Eco. To establish its agency over the communions of the great and grinding system. In short, and in all ways: the less Eco, and the more Ego, the better.
The Eco camp watched all of this with absolute alarm. The Ego wasn't just establishing its agency, this camp maintained; it was severing and repressing its connections and communions with nature—both external nature and, more important, internal nature (sensual, desirous, sexual, vital). And the more the Ego succeeded in its goal of devaluing the Eco, then the more abstract, arid, dry, and desiccated it became. The very emergence of the Ego, they maintained, was now destroying the rich fabric of communions on which the Ego itself depended. And the solution seemed equally obvious: the more Eco, and the less Ego, the better for all.
Without a genuine holarchy, the two partial views could not be superseded: they both claimed to encompass the other camp, but they both did so only through aggressive subtraction. They were in fact locked into a battle royale that, in many ways, was the archbattle, and remains the archbattle, of modernity and postmodernity.
In this world, this Descended world, the Ego and the Eco battle for the good life, doomed as they are to mutual repugnance.
It would be useful, then, to look more closely at the flatland Ego and the flatland Eco—both what they accomplished (which was much) and what they mutilated (which was much more), since, as I indicated, this fruitless battle, which cannot be solved in a flatland ontology, is still with us today, and still contributing equally to the despoliation of the real world, the world they both claim to be saving.

the ego

In this and the next section, we will look more carefully at the strengths and the weaknesses of both the Ego and the Eco camps.
As I indicated, this was a battle that was fought fundamentally within the Descended and flatland world, with the internal disengaged Ego attempting to figure out its relation to the external holistic Eco, both monological to the core. As we will see, however, the Ego camps were constantly breaking in the direction of a pure Ascending Path, attempting to disengage the Ego altogether in the direction of a Pure Self, and this would culminate in Fichte's infinite Subject as the transcendental One (as we will see). And the Eco camps were constantly breaking toward a pure and radical Descent, embracing fiercely the purely Descended world of the diverse and immanent Many, epitomized in Spinoza's pure Substance (which was often taken to mean pure immanence or Descent, as Fichte's infinite Subject was taken to mean pure transcendence or Ascent).
And by the end of the eighteenth century, this tension—between the Ego and the Eco, and in its extreme forms, between pure Ascent and pure Descent—this tension had become extremely and even unbearably acute, and the watchwords of the age became "unite Fichte and Spinoza!"— unite Ego and Eco, unite Ascent and Descent, and thus heal the two-thousand-year-old schizoid God that had dominated Western culture virtually from its inception. And a very special individual would rise to that occasion and attempt the long-sought integration. . . .
But in the meantime, the Ego and the Eco squared off as mortal enemies, and the battle, as I said, was: Did the good life reside in the Ego's agency or in its communions? In the Ego or the Eco?
I will divide each section into "positive" and "negative." In the positive, I will sympathetically state the case for each camp, and include what seem to be the genuinely enduring truths of each. In the negative, I will give the criticisms that each camp failed to answer satisfactorily, criticisms that exposed the real weaknesses in each camp, weaknesses that would historically drive Idealism to attempt the long-awaited integration (whether it succeeded or not, we will examine later).

Ego-positive

We can correctly situate the Ego camp(s) only if we remember the genuinely beneficial gains that the rational-ego had indeed accomplished in its emergence from the role identity of mythic dominator hierarchies.
(And recall the confusing terminology: the rational-ego was not, per se, "egotistical," but something of the opposite: the self had developed from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric capacities—to the postconventional worldview of universal pluralism and universal perspectivism. To the extent the ego lived up to its rational potential, that mature ego was worldcentric—a decentered view of universal pluralism. It is this "mature ego" that I mean by "the Ego" camp, and it was this mature ego of world-centric reason that its proponents had in mind.)
This was indeed part of the dignity of modernity, part of the liberating and enlightening move that strove, ideally, to free itself from ethnocentric prejudice and mythic imperialism, and the violence inherent in those shallower engagements. No more myths!
"In the tradition of the Enlightenment," Habermas reminds us, "enlightened thinking has been understood as an opposition and counter-force to myth. As opposition, because it opposes the unforced force of the better argument to the authoritarian normativity [dominator hierarchy] of a tradition interlinked with the chain of generations; as counterforce, because it... breaks the spell of collective powers. Enlightenment contradicts myth and thereby escapes its violence."
The power—and violence—of mythology is due in large measure to the fact that it is making claims that cannot be exposed to deeper evidence . . . without destroying the authority of the claim itself. That is the definition of ideology: hidden interests, hidden power claims, parading as truth, a truth that cannot be exposed to evidence without robbing it of its power. "That behind the back of the theory there lies hidden an inadmissible mixture of power and validity, and that it still owes its reputation to this—they are confused because validity claims are determined by relationships of power."
And at its best, the Enlightenment committed itself to exposing these power relations and to dismantling the dominator hierarchies that had formed the core of the social, cultural, and religious institutions of the entire mythic and mythic-rational epochs. Liberty, equality, fraternity: "No more myths!" meant "No more dominator hierarchies!," and the Age of Reason and Revolution set out to prove just that.
"Despite all the efforts of tyranny, despite the violence and trickery of the priesthood, despite the vigilant efforts of all the enemies of mankind," cried an impassioned Holbach, "the human race will attain enlightenment; nations will know their true interests; a multitude of rays, assembled, will form one day a boundless mass of light that will warm all hearts, that will illuminate all minds" (Essai sur les prejuges). Ecrasez l'infame!
The utilitarians may have been operating within a purely flatland ontology (which now goes without saying), but even they were driven by a goal of universal benevolence extended to all humans (and often animals), regardless of race, creed, color (and soon gender). Bentham: "Is there one of these my pages in which the love of humankind has for a moment been forgotten? Show it me, and this hand shall be the first to tear it out."
All of this, indeed, was radically new, on any sort of collective scale.
That reason could rise above the narrow interests of an egocentric or ethnocentric stance, and attempt to discover and affirm what was good and fair for all beings, and not merely for me or my tribe or my nation— this was one of the enduring drives of the rational Ego.
And in order to rise to this worldcentric pluralism, I, as Ego, must fight, in myself, any tendencies to act in egocentric or ethnocentric ways. I must fight my own inclinations, my own desires, my own natural impulses, to the extent that they deter me from a worldcentric fairness.
The rational Ego, then, has to battle those currents both in nature and in culture that pull it away from its worldcentric moral stance. Reason, and reason alone, delivers this moral vision to me, and thus I, as Ego, must distance myself from those powers and pulls that do not live up to this rational ethics of universal care.
And, the Ego camp would argue, if the rational-ego were really just another strand in the great natural web, then all of its actions would already be determined by the web itself. We would then be driven merely by pleasure and pain, and thus we would have no resources in ourselves that could deny our own egocentric drives in the name of a deeper and wider compassion for others. It is certain the fox never goes out of its way to help a stranded chicken (unless it's on the menu), and why should it? But is that the ideal model of my ethical response?
No, the great web of nature, the Eco-world, can offer me nothing for a worldcentric moral response. Rather it is reason, and reason alone, that allows me to step outside of my own natural inclinations and act for the benefit of others, and to treat others as I would myself be treated.
The central figure in all of this is, of course, Immanuel Kant. The moral subject, the rational-ego, is free precisely to the degree that it can disengage itself from the lesser pulls of egocentric desire, merely natural self-preservation, and dispersed inclinations, and reside as moral freedom.
One of Kant's central aims was to vindicate this moral freedom and independence of the ego-subject—to establish its autonomy as against the pull of heteronomy, or "other-directedness," by which he meant especially the other-directedness of ethnocentric culture, of mythic (metaphysical) religion, and of lower natural inclinations and desires. The truly moral will draws its worldcentric perspective from within, from its own reason, and not from any external source whatsoever, whether that source be church or state or nature.
Thus, for Kant, a person is truly free—that is to say, truly self-determined, and not pushed by some external other—when, and only when, the person acts from a determination imposed by his or her own rational will. When I act from a worldcentric perspective, then I am truly free, free of the lesser and meaner stances that wound me in their shallowness. When I act from a worldcentric stance, I am truly free—and that world-centric stance is itself generated and understood only by rationality (by universal perspectivism).
And thus, I am truly free only when I am acting in accord with my own moral will in its worldcentric capacity. When I act from that rational stance, then I am acting in the pure freedom of the rational will, since that is my own deepest and truest self (so to speak). I am not being forced by some other to act in this way (heteronomy), because the worldcentric stance is generated only by my own rationality: I am fully self-determined and thus free in the truest sense.
Thus, I am not really free when I am acting egocentrically—that is simply being a slave to my desires. Nor am I free when I am a slave to the herd mentality and mass opinion (of the sociocentric and conformist mode). Further, Kant would say, neither am I free in amoral nature— there, I am merely a cog in the interlocking web. Rather, I am free only when I act from the worldcentric stance given by my own rationality, free because I transcend these lesser and shallower engagements, engagements that proceed without benefit of universal compassion and categorical care, and thus engagements that hurt me as well.
In moral freedom, I declare my independence from nature and its amoral ways. "Such independence," says Kant, "is called freedom in a strict, i.e. transcendental sense." And conversely, to be bound by external authorities, traditional customs, Church dogma, or nature and nature's net: all of that drags me down from a worldcentric stance and into one or another partiality, meanness, narrowness, theft.
"This is the central, exhilarating notion of Kant's ethics. Moral life is equivalent to freedom, in this radical sense of self-determination by [one's own] moral will. This is called 'autonomy.' Any deviation from it, any determination of the will by some external consideration, some inclination, some authority, even as high as God himself, is condemned as heteronomy. The numinous which inspired awe was not God as much as the moral law itself, the self-given [but worldcentric] command of Reason ... the moral law which he gives to himself as rational will. So that men were thought to come closest to the divine, to what commands unconditional respect, not when they worship but when they act in moral freedom."
There is much truth in Kant's position, I believe, and certainly in the general terms as I sketched it. Not only has Kant carefully differentiated the Big Three, he is fighting mightily the reductionistic flatland trend of the Age. Using our terms, Kant would point out that the noosphere is not in the biosphere (I would say, it is within and beyond the biosphere); therefore the noospheric moral imperative cannot be found empirically (but only interpersonally or practically). And he is clearly fighting the homogenization of motives so prevalent with the utilitarians; for Kant, expanding sensual inclinations and desires is just expanding heteronomy, expanding slavery, expanding addictions.
But Kant's view is also hobbled by his inability to finally integrate the Big Three (despite his efforts in the Third Critique via art and organism; and indeed, this integration or "reconciliation" is what Schelling and Hegel took upon themselves to provide, as we will see shortly). For among other things, this deficiency left the intractable problem: how are the Ego and the Eco related?
But in the meantime, some of the obvious truths in this type of position were the driving force behind the Ego camps in their many forms. The greater the agency of the Ego—that is, the more the Ego can disengage from the Eco (and heteronomy in general)—the greater the knowledge and freedom of the self.
And thus arose the subjective pole of the fundamental Enlightenment paradigm, variously referred to as the "self-defining subject," the "autonomous ego," the "disengaged self," the "punctual self," the "philosophy of the subject," "self-sufficient subjectivity." Taylor refers to this overall emergence as "a revolution in moral consciousness." Foucault calls it a "sudden, radical restructuring" and a "profound upheaval, an archaeological mutation." It is, in essence, the emergence of modernity. It is the emergence of the Ego.
We could say, on the positive side, that it is an ethic of self-responsibility and self-esteem needs (Maslow) arising out of conformist and belongingness needs. But its general trend is clear: from Descartes to Locke to Kant to Fichte: the more Ego, and the less Eco, the better.
And here the Ego camps began to veer into the negative.

Ego-negative: "The Age of Man"

For each of those theorists (and for a host of others in the rational-egoic camp), the disengaged subject does indeed disenchant the world, and so much the better! It is precisely by disenchanting the world that the knowing subject liberates itself!
(Apart from a definite truth in that stance—namely, reason does indeed disenchant mere myth: grownups no longer need to believe in Santa Claus—nonetheless, this is the point where the Eco camps would generally begin their critiques. Even if a large dose of disenchantment was called for, the Eco camps would maintain, it had gotten quite out of hand, even wreckless and vicious, and disenchanted was fast becoming disemboweled.)
In the meantime, the disengaged Ego-subject, in its cruder forms, simply set about to unambiguously reflect on the world in purely objective terms (since the two were radically divorced, this did not seem to present any problem: one simply looks). The disengaged subject stares at the world, objectifies it, and describes the results—the so-called "reflection paradigm"—a representational epistemology that has been one of the central tenets of modernity from Descartes and Hobbes and Locke down to Quine—what Habermas calls "the Enlightenment's proud culture of reflection" and Taylor summarizes as "To know reality is to have a correct representation of things." And if it wasn't merely the Ego reflecting on the Eco, then it was the Ego working on the Eco—the so-called "production paradigm" (Marx).
In this scheme, language is thought to be very simple: it is a set of conventional signs that straightforwardly represent concrete things (and we see this from Hobbes and Condillac to today's empiricist linguistics, all of which overlook the fact that signs themselves possess meaning only by virtue of the intersubjective system of other signs, and, further, only the least interesting signs "point" to things; most signs point to other signs: language creates worlds, it doesn't just reflect pregiven worlds).
In all of these accounts, and in the reflection paradigm in general, what we see is the world reduced unambiguously to monological terms, to it-language, to objective surfaces with no depth requiring interpretation and no dialogue requiring mutual understanding. The world is simply a collection of objectively interlocking events, and knowledge consists in correctly representing those events. Knowledge is of those objects, and not also the mutual understanding between subjects (and certainly not the transcendence of both subjects and objects in the nondual One). This knowledge is not translogical; it is not dialogical; it is monological.
So again, it is not that representational and objective (or empirical) knowledge is simply wrong, but rather is extremely partial. It reduces all dimensions to their Right-Hand correlates (which is subtle reductionism; in gross reductionism, the Right-Hand dimension is itself further reduced to its atomistic elements; both are monological). And since all dimensions do have some sort of Right-Hand correlate, the project can always seem to be making headway—there is always some sort of evidence one can point to (even though it involves a reduction). It genuinely appears, within this prejudice, that the entire world can be captured in it-language.
Thus is the Kosmos reduced to the neutral flatland cosmos. And whereas the Kosmos possesses depth—and thus intrinsic value inheres in the depth of each and every holon (animal, human, divine)—the flatland cosmos itself (or so it appears to it-language) is completely devoid of meaning, value, awareness, prehension, consciousness—there are no Left-Hand components at all! As Whitehead's famous summary has it, the cosmos is now "a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly." (To which he added, "Thereby, modern philosophy has been ruined.")
But that is how all surfaces correctly appear anyway; and thus if the only knowledge one allows is objectifying knowledge—knowledge of surfaces that can be seen with the senses or their extensions—then the results of that type of investigation are predetermined: look at any value in an objectifying fashion, and you find no value, just neutral surfaces, at which point you say, "What value?"
As we have seen, this empirical, objective, mutually interlocking and holistic world of "its" left no room for the subject (I's and we's). And so, in the strangest twist in this already strange tale, beginning around the eighteenth century (with a few earlier efforts), the subject attempted to get at itself, to know itself, by turning this monological gaze inward upon itself. It retroflected the monological gaze. That is, the subject attempted to categorize, describe, and explain itself in objective terms, in it-language. Not in inter subjective terms of mutual understanding and mutual recognition, but in the neutral, naturalistic, "scientific" terms of it-language.
And thus was born what Foucault called "the Age of Man"—the merely "objective" study of humans. And in a beautiful phrase that would summarize the net effect of the entire Enlightenment paradigm (right down to today's systems theory), Foucault points out that with the "Age of Man," humans became "the object of information, never the subject in communication."
Much of Foucault's work is a cataloguing of the nightmares that descended on citizens as they became merely objects (and thus "subjugated subjects") in the holistic net of monological knowledge (particularly in the biologized form of "biopower").
This is likewise what Habermas refers to as "the totalitarian characteristics of an instrumental reason that objectifies everything around it, itself included." In this respect, Habermas is in complete agreement with Foucault. "It is an idea that attains dominance at the same time as subject-centered reason: that killing off dialogical relationships transforms subjects, who are monologically turned in upon themselves, into objects for one another, and only objects."
Further, says Habermas, "The same structure [retroflected monological gaze] is to be found at the cradle of the human sciences"—the so-called "dehumanizing humanism" and the "sciences of man" (toward which so much of the postmodern attack has rightly been focused). Habermas, noting his point of agreement with Foucault, is specific: "A gaze that objectifies and examines, that takes things apart analytically, that monitors and penetrates everything, gains a power that is structurally formative for these institutions. It is the gaze of the rational subject who has lost all merely intuitive bonds with his environment and torn down all the bridges built up of intersubjective [and dialogical] agreement, and for whom in his monological isolation, other subjects are only accessible as the objects of nonparticipant observation" Habermas makes clear that this is yet another version of ... monological systems theory, where the great monological systems net descended on citizens for their own "benefit and welfare."
The bad news continues. These objectifying and systematic "sciences of man" are in fact pseudo-sciences, according to both Foucault and Habermas, and pseudo-sciences driven by self-aggrandizing power. "Because the human sciences with their borrowed models and alien ideals of [exclusive] objectivity, became involved with a human being that was for the first time turned into an object of scientific investigation by tbe modern form of knowledge, an impulse could prevail in them unawares, which they could not admit without risking their claim to truth: just that restless pressure for knowledge, self-mastery, and self-aggrandizement...."
In other words, the "sciences of man" and the new "dehumanizing humanism" did not just study the objective (and monological) aspects of human beings (which would be fine), they reduced human beings to their merely objective and empirical components (which was the crime). Humans were not "subjects in communication" but merely "objects of information." And because that reduction is not supported by the Kosmos, because that reduction is a violation of the richness of the universe, then it must be driven by something other than truth: it must be driven in large measure by self-aggrandizing power, according to both Foucault and Habermas.
And with this, the whole dark side of the Enlightenment comes lurching to the fore. The catastrophe was not the emergence of reason, but reason confined to and initially captured by empiric-analytic modes—objectifying, monological, positivistic—modes which see only the Right-Hand dimensions and never the Left-Hand (even though their own operation depends intimately on them). It was a reason that differentiated the Big Three only to let them fall into dissociation, with the resultant emphasis solely on the Right-Hand (the Big Three reduced to the Big One of it-language).
Or again, it was a reason that went from an altogether commendable worldcentric understanding, to a virtual repression of anything not automatically of its ilk. It was a higher emergence used for altogether rude purposes, turning everything into objects of the monological gaze, and severing, alienating, repressing the rich communions that allowed its agency to function in the first place. If only the Right-Hand dimensions are acknowledged, then the entire Left half of the Kosmos has to be repressed, denied, reduced, distorted.
It was the repressive side of the Enlightenment that its critics have especially focused on (in various forms, their names would soon be legion: Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bataille, Foucault, Derrida). But none of the Enlightenment's critics have been more acute than Hegel. We have already heard him brand the Enlightenment as a "vanity of the understanding"—"the understanding" being empirical-categorical, reflective, and monological reason, as opposed to (or rather subsumed in)
mature Reason (vision-logic), which is dialectical, dialogical, and process-oriented. Hegel felt that "In the modern world emancipation became transformed into unfreedom because the unshackling power of [monolog-ical] reflection had become autonomous and now achieved unification only through the violence of a subjugating subjectivity ... it posited as absolute that which is conditioned."
In short, reason that has become monological holds all nonreason at arm's length, marginalizes it, excludes it, dominates it, objectifies it, disinfects it with disgust.
Put a final way: it was reason shot through with Phobos. The great Enlightenment rationality did not just transcend and include, and meet the world with an Agape to balance its Eros. Instead of embrace, there was all too often a distancing gone mad, disengagement gone extreme, alienation and repression and dissociation—all out of an understandable but ultimately insane aversion to anything that looked like "heteronomy."
Not just commendable Eros but a prickly Phobos was at work in the Ego's cherished autonomy, an autonomy and an agency that therefore all too often severed its communions with nature, body, sensuality, community—and sent scattered fragments running to the winds where union and integration were supposed to be gloriously forthcoming.
(Notice that this is a precise example of a holarchy gone pathological, which we discussed in chapter 1—an arrogant holon usurps its place in the normal holarchy, thus dominating/repressing those holons upon which its own existence intimately depends. Not holarchy, but pathological holarchy, with hyperagency severing and dominating—precisely because fearing—its communions: there was rationality run amok, and there was Phobos driving the repression.)
Thus, reason "denounces and undermines all unconcealed forms of suppression and exploitation, of degradation and alienation, only to set up in their place the unassailable domination of rationality. Because this regime of a subjectivity puffed up into a false absolute transforms the means of consciousness-raising and emancipation into just so many instruments of objectification and control, it fashions for itself an uncanny immunity in the form of a thoroughly concealed domination."
And thus, "The permanent sign of enlightenment is domination over an objectified external nature and a repressed internal nature. Reason itself destroys the humanity it first made possible."
The repressive side of the Enlightenment, the tendency of monological reason to marginalize everything that is not of its ilk, Eros gone catastrophically into rampant Phobos—this cancer was eating its way into the Age of Reason even while its nobler ideals were remaking Europe. Hoibach could indeed sing—and who would not join him?—"How this portrait of mankind, free of all these chains, no longer under the enemies of progress, and walking with a sure and certain step on the path of truth, of virtue and happiness, presents to the philosopher a sight which consoles him for the errors, the crimes, the injustices which still sully the earth. . . . He then dares to bind these efforts to the chain of human destiny: there he finds virtue's true reward, the pleasure of having created an enduring good, which fate will no longer destroy with a deadly compensation by bringing back prejudice and slavery. Living in thought with a humanity re-established in the rights and dignity of its nature, he forgets the one which is corrupted and tormented by greed, fear, or envy; it is there that he lives . . . , which his love for humanity has embellished with the purest enjoyments."
There, truly, the noble aspirations of the Age, and never so nobly expressed.
What Holbach could not know, as he wrote those words, was that he had but a few months to live. He was hiding in Paris, 1793, where a warrant for his arrest had been issued by the Jacobins, whose main leader, Robespierre—by all accounts a man of great integrity, courage, and devout republicanism—would soon oversee the Reign of Terror, in which many thousands would be drowned or guillotined for the revolutionary cause of a reason rising up to build the radiant future—only to succumb to its own limitations mistaken for the absolute, and set Phobos loose with terror and retaliation in its hardened heart.

the ECO

The Eco camps would seize most immediately upon the repressions and exclusionary practices that reason could, and often did, bring in its wake. The representational/reflection paradigm left the subject staring out at an alien world, with an unbridgeable gap, hiatus, rift running right down the middle of the Kosmos. The Eco camps found this rift intolerable and set out to heal the split between the ego and the eco, unaware that they would do so only by introducing their own form of covert violence, a violence that, like its egoic cousin, was all the more insidious because it was given a noble, often spiritual label.

Eco-positive

The intentions, as always, were honorable (as were those of the Ego camps), and the approach contained much that was (and is) undoubtedly true. First and foremost was the attack on the absolute status of the reflection paradigm, where a disengaged and dangling subject stared out mutely, dumbly, at a monochrome world. The Enlightenment, the Eco camps felt, had introduced "a false world of representation which cuts man off from the real living sources." And it was only in a return to nature, to the rich fabric of the great organic life stream, that the "living sources" could be resurrected, recontacted, celebrated, renewed.
As Taylor summarizes the situation, "If the Enlightenment anthropology recommended itself through the sense of freedom, even exhilaration, of self-definition, the reaction to it [the Eco camp] experienced this picture of man as dry, dead, as destroying life. For the sense of freedom as a self-defining, reasoning subject was won by objectifying nature, and even our own nature in so far as we are objects for ourselves [retroflected monolog-ical gaze]. It was won at the expense of a rift between the subject who knows and wills, and the given: things as they are in nature."
The originators of the broad Eco movement—Rousseau (1712-1778), Herder (1744-1803), the various Romantics (the Schlegels, Schiller, Novalis, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Whitman)—took it upon themselves to heal this rift. Herder: "See the whole of nature, behold the great analogy of creation. Everything feels itself and its like, life reverberates with life."
The mode of knowing most appropriate to this type of vision was not disinterested thought or representation, but rather a type of ecstatic feeling, what Wordsworth called "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." As Herder put it, "Impulse is the driving force of our existence, and it must remain this even in our noblest knowings. Love is the noblest form of knowing, as it is the noblest feeling." And as for those who believe detached representation is the truest form of knowledge, they must be, says Herder, either "liars or enervated beings."
Thus, the truest and purest use of language, the Eco camp maintained, was not merely to reflect or represent an objectified and stultified reality, but rather to express the wondrous currents of life—and for this poetry and art were most ideally suited. (This was an important move, with far-reaching repercussions, to reintroduce the Upper-Left dimension of sincerity and truthfulness in expression, and not just the Right-half dimension of the truth of propositions; this was a truly profound contribution, even if it was often overblown to silly proportions.)
The idea wasn't to stand back and impartially and disinterestedly reflect on nature; the idea was to participate with nature and express nature, to join in the great currents of communion that nourish each and all, and not merely glorify one's own self-generated, self-independent agency. "This feeling cannot stop at the boundary of my self; it has to be open to the great current of life that flows across it. It is this greater current, and not just the current of my own body, which has to be united with higher aspiration ... if there is to be unity in the self. Thus our self-feeling must be continuous with our feeling for this larger current of life which flows through us and of which we are a part; this current must nourish us not only physically but spiritually as well. Hence it must be more than a useful interchange of matter. It must be experienced as a communion."
Thus, what the Ego camp had taken as proof of self-freedom and self-determination—namely, the objectification and disenchantment of nature—the Eco camp took as a sign of a deep inner cleavage, a profound alienation within the subject that expressed itself as a cleavage or rift between the subject and nature as well. Where the Ego camps had developed a passion for what they saw as self-determination, independence, and self-responsibility, the Eco camps displayed an equal passion for what they saw as unity, wholeness, harmony. For the one, self-responsible agency; for the other, self-abnegating communion.
"There was a passionate demand for unity and wholeness. The [Eco] view bitterly reproached the Enlightenment thinkers for having dissected man and hence distorted the true image of human life in objectifying human nature. All these dichotomies distorted the true nature of man which had rather to be seen as a single stream of life, or on the model of a work of art, in which no part could be defined in abstraction from the others. These distinctions thus were seen as abstractions from reality. But they were more than that, they were mutilations of man. ... It was a denial of the life of the subject, his communion with nature and his self-expression in his own natural being."
And thus, as Taylor summarizes the aspirations of an entire age of Eco-thinkers, "What they themselves yearned for was unity with self and communion with nature—that man be united in communion with nature." And this was to be accomplished by a "sympathetic insertion into the great stream of life of which they are a part."

Eco-negative

And just there was the problem. Granted that this insertion was desirable, just how does the ego insert itself into something larger without losing the positive side of the beneficial gains that it had just made, and for which it had so valiantly fought? By giving up ego, the Ego camps asked, do you mean giving up autonomy and going back to heteronomy? Back to conformist determination by the church or state, since they are definitely "larger"? Back to personal impulse and inclination and natural feeling, no matter how self-serving or self-absorbed they might be? Back to the amoral currents of nature that, however lively and vital, still do not have to construct intersubjective cultures and do not therefore provide a model for human interaction? Back to fox eats chicken—which is supposed to be good simply because it is natural?
The problem was that we cannot simply say the subject and the object are one in the great stream of life. We have to show how this is so, and how it can be so, without resorting to facile verbal flourishes. The Ego camps were quite persuasive in this particular regard. If we are supposed to insert ourselves into the great stream of nature, they asked, then you— the Eco camps—must tell us how we can do this without losing the moral stance of worldcentric benevolence and universal pluralism. Since the worldcentric stance is achieved only in the space of rationality—it is found nowhere in nature—then you must tell us how to dissolve reason into life-feeling without destroying the very stance that allows that sympathy to exist in the first place.
The Ego camp, from Kant to Fichte (to aspects of Hegel), rather brutally tore into the Eco-minded "mushiness." Standing in nature and ego-centrically emoting, they maintained, and seizing any sentiment that makes me weep at my wonder—that hardly constitutes the "noblest knowing, noblest feeling."
For the Eco-camp, the problem always returned to this: if mind and nature, ego and eco, are actually one in a greater stream of Life or Nature, then what is the relation of nature to Nature?
The Eco-camps were notoriously unsatisfactory in their answers, largely because they switched back and forth from nature to Nature as suited their various purposes (interestingly, this is exactly the charge that Derrida levels at Rousseau). On the one hand, the Eco camp maintained, the ego-subject has divided and divorced itself from nature, which is now repressed externally and internally. (So that nature is obviously not the great total Whole or Force that integrates both, because that nature is clearly one of the two alienated poles.) On the other hand, there is supposed to be a single, unitary, harmonious whole—the deeper Nature (capital N)—that is the integration of alienated subject and alienated nature.
But if alienated Nature appears as ego versus nature, then in which direction are we to find the real Nature: in the direction of the ego, or in the direction of nature? Do we look within, or do we look without? Do we continue our inward turn in consciousness, or do we abandon that path and turn without to the world of nature? Do we disengage and detach more?, or do we insert and commune more?
The Eco camps answered unanimously: we insert more. And in this move there was a virtually universal confusion of differentiation and dissociation. Any differentiation was taken to be the sign, not of a newly emerging integration, but of a lost paradise, a sign of a fracture, a sign that a prior "union" was being torn asunder into alienated parts and parcels.
And thus, instead of going forward to a higher but not-yet-emerged integration, we are supposed to go back to nature prior to the alleged crime—back to a time before the differentiation of the noosphere from the biosphere, back to those cultures that do not differentiate the Big Three, back to those idyllic times of the noble savage and the pristine communion with nature, back in any case to some sort of Eden that must have existed because differentiation is now thoroughly mistaken for alienation.
In other words, instead of seeing that differentiation is the necessary prelude to a deeper or higher and emergent integration, it was seen, in all cases, as a disruption, a division and destruction, of a prior harmonious state. The oak was somehow a violation of the acorn.
And in this confusion—this pre/trans confusion—all true critical edge was lost, because the cure for the actual dissociations that had indeed beset modernity was mistakenly thought to be a regression to a state prior to all differentiation whatsoever.
In other words, where the Ego camps were marked by repression, the Eco camps were shot through with regression.
Both camps would tear aggressively, often brutally, into the fabric of the Kosmos with their preferred ideology, precisely because, as we will see, they were (and are) both locked into the same flatland paradigm, where the more of Ego means the less of Eco, and vice versa—with no way whatsoever to consolidate their equally important claims in a new and emergent and integrative growth.
In the meantime, the Eco-Romantic atmosphere was all aglow with yesterday. Central to all of the Eco-theorists was the notion that something had gone horribly wrong, that somebody or something had made a terrible mistake, that history was primarily the shadow of a great and heinous Crime, and that salvation, above all, was the resurrection of the dead and dismembered Paradise Lost.
Various theorists would set their Way Back machine to different dates, depending primarily, it seemed, on what they personally disliked most about modernity. Because differentiation and dissociation are now so thoroughly confused, culture itself becomes, not also a mode of emergent transformation that discloses deeper and wider worlds, but simply and primarily a distorting force that conceals and contorts both a pure nature and my truly pristine self. Culture is not a transformative emergence of greater differentiation/integration that can go too far into dissociation/ alienation. No, culture is primarily nothing but an alienating force that necessarily and nastily separates humans from nature and me from myself.
And so above all, I must get away from culture and get back to nature, back to a wilderness that expresses a pure nature and my own most authentic impulses. Culture is fundamentally a crime of distortion, and I must seek behind this distortion for the truth of pure nature and the truth of my pure self.
(That "back to nature" might be headed in a preconventional and not postconventional direction did not seem to dawn on the Eco-Romantics, or at any rate did not deter them in the least. When differentiation is confused with dissociation, regression is confused with salvation.)
And so the search for Paradise Lost commenced. First stop on the Way Back was the medieval age, which was eulogized by many Romantics (then and now) as an "organically seamless society" whose members were tightly woven together in a net of meaning that did not yet sever culture and nature. This society certainly did not differentiate the Big Three— seven body orifices demanding seven planets is indeed a tight organization. On the other hand, there was that nastiness of the dominator hierarchies of King and Pope and hypermasculine God: perhaps, after all, 'tis not the Paradise sought.
The next, and by far the most popular stop on the Regress Express, was classical Greece, the admiration for, even worship of which, reached fevered proportions. "For the ancient Greeks represented to this Age a mode of life in which the highest in man, his aspiration to form and clarity was at one with his nature and with all of nature. It was an era of unity and harmony within man, in which thought and feeling, morality and sensibility were one, in which the form which man stamped on his life whether moral, political or spiritual flowed from his own natural being, and was not imposed on it by the force of raw will."
Never mind that the force of raw will had in fact made approximately one out of every three people into slaves, and assured a virtually identical fate for all women. This, of course, did not stop Schiller from singing:

When poetry's magic cloak
Still with delight enfolded truth
Life's fulness flowed through creation
And there felt what never more will feel.
Man acknowledged a higher nobility in Nature
To press her to love's breast. . . .

The Eco camp continued unabated (and virtually unchanged) into many of today's ecophilosophies and "new paradigm" movements, which have taken up the Regress Express but in even more aggressive and violent forms. The ecofeminists do not at all approve of ancient Greece, but rather prefer the immediately preceding period of horticultural society, ruled by the Great Mother, where women, who did most of the productive work (women produced about 80 percent of the food in such societies), at least shared in many of the public policy decisions—just as they handsomely oversaw the central rite in horticultural society, that of the ritual human sacrifice (which drew "equalitarianly" on men, women, and children; one such site revealed eighty one-year-old infant girls sacrificed to the Great Mother).
On the other hand, today's ecomasculinists, never ones to be outdone, have pushed the Way Back machine to its human limits. They do not at all approve of horticultural societies (the heaven of the ecofeminists)—in fact, the beginning of farming is for them the beginning of the great Crime of Humanity, of which industrialization is merely the inevitable endgame of planting seeds and thus "interfering" with "pure" nature. (This is one of the many reasons that ecomasculinists and ecofeminists do not get along well—one's "pure and pristine nature" is the other's "primal crime against pure and pristine nature"—the reason, of course, is that "pure and pristine nature" is pure ideology to which both camps equally succumb, and thus each is thoroughly annoyed that the other is infringing on its "pure and pristine" territory.)
Ralph Metzner, representing a long line of ecomasculinists, explains that "in tracing back the historical origins of the split between human consciousness and nature"—and notice already that he cannot tell the difference between differentiation and dissociation, and so he is going to have to push back to the very beginning in order to get beneath the Crime, because every differentiation is going to be interpreted as a distortion—"it is possible to discern further layers of distortion, further choice-points and cultural transformations that lead to deeper dissociation and alienation. The first movement toward a controlling, altering attitude toward nature came with the neolithic [horticultural] domestication, ten thousand to twelve thousand years ago, when the hunting-gathering way of life that we had practiced for hundreds of thousands of years, attuned to the changing seasons and rhythms of life, gave way to herding and farming economies, settlement in small villages and towns, the accumulation and hoarding of surpluses, raiding and warring upon neighboring tribes, and so forth."
And so there we have it. The Regress Express crashes into ground zero, beyond which it cannot go and still call itself human. There is the ultimate Lost Paradise: prior even to the invention of the wheel, the pristine and pure state is to be found in an updated version of the noble savage in small foraging tribes—which, if nothing else, is certainly the ecomasculinist's idea of heaven: where all real men could hunt and all real women picked berries. The typical day was a nice nature hike, then a little male bonding in the great hunt, then home to the women, barefoot, pregnant, around the campfire; smoke some herb, a little singing ("nature loves me this I know, for the raindrops tell me so . . .").
And let us conveniently forget that, as Gerhard Lenski reports, the average life expectancy was 22.5 years; one out of three infants were "thrown away" for population control; the roots of war and slavery and female oppression were already entrenched. . . .
And so the search would go, scraping more and more layers of depth off the Kosmos in search of a pristine and foundational paradise, beyond which all evolution was then thought to be a grotesque mistake. The representatives of this Paradise were then in possession of a critique of culture, they believed, that gave them immense power in condemnatory rhetoric for all things modern, or rather, all things past the chosen paradisaical epoch. Not only did this condemnatory rhetoric plot the course of humanity's horrific Fall, it gave these "critics" the key to Salvation, because the Paradise Lost, from which we had egregiously deviated, would also be the Promised Land, to which we must all return (following the directions of those perceptive few who possessed the chosen critique).
In all of these Eco camps (from the Romantic era to today), the result of the regressive slide—of the failure to understand the difference between differentiation and dissociation—results inevitably in a very dualistic, very Manichaean, almost Zoroastrian, worldview. There is the good spirit (pristine nature) and the bad spirit (human intervention interpreted as any deviation from "harmony with nature").
But "harmony with nature" is impossible to define or even indicate. We already saw the ecofeminists eulogize planting societies as being most in harmony with the seasonal currents of nature and the Great Mother, while ecomasculinists damn it altogether as the primordial Crime against nature. The ecomasculinists, of course, then claim that the even earlier tribal and foraging life represented pure and pristine harmony with nature. But these tribes cooked, built shelters, created clothing, entered into rituals to influence the outcome of the hunt, and so forth. These are all "interferences with nature" of one sort or another.
And so it soon becomes obvious that, since "harmony with nature" is impossible to define in any way that allows humans to be anything other than primates, then each Eco-theorist simply and arbitrarily decides what he or she doesn't like about the current of humanity's necessary differentiations.
It is an ugly and all too often hypocritical business, this regressive slide. And, like its Ego cousin, it has its own sad pathos and absolute irony. The Ego-Enlightenment set out to free Eros from its heteronomy, its immersion in conformist and herd mentalities; and it sought this autonomy with such force that it went too far into alienation, and ended up with Eros degenerating into Phobos: seeking freedom, it found only fear and alienation, which bound it even more tightly to that which it wished to transcend.
And the Eco camps, so intensely desiring insertion into a Larger Life, an Agape that embraced the depth of the Kosmos with joyful Love and Care, ended up scrapping layers and layers of depth off the universe in search of the primal ground where this insertion could occur: it reduced the deeper and higher to the lower and shallower, a reduction and regression and leveling that, by any other name, is Thanatos. In search of a larger life, they found only a greater death, a rancid leveling of just those differentiations that allowed their search in the first place.
"This leveling," says Habermas, "can also be seen in the diachronic comparison of modern form of life with pre-modern ones. The high price earlier exacted from the mass of the population (in the dimensions of bodily labor, material conditions, possibilities of individual choice, security of law and punishment, political participation, and schooling) is barely even noticed."
What is noticed, in each of the Eco-schools, is that today's world is God-forsaken. At some point in the historical (or prehistorical) past—at some point in yesterday's time—we have actually deviated from the Great Spirit, we have dissociated from the Great Goddess. And it is this dualistic notion—the notion that we can profoundly deviate from the actual Current of the Kosmos—that sets up an extremely arrogant, egocentric, and regressive Zoroastrian worldview, a worldview that overlooks the fact that the Great Spirit, if it really is Great, must be behind even those moves that look to us like deviations. All of which overlooks, as Zen would have it, that "that which one can deviate from is not the true Tao."
That is the deeper truth, the profound secret, altogether lost in the retrogressive Eco-stance. The Eco-theorists get so enraptured in their Manichaean good-versus-bad spirit that they paradoxically contribute to just those dualistic and destructive forces that at their best they, and all thoughtful men and women, do indeed wish to see superseded.
The Ego and the Eco: the flatland twins locked in the dance of ironic self-destruction, both contributing equally to the failure of integration. The one absolutizes the noosphere, the other absolutizes the biosphere, neither of which alone can integrate the other. And that which does not contribute to the integration of both contributes directly to the destruction of each.
It was in this climate of mutual repugnance—Ego versus Eco—that two events would emerge that altered the course of history irrevocably.
One was the discovery of evolution.

13

The Dominance of the Descenders

It is the time of the gods that have fled and of the god that is coming. It is the time of need, because it lies under a double lack and a double Not: the No-more of the gods that have fled and the Not-yet of the god that is coming.       —martin heidegger

both the ego camps and the Eco camps, starting out with the best and even noblest of intentions, had paradoxically brought about precisely what they had set out to eradicate. The reason was fairly simple: since both camps were (and still are) playing on the same flatland field, then the more one pole succeeds, the more the excluded pole returns in paradoxical forms—the more the "return of the repressed (or regressed)" comes to haunt the house of its originator. Lacking a hol-archical Ascent to (and Descent from) the nondual One—which negates and preserves both Ego and Eco in a Nondual transcendence and embrace—there was only a mutual negation, and mutual repugnance, of one camp for the other.
The integration of the Big Three (person, culture, nature), now that they had been finally differentiated: this was (and is) the single greatest task facing modernity (and postmodernity). In simplified form, what was demanded was the integration of the interior or subjective worlds (I and we) with the exterior or objective (nature); or again, the integration of the noosphere (Ego) and the biosphere (Eco).
The great differentiation had already, irreversibly, irrevocably occurred. What the world awaited, anxiously, was a voice signaling integration.

the paradox of damage

Both the Ego camps and the Eco camps had responded with their own healing agenda, only to find that both agendas aggravated what they were meant to soothe and inflamed what they were meant to cure. Both camps were their own worst enemy, and both camps contributed to a violent fracturing of the world they were supposed to heal.
We already saw that the rational Ego took as its goal the transformation from egocentric inclinations and ethnocentric dominator hierarchies to a worldcentric stance of universal pluralism, altruism, benevolence, and freedom. It was a "declaration of independence" in more ways than one: independence from religious and mythic domination, from state-imposed interference in personal life, from conformist modes of the herd mentality, and from nature conceived as a source of not-yet-moral drives and inclinations. The autonomy of the rational Ego had to be fought for, had to be actively secured against all those forces of heteronomy that constantly were at work to pull it down from its worldcentric stance of universal tolerance and benevolence.
These values—in particular, universal pluralism, altruism, and freedom—are what Taylor calls the three "hypergoods" (goods that are felt to be better than other goods) that have most deeply characterized modernity (and postmodernity), and they are values that no doubt constitute much of the true dignity of modernity. But no sooner had the rational Ego secured some notion of these hypergoods than it began not just to differentiate from other goods, but to alienate them, dissociate them, repress them, seal them off.
And in all directions:
1. The rational Ego totally refused transrational and transpersonal occasions—"No more Ascent!" In understandably wanting to preserve the autonomy it had fought so hard to secure, it latched onto it with a death grip, and pressed its own autonomous agency in an extreme and exorbitant form—what we will call "hyperagency"—and this meant, above all else, not handing its newly won freedom over to anything that looked even remotely like a God or Spirit.
2.  It completely ignored, almost totally forgot, its own interpersonal dimension, the dimension of dialogical and intersubjective communication, in favor of the merely monological and objectifying mode, which is also a very hyperagentic mode, in that the communions of inter subjectivity are ditched in favor of the monologues of individual power and agency. The Age of Man: the disengaged (hyperagentic) subject staring at other humans as "objects of information" and not "subjects in communication" or communion.
3.  And where it could have transcended and included the prepersonal dimension of elan vital, biotic roots, organic richness, it all too often simply dissociated and repressed them (in a hyperagentic fashion: nothing would touch its "freedom"). The disenchantment of the natural world, both without and within.
Each of those dissociations and alienations—of the transpersonal, the interpersonal, and the prepersonal—would severely curtail its cherished freedom. And thus the paradox of damage: in aggressively pursuing intense freedom, it manufactured massive unfreedom.
In seeking freedom—autonomy not bound by any sort of heteronomy—it ended up cut off from spirit, cut off from nature, cut off from its own body, cut off from its fellows. And the worse it felt, the more it intensified its hyperagentic withdrawal and disenchantment: the unfreer it became. Not within and beyond, but within and withdrawn.
In short, in all those domains (spirit, nature, body, civics), corpses lay strewn everywhere on the road to a reckless independence. The rational-ego, hyperagentic and hyperindependent, took its own relative autonomy (which had indeed increased significantly), and blew it up to absolute proportions. In understandably wishing to increase freedom and liberty, it paradoxically left massive road kill everywhere on the highway to rational heaven.
But the same paradox of damage beset the Eco camps. In starting out with the express intention of decentering the Ego, of inserting it back into the larger currents of Life and Love, the Eco camps ended up— inadvertently, paradoxically—championing modes of knowing and feeling that were supremely egocentric and flagrantly narcissistic. In wishing to overthrow the Ego—and still being stuck, with their opponents, in monological ílatland—the Eco camps introduced the modern world to a glorification of divine egoism: the outrageous return and exaltation of that which it expressly set out to overcome.
It started innocently enough. It started, as all modern and postmodern currents do, with a worldcentric stance secured in rational space—a stance of universal pluralism.

the ECO slide into divine egoism

Rationality, or worldcentric and universal perspectivism, operates in a worldspace that allows, as all structures do, several different and apparently contradictory stances, which can be confusing if we don't look carefully at what is actually occurring.
Thus, on the one hand, rationality can tend toward a rather rigid version of "universal" truth, operating in a very abstract and mechanical and formulaic fashion, ignoring all individuality and all particulars and all differences. "Universal" comes to mean rigidly "uniform," and an otherwise admirably worldcentric perspective comes to mean "must be the same for everybody everywhere." And, we might say, rationality tends first to emerge in this fashion, in a monological and objectifying universal-ism that is, in fact, a uniformitarianism (and that is certainly the way it first emerged in the Age of Reason). It understands nicely the worldcentric perspective, but in its excitement it goes much too far and imagines that the worldcentric perspective is, in all its particulars, necessarily the same for everybody everywhere, with all colorful differences ironed out of the abstraction.
Thus, in the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment—with the exhilarating excitement of newly emergent reason, but reason captured almost exclusively by the monological and objectifying mode—uniformitarianism was all the rage. The central and by far the dominant reason that mythic-religions were rejected by the Age of Enlightenment was that these religions were everywhere different from each other—this god here, that goddess there, one creation story here, another there. Since they all disagreed with each other, how could they possibly all be true? What conceivable use could they have except to divide and fragment humanity? Precisely because they all lacked a true universality, a true worldcentric perspective, then they must be rejected: "No more myths!" meant "No more isolated and contradictory truths!"
There thus arose a positive mania for the universal and "common truths" of humankind, truths that could speak to everybody, and thus truths that must be "truly true," deeply true, for all peoples. All merely individual preferences and tastes, all peculiarities, all local differences, were dismissed as not being part of a common and universal humanity. "La religion naturelle," proclaimed Voltaire, can only include "les principes de morale communs au genre humain." And Dr. Samuel Clarke spoke for an entire age when he said, "What is not universally made known to all men is not needful for any."
This search for a universal and unvarying set of codes and "natural law" (meaning universal law) swept through every branch of learning, science, political and social theory—and reached right down into the arts, into poetry, into painting, into architecture.
Dr. Johnson's pronouncements on uniformitarianism in aesthetic theory are well known; it is, he says, "a general rule of poetry that all appropriated terms of art should be sunk in general expressions," which meant, as he put it, "poetry is to speak a universal language." A universal language, a common humanity.
Thomas Wharton, the English poet and literary historian, came to view his youthful embrace of Gothic architecture as a "deviation" into a merely particular style, and recanted his grievous error with this exclamation, offered in 1782:

Thy powerful hand has broke the Gothic chain,
And brought my bosom back to truth again.
To truth, by no peculiar taste confined,
Whose universal pattern strikes mankind.

And thus, for nearly two centuries, "the efforts made for improvement and correction in beliefs, in institutions, and in art had been, in the main, controlled by the assumption that, in each phase of his activity, man should conform as nearly as possible to a standard conceived as universal, uncomplicated, immutable, uniform for every rational being."
Spinoza, no doubt, summed it up best: "The purpose of Nature is to make men uniform, as children of a common mother."
A universal language, a common humanity, a uniform pattern. It was a noble enough cause, and there are some important truths in it. For we all, all of us, share the capacity for images and symbols, for concepts and desires, for aspirations and hopes; we are all born from a womb and find our way to a tomb; we all eat and labor and love and learn.
And thus, during its first large-scale emergence, the admirably world-centric stance of rationality took all the various perspectives of different peoples, places, races, and creeds, and attempted to abstract those items that they all agreed upon, that were not merely idiosyncratic or egocentric or sociocentric.
But in its frantic rush to find and speak a "universal language"— whether in science, politics, art, or religion (Deism)—it simply steamrollered over every single trace of individuality wherever it appeared. Humans were monologically objectified, and only objectified, to find their commonalities (and this, we have seen, was a central project of the Ego-Enlightenment camps).
But rationality can rise to its fullest potential and find its fairest expression when it also pursues more even-handedly the actual space of universal perspectivism. The whole point of rationality and its capacity for multiple perspectives is not simply to abstract the commonalities (important as that might be, for example, in medicine), but to put oneself in the shoes of others and thus find a mutual enrichment and appreciation of differences. This is the same worldcentric rationality, but now celebrating all the multiple perspectives and not merely steamrollering them into monotonous uniformity.
And it was precisely this celebration of diversity that was behind so much of the Eco-Romantic rebellion against the Ego-Enlightenment. Eco-Romanticism often called itself "antirational," but in this particular regard it was actually "anti-uniformitarian." It started from the same rational stance of universal perspectivism, but it emphasized the "perspectives" instead of the "universal."
This trend is altogether unmistakable in the early Romantics. Notice how Schlegel moves from the rational-universal perspective seamlessly into the cherishing of cultural differences: "One cannot become a connoisseur without universality of mind, that is, without the flexibility which enables us, through the renunciation of personal likings and blind preference for what we are accustomed to, to transpose ourselves into that which is peculiar to other peoples and times, and, so to say, to feel this from its centre outwards."
It was precisely the decentering or worldcentering capacity of rationality that allowed cultural differences to be cherished and even glorified, something that had never happened on a large scale anywhere before in history (it is simply inconceivable, for example, that one horticultural society would celebrate the specific values of another). People, wrote Wackenroder at the time, "always think of the point at which they stand as the centre of gravity of the universe; and similarly they regard their own feeling as the centre of all that is beautiful in art, pronouncing, as from the judge's seat, the final verdict upon all things, without remembering that no one has appointed them to be judges. If you are unable to enter directly into the feelings of so many beings different from yourself and, by penetrating to their hearts, feel their works, [then] strive at least, by using the intellect as a connecting bond, to attain such an understanding of them indirectly."
This was not simply a tolerance for different points of view, although that was certainly part of expansive rationality's worldcentric project (even the Ego camps would champion tolerance). The Romantic move was that and much more: it was rather a direct attempt to cultivate an understanding and a sympathetic valuation of different points of view, both as a means of enriching one's own inner life and as a way to give objective validity to different cultures and valuations. Thus, where Kant would search for the universal in all humans, the Romantics, standing in the same open space of worldcentric rationality, would search out all the differences.
Accordingly, an ethic of individuality, of diversity, of idiosyncrasies, of the exotic, of the deeply personal, even of the strange and weird, of the anything-out-of-the-ordinary, rushed in to displace the previous uniformi-tarianism. "It is precisely individuality," as Friedrich Schlegel would put it, "that is the original and eternal thing in men. The cultivation and development of this individuality [is] one's highest vocation." Or Novalis on art: "The more personal, local, peculiar, of its own time, a poem is, the nearer it stands to the center of poetry." Schlegel on literature: "From the romantic point of view, the abnormal species of literature also have their value—even the eccentric and monstrous—as materials and preparatory exercises for universality"—universality in the sense that everything is to be honored. As he puts it, "Does admiration for one really require of us depreciation of the other? Can we not grant that each is in its own way great and admirable, even though the one is utterly unlike the other? The world is wide, and many things can coexist in it side by side."
The idealization of diversity. This was, in very large measure, the direct influence of the Great Chain theorists, who, we have amply seen, saw diversity and Plenitude as marks of the superabundant Efflux and Goodness of the Divine—the visible, sensible God: the greater the variety, the greater the Goodness. The early Romantics, just like the Enlightenment philosophers, were themselves dedicated theorists of the Great Chain, and traced much of their heritage to Plotinus (as we will see), so it is not surprising in the least that they would eulogize and celebrate, as Akenside put it, "the fair variety of things."
Most of the "politically correct multiculturalists" of today would, no doubt, be shocked and horrified to learn that their ideas come directly in an unbroken lineage from Plato and Plotinus (the dreaded Eurocentric, logocentric Plato). But Lovejoy is surely accurate in his appraisal: "The discovery of the intrinsic worth of diversity, with all of the perils latent in it, was one of the great discoveries of the human mind; and the fact that it, like so many other discoveries, has been turned by man to ruinous uses, is no evidence that it is in itself without value. In so far as it was historically due to the age-long influence, culminating in the eighteenth century, of the [Great Chain] principle of Plenitude, we may set it down among the most important and potentially the most benign of the manifold consequences of that influence."
At its very best, then, the Romantic idealization of diversity tended "to nothing less than an enlargement of human nature itself—to an increase of men's, and nations', understanding and appreciation of one another, not as multiple samples of an identical model, but as representatives of a legitimate and welcome diversity of cultures and of individual reactions to the world which we have in common."
"The fair variety of things." And thus, it is only a slight exaggeration to say that where the Ego-Enlightenment project of modernity would emphasize universal uniformitarianism, the Eco-Romantic project, searching for a larger Life and Love beyond the self-defining Ego, would emphasize universal diversitarianism.
Both were universal stances, because both stood in the same postconventional, worldcentric space of reason. But their aims were diametrically opposed, and their methods as well. The Ego camp was still intent upon securing its self-defining freedom, autonomy, and agency in an absolute and monologically aggressive enterprise; the Eco camp, on the other hand, was desperately reaching out for a larger and more variegated Life and Love, enriched with the communions of all imaginable variety—in nature and in other cultures—and promoting diversity and egalitarianism with a passion.
This diversitarianism would continue unabated right down to today's "postmodern" and "multicultural" movements. And as much as "postmodern poststructuralists" like to claim wild originality for their musings, it is all right there in the original Eco-Romantic agenda (including, of course, the emphasis on individual uniqueness and "wild originality").
Read carefully Lovejoy's summary of the Eco-Romantic project (and remember, Lovejoy wrote this in 1932; he could not possibly have had the "poststructuralists" and "multiculturalists" in mind, even though his summary reads with frightening accuracy their standard agenda, and not it alone; moreover, Lovejoy is describing the agenda as it first developed a century and a half ago):

The immense multiplication of genres and of verse-forms; the admission of the aesthetic legitimacy of the genre mixte; the goût de la nuance [relishing of differences]; the naturalization in art of the "grotesque"; the quest for local color; the endeavor to reconstruct in imagination the distinctive inner life of peoples remote in time or space or in cultural condition; the étalage du moi [display of self]; the demand for particularized fidelity in landscape-description; the revulsion against simplicity; the distrust of universal formulas in politics [or social theory]; the feeling of "the glory of the imperfect"; the cultivation of individual, national, and racial peculiarities; the depreciation of the obvious and the general high valuation (wholly foreign to most earlier periods) of originality, and the usually futile and absurd self-conscious pursuit of that attribute.

Where the Ego-Enlightenment counseled each and all to be uniformly universal, the Eco-Romantics' deepest desire was to be absolutely and even radically different, that is, utterly and radically unique. "It is precisely individuality," we heard Friedrich Schlegel announce, "that is the original and eternal thing in men." To which he adds, "The cultivation and development of this individuality, as one's highest vocation, would be a divine egoism."
Imagine one's highest vocation being, not the alleviation of human suffering, not the promotion of universal tolerance, not selfless service, not duty or devotion to family or kin or nation or globe, not compassion and not care: but the cultivation of divine egoism!
There is a worldcentric cherishing gone catastrophically egocentric. There is the Eco-Romantic slide into forms of ego-absorption that no Ego camp would even dream of! In fact, this divine egoism was precisely the heteronomy that the Ego camps were fighting!—and fighting because this self-absorbed and self-glorifying stance actually pulls me down from the higher and wider stance of worldcentric embrace and compassion, pulls me away from the freedom of a deeper and wider self to the confines of a shallower and narrower engagement, an engagement that hurts me as well as others, because it is so much less than what is available, and the lesser always tears at the seams, and leaves an agony where joy ought to sing.
And that indeed is heteronomy—other-directedness!—because the egocentric self is not my true self, not my higher and deeper worldcentric self, but rather an addiction to a lower impulse, rendering me a slave of my own me-ness. Divine egoism is a sickly other within my own deeper possibilities. And thus, in divine egoism, I am other-directed, off-centered, out of my true self and out of my right mind.
The Eco-slide into an absolute anarchy of the particular, a riot of individual differences, a heap of the necessarily isolated and fragmented, with no commonalities at all, save a mutual divine egoism, which, at bottom, despises the existence of all other egoists as well—this fanatical diversitarianism "promoted a great deal of sickly and sterile introversion in literature—a tiresome exhibition of the eccentricities of the individual Ego, these eccentricities being often, as is now notorious, merely conventions painfully turned inside out. Thus the wheel came full circle; what may be called a particularistic uniformitarianism, a tendency to seek to universalize things originally valued because they were not universal, found expression in poetry, in a sort of philosophy, in the policies of great states and the enthusiasms of their populations. It has lent itself all too easily to the service of egotism, and especially—in the political and social sphere—of the kind of collective vanity which is nationalism or racialism. The belief in the sanctity of one's idiosyncrasy—especially if it be a group idiosyncrasy, and therefore sustained and intensified by mutual flattery—is rapidly converted into a belief in its superiority. More than one great people, in the course of the past century and a half, having first made a god of its own peculiarities, good or bad or both, presently began to suspect that there was no other god."
The Eco-diversitarian slide into egocentric glorification. Precisely what it had set out to avoid, it now preeminently embodied.
And nowhere could this be more clearly seen than in the Eco-Romantic approach to what it now called "nature."

A denatured nature

In the eighteenth century, the whole approach to nature itself underwent a monumental shift. Nature was no longer a syncretic indissociation, as in magic and also, to a lesser but still important degree, in mythic-membership (and this newly emergent differentiation was itself a step up, so to speak: it was part of the differentiation of the Big Three, part of the dignity of modernity). But neither was nature an embodiment of Spirit or an expression of the One (as in Plato or Plotinus or Eckhart—or Lao Tzu or Huang Po or Padmasambhava).
Rather, nature became, first and foremost, the source of egoic sentiment. Nature became "nature as it makes me feel."
Although this was of course called "spiritual"—the "pure and pristine" encounter with a spiritual nature away from the confines of culture—it was in many cases, as we will see, the simple biosphere as reflected in divine egoism—nature as narcissistic reflecting pond—a monological nature that was, in all respects, the photographic negative of the monological ego. The Ego and the Eco were still battling it out on the flat and faded landscape of the great interlocking order—both of them monological to the core.
Indeed, part of Charles Taylor's task, in Sources of the Self, is to trace this extraordinary shift in our encounter with nature, and he is not alone in his conclusions. "I have been tracing a movement, indeed, a massive shift in the notion of nature." One aspect of this shift, he points out, is what we have been calling "the collapse of the Kosmos"—the Great Holarchy of Being was collapsed into a monological and flatland holism of observable exteriors, namely, the great interlocking order.
In flatland holism, as we have seen, nature and reality are still conceived as hierarchical or holarchical (or composed of interlocking wholes), but these wholes are now all empirical (the great interlocking order, or the universal system, is simply how the Great Holarchy looks when empirically and monologically collapsed; it is the result of subtle reductionism).
Since the wholes and the holarchies are now all empirical, then inner transformation is no longer needed to see a truer reality. One simply pokes around, with more sophisticated instruments, in one's already given empirical field. No ascesis, no yoga, no shiktantaza, no personal injunctions or transformations are required to get at the truth—one simply opens one's eyes and sharpens one's monological gaze.
The radical Enlightenment had offered instrumental or calculative reason as a way to orient the Ego to the great interlocking order; the Eco-Romantic rebellion chaffed at the too-often exclusionary reason, and offered instead sentiments as a way to "feel" ourselves into the great interlocking whole. It offered, we might say, not instrumental reason but instrumental feelings, feelings that allowed us to fit into the web of life as a part and not try to dominate on the whole. Nature—the "true" or "real" nature—was thus disclosed to me primarily in feelings; nature was the sum total of what it evoked or awakened in me, as my own inner nature, and as my own pure and undistorted feelings.
This is what Taylor means when he says that "this new orientation to nature was . . . concerned with the sentiments which nature awakens in us. We return to nature, because it brings out strong and noble feelings in us: feelings of awe before the greatness of creation, of peace before a pastoral scene, of sublimity before storms and deserted vastnesses, of melancholy in some lonely woodland spot. Nature draws us because it is in some way attuned to our feelings, so that it can reflect and intensify those we already feel or else awaken those which are dormant. We turn to nature, as we might turn to music, to evoke and strengthen the best in us. But always the point lay in the feelings" (his italics).
Taylor's acute insight is that this "nature as sentiment" presupposes a profound denial of the Platonic/Plotinian notion of nature as the embodiment of Spirit (or what Taylor calls an "ontic logos"—another way of saying that this "new" nature was not part of the Kosmos but was itself the entire cosmos of which we are now simply a part).
According to this new understanding, he says, "the meaning that the natural phenomena bear is no longer defined by the . . . Ideas [or Spirit] which they embody. It is defined through the effect of the phenomena on us, in the reactions they awaken. The affinity between nature and ourselves is now mediated not by an [ontic or Kosmic] order but by the way that nature resonates in us. Our attunement with nature no longer consists in a recognition of ontic hierarchy [the Great Holarchy], but in being able to release the echo within ourselves." The egoic echo . . .
It is the same flatland web of life, the great interlocking whole, but now approached in egoic sentiment and not egoic logic. Taylor's well-argued point is that they (the Ego and the Eco) are, in essence, the photographic negatives of each other. In the Platonic/Plotinian view, says Taylor, "our being is identified with our being attuned to the order of things"—that is, attuned to the multidimensional Kosmos, to the Great Holarchy that "interlocks" not only horizontally in empirical wholes, but also vertically in inner transformations aspiring to the nondual One. "But in the feeling for nature which we see emerging in the eighteenth century and since, this [order] is fundamentally broken and then forgotten"—the collapse of the Kosmos into the flatland interlocking order, into a monoíogical reason and an equally monoíogical nature—a mononature, itself conceived as absolute (just as the Ego considered its "reason" to be absolute).
"In other words," summarizes Taylor, "this modern feeling for nature which starts in the eighteenth century presupposes the triumph of the new identity of disengaged reason over the premodern one embedded in an ontic logos." The Ego and the Eco as flip sides of the same flat and faded coin, both oriented toward the same great interlocking order, however much their responses to it indeed varied (the Ego trying to get out of it, the Eco trying to get into it).
This is why Taylor can point out that, for the Eco camps, "our nature is no longer defined by a substantive order of purposes [ontic Kosmos], but by own our inner impulses and our place in the interlocking whole"—the same interlocking whole of the Ego camps! The Ego and the Eco: the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of interlocking flatland.
We might summarize the overall shift in this way:
The differentiation of the Big Three, which released the rational-ego from its confinement to syncretic mythic-membership, fell into dissociation with the capture of reason by its objectifying, monoíogical, and instrumental forms (a capture concomitant with industrialization). The Big Three were reduced to the Big One of mononature: the empirical flatland world, the great interlocking order of the système de la nature.
The Ego camps approached the great interlocking order of nature with an objectifying and monoíogical analysis (empiric-analytic)—a "dry and abstract" approach against which the Eco-Romantic camps aggressively rebelled, preferring instead to find a unity with self and communion with nature via a more feeling-oriented awareness (inner and outer nature being "united" in feeling, in biospheric immersion).
But Taylor's point is that in both cases, the nature that is approached is essentially the same nature, and this "nature" is a denatured nature in comparison with the Platonic/Plotinian view, where nature is a direct expression and embodiment of Spirit. In the Ego camps, nature is the final and ultimate reflected reality, and in the Eco camps nature itself gets elevated to Spirit, simply because real Spirit can no longer be found.
In both cases the same flatland nature (mononature) is the object of awareness; in both cases, an ontic Order has been "broken and forgotten"; in both cases, mononature is serving a purpose it cannot ultimately sustain; and both cases absolutely presuppose the same collapse of the Kosmos.
And this is why both the Ego's nature and the Eco's nature are the photographic negatives of each other: the dumb-down twins in the collapse of the Kosmos. However much they went at each other's throats, they were still fighting over the same anemic territory, the territory they both called "nature."
We have already seen that the Ego camps would approach this mono-nature in an objectifying and analytical fashion: nature was the fundamental reality to be known by reflection (the "mirror of nature"; nature was the ultimate "reflectee"). The Eco camps would approach the same mononature in an attempt to unite with it, commune with it, return to it, spiritualize it. Communing with or even uniting with flatiand became the ultimate spiritual occasion. (This remains the crux of the ecophilosophies to this day.)
But this would have a profound impact on how "nature" and "spirit" were viewed by the Eco camps. Arguing against this flatiand Eco-view (which equated mononature with "spirit"), we already heard Emerson, as but one example, explain that "beauty in nature is not ultimate. It is the herald of inward and eternal beauty, and is not alone a solid and satisfactory good." Rather, he says, "nature is a symbol [or expression] of Spirit. Before the revelations of the Soul, time, space and nature shrink away. Vast spaces of nature, the Atlantic Ocean, the South Sea; long intervals of time, years, centuries, are of no account. Let us stun and astonish the intruding rabble of men and books and institutions by a simple declaration of the divine fact. Bid the intruders take the shoes from off their feet, for God is here within. Let our simplicity judge them, and our docility to our own law demonstrate the poverty of nature beside our native riches."
But now, with the collapse of the Kosmos, nature was itself spirit, was the ultimate source of spiritual sentiment and the ultimate foundation of a salvation to be found away from the distortions and crimes of culture.The Ego was to immerse itself in the Eco, in the simple biosphere, and therein was to be found its liberation from the stultifying grip of rationality.
Thus, in this new and flattened orientation, during a pure encounter with nature, spirit would flow from nature and into me, instead of flowing through me and into nature. No longer did Spirit or the Over-Soul shine through me and illuminate nature with a spiritual radiance, disclosing nature as a perfect manifestation of Spirit. Rather, now I am flooded by feelings released in my self by and from a mononature.
And the more immersed in this mononature I can become, the closer to "spirit" I will be. I am no longer an opening or clearing through which the Divine can flow, baptizing nature and all manifestation with the Goodness of the Divine; I am now the receptacle of feelings coming from nature and into me, carrying me away in floods of sentiment and communions of sensory drenching.
Which is why Emerson would continue and say, "To the senses and the unrenewed understanding, belongs a sort of instinctive belief in the absolute existence of nature. In their view [the Eco camp's view] man and nature are indissolubly joined. Things are ultimates, and they never look beyond their sphere. His mind is imbruted, and he is a selfish savage."
But true intuition breaks this divine egoism, says Emerson, because "the presence of intuition mars this faith [in nature]. The first effort of thought tends to relax this despotism of the senses which binds us to nature as if we were a part of it. Until this higher agency [intuition] intervened, the animal eye sees, with wonderful accuracy, sharp outlines and colored surfaces. When the eye of intuition opens, to outline and surface are at once added grace and expression. These proceed from imagination and affection, and abate somewhat of the angular distinctions of objects. If the intuition be stimulated to more earnest vision, outlines of surfaces become transparent, and are no longer seen. .. . The best moments of life are these delicious awakenings of the higher powers, and the reverential withdrawing of nature before its God."
But nature would not now withdraw before its God, because nature was now the only God. Monological thought (by collapsing the Kosmos) had converted nature into God (for the Eco camps), and thus "God" was to be known by the impact that nature released in me. Nature was valued because of the thrill it sent swishing through the ego in "pristine" wilderness encounters. Not a transparency to the Divine, but the divine ego reflected to itself in monological feeling. This new nature was not trans-logical, and certainly it was not the dreaded dialogical intersubjectivity of culture—instead it was away from all of that and back to pristine and unadulterated nature: the same monological gaze, settled now on the simple biosphere.
In place of Nature with a capital N (or Spirit as the nondual One), there was now only sensory nature, and sin is therefore anything that separates me not from Nature but from nature. Thus return to biocentric impulse and feeling is and must be my salvation, with rationality and culture being fundamentally the forces that stifle and contort this nature, both within me and without. And in immersing myself in this nature, I will find my true self.
(Culture is thus not a development on the way to conscious realization of Spirit; rather, culture is the crime that hides and distorts and negates nature, that negates "spirit." Of course, what culture is actually negating is biocentric and egocentric perception, and this the divine ego will not countenance.)
In mononature, away from dialogical culture, I can do as I please. In mononature, my pristine self reemerges. In mononature, I expand my glory and freedom without the stultifying presence of cultural demands, a culture that anyway embodies the great Crime of Humanity against the système de la nature. In this nature, I find my God or Goddess in the mute purity of the monological gaze.
And I can find my release and my salvation by an immersion in and union with the world so disclosed. To unite with the Shadows: that would be the Light. To become one with a denatured nature: there would be salvation. To unite with flatland: there would be the glory. To return in feelings so as to be closer to the Shadows: there would be my true self.
It wasn't that true spiritual insights weren't available in this new encounter with nature. But even Wordsworth knew the true source of the spiritual intuitions and illuminations that might be evoked in nature: "An auxiliar light, Came from my mind, which on the setting sun, Bestowed new splendour."
But in the new flat and faded cosmos, that splendor would immediately be interpreted as flowing from the sunset and into me, and I would then imagine that the sunset, that nature, is the source of the spiritual illumination. But that "splendor" is not lying around "out there" waiting to be perceived by the senses. Rabbits and weasels and foxes and company do not stare for hours at the splendor and beauty of the sunset, even though in many cases their senses are sharper.
No, nature is not the source of this spiritual splendor but rather its destination. When I can relax my egoic contraction (and many people appropriately find nature a fit and inviting space for this more easily to happen), then I can relax into that great Over-Soul, and then through me comes rushing the spiritual splendor of the One which outshines even the setting sun and bestows on it new glory.
But as long as I am locked into the flatland world of empirical mononature, as long as I interpret nature as the source of the Divine, then to just that extent I am locked out of any deeper or truer spiritual illuminations and intuitions: in glorifying merely the golden eggs, I am ignoring to death the goose that laid them.
Moreover, I am thus completely locked out of any sort of integrative vision. If the biosphere is the Divine, then the noosphere must be the Crime. I cannot integrate nature and culture in Spirit (or true Nature), I can only recommend back to nature. I must recommend, that is, regression.
Away from the transpersonal, away from the interpersonal—and back to the prepersonal, back to biocentric immersion—perfectly geocentric and perfectly egocentric—back to the prerational divine egoism that mistakes unconfined sensory immersion for transpersonal release. Back to a sensory nature that, as Taylor puts it, all too often confuses self-indulgence with self-transcendence.
And thus the horrible realization dawns: back to nature is away from Nature. And the Eco camps, like the Ego camps, end up bringing about precisely that which they wished most to avoid: the glorification of the ego and the denial of true Nature.
The Ego and the Eco will never be integrated in this scheme, with the one absolutizing the noosphere and the other absolutizing the biosphere.
Neither of them will allow a true integration because both are rabid about privileging their chosen fragments. Both insist on converting the other by sharing their disease.
Under these circumstances, we will never be able to take monological nature up and into dialogical culture, and then take both nature and culture up and into translogical Spirit. The Ego and the Eco, the noosphere and the biosphere, will never be integrated in this scheme. Each will remain forever the great Devil in the other's eyes.
And so the paradox of damage. Playing on the same flatland field, locked in mutual incompatibility and mutual repugnance, both camps would bring about precisely that which they most wanted to avoid. The Ego camps, seeking first and foremost autonomy and independence, sought this as a freedom from the heteronomy of nature and conformist modes, only to find that its own intense demand for a higher freedom choked off its roots in nature and in cultural communions, and these repressions would return to sabotage and dramatically curtail its own freedom, a rancid transcendence (alienation and repression) driven by a Phobos bound ever more tightly to the objects of its disgust.
And the Eco camps, seeking first and foremost a freedom from the Ego, embraced the world of Eco-nature with such exuberance, and moved so intensely to do away with the rational Ego, that they ended up with prerational impulses in nature's display, and were alarmed to find that the prerational modes are precisely the most egocentric. In setting out to do away with Ego, they ended up locked into their own sentiments, the echo within of a mononature without, both glorified as Divine. From world-centric pluralism to divine egoism and biocentric sensory immersion—at one with sentimental nature in my own self-reverberating feelings—this was the other endgame of flatland holism, a morbid embrace driven by a Thanatos that, in the way of all deception, whispered always of the wonders of ever-shallower engagements.

sexuality and modernity

Small wonder that both the Ego's view of nature as the fundamental reflected reality and the Eco's attempt to glorify nature as spirit would both meet in an absolute obsession with: sexuality.
As Foucault ably demonstrates, the rise of modernity was marked, not so much by a repression of sexuality (although he does not deny that happened) as by an obsession with sexuality. The entire era (beginning a century before Freud) saw an explosion of interest in all things sexual, from medicine to psychiatry to literature to education. Never, says Foucault, had an epoch's discourse been so dominated by sexuality in so many domains. "Never, it seems, had so much attention been focused on every aspect of the body and every dimension of its sexuality. Sex became the object of a major investment of signification, of power, and of knowledge."
We needn't go into Foucault's explanation (or rather, description) of this obsessive sexuality, or how I would reconstruct it; this is dealt with in volume 3. In the meantime, I have a simple take on the whole situation:
If nature is the fundamental and in many respects the final reality (according to the reflective Ego) and nature is the source of deep, ultimate, and often hidden truths (according to the Eco), then how better to unite them than in the belief that sexuality holds the secret to human personality? When nature (biosphere) alone is the final reality, what other secrets are there?
There was something (and still is something) in the obsession with sexuality that satisfied nearly all parties in the flatland world: hedonic happiness for the utilitarians; a source of hidden interpretations for the psychologists, interpretations that nevertheless safely remained quite shallow and flatland, almost empirical-sensory (a hermeneutics that hugs the surface); a finding in nature (in the biosphere) the ultimate and most profound impulses of human life, which delighted the Romantics.
In general, the differentiation of the Big Three (and the differentiation of the noosphere and biosphere) meant that now there was indeed a differentiated body/nature/libido ío be obsessed with (and likewise repressed in novel ways). And since, with the collapse of the Big Three to the Big One—to the objective and empirical interlocking order of mononature— sexuality came very close to being all things to all people: the ultimate hidden secret of human personality; the ultimate motivation that pushed all human beings; the great Life Force into which we can immerse ourselves for liberation and freedom ("sexual freedom," "liberation from repression," "sexuality as cultural anarchy," "free love"), a great Life Force that is, in and by itself, the ultimate spirit of the universe: sex as God, sex as Goddess, nature alone can rule supreme: the push of the bios is the only push around.
Georg Groddeck's The Book of the It (which was based in part on Eastern mysticism, the great "It" being essentially the great Tao that moves us all) was explicitly acknowledged by Freud to be the source of what he also started calling "the it" (translated as "the id"). The id is what moves all psychic life, and disrupting the id is the source of most pathology (and unhappiness). And the id is biospheric sex and aggression, the great organic and vital-somatic life of nature, the pranamayakosha. Not Spirit but sex is the great secret, and digging down into the depths of the human soul we will ultimately find the hidden, deepest, darkest and profoundest secret of all: not Ur-Geist, but orgasm.
The Tao reduced to the id: there is only the most notorious example of the collapse of the Kosmos into a flatland mononature, with sexuality the new and virtually sole (or certainly "most important") drive of the flat-land world.
It's not just that Plotinus or Shankara or Garab Dorje would have found that notion hilarious; it was a perfect example of the great collapse, where the most superficial (the shallowest, the least-depthed) holons were proclaimed the most profound, precisely because the collapse of the Kosmos left no place else to situate profundity. Like so many other features of this collapse, most fundamental was confused with most significant.
Approaches such as the Freudian were called "depth psychology" precisely as a misnomer: it was actually "shallow psychology." (Although not, of course, as shallow as behaviorism, in contrast to which psychoanalysis did indeed seem "deep." In the nine-layered onion of the self— the nine Fulcrums—where matter is the first skin or sheath, libido or prana is the second layer or sheath, and this appears "deep" only in comparison with behaviorism-positivism-empiricism, which refused to peel beneath even the first skin. Psychoanalysis was thus a bold and daring plunge into the "depths" for the flatland world! And never mind the seven deeper/higher sheaths beyond psychoanalysis!)
And thus, in "digging down" into the libido, one was not actually digging toward any great depths, but more or less the opposite: one was suspending the deeper or higher cognitive faculties in order to temporarily regress to a lower and shallower and more ontologically surface level. One intentionally surrendered the deeper/higher cognitive faculties of intersubjective and worldcentric reason ("secondary processes") and moved to shallower and more narcissistic feeling-toned and imaginary processes ("primary process"), thus recontacting these shallower occasions, which, precisely because they were more fundamental (and less significant), could cause so much subsequent developmental damage. The point being (true enough) that when these lower/shallower levels are traumatized, then deeper/higher developments are often hobbled.
Thus, getting in touch with these earlier, shallower occasions was (and is) quite difficult, not only because they were laid down in earlier development, but mostly because they are indeed so altogether shallow. Staying with the libido is like having to stay afloat on the surface of the ocean, instead of relaxing and sinking into the real depths (of higher consciousness). One has to thrash around incessantly to remain on the surface: as everybody knows, hedonism is absolutely exhausting.
(One of the often misunderstood aims of Tantra is to take sexual orgasmic thrill and release it from its exhaustion in surface forms by opening it to deeper and higher spiritual occasions, where thrill is converted to bliss and exhaustion to rejuvenation. Sex is not apart from or against Spirit, but is simply one of the lowest or most fundamental of Spirit's expressions, and so a person's sexual nature is one of the easiest of the many threads that can be used to return to Spirit. There is indeed Life Force or prana or "cosmic libido," as it were, but it is only one of the lower of several sheaths of Spirit: the sheath found in nature, in the biosphere.)
But for a reality that is only nature, and is thus only moved by sex, pleasure, pain—and wonderfully strange Marquis-de-Sadean combinations thereof—then a thrashing exhaustion that demanded constant obsession was the only basic course (and curse) available to the collective mind: mononature is the ultimate reality, the surface is supreme, and the "deepest deep" of those surfaces is sexuality—and that exhausts the secret motivations of nature and captures the key to human personality.
And thus captures the key to human liberation. When monological thought turns nature into God, then spiritual liberation consists not in resurrecting a forgotten Spirit but in digging up a repressed sexuality. What other hidden god is there? Where else could liberation be found?
In its Romantic version: when nature is the ultimate reality, what other kind of liberation could there be, except a liberation from anything (such as culture) that "obstructs" nature and sexuality from its free play? Not progression to superconscious Spirit but regression to infraconscious nature; not recollecting a Spirit prior to manifestation but digging up an impulse prior to culture; not postconventional transcendence but preconventional immersion: sexuality is the great Deus abscondus, the great repressed and absent God, a God buried and suppressed by the Crime of Culture, by the wretched "smothering" of the life force that is known as civilization, a smothering that brings only the winter of our discontent.
And thus the libidinal God must be resurrected, a resurrection that will confer salvation, in the form of liberation from repression, on all who participate in the Great Libidinal Body as it rises from the dead night of repression and confers free orgasmic release on all who eat of that body and drink of that blood. Not Spirit, but sexuality, is the gateway to the Kingdom; and the liberation offered is not a freedom from finitude and mortality and temporal suffering, but a freedom from stultifying culture by finding orgasmic potency.
What's wrong with this picture? It's not that sexuality wasn't being repressed and couldn't use a little "loosening up." Nobody (including Foucault) is denying that culture can "go too far" and repress sexuality, and that a certain amount of "de-repression" is called for. Precisely because the noosphere and biosphere had been differentiated, they could indeed be dissociated (repression), and this no doubt accounted for a good deal of the explosion of interest in sexuality that marked modernity.
But something else was going on. Sexuality was invested with a force, a power, a mystique, an aura, an authority, all out of proportion to anything that could actually be dug up from the libido itself. The actual Deus abscondus—authentic spiritual realization of the truly deeper or higher disclosures—was being dramatically sought in the hidden and oppressed thrill of orgasmic release, because, again, what other kind of release can be found in a flatland world where mononature alone is real?
Thus the basic and otherwise quite different interests of the Ego and the Eco came together in a proclaiming of the fundamental and even ultimate reality of mononature (the flatland interlocking order), and consequently both their interests intersected in an obsession with sexuality, which is, after all, the great mover of the natural world.
Put differently, when monological thought became the God of the Ego—an Ego which confidently and supremely reflected on reality—then empirical nature (the reflectee) became equally absolute (it was the final and ultimate reality "reflected on" by the Ego): the monological thought of the Ego "absolutized" empirical nature (the Big One). And in similar fashion, the same monological thought, absolutizing nature, would, in the hands of the Eco-Romantics, simply proclaim this new and absolute mononature to be the ultimate God/Goddess/Spirit (the Ego and the Eco as the twin poles of the monoworld, both created by the same collapse, both oriented to the same denatured nature: this was Taylor's point). Thus both camps were united by their worship, in very different ways, of monological nature (the great interlocking order of nature). And the great secret of nature is sex.
And so began the fabulous search of modernity for sexual release, upon which so many hopes were pinned. The Marquis de Sade became an enduring (and quite influential) point of reference, and Freud became Every-person's doctor. As modernity unfolded, "free sexuality" would spread into Reichian forms (where culture was converted into muscular armor and liberation identified with orgasmic potency); into political forms (where sexual "de-repression" joined forces with Marxist "de-oppression": "free love" would not only undo repression, it would bring down capitalism: fascism supports genital repression, and orgasmic potency would end dictatorships, whether dictatorships of capital or of authority); it would drive student rebellions (Paris, May 1968: frenetic shouts of "Marx, Mao, Marcuse"); it would revitalize the retro-Romantic movements and invade literary theory (Norman O. Brown's salvation through libidinal "polymorphous perversity," all the way to Roland Barthes's Le Plaìsir du texte and Bataille's shock-value orgasmic release and even Foucault's sadomasochistic pursuits, a "new economy of bodies and pleasure"). When an authentic spiritual realization is no longer part of serious discourse, then endless digging into the personal libido is one of the only and lonely substitutes.
The orgasmic well would be dipped into time and time again; strange that the release obtained never seemed to measure up to the liberation promised. And yet these "liberators" would still keep looking in the same direction, the hidden libidinal and biospheric god, the lunar goddess of sexuality, which had, it was fervently believed, been so brutally suppressed by modernity (completely overlooking the other side of the coin: the obsession with sexuality was not an escape from modernity but a mark of modernity. This obsession was not simply and solely due to the fact that real sexuality had been repressed, but was in part a substitute for a release no longer recognized; and thus in pursuing their intense sexual liberation as an escape from modernity, the "liberators" were pursuing something quintessentially modern—another version of the paradox of damage: they were once again presupposing and pursuing exactly that which they claimed to be overthrowing).
And when the liberation was not in fact forthcoming, when orgasm after orgasm left the participants not enlightened but exhausted, what was the recommendation? Try harder, fuck longer, come wilder, scream louder: the liberation has to be in there somewhere.
All these movements, and so many more, bound by the notion: the secret to human liberation is the liberation of sexuality.
Scholars have puzzled for decades over the fact that Freud was both a supreme rationalist (Ego camp) and a profound Romantic (Eco camp). He was said to possess "the mind of a moralist" and yet also called the "last great Romantic." He has been seen as primarily Victorian, repressive, and harshly puritanical; and yet he is also the father of virtually every Reichian, free love, antirepression movement of modernity. He has been seen as the reactionary upholder of culture and the status quo, and yet he has inspired virtually every progressive "sexual anarchy" movement of the last century. He has been proclaimed as the great prophet of the pleasure principle, and yet also as the firm and rigid upholder of the reality principle.
My point is that this is not surprising in the least. Freud was a prime example of the perfect intersection of the Ego and the Eco in an obsession with sexuality, the only real "juice" left in the flatland world. Since development now moved only from prerational libido to rational culture (and no genuinely transrational Spirit was officially acknowledged), then a profound and agonizing ambivalence developed around libido itself: if nature is the absolute (is even "God"), and if libido is the primary and "paradisaical" state free of repression, nonetheless an exclusive allegiance to that God has to be surrendered for culture to develop at all. Libido might be God (the Romantic position), but that God has to be broken (the Ego-rationalist position), and this leaves everybody, Freud included, in an altogether depressing dilemma: we want our God, but we really can't have it.
The Eco-Romantics would forever lament the loss and wail at modernity for killing their God, and take from Freud the urgent "necessity" to de-repress sexuality and free nature from the suffocation of culture (they would thus remain forever fascinated with sexuality as the great liberating force that would undo modernity, a way for the de-repressed biosphere to throw the noosphere off its back once and for all).
The Ego-rationalists, on the other hand, would remain just as fascinated and obsessed with sexuality, but take from Freud the "necessity" to build against the libido the bulwark of civilization (while meanwhile producing an endless scientific and medical literature on the subject of sexuality, which assured the scientific community of its own right to investigate every nook and cranny of individuals' sexual lives, rather like the antipornographer who nonetheless carries with him always the X-rated photographs to demonstrate the dangerous force that he is nobly trying to control. Foucault's work on "biopower"—the modern rational Ego's obsession with sexual and bodily information as a way to control it—is merely one of numerous indicators).
In short, when monological thought became God, sex became God's obsession.
And when monological thought likewise converted nature into God, sex became the key to human liberation and salvation.
In both cases, monological thought collapsed the Kosmos into flatland nature, which was the one, final, ultimate reality "reflected on" by the Ego and exalted to Spirit by the Eco, which left them both obsessed with a nature whose prime mover is sex. And in this obsession Ego and Eco were secretly united—mononature was all, sex was the secret.
The Ego would control it, the Eco would liberate it. But the "it," in both cases, was sex.
And so it came about that "modernity" and "sexual obsession" would be another two names for the same headache. And modernity rarely answered, Not tonight, dear. . . .

evolution

We could, indeed, embrace the whole in the single principle of development; if this were clear, all else would result and follow of its own accord.                                                         — hegel

The Ego and the Eco—apart from their shared obsession with sexuality and their worship, in very different ways, of mononature—remained nevertheless in a theoretical standoff, locked otherwise in mutual contempt: approach nature by disengaging from it versus uniting with it.
And here the stalemate might have remained, were it not for the discovery of evolution.
There were many forerunners to the doctrine of evolution—Thales, Empedocles, Anaximander, Aristotle, Saint Gregory. Yet for fifteen centuries any sustained inquiry into evolution was effectively halted by the literal Genesis myth. But by the sixteenth and seventeenth century, upholders of the Great Chain began to realize that the Holarchy itself, exactly as presented by Plotinus, could in fact be not just a map of individual growth and development, but a map of the growth and development of the Kosmos at large. If the Great Holarchy was a general map of the dimensions of Reality, what difference would it make when they unfolded? And, indeed, philosopher-sages such as Origen had long ago proposed that Plotinus's hierarchy was actually played out over cosmic epochs, one epoch after another, stage by unfolding stage.
Thus, a century before Darwin, theories of cosmic and human evolution were springing up everywhere, theories that, as we saw, were looking for "missing links," but missing links that were now believed to have unfolded in time and history. Leibniz maintained that "the species of animals have many times been transformed," and that, for example, at some previous time "many species which have in them something of the cat, such as the lion, the tiger, the lynx, may have been of the same race, and may now be regarded as new sub-varieties of the original cat-species." The entire universe, he suggested, may have been one that developed, because we see everywhere the creative advance of nature—what he called "transcreation" (transformation).
Again, long before any scientific evidence had been marshaled for any of these ideas, the conclusion had been quite firmly reached that, as Lovejoy puts it, "the world is as yet incomplete, and the Chain of Being must be construed as a process in which all forms are gradually realized in the order of time." Already by 1693 Leibniz was deducing from this the necessity for the past extinction of certain species and the "transcreation" of others. By 1745, the president of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, Maupertuis, had advanced the thesis that all species alive today had derived from a very small number, perhaps a single pair, of original ancestors, and this thesis was echoed by Diderot, the major editor of the Encyclopedic, in 1749. (This was one hundred and ten years before the publication of Origin of Species.)
Kant, as is well known, soon produced a rather profound theory of cosmic evolution. The universe began relatively simple and undifferentiated, he says, and became progressively more various, complex, organized. Even matter, he says, "has even in its simplest state a tendency to organize itself by a natural evolution into a more perfect constitution"— surely one of the clearest descriptions of the self-organizing property of evolution (reaching into even the physiosphere). Thus evolution, he says, "is forever busy achieving new ascents of nature, bringing into existence new things and new worlds." And the Fecundity (Plenitude) of Nature has one law, he maintains: progressive diversification (what we would call progressive complexification or differentiation).
Nature's unfolding, in short, has a direction—greater and greater creative diversification. From Robinet to Bonnet to Schelling to Bergson, "the pageant of evolution is the progressive manifestation of the expansive, self-differentiating energy, the creative urge. . . ."
But not just differentiation; each ascent, it was maintained, also brings a new and higher union or integration. As Kant put it, "the creation, or rather the development, of Nature spreads by degrees with a continuous advance to an ever greater breadth. . . ." Schelling, writing in 1800, was specific:

Succession itself is gradual, i.e., it cannot in any single moment be given in its entirety. But the farther succession proceeds, the more fully the universe is unfolded. Consequently, the organic world also, in proportion as succession advances, will attain to a fuller extension and represent a greater part of the universe. And on the other hand the farther we go back in the world of organisms, the smaller becomes the part of the universe which the organism embraces within itself [notice the distinction between significant and fundamental].

The greater the advance and differentiation, the greater the embrace and integration. As with Plotinus, development included diversity, took diversity with it, into higher unions, higher embraces—it is not the One versus the Many, it is the One-in-the-Many, played out in successive differentiations and integrations, each unfolding more of the universe and therefore enfolding more of the universe.
And here we have our old friend Eros, ever striving for greater unions, greater integrations, the binding love that unfolds more, enfolds more (Eros/Agape), the omega force hidden even in matter, driving it into higher levels of self-organization and self-transcendence, the omega force that will not let even matter sit around in unorganized heaps. We will return, in a moment, to this part of the story, and to Darwin's drudging and dutiful accumulation of evidence for a conception that was in the main already known in advance.
But how the new evolutionary understanding would fit into the prevailing flatland worldview was not at all obvious. Ego and Eco were still staring at each other across an unbridgeable gulf, and the two absolutisms were altogether incompatible.

the agony of modernity:
fichte versus spinoza

The Ego camp had developed into the end limit of Fichte's Pure Ego or infinite Subject, and however much the Pure Ego was indeed partly a genuine intuition of the Over-Soul (and even the Witness), and however much the Pure Ego or infinite Subject was said to have posited nature out of itself, nonetheless the pragmatic and ethical point was clear enough: the more of the Ego, and the less of the Eco, the better for all.
This was indeed a genuine attempt to escape flatland and introduce Spirit, but a Spirit found by radicalizing the Subject or Ego (and thus a path breaking toward pure Ascent, free of any descended nature, free of any objects). And indeed, to an entire age Fichte stood for Spirit as pure freedom in the transcedental and Absolute Subject. It was the height of the aspirations of everything that the Ego camps had stood for: a radical autonomy that found pure freedom in the Pure Subject.
The Eco camps, on the other hand, all had recourse to Spinoza, suitably interpreted for their purposes (this recourse to an imaginatively interpreted Spinoza is still quite common in ecomasculinist circles). Spirit was here viewed as the absolute and total Objective System, into which the ego was to insert itself seamlessly, and so the ethical imperative was just as clear: the more of the Eco, and the less of the Ego, the better for all.
This, too, was in essence an altogether noble attempt to introduce Spirit, but a Spirit found by radicalizing the Eco (and thus a path embodying pure Descent, pure immanence). To the same age, Spinoza stood for Spirit as eternal and total objective Substance (or infinite and Absolute Object, as Fichte stood for infinite and Absolute Subject). It was the essence of everything the Eco camps had stood for: a dissolution of the ego into the Greater Order of infinite Life and Love, Spirit present as the total diversity of the manifest world.
The great interlocking order of nature: the Ego camps wanted out of it (tending toward the Pure Ascending Subject, driven, at its best, by Eros), and the Eco camps wanted into it (as pure Descended Union, driven, at its best, by Agape). For the Ego, the more it could disenchant and disengage from nature and communions, the greater the knowledge and freedom of the self. The more agency, and the less communion, the freer and more liberated it would be. And the purest freedom would be the Pure Ego, the pure Subject, transcending nature and objects altogether, and finding ultimate ethical clarity. And apart from the paradox of damage (the Ego's reckless repressions), there was much truth in this stance of mature self-responsibility and self-determination.
For the Eco camp, self-isolated agency, however important, had sealed off the rich networks of unions and communions with nature and other cultures, and thus the more reenchanted the world, the better. The more communion, and the less agency, the freer and the more liberated it would be. And the purest freedom would be the Pure Eco, free of separate egos altogether. And this was Spinoza's great system as an Objective and Eternal Substance, purely immanent (Descended). And apart from the paradox of damage (the Eco's reckless regressions), there was much profound truth in the Eco's insistence on reengaging with the world of cultural and natural communions.
As Frederick Copleston, Taylor, and numerous other scholars have pointed out, an entire intellectual age was devoted to, or at least obsessed with, the integration of Absolute Subject and Absolute Object, of Fichte and Spinoza (or Kant and Spinoza, or Fichte and Goethe)—it came to the same thing: how can you possibly unite Subjective Freedom with Objective Union?
That is: how can you unite a path of radical freedom and detachment heading in the direction of the ascending One, versus a path dedicated to descending union and communion with the diverse Many? How to heal this deepest of dualisms that had cruelly carved the landscape of Western culture for two thousand years? How to end the schizoid fracture in the massive footnotes to Plato? How to join the two broken Gods that had dominated Western history from its inception? And that had finally found their endpoint champions in Fichte and Spinoza? And that showed up in individuals as Subjective Freedom versus Objective Union?
We can't simply add them together with glib platitudes about subject and object being one, because subjective autonomy and objective heteronomy are absolutely incompatible, which is why, if consistently pursued, these positions lead inevitably to Fichte or Spinoza. Since the gain of one is the loss of the other, it's a win-loss situation, never a win-win.
By the end of the eighteenth century, the split between the ascending Ego and the descending Eco, although fundamentally the same basic split, showed up in an extraordinary number of dualisms, of which Taylor summarizes some of the more pertinent: "The opposition between thought, reason, morality, on one side [Ego], and desire and sensibility on the other [Eco]; the opposition between the fullest self-conscious freedom [autonomy/agency], on one side, and life in the community [civic communions], on the other; the opposition between self-consciousness [Ego] and communion with nature [Eco]; and beyond this the separation [and] the barrier between the Kantian subject and the Spinozist substance. . . ."
Notice that the dualisms Taylor mentions include the split between mind and body, human and human, human and nature, and nature and spirit. Both camps claimed to have handled these massive dualisms; both camps lied. The Big Three had indeed been differentiated, but there was no apparent way to fashion their integration without privileging one or another domain. The "I" split from the "we," and the "I" and "we" split from the "it" . . .
. . . and in particular, there was that Sovereign I (Kant/Fichte) and that holistic It (Spinoza), the total I and the total It, the Ego and the Eco. "And the ambition becomes general in the 1790's: autonomy must be reconciled with unity with nature, Kant and Spinoza must be united; these were the watchwords."
In order to honor the positive and true contributions of both the Ego and the Eco camps, we would have to simultaneously separate from the Kosmos (to preserve autonomy) and unite with the Kosmos (for wholeness), and neither camp had the slightest clue as to how to actually proceed with that necessary but seemingly contradictory project. How to reconcile Ego-agency with Eco-communion, reconcile a path tending toward pure Ascent cut off from all, and a path tending toward pure Descent immersed in all: It was an agony for the entire era, and it was not at all obvious how to proceed.
And indeed, it might have remained a mystery to this day, were it not for an altogether extraordinary individual.

SPIRIT-IN-ACTION

Schelling is lecturing to an amazing audience, but amidst so much noise and bustle, whistling, and knocking on the windows by those who cannot get in the door, in such an overcrowded lecture hall, that one is almost tempted to give up listening to him if this is to continue. During the first lectures it was almost a matter of risking one's life to hear him. However, I have put my trust in Schelling and at the risk of my life I have the courage to hear him once more. It may very well blossom during the lectures, and if so one might gladly risk one's life—what would one not do to be able to hear Schelling?
I am so happy to have heard Scbelling's second lecture— indescribably. The embryonic child of thought leapt for joy within me when he mentioned the world "actuality" in connection with the relation of philosophy to actuality. I remember almost every word he said after that. Here, perhaps, clarity can be achieved. This one word recalled all my philosophical pains and sufferings.—And so that she, too, might share my joy, how willingly I would return to her, how eagerly I would coax myself to believe that this is the right course—Oh, if only I could!—now I have put all my hope in Schelling. . . .
— SØREN kierkegaard,  letters from Schelling's Berlin lectures (1841)

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854) was born at Leonberg in Wurttemberg, and, always something of a boy wonder, was at age fifteen admitted to the University at Tubingen, where he became friends with Hölderlin and Hegel (both were five years older). He began publishing in his late teens and, though younger than Hegel, was the senior partner in their period of collaboration at Jena (where, in 1798, he was appointed to a chair at the age of twenty-three; his writings had already won commendation from Fichte and Goethe; he had Hegel called there in 1800). Unfortunately, Schelling is usually treated summarily as the transition from Fichte to Hegel (that is, from Kant's critical philosophy to absolute idealism). This is a great mistake, I believe, because in many ways he was eventually more influential, in my opinion, than even Hegel (Heidegger, for one, felt Schelling was always the most profound of the Idealists). Hegel's system was so massive and so coherent that when it began to unravel, which it did, it rather totally collapsed, whereas Schelling ended up planting numerous small time bombs that are still going off.
Schelling began, in a sense, by reacting to the Enlightenment notion that rationality alone is the highest Ascent to which we can aspire. For if it is true that the Enlightenment had succeeded in differentiating Mind and Nature, the noosphere and the biosphere, it had also tended to forget the transcendental and unifying Ground of both, and thus it tended to dissociate Mind and Nature (the great potential pathology of reason). This dissociation of Mind and Nature, Ego and Eco, with Mind "mirroring" Nature in scientific inquiry (the reflection paradigm) was, of course, well under way; but reflection had, Schelling pointed out, introduced a rift or cleavage between Nature as external object and the reflecting self as subject (which also, he said, made humans objects to themselves—the retroflected monological gaze, as we earlier put it). And when reflection is made an end it itself, it becomes "a spiritual malady."
At the same time, Schelling realized that the dissociation could "not be overcome by a return to the immediacy of feeling, to the childhood, as it were, of the human race." There was no going back to Eco-nature, and Schelling knew it.
Rather, he maintained, we have to go forward beyond Reason in order to discover that Mind and Nature are both simply different movements of one absolute Spirit, a Spirit that manifests itself in its own successive stages of unfoldment and enfoldment. As Hegel would soon put it, Spirit is not One apart from Many, but the very process of the One expressing itself in successive unfoldings in and through the Many—it is infinite activity expressing itself in and as the finite process of development itself (or evolution).
The Absolute is thus both the Alpha and the Omega of development. Schelling: "I posit God as both the first and the last, as the Alpha and the Omega, as the unevolved, Deus implicitus, and the fully evolved, Deus explicitus"—in other words, both Source and Summit—and present throughout the entire ascending or developmental process as telos (Eros), as the self-organizing and self-transcending drive of the whole process.
And, as Schelling put it, it is this "organizing principle which makes the world a system ... a self-organizing totality."
Whatever else we might say, the world does hang together, and evolution does have a direction: Eros as Spirit-in-action. Thus, both Schelling and Hegel would maintain that evolution is not simply the drive toward Spirit; it is the drive of Spirit toward Spirit, manifested in a series of increasing wholes and integrations (holons) that express increasing degrees of Spirit's own self-realization or self-actualization. Eros is fully present at each and every stage of the process, as the very process itself. As Fichte had put it, Being is one "endlessly self-developing life which always advances toward a higher self-realization in a never-ending stream of time." Or Hegel: the Absolute is "the process of its own becoming; it becomes concrete or actual only by its development."
As Hegel explained in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History: "That the history of the world, with all the changing scenes which its annals present, is this process of development and the realization of Spirit—only this insight can reconcile Spirit with the history of the world—that what has happened, and is happening every day, is not only not 'without God,' but is essentially God's work" (which is precisely why "that which one can deviate from is not the true Tao").
Each stage of development (or evolution) is thus Spirit's knowledge of itself through the structures (and limitations) of that stage. Each stage is therefore a thesis (Fichte, Hegel) that eventually runs into its own limitations (Fichte: antithesis; Hegel: contradictions; Schelling: checking forces), which triggers a self-transcendence to a new synthesis (Fichte, Hegel; Schelling: organic unity), which both negates and preserves its predecessor (Schelling, Hegel). This dialectic, of course, is Eros, or Spirit-inaction, the drive of Spirit to unfold itself more fully and thus unify itself more fully.
Thus, Spirit tries to know itself first through sensation, then perception, then impulse. At this point Spirit is still un-self-conscious. Both Fichte and Schelling make much of the notion of the unconscious, quite along the lines used by Plotinus: the higher stages are implicit in the lower, they are unconscious potentials of the lower, and as they develop they envelop.
Thus the whole of Nature Schelling refers to as "slumbering Spirit." Nature is not a mere inert and instrumental backdrop for Mind. Rather, Nature is a "self-organizing dynamic system" that is "the objective manifestation of Spirit"—"Nature as a unified, self-developing super-organism"—precisely Plato's "visible God," but now set developmentally or evolutionarily afloat.
Thus Nature is most definitely not a static or deterministic machine; it is "God-in-the-making." All life processes are manifestations of the Divine Life, unfolding in space and time. But it is, says Schelling, Spirit slumbering because Spirit has not yet become self-conscious, the Kosmos has not yet begun to consciously reflect on itself.
With the emergence of mind, Spirit becomes self-conscious. Spirit seeks to know itself through symbols and concepts and reason, and the result is that the universe begins to think about the universe—which produces the world of reason and, in particular, the world of conscious morals. Thus, says Schelling, where Nature was objective Spirit, Mind is subjective Spirit.
And it is here, he says, that Mind and Nature can seem to drift apart, to be totally unrelated, to stare blankly and uncomprehendingly across the subject/object dualism at the alien beings on each side of the divide. The Ego and the Eco.
These two "apparent absolutes," as he calls them, are synthesized in the third great movement of Spirit, which is the transcendence of both Nature and Mind and thus their radical synthesis or union "in which these two absolutenesses (absolute objectivity and absolute subjectivity) are again one absoluteness," as he puts it (with Fichte and Spinoza in mind). This is also the identity of subject and object in one timeless act of self-knowledge, of Spirit directly knowing itself as Spirit, a direct mystical (or contemplative) intuition, says Schelling, that is not mediated through any forms, whether those forms be the feelings of objective Nature or the thoughts of subjective Mind.
There is an unmistakable and profound glimpse of the formless and nondual groundless Ground; Schelling would often have recourse to the "indifference" and the "Abyss," precisely in the lineage of Eckhart and Boehme (and Dionysius). "In the ultimate dark Abyss of the divine Being, the primal ground or Urgrund, there is no differentiation but only pure identity." Precisely what the Sufis would call the Supreme Identity. And, as Schelling says, "A division, a difference must be posited, if we wish to pass from essence to existence" (and thus start the whole process of what we have called involution or Efflux).
Thus, for both Schelling and Hegel, Spirit goes out of itself to produce objective Nature, awakens to itself in subjective Mind, and then recovers itself in pure Nondual perception, where subject and object are one pure act of nondual awareness that unifies both Nature and Mind in realized Spirit. Spirit knows itself objectively as Nature; knows itself subjectively as Mind; and knows itself absolutely as Spirit—the Source, the Summit, and the Eros of the whole sequence.
(We would also recognize these three large movements as subconscious, self-conscious, and superconscious; or prepersonal, personal, and transpersonal—the three large domains that we have met many times in the previous chapters.)
The whole evolutionary sequence is thus holonic through and through. Each stage (of Ascent) builds upon and incorporates its predecessors— "the last is the result of all earlier: nothing is lost, all principles are preserved" (Hegel). What is lost is the narrowness of the predecessor, or its claim to be the Whole (Hegel calls this "the negation of the negation"). Each stage incorporates its predecessor but negates its partiality. Says Hegel: "To supersede is at once to negate and to preserve."
Schelling's view is likewise a precise and perfect summary of development or evolution as emergent holons within emergent holons: "The lower is the necessary foundation for the higher, and the latter subsumes the former in itself. But there is also the emergence of something new, and this new level explains the level which it presupposes."
This is a truly stunning vision, a profound integration of Ego and Eco, of Spirit descending into even the lowest state and ascending back to itself, with Spirit nonetheless fully present at each and every stage as the process of its own self-realization and self-actualization, its own self-unfolding and self-enfolding development, a divine play of Spirit present in every single movement of the Kosmos, yet finding more and more of itself as its own Play proceeds, dancing fully and divine in every gesture of the universe, never really lost and never really found, but present from the start and all along, a wink and a nod from the radiant Abyss.
We will return to Schelling's vision in the next chapter, and point out more clearly just how it managed to unite Ego and Eco, Ascending and Descending, without sacrificing the gains of either. But for the moment, we should note that if all of this sounds like Plotinus temporalized, that would not be far wrong. As one historian of the period put it:

If we are to speak of a "key" to early Romanticism, it is to be found in one of the thinkers of antiquity, Plotinus. For this Neoplatonic philosopher not only inspired the entire system of Novalis, and many of the ideas of Schelling in his middle period; his arm reached further: through Novalis and Schelling he exercised an influence upon both Schlegels, and without a knowledge of this fact many a passage in the "Dialogue Concerning Poetry" and in the Berlin lectures [of W. Schlegel] remains an enigma.

The "genius Novalis," as he is usually referred to, wrote in a letter to Friedrich Schlegel, "I do not know if I have already spoken to you of my beloved Plotinus. Through Tiedemann I have been initiated into this philosopher, born expressly for me, and I have almost been frightened by his resemblance to Kant and Fichte. He pleases me more than either of them."
He certainly pleased Schelling, and Schelling's influence was enormous, and not only as the starting point for Hegel's system. Schelling was friends with Hölderlin, Goethe, Schiller, the Schlegels. He directly influenced Friedrich Schleiermacher, who revolutionized the concept of religion by suggesting that all genuine spirituality is a result of direct experience, not beliefs. Schelling's notion of organic unity, and his belief that perception is not "mirroring" but "actioning," anticipated much of Gestalt psychology (and autopoietic cognitive theory). In his idea of Eros as unlimited activity, he set off a whole line of "will" theorists, from Schopenhauer to Bergson to Nietzsche. Paul Tillich traces this line of influence: "The most important pupil of Schopenhauer was Nietzsche. The line then runs from Nietzsche to Bergson, the French voluntarist, Heidegger and Sartre, and to Whitehead, the great metaphysician of our century—all of this came from Schelling."With his theory of art and aesthetic perception—namely, that in great art we have a chance to transcend the subject/object duality—he became, with Schiller, the father of virtually all Romantic aesthetic movements. And his theory of symbolic forms was a forerunner, as Cassirer pointed out, of his own work and much of Jung's analytic psychology.
Schelling's (Plotinian) notion of the unconscious passed to Carus, whose book Psyche (1846) maintained that the key to conscious mental life is to be found in the unconscious. From there it reappears in Schopenhauer, one of whose students, Eduard von Hartmann, wrote the enormously successful and influential Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869)—it went into ten editions, and appeared two decades before Freud and Breuer's Studies in Hysteria (1895).
Connected with the notion of the unconscious was Schelling's introduction of the extremely influential concept of alienation, which specifically meant that Spirit "loses" itself in manifestation, and evolution or development is the overcoming of this self-estrangement, an overcoming of alienation by the return of Spirit to Spirit, or a direct rediscovery of the Non-dual (what we called dis-memberment re-membered). Men and women, caught in the subject/object duality, are thus alienated from Source and Summit—and thus alienated from the All—and it is only in overcoming duality and existential alienation that men and women can find genuine happiness. Among those attending these Berlin lectures were Søren Kierkegaard, Jakob Burkhardt, Michael Bakunin, and Friedrich Engels, collaborator with Karl Marx.
But the immediate effect of this "developmental philosophy" (or the philosophy of Eros) was that the notion of evolution was everywhere "in the air"—and this was still six decades before Darwin. "A theory of emergent evolution [was] demanded by Schelling's view of the world as a self-developing organic unity. Indeed, he explicitly refers to the possibility of evolution. He observes, for instance, that even if man's experience does not reveal any case of the transformation of one species into another, lack of empirical evidence does not prove that such a transformation is impossible. For it may well be that such changes can take place only in a much longer period of time than that covered by man's experience."
Thus, by 1810, Schelling's friend and student, the naturalist Lorenz Oken, maintained that "the philosophy of Nature is the science of the eternal transformation of God into the world," and outlined the research agenda:

It has the task of showing the phases of the world's evolution from the primal nothingness [doesn't sound quite so silly anymore, does it?]: how the heavenly bodies and the elements arose, how these advanced to higher forms, how organisms finally appeared. . . . These phases constitute the history of the generation of the universe.

Plotinus temporalized = evolution. Lovejoy, ever on the scene with a perceptive report, points out that "the appearance of the general notion of an evolutionary advance long antedated the discovery of most of the scientific evidence for that hypothesis; it was becoming familiar in very widely read writings before the middle of the eighteenth century. Thus one of the effects often attributed to the influence of biological evolutionism had in fact come about long before the establishment and general diffusion of that doctrine, and quite independently of it."
When Darwin came along and dutifully supplied some of the empirical evidence for biological evolution, it shocked nobody except the remnants of the mythic believers in the literal Genesis myth; but they were already shocked by what Schelling and other developmentalists were doing anyway.
For the past century or so, it has been scientific dogma that Darwin's great and enduring contribution was the discovery, not that evolution occurred (this, as we have seen, was an almost century-old hypothesis by then), but how it occurred: namely, through natural selection (codiscov-ered by Wallace). In an updated version: chance mutation leads to genetic alterations, the vast majority of which are maladaptive, but a few of which contribute to a greater (or at least different) capacity for adaptation and survival, and thus these mutations are selected and genetically carried forward in the gene pool. Whatever else this theory did or did not accomplish, it preeminently allowed science to ignore any sort of Eros, any sort of "gentle persuasion" or transcendent/emergent drive, and thus men and women could "trace science then with modesty thy guide."
But it is now almost universally recognized by scientists that, although natural selection can account quite well for "microevolution" (or variation within a given range of possibilities), it can account not at all for macroevolution (or the emergence of new ranges of possibility). Add to that the fact that the Big Bang has made Idealists out of virtually anybody who thinks about it, and the result is that most philosophers of science now openly admit—and even champion—the fact that evolution has some sort of self-transcending drive tucked within its own processes— what we called tenet 2c, the self-organizing and self-transcending capacities of all holons. In other words, Eros.
The lasting contribution of Darwin's theory, then, was not that it discovered a mechanism for macroevolution, for it did not; rather, it obscured for over a century the fact that a genuine theory of evolution demands something resembling Eros. Darwin's lasting contribution was primarily a massive obscuratanism. Scientists all cheery and self-content began to scrub the universe clean of anything resembling love and its all-encompassing embrace, and all congratulated themselves on yet another victory for truth (Wallace, as is well known, did not think natural selection could replace Eros; evolution was itself, he thought, "the mode and manner of Spirit's creation," and Darwin himself notoriously wavered).
But the world did not waver. As we will see in the next chapter, with the collapse of virtually any form of Idealism, the Western world nestled comfortably into the Descended domain of the naturalistic flatland, with its altogether low center of ontological gravity, like a beanbag chair already settled. And within this cozily low and snug—some would say cowardly—stance, the mono-Ego and mono-Eco battled it out in mortal combat, fighting for the royal right to dominate a cardboard cosmos.
And there the Western world would remain until only the most recent of times.

It is the time of the gods that have fled and of the god that is coming. It is the time of need, because it lies under a double lack and a double Not: the No-more of the gods that have fled and the Not-yet of the god that is coming.

14

The Unpacking of God

This awareness, free from an inside or an outside, is open like the sky.

It is penetrating Wakefulness free from limitations and partiality.
Within the vast and open space of this all-embracing mind,
All phenomena of samsara and nirvana manifest like rainbows in the sky.

Within this state of unwavering awareness,
All that appears and exists, like a reflection,
Appears but is empty, resounds but is empty,
Its nature is Emptiness from the very beginning.
—tsogdruk rangdrol,  The Flight of'the Garuda

THE god that was to come. The Descent of the all-pervading World Soul. The coming of the Over-human, the Over-Soul, the transpersonal dawn, Homo universalis. And not merely in rare, individual, isolated cases, but as a center of social organizing forces—just as magic and mythic and mental had previously emerged at large and organized cultures around the world according to their basic patterns. The coming of the World Soul, blessing each and all with intuitions of the Over-Soul, joined each and all in the council and communion of all sentient beings, the community of all souls, likewise institutionalized in structures that guard its preciousness the way the worldcentric rationality is now institutionalized and guarded in law and education and government and community. The integration of the physiosphere and biosphere and noosphere in each and every compound individual, not as a theory but as a central identity in consciousness (just as the ego or person is the central identity institutionalized in rational cultures of today).
The coming of the Over-Soul that is the World Soul, touching each and all with its Goodness and its Glory, baptizing each with its Brilliance and its Blessing. The coming of the World Soul, trailing clouds of wonderment, singing songs of liberation, dancing madly and divine in splendor and salvation. The long-sought coming of the World Soul, changing every "it" and every "we" and every "I" it touches: in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, we will be changed, we all will be changed.
The loveless, beaten, battered self will let go the torment and the torture of its self-embracing ways, tire of that marriage to a special misery that it had chosen over loneliness, to nurse it through the long brutality of a life that doesn't care, surrender the murderous love affair with its own perplexed reflection, which had itself pretended to the throne of the Divine, and find instead its soul in Grace and drenched throughout with a luminous God that is its own true Being—its always and only Original Face, smiling now from the radiant Abyss, unreasonably happy in the face of every sight, set helplessly afloat on the Sea of Intimacy, adrift in currents of Compassion and caressed in unrelenting Care, one with each and one with all in mutual Self-recognition, dancing in the dawn that heralds now the Self of all that truly is, and the Community of all that well might me, and the State of all that is to come.
And every I will sing of the Self, and every We will resonate with worship of the Divine, and every It will radiate the light of a Spirit happy to be seen, with dialogue the abode of the Gods and perception the home of Grace, and gone the lonely loveless self, the god of its own perception, and gone the Godless destiny of time and separation.
The blessed, blessed Descent of the World Soul: in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, we will be changed, we all will be changed.
Perhaps it will happen after all.
And perhaps it will not. I believe that the intuition of the Over-Soul, the World Soul, is indeed increasing in frequency and in intensity in more and more individuals around the globe; and in the next two volumes in this series we will look more closely at the evidence, quite impressive, I believe, that this is indeed happening.
But as always, we have to make the future that is given to us. And it is my strongest conviction that the Descent of the all-pervading World Soul is facilitated, or hindered, to precisely the degree that we unpack its intuition adequately.
As we have seen, all depth must be interpreted. And how we interpret depth is crucially important for the birth of that depth itself. New depth allows us new interpretations; the new interpretations cocreate and give birth to that depth, help unpack that depth. Unpacking the depth is the emergence of that depth.
And thus, let us oh-so-carefully unpack this precious Gift of spiritual intuition.
Many individuals intuit the Over-Soul (or higher) and yet unpack that intuition, interpret that intuition, in terms merely or solely of the Higher Self, the Inner Voice, the care of the Soul, interior Witnessing, the Universal Mind, pure Awareness, transcendental Consciousness, or similar such Upper-Left quadrant terms. And however true that aspect of the intuition is, this unpacking leaves out, or seriously diminishes, the "we" and the "it" dimensions. It leaves out the social and cultural and objective manifestations: it fails to give a seamless account of the types of community and social service and cultural activity that are inherently demanded by a higher Self; it ignores or neglects the changes in the techno-economic infrastructures that support each and every type of embodied self (whether higher or lower or anything in between); it ignores the overall objective state of affairs or objective reality that does not detract from the Self but is an unavoidable aspect of that Self's very manifestation.
The idea seems to be that if I can just contact my higher Self, then everything else will take care of itself. But this fails miserably to see that Spirit manifests always and simultaneously as the four quadrants of the Kosmos. Spirit (at any level) manifests as a self in a community with social and cultural foundations and objective correlates, and thus any higher Self will inextricably involve a wider community existing in a deeper objective state of affairs. Contacting the higher Self is not the end of all problems but the beginning of the immense and difficult new work to be done.
Thus, intuiting Spirit but interpreting it merely in "I" terms as a Higher Self or whatnot (Upper-Left quadrant)—this ends up being a merely Ascending Path, with no sincere and well-conceived interpretations of exactly how to go about embracing the manifest world in all its dimensions. It is the old Fichtean move. It is still caught in one pole of the fundamental Enlightenment paradigm: the pure Ego, the pure Self, will solve all problems.
And thus the lingering suspicion that soaks these approaches: if you really care about the world, or worry about the world, then you can't actually be contacting the Higher Self (because the Higher Self would take care of that: your "concern" or "worry" for the world shows you haven't found the true Self). Whereas in fact, it is just the opposite: the more you contact the Higher Self, the more you worry about the world, as a component of your Very Self, the Self of each and all. Emptiness is Form. Brahman is the World. To finally contact Brahman is to ultimately engage the World.
Thus, a true and profound intuition is corrupted, or distorted, or tilted, by a well-meaning but not very adequate interpretation. The intuition of Spirit is unpacked poorly, hastily, and the Gift is damaged in the process. Conversely, a more graceful unpacking facilitates further and deeper intuitions, intuitions touching the I and the We and the It domains: not just how to contact the higher Self, but how to see it embraced in culture, embodied in nature, and embedded in social institutions.
Realized, embraced, embodied, embedded: a more graceful interpretation covering all four quadrants (because Spirit itself manifests as all four quadrants) facilitates the birth of that Spirit which is demanding the interpretation. Graceful interpretation midwifes Spirit's birth, Spirit's descent. The more adequately I can interpret the intuition of Spirit, the more that Spirit can speak to me, the more the channels of communication are open, leading from communication to communion to union to identity.
And Spirit's interpretation merely as a Higher Self is not very graceful, I don't think.
Likewise, there are many good souls who have a profound intuition of Spirit but unpack that intuition in merely "It" terms, describing Spirit as the sum total of all phenomena or processes interwoven together in a great unified system or net or web or implicate order or unified field (Lower-Right quadrant). All of which is true enough, but all of which leaves out entirely the interior dimensions of "I" and "we." This less-than-adequate interpretation is monological to the core, flatland through and through.
It is the old Spinozist move, the other pole—the Eco pole—of the fundamental Enlightenment paradigm (in the form of the Romantic rebellion). It thinks that the enemy is atomism, and that the central problem is simply to be able to prove or demonstrate once and for all that the universe is a great and unified holistic System or Order or Web. It marshals a vast amount of scientific evidence, from physics to biology, and offers extensive arguments, all geared to objectively proving the holistic nature of the universe. It fails to see that if we take a bunch of egos with atomistic concepts and teach them that the universe is holistic, all we will actually get is a bunch of egos with holistic concepts.
Precisely because this monological approach, with its unskillful interpretation of an otherwise genuine intuition, ignores or neglects the "I" and the "we" dimensions, it doesn't understand very well the exact nature of the inner transformations that are necessary in the first place in order to be able to find an identity that embraces the manifest All. Talk about the All as much as we want, nothing fundamentally changes.
And nothing changes because the "proof" or the "new paradigm" or "great system" is still being put in monological it-language. This doesn't engage the process of inner transformation, because that process is exactly one that moves away from the monological to the dialogical to the translogical (as Augustine put it, from the exterior to the interior to the superior). And simply giving more and more exterior and monological evidence, however true, is utterly beside the point.
The profoundly transformative question is not: is the world holistic or atomistic? The transformative question is: who or what is aware of both holistic and atomistic concepts? (The move from the exterior to the interior.) And then: having rested in the Witness of those concepts, a Witness that itself is neither holistic nor atomistic, see here the Witness dissolve in an Emptiness that embraces the entire Kosmos. (The move from the interior to the superior.)
To remain arguing about the exteriors is to effectively seal out the interior and thus the superior. Focusing on the exterior world being holistic thus misses the central transformative occasion.
Long ago Nagarjuna completely devastated such approaches, pointing out that holistic or atomistic, or both or neither, are all beside the point (and, he added, they're all false anyway). It is the radical deconstruction of all conceptualizations whatsoever that paves the way for pure intuition (prajna) of Shunyata (Emptiness or Openness). If we meet even the Buddha and are supposed to kill him, guess how holism will fare.
Thus, however true the original intuition of Spirit is (and I do not doubt that it is true), it is not facilitated by an interpretation that reduces all of Spirit's dimensions merely to the Right-Hand path, merely to descriptions of the great interlocking order (even if those descriptions are true enough). Those interpretations, taken in and by themselves, block the transformative event; those interpretations, driven originally by a true intuition of the very Divine, do not facilitate the further descent of that Divine; those interpretations are unskillful to midwife the birth of Spirit (which is nonetheless the original source of what turns out to be less-than-adequate interpretations).
And worse: when the intuition of Spirit is unpacked merely or solely in it-terms, in monological terms, the approach ends up being a purely Descended worldview. Spirit is simply identified with the Sum Total of exteriors, the Sum Total of the shadows in the Cave. So intent are we on proving that the shadows are one great interlocking order that we never move from these exteriors to the real interior, and thus we never find the genuine superior.
This less-than-adequate interpretation makes it appear that the most urgent problem in the modern world is to teach everybody systems theory (or some version of Gaia's web-of-life notions, or some version of the "new physics"), instead of seeing that what is required is inquiry into the Witness of systems theory or any other theory, dissolving that into the empty Ground of all worlds, and from there embracing all worlds, not just as an objective Truth or Dharma (the ultimate It), but also as a pure selfless Self (Buddha) in the community of all sentient beings (Sangha).
The pure Eco approach, like its cousin the pure Ego (or pure Self) approach, simply reduces all of Spirit's dimensions to one privileged domain, crippling the full emergence and descent of Spirit itself. Just as the idea in the pure Self camp is that if we simply contact the Higher Self, all our problems will be solved, so the idea in the pure Eco approach is that if we can just demonstrate, once and for all, the unified and holistic nature of the pure Eco, then that will solve all our problems. That forceful demonstration (that Spinozist proof in objective terms) will itself compel all individuals to transform to ultimate unity, or so it is maintained.
Thus, the only "interior" change this camp recognizes is the single change from holding an atomistic conception to holding a holistic conception. Because this camp centers on exteriors, it has an incredibly naive and anemic conception of all the inner and interior developments necessary in order to be able to embrace the All. Further, in recognizing only this "single" change from atomistic to holistic concepts, it misses the crucial fact that change of beliefs does not mean change of consciousness. It means simply a new translation, not necessarily a new transformation.
The standard response from the Eco camps is that if people truly learned and really understood the holistic oneness of reality and the great web, that would force them to give up their egos and they would indeed truly transform. But, as we have seen, it is actually quite the contrary: embracing a monological worldview in flatland terms results precisely in divine egoism.
(A monological worldview has no way to get up to a dialogical perspec-tivism, and thus no way to break through to a translogical release. A few individuals holding these beliefs do indeed break through to spiritual intuition; but it is in spite of, not because of, the monochrome worldview they profess and the denatured nature they would share with others.)
This approach, then, focuses almost exclusively on Dharma, or the objective Truth, and not enough on Buddha (subjective) and Sangha (inter-subjective), or how that Truth refracts as well through the psychological and cultural domains (how that Spirit manifests as all four quadrants of the Kosmos). And when objective truth is made the "total truth"—when it is really thought to be "utterly holistic" and "all-encompassing"—then Buddha and Sangha are violently reduced to flatland objectivist terms, and an approach that originally wishes us to transcend and include, ends up being a merely and purely Descended worldview that effectively blocks transcendence altogether.
My point is that less-than-skillful interpretations of otherwise genuine Spiritual intuitions do not facilitate the birthing of further intuitions, and thus a special care and thoroughness is required in the unpacking of this Gift of God, this precious spiritual intuition.
I would like to spend the rest of this chapter exploring this idea, and end with a brief review and summary of the difficulties in both the Ego and the Eco views. And we will finish our account of the Idealists and their enduring legacy. But I would like to start with one last reason that an approach to Spirit based on monological exteriors is a losing proposition.

incomplete or uncertain

Addition 2: Every holon issues an IOU to the Kosmos. A general theme running throughout the Idealist writers—and indeed, a theme found in virtually all of the mystically or contemplatively oriented philosopher-sages the world over—is that finite things, finite holons, are somehow profoundly lacking, or even profoundly contradictory, in and of themselves. "All finite things are contradictory," as Hegel put it. Nagarjuna would maintain the same for all finite phenomena (both thought and things are self-contradictory). From Eckhart to Bradley, from Shankara to Ramana, from Abinavagupta to Gaudapada—the general notion is that, as Hegel put it, "All things in themselves are contradictory."
These types of statements have often stirred much controversy in philosophical circles, and many philosophers are either annoyed or puzzled by what they mean (or even can mean). But the reason these types of statements ("All holons are self-contradictory") come from mystically oriented philosopher-sages is that they have glimpsed the eternal, tasted infinity, and thus all finite things by comparison are pale, incomplete, uncertain, shifting, shadowy. And thus to be merely finite is not only a constriction, it is ultimately self-defeating: to be merely finite is to deny infinity, and this is self-contradictory in the deepest sense because it denies one's deepest reality.
This is why, I think, Hegel says, "For anything to be finite, is just to suppress itself and put itself aside." And thus, "all that is determinate and finite is unstable." And it is this incompleteness, this instability, that drives the agitated movement of the entire finite and manifest universe: "Only insofar," he says, "as something has contradiction in itself does it move, have impulse, or activity." (And Eros, as we saw, is this agitated movement to find higher unions and thus overcome or escape the instability, and Eros therefore finally rests only in the infinite, which itself has no contradiction and thus is the "timeless," the "changeless," the indestructible Abyss, the Vajra or Diamond nature—although all of those terms are not descriptive per se, but only developmental signifiers.)
Now, I mention all of this because, as I said, virtually every mystically oriented philosopher ends up making some sort of these types of statements—none, perhaps, with more exuberance than Francis Bradley: "Relation, cause, space, time, thing, and self are self-contradictory." And Nagarjuna's powerful dialectic is an intense and unrelenting bearing-down on every single category of thought imaginable, all with the same result: they are totally self-contradictory and, if consistently pressed, they totally self-destruct (leaving Emptiness, leaving the formless infinite; the decons-truction of the phenomenal leaves prajna).
The deconstructionists have picked up certain of these lines of thought (mostly from Hegel, whom Derrida uncharacteristically treats with much respect), but after Bradley and Nagarjuna, the deconstructionists are very thin soup indeed, and, depressingly, they almost always miss the punch line: if you don't want to be a complete self-contradiction, then you must rest in infinity.
But admittedly, the philosopher-sages' explanations of why all holons are "self-contradictory" are not very clear, and have caused a great deal of confusion. I think the situation can be explained more easily and a bit more clearly.
The point, as I would put it, is that every holon is a whole/part. There are no wholes and no parts anywhere in the manifest universe; there are only whole/parts. If actual wholes or actual parts really existed somewhere, then they could rest; they would simply be what they were; there would be no massive instability, no internal "self-contradiction."
But every holon is simultaneously a whole/part. It has a dual tension inherent in its very constitution. As a wholeness, it must achieve a degree of coherence and consistency in order to endure at all as the same entity across time (this is its regime, code, agency, relative autonomy, and so on). But as a partness, as a part of some other holon, it must embrace its partialness, embrace its incompleteness, or else it will simply not fit in, will not be a part but will always drift off into its own isolated wholeness. In order to be complete, or to complete itself, it must join with forces larger than itself. As a whole/part, there is thus a constant tension between coherency or consistency, on the one hand, and completeness, on the other.
And the more of the one, the less of the other—neither "force" can win without destroying the holon, and so the holon remains in constant instability. The more consistent (self-contained), then the less complete (the less in communion).
And thus the second Addition: All holons issue an IOU to the Kosmos, where IOU means "Incomplete Or Uncertain," and which specifically means, the more complete or encompassing a holon, the less consistent or certain, and vice versa. To say a holon can be complete or consistent, but not both, is also to say that every holon is therefore incomplete or inconsistent (uncertain), and thus: every holon issues an IOU to the Kosmos.
Put more simply, since every holon is incomplete or inconsistent, every holon issues a promissory note to the universe, which says, in effect: I can't pay you now, I can't achieve certainty and stability and completeness and consistency today, but I will gladly pay you tomorrow. And no holon ever delivers, or can deliver, on that promise.
This IOU principle has, of course, started to become very obvious (and very famous) in certain branches of knowledge, particularly mathematics, physics, and sociology (to name a few). In mathematics, it shows up as Tarski's Theorem and Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, both of which are taken to mean that in any sufficiently developed mathematical system (mathematical holon), the holon can be either complete or consistent, but not both. That is, if the mathematical system is made to be consistent (or self-certain), there remain fundamental truths that cannot be derived from the system itself (it is incomplete); but if the system is made to include these truths and thus attempts to become complete, then it inevitably (and inherently) contradicts itself at crucial points—it becomes inconsistent.
Perhaps a simple example from sociology will illustrate what is involved. The United States and Japan are often taken as examples of two very different types of social organizations. Japan is an extremely coherent or very tightly woven society (it is consistent); but it achieves this consistency only by excluding foreign races (Japan's xenophobia being rather notorious). In other words, it is very consistent but very incomplete (very partial or very exclusionary).
The United States, on the other hand, attempts to be as complete as possible, attempts to open its doors to any and all (the "melting pot"), but it does so at the cost of being rather incoherent and unstable: at times, the U.S. seems so willing to embrace various cultures that it is in danger of flying apart at the seams. It achieves a great deal of completeness at the cost of being inconsistent or incoherent or uncertain, of having no tightly knit unifying regime or common principle. In other words: complete or coherent, and the more of one, the less of the other—IOU.
In mathematics, the introduction of the IOU principle (in various ways, by Russell, Tarski, Gödel), the introduction of "the paradoxes" in set theory, initially caused an uproar, almost panic, because it meant that set theory and arithmetic (and by implication, the whole of mathematics) were on very shaky ground—that is to say, on self-contradictory ground. And in a sense that is true, but mathematics "escaped" the paradoxes by postulating unendingly expanding sets ("transfinite").
We saw, in chapter 2, that this was just another example of "holons all the way up, all the way down." And we can see now that this also means that mathematics simply issued a transfinite IOU to the Kosmos. Put rather simplistically, the only way for mathematics to avoid profound self-contradiction is to postulate a yet higher level of inclusion, which avoids the paradoxes of one level—but then faces the same paradoxes on its own level. Another yet-higher level is thus postulated, and this continues endlessly ("transfinitely").
Thus, the mathematical paradoxes and !OUs of one level can be superseded at the next higher level (the next more-encompassing set), but that set then faces its own IOU (it is either incomplete or inconsistent), and that continues . . . forever. The sets must be postulated to expand forever, because the moment they stop, mathematics becomes self-contradictory. Nobody ever actually sees all of these transfinite sets: they are just a promissory note that allows mathematics both to keep going and to get going in the first place.
Thus the IOU: it says, I cannot pay you now, but I will gladly pay you tomorrow. It will even gladly pay with lots of interest, because the point is: it can never actually pay. The debt is never settled. Mathematics, like all holons, lurches forward forever in an attempt to get over its inherent limitations, its "self-contradictions." (Recall Hegel: "Only insofar as something has contradiction in itself does it move, have impulse, or activity.")
The point: all holons issue an IOU to the Kosmos, and the debt is never redeemed.
IOUs, then, represent the tension or instability (incomplete or inconsistent) inherent in all manifest holons by virtue of the fact that they are all whole/parts. Another way to say exactly the same thing is to say that all holons are agency-in-communion (wholes that are parts of other wholes). As agency (as wholeness), a holon must seek consistency in order to endure. But as communion (as partness), it must seek union with other holons in order to be more complete. And the more of one, the less of the other (on the same level; a supersession embraces both, but then the new level faces its own IOU).
In other words, the more agency, the less communion, and vice versa (another version of the IOU), and neither side can finally win without destroying the other. They are mutual antagonists that depend on each other for existence (which, we might say, makes samsara an unpleasant place to be caught).
In volume 3, I attempt to explain this IOU principle in much greater detail, and this is meant only as a very brief introduction. I attempt to show that agency across time and communion across space, as the two fundamental "drives" of all holons (on a given level), show up in various fields as, respectively: time and space, coherence and correspondence, rights and responsibilities, metaphor and metonym, intrinsic value and extrinsic value, determined and probabilistic, necessity and chance, consistency and completeness, consciousness and communication—the list is virtually endless. But the central point is that these typical dualisms (such as coherence versus correspondence in epistemology) are dual partners forever fated to battle it out with each other . . . and never, never win.
The final example I will mention of an IOU principle that has become quite famous is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, whose many forms all state the same thing: the more we can know of the time-component of a wavicle (agency), the less we can know of the space-component (communion)—momentum and position, for example—with the crucial point being: the wavicle doesn't know either. The wavicle issues an IOU to the Kosmos. The more one aspect is pinned down, the more the other fades into obscurity.

emptiness

Now the real reason I mention all these examples of the IOU principle, and the real reason the mystically oriented philosopher-sages are always bringing it up (Hegel to Bradley to Nagarjuna to Shankara), is very simple:
Addition 3: All IOUs are redeemed in Emptiness.
Emptiness is neither a Whole nor a Part nor a Whole/Part. Emptiness is the reality of which all wholes and all parts are simply manifestations. In Emptiness I do not become Whole, nor do I realize that I am merely a Part of some Great Big Whole. Rather, in Emptiness I become the opening or clearing in which all wholes and all parts arise eternally. I-I am the groundless Ground, the empty Abyss, that never enters the stream of endless IOUs; that never lives the transfinite nightmare of ceaseless self-contradiction, the perpetual agony of samsara's cascading wholes and parts; the empty Ground that never bows to the terrors of time and the perpetual motion sickness known as space; that steps off the relentless torment of unending IOUs—only to embrace them all, to embrace the All, as a mirror one with its many reflections, and nothing comes to rest except the insane thought that I ever could have found liberation in endless IOUs, or that salvation had anything to do with the unending debts and promissory notes that samsara calls "reality," the sickness-inducing self-contradiction in the very heart of every finite thing.
And there is the message of the mystics, ever so simply put: Emptiness, and Emptiness alone, redeems all IOUs. In Emptiness alone, my debt is paid to the Kosmos, because in Emptiness, I-I am the Kosmos. Redemption of debt, erasure of guilt, a balancing of the Kosmic books, a release from transfinite insanity.
Not in Emptiness, but as Emptiness, I am released from the fate of a never-ending addition of parts, and I stand free as the Source and Such-ness of the glorious display. I taste the sky and swallow whole the Kosmos, and nothing is added to me; I disappear in a million forms and nothing is subtracted; I rise as the sun to greet my own day, and nothing moves at all.

the legacy of the idealists

The Idealist movement was, in the West, the last great attempt to introduce true Ascent and, most important, to integrate it believably with true Descent—the Ego and the Eco both taken up, preserved and negated, honored and released, in all-encompassing Spirit. The true heirs of Plotinus.
And although the great Idealist movement finally failed, its enduring contributions will, I believe, be part of any graceful unpacking of spiritual intuition for the modern and postmodern world. Its enduring contributions will, I think, be a necessary component in any sort of truly comprehensive worldview, a worldview still begging to emerge, a World Soul still struggling to break into collective consciousness and heal the fragments of a modernity gone slightly mad.
The details of the Idealist system are explored in volume 3. For the moment, I think we could fairly summarize the thrust of the Idealist movement as: an intuition of the transpersonal domain expressed in vision-logic. And there was both its great strength and its fatal weakness.
As vision-logic, it was a developmental evolution beyond simple formal operational rationality, a move beyond instrumental and ego-centered rationality (Verstand) into dialogical, dialectical, intersubjective reason (Vernunft), carrying with it a unifying of opposites and a reconciliation of fragments.
As holoarchic vision-logic, it saw neither isolated wholes nor abandoned parts: each stage of development was a whole/part that preserved and negated its predecessors. Idealism pointed out, in effect, that since every holon is simultaneously both a subholon and a superholon, then all agency is always agency-in-communion (the insight utterly lacking in the Enlightenment's "proud culture of reflection," that "monster of arrested development"). Thus no dualism has a final place to rest; no whole, and no part, can ever repose triumphant; Spirit speaks throughout the evolutionary process, as the process itself—self-unfolding, self-enfolding, self-realizing: "nothing is lost, all is preserved."
As vision-logic, the integration of the Big Three could be seriously contemplated and in many ways completed: nature is not just a collection of phenomenal interlocking processes or "its," but of potential I's; and I's exist only in an intersubjective space of we. Accordingly, science, morality, and art are all integral expressions and moments of Spirit; none can claim isolated authority; each is to be honored in its respective task. And I can integrate them because I am vehicle of Spirit, and not any particular manifestation.
Most important, these integrations were not just verbal formulas; up to a certain point, the Idealists genuinely managed to "square the circle," as Taylor summarizes the seemingly impossible task of reconciling Ego and Eco, Fichte and Spinoza, Mind and Nature, Ascent and Descent, Subjective Freedom and Objective Union.
The requirements were inordinately intense: "If the aspirations to radical freedom [Ego] and to integral expressive unity with nature [Eco] are to be totally fulfilled together, if man is to be at one with nature in himself and in the cosmos while also being most fully a self-determining subject, then it is necessary first, that my basic natural inclination spontaneously be to morality and freedom; and more than this, since I am a dependent part of a larger order of nature, it is necessary that this whole order within me and without tend of itself toward spiritual goals, tend to realize a form in which it can unite with subjective freedom. If I am to remain a spiritual being and yet not be opposed to nature in my interchange with it, then this interchange must be a communion in which I enter into relation with some spiritual being or force. But this is to say that spirituality, tending to realize spiritual goals, is of the essence of nature. Underlying natural reality is a spiritual principle striving to realize itself."
And those were precisely the requirements met by Schelling and hammered out by Hegel. Nature and Mind are both taken up and integrated in Spirit, an integration that can occur precisely because the Spirit that is awakened in the integration is the same Spirit that was present throughout the entire process of unfolding and enfolding itself.
"So that while nature tends to realize spirit, that is, self-consciousness, men and women as conscious beings tend toward a grasp of nature in which they will see it as spirit and one with their own spirit. In this process men and women come to a new understanding of self: they see themselves not just as individual fragments of the universe, but rather as vehicles of spirit. And hence men and women can achieve at once the greatest unity with nature, i.e., with the spirit which unfolds itself in nature, and the fullest autonomous self-expression. The two come together since man's basic identity is as vehicle of spirit. [This] provides the basis of a union between finite and cosmic spirit which meets the requirement that men and women be united to the whole and yet not sacrifice their own self-consciousness and autonomous will."
Because the same spiritual Will (or self-realizing Eros) is at work in both Ego and Eco, then when I rise to a vision of that Spirit, I see—and directly feel—that where It was (the "external" world of Eco-nature), there I have become (one with nature in my truest Self), and there We all shall be, the Community of Spirit made manifest.
United in Spirit without erasing differences—there is the One-in-the-Many as my truest Self (the ultimate I or Buddha), and as the highest Truth (the ultimate It or Dharma), and as the all-encompassing Community of all sentient beings (the ultimate We or Sangha).
Further, according to the Idealists (and nondual sages everywhere), the extraordinary and altogether paradoxical secret is that the Final Release is always already accomplished. The "last step" is to step off the cycle of time altogether and find the Timeless there from the start, ever-present from the very beginning and at every point along the way. The great far-off spectacular climax ... is right now. "The Good," says Hegel, "the absolutely Good, is eternally accomplishing itself in the world; and the result is that it need not wait upon us, but is already in full actuality accomplished.''
As J. N. Findlay, one of Hegel's greatest interpreters, puts it: "It is by the capacity to understand this that the true Hegelian is marked off from his often diligent and scholarly, but still profoundly misguided misinter-preter, who still yearns after the showy spectacular climax, the Absolute coming down . . . accompanied by a flock of doves, when a simple return to utter ordinariness is in place [the language of ordinariness, as we saw, always marks the Nondual]. Finite existence in the here and now, with every limitation, is, Hegel teaches, when rightly regarded and accepted, identical with the infinite existence which is everywhere and always. To live in Main Street is, if one lives in the right spirit, to inhabit the Holy City."
As Plotinus knew and Nagarjuna taught: always and always, the other world is this world rightly seen.
This is a truly staggering synthesis and integration. (Credit for this type of developmental synthesis often goes to Aurobindo; without in any way detracting from Aurobindo's magnificent contributions, the pioneering credit belongs to Schelling, and by a century.) And yet, in the end, the Idealist movement failed to live up to its bright promise and huge potential. Although, as I mentioned, the details will be taken up in volume 3, I think we can quickly summarize the failure in two parts.
The first was a failure to develop any truly injunctive practices—that is, any true paradigms, any reproducible exemplars. Put differently: no yoga, no contemplative practices, no meditative paradigms, no experimental methodology to reproduce in consciousness the transpersonal insights of its founders. The great Idealist systems were mistaken for metaphysics—which in this sense, they were, alas—and suffered rightly the fate of all mere metaphysics.
The second failure: although profound intuitions and insights into the genuinely transpersonal domains were clearly some of the major, I would say the major, driving forces behind the Idealist movement, these intuitions and insights were expressed almost totally in and through vision-logic, and this burdened Reason with a task it could never carry. Particularly with Hegel, the transpersonal and transrational Spirit becomes wholly identified with vision-logic or mature Reason, which condemns Reason to collapsing under a weight it could never carry.
In 1796, Hegel wrote a poem for Hölderlin, which says in part: "For thought cannot grasp the soul which forgetting itself plunges out of space and time into a presentiment of infinity, and now reawakens. Whoever wanted to speak of this to others, though he spoke with the tongues of angels, would feel the poverty of words."
Would that Hegel had remained in poverty (with Plato: "No treatise by me concerning it exists or ever will exist"). But Hegel decided—in part in reaction to the Eco camp's calamitous slide into regressive feeling and divine egoism—that Reason could and should develop the tongues of angels. This would have been fine, if Hegel also had more dependable paradigms, more reproducible injunctions, for the developmental unfolding of the higher and transpersonal stages. As we said, Zen masters talk about Emptiness all the time! But they have a practice and a methodology (zazen) which allows them to discover the transcendental referent via their own developmental signified, and thus their words (the signifiers) remain grounded in experiential, reproducible, fallibilist criteria.
The Idealists had none of this. Their insights, not easily reproducible, and thus not fallibilistic, were dismissed as "mere metaphysics," and gone was a priceless opportunity that the West, no doubt, will have to attempt yet again if it is ever to be hospitable to the future descent of the all-embracing World Soul.
In the meantime, the collapse of Idealism left the Descenders virtually unchallenged as the molders of modernity.

dark shadows

Darwin's "naturalism"—this denatured nature—seemed, to the dominant flatland worldview, to cover all the necessary bases. Mononature alone was all the "spirit" men and women needed, and all the "spirit" there was.
But it wasn't the Darwinian "revolution" that would play most decisively into the hands of the Descenders. After all, the Darwinists could always be seen, whether they wished to or not, as simply supplying empirical evidence for a scheme already known and accepted, namely, evolution as God-in-the-making, Eros not simply seeking Spirit but expressing Spirit all along via a series of ever-higher ascents, which Darwin had merely chronicled in a not-very-surprising fashion.
Darwin was never the problem. It was Carnot, Clausius, and Kelvin. At about the time that Darwin was on HMS Beagle, William Kelvin and Rudolf Clausius were formulating two versions of the second law of thermodynamics, versions later shown to be equivalent, and both of which were taken to mean: the universe is running down. In all real physical processes, disorder increases.
This split the world of science into two utterly incompatible halves: a biology describing the world winding up, and a physics describing a world winding down. The "two arrows" of time . . .
With this, of course, we have come full circle, come to the point where we began our account in chapter 1. This wasn't just subtle reductionism— the collapse of the Kosmos into the empirical interlocking order—this was gross reductionism—the further collapse of the interlocking order into its atomistic components, a situation that can fairly be described as complete psychotic insanity. (If the Kosmos is the wondrous multidimensional reality anything similar to that described from Plotinus to Schelling, from Mahayana Buddhism to Vedanta Hinduism, or even from Kant to Rousseau, imagine the blindness and the violence of the mentality that acknowledges only atoms.)
The laws of thermodynamics seemed to totally undermine any sort of "organic unity" or "self-organizing nature" or "the total and unitary process of self-manifestation" (Schelling, Hegel)—let alone any sort of Eros operative "even in the lowest state of matter" (Kant). And if the Idealists couldn't even get the first floor of evolution right, why should we believe them about any "higher stages"? There is no Eros in the physical world, and if the physical world is part and parcel of Spirit's manifestation, then there is and can be no Eros in Spirit. Which is to say, there is no Spirit, period.
This completely undercut any sort of idealist or spiritual view of evolution or manifestation in general. The first floor of the magnificent Idealist edifice crumbled, and the higher floors almost immediately followed suit (Idealism would survive in any viable form no more than a few decades after Hegel's death).
The net effect of the utter collapse of this noble attempt to escape the Cave, embrace the Cave, was that, once again, Ascent was looked upon very suspiciously. Everywhere the cry "Back to Kant!" arose, which eventually meant: back to rationality and its grounding in the senses, back to "tracing science then with modesty thy guide."
Back to the phenomena, back to the shadows. Back to "this world." The collapse of Idealism left the Descenders virtually unchallenged as the holders and molders of modernity. Not only was any sort of transcendental Spirit abandoned, vision-logic itself was scaled back to various forms of instrumental, subject-centered rationality. "As a consequence," Habermas reminds us, "in the period after Hegel, only those who grasp reason in a more modest fashion have any options." Modernity then, he says, "pruned reason back into understanding and rationality back into purposive rationality"—that is, vision-logic back into the reflection paradigm and back into subject-centered instrumental-rationality.
Ludwig Feuerbach, a student of Hegel, would soon announce that any sort of spirituality, any sort of Ascent, was simply a projection of men and women's human potentials onto an "other world" of wholly imaginative origin. And, according to Feuerbach, it is exactly this projection of human potential onto a "divine" sphere that cripples men and women, and is the true cause of self-alienation. Any real social progress, then, is not spirit's return to spirit, but man's return to himself. Feuerbach: "Religion is the separation of man from himself: he sets God over against himself as an opposed being. God is not what man is, and man is not what God is. God is the infinite Being, man the finite; God is perfect, man is imperfect; God is eternal, man is temporal; God is almighty, man is powerless; God is holy, man is sinful. God and man are extremes."
However well that does indeed describe aspects of mythic dissociation, it has precisely nothing to do with one's own transpersonal potentials, vertical potentials that if they aren't actualized are merely projected horizontally into utterly futile schemes to turn this finite world into a Utopian world of infinite wonderment: an infinite above collapses into an infinite ahead, and whether that infinite ahead be endless scientific progress or boundless material possessions or political utopianisms as ultimate salvation, they are all fundamentally ways of fussing about in the finite looking for the infinite, and doing irreparable harm to the finite world in the process by placing demands upon it which it could never fulfill.
But that is exactly what Feuerbach would recommend: "Politics," he says, "must become our religion." Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were paying very close attention. "Apart from Nature and human beings," Engels would write, "nothing exists; and the higher beings which our religious fantasy created are only the fantastic reflection of our own essence. The enthusiasm was general; we were all for the moment followers of Feuerbach."
And the entire modern (and postmodern) world is, in effect, the followers of Feuerbach.

the contours of the cave

And so it was, I believe, that the Descenders became the inheritors of frustrated Ascent—the ever-frustrated desire to move up became the ever-frustrating desire to move forward. One crippled God replaced the other, and Ascent pitched headlong into the endless world of scurrying shadows.
With "No more Ascent!" the infinite vertical yearning toppled forward, and that correct intuition of infinity was now misplaced and displaced onto the horizons of a temporal and agitated and insatiable hunger for all things material and "natural," a hunger driven by the same power of infinite yearning, but now under the gaze of a different God.
And there remains the modern—and the postmodern—mind. People had, and have, two basic choices in these modern times: myth or naturalism. Remain at a mythic level of development, and embrace this or that imperialistic fundamentalism with its (promised and frustrated) Ascent; or evolve to rationality, shed the myths, and embrace a world of pure Descent, basking in the shadows, never getting metaphysical sunburn of any imaginable variety, "tracing science then with modesty thy guide," but seeking always to reform the phenomena, tinker with the shades, eat the shadows, endlessly.
And within naturalism, there are still the same two-centuries-old "paradigms" engaged in the same shopworn arguments: the Ego versus the Eco, both still dragging behind them the same pitiable paradox of damage. The Ego, for all its otherwise admirable worldcentric stance, still has no idea how to go about integrating the biosphere in a higher synthesis of its own interests; still leaves everywhere the corpses of its reckless repressions; still totally confuses transrational Spirit with prerational myth; and thus still runs breathlessly away from the Source of its own salvation.
If the Ego camps still absolutize the noosphere, the Eco camps are still absolutizing the biosphere, utterly unaware that this contributes every bit as much as the Ego camps to the destruction of the biosphere itself. "Saving the biosphere" depends first and foremost on human beings reaching mutual understanding and unforced agreement as to common ends. And that intersubjective accord occurs only in the noosphere. Anything short of that noospheric accord will continue to destroy the biosphere.
Thus, if the Ego is destroying the biosphere by a sin of commission, the Eco is destroying it by a sin of omission.
Gaia's primary problems and threats are not pollution, industrialization, overcultivation, soil despoliation, overpopulation, ozone depletion, or whatnot. Gaia's major problem is lack of mutual understanding and mutual agreement in the noosphere.
The problem is not how to demonstrate, in monological terms and with scientific proofs, that Gaia is in desperate trouble. The general evidence of this serious trouble is already and simply and absolutely overwhelming. Any idiot can grasp the data. But most idiots just don't care.
In other words, the real problem is not exterior. The real problem is interior. The real problem is how to get people to internally transform from egocentric to sociocentric to worldcentric consciousness, which is the only stance that can grasp the global dimensions of the problem in the first place, and thus the only stance that can freely, even eagerly, embrace global solutions.
And about these interior transformations, and all the intricate psychological changes necessary in order to effect them, the Eco camps have virtually nothing to say. They are so focused on exterior, monological, reflective "paradigms" that their understanding of interior dynamics and development is incredibly anemic, virtually nill: they are contributing nothing fundamental to the real changes that have to occur in order to "save Gaia."
Thus, the only "transformation" they even talk about is having everybody change their objective and monological views of reality and accept a "web-of-life" conception, as if that would do a single thing to effect a genuine interior transformation. Not only is the web-of-life ontology regressive (its end limit is always biocentric feeling in divine egoism), but, more tellingly—and this is the only point I would like to emphasize—even if the web-of-life ontology were absolutely true, nonetheless change in objective belief is not the primary driving force of interior development.
(For example: all ecological forecasts are forms of as-if and what-if scientific projections, often computerized. These can only be grasped by formop. Teach these what-if scenarios to preop or conop individuals, and no matter how much they parrot the words, they do not possess the developmental signified and thus they have no real idea of the actual referent. Genuinely global or worldcentric consciousness is not possible short of formop. In other words, global consciousness is not an objective belief that can be taught to anybody and everybody, but a subjective transformation in the interior structures that can hold the belief in the first place.)
We have an enormous amount of information about how and why those interior psychological transformations occur (egocentric to socio-centric to worldcentric), and the Eco camps by and large display no awareness of, and no interest in, those inner dynamics, fixated as they are on describing exterior mononature in "holistic" terms.
This is outrageously naive, and belies the aggression and violence inherent in attempting to change people by altering the object instead of growing the subject. Focusing merely on monological and objective and exterior and scientific terms—no matter how utterly true—beyond a certain point simply detracts away from the fundamental problem, hides the fundamental problem, buries it in a cloud of rhetoric and ideological foaming at the mouth.
Thus, by simply absolutizing the biosphere, by privileging it in an ontology of regressive leveling, the Eco camp contributes precisely nothing to noospheric integration (and thus everything to biospheric disintegration).
Everywhere the paradox of damage: absolutizing the biosphere contributes inexorably to its destruction.
Everywhere the same old story: the Ego and the Eco as the vulgar twins in the wretched dance of Gaia's demise.

the ego and the Eco: phobos and thanatos

And thus, to return to my point at the beginning of the chapter: stuck with these two variants of flatland ideology, any intuitions of deeper and higher occasions become immediately misinterpreted in terms of one or the other of these monological paradigms. People continue to have strong and powerful intuitions of the Over-Soul and World Soul, but they immediately misinterpret these otherwise correct intuitions in terms of either a disengaged "Higher Self" (a la Fichte) or a "reengaged biospheric union" (a la Spinoza).
The "Higher Self" camp is notoriously immune to social concerns. Everything that happens to one is said to be "one's own choice"—the hyper-agentic Higher Self is responsible for everything that happens—this is the monological and totally disengaged Ego gone horribly amok in omnipotent self-only fantasies. This simply represses the networks of communions that are just as important as agency in constituting the manifestation of Spirit.
This is not Eros; this is Phobos—a withdrawal from social engagement and intersubjective action. All of this totally overlooks the fact that Spirit manifests not only as Self (I) but as intersubjective Community (We) and as an objective State of Affairs (It)—as Buddha, Sangha, Dharma—each inseparably interwoven with the others and interwoven in the Good and the Goodness of the All.
The Eco camps likewise too often misinterpret the intuition of the World Soul, but in the other direction, as some sort of Gaia-self, but still and equally framed in monological and flatland terms. Not Nature, but nature, is their beloved God/dess. Actual hierarchies of any sort are denied in the name of a diversitarian stance that explicitly denies that which its own stance implicitly presupposes. In their understandable zeal to go transrational, they often embrace any prerational occasion simply because it is nonrational—any occasion that looks biocentrically oriented, from horticultural planting mythology to rampant tribalism to blood magic and sensual glorification of a sentimental nature, all in the name, of course, of saving Gaia.
The Eco-Noetic Self is thus misinterpreted as a merely ecological self (the absolutizing of the biosphere)—completely overlooking the fact that no ecological self can take the role of other. The resultant regressive slide into divine egoism is just as disheartening as the Ego's aggressive slide into repression. This is not Agape; this is Thanatos. An attempt to save the lower by killing the higher.
Under these conditions—Ego versus Eco—we will never take monological nature up and into dialogical culture, and then take both nature and culture up and into translogical Spirit. And yet that, I will argue in the next two volumes of this series, is exactly the task whose initial steps are (and must) define postmodernity.
The correct intuitions are already present; they are in place; Spirit is indeed a Higher Self with a wider Community of all beings. But unpacking that intuition solely in terms of one or the other cripples the intuition itself, deforms it and delivers it stillborn into the hands of the ideologues, with the bizarre result that we are now in need of being saved from our would-be saviors.

environmental ethics

In my opinion, one of the most urgent tasks of postmodernity—arguably, the most urgent—is the development and establishment of a genuine environmental ethics, or a moral and ethical stance to nonhuman holons.
And nowhere are the difficulties of the Eco camp more obvious than in its attempts to develop an environmental ethics, which is embarrassing in that this should be, one would think, the Eco camp's strong suit. But with a few notable exceptions (such as Birch and Cobb's wonderful The Liberation of Life, Michael Zimmerman's work, and a handful of others), most approaches center exclusively on the principle of "bioequality," a reworking of the very old tenets of the Descending path of Plenitude (divorced and dissociated from any true Ascent).
The point, or so it is argued, is that all holons, or certainly all life forms, have equal value and equal worth, another qualitative distinction that denies all qualitative distinctions. This environmental ethics—noble enough in itself, and often driven by a profound intuition of the World Soul, the Eco-Noetic Self—is nonetheless completely crippled by operating within the flatland paradigm.
In volume 2, I will examine each of those approaches in great detail, and then present a holarchical alternative, which may be very briefly summarized as follows:
1.  All things and events, of whatever nature, are perfect manifestations of Spirit. No holon, whether conventionally considered high or low, sacred or profane, simple or complex, primitive or advanced, is closer or farther from Ground, and thus all holons have equal ultimate value or equal Ground-value. All Forms are equally pure Emptiness, primordial Purity.
2.  But in addition to Ground-value, all holons, we have seen, are also both particular wholes and particular parts. As a wholeness, any holon has "whole-value." It has a value in itself, and not merely for something else. It is an end in and for itself, and not merely a means for something other. It has autonomous value, and not merely instrumental value. This is usually referred to as "intrinsic value," which I accept; I will also call in-itself value "autonomous value" or "wholeness value." All holons, as wholes, have intrinsic value.
From which it follows, the greater the wholeness, the greater the intrinsic value. Wholeness-value, in other words, is the same as depth-value. The greater the depth, the greater the value (and the greater the potential depth, the greater the potential value).
This also means, as we have seen repeatedly, that there are levels of significance: the greater the depth, or the greater the wholeness, then the more significant that wholeness is for the Kosmos, because the more of the Kosmos is embraced in that wholeness, embraced in that depth.
Likewise, as a wholeness (as agency), all holons have rights which express the conditions that are necessary for that holon to remain whole. The greater the wholeness, the more rights necessary to maintain it (i.e., the more significant the wholeness, the greater the network of rights required to sustain the significance). These rights are not something added to the holon; these rights are a simple statement of the conditions (objective, interobjective, subjective, and intersubjective) that are necessary to sustain the wholeness of the particular holon. If those rights are not met, the wholeness dissolves or disintegrates.
3. All holons are also parts, and as a part, all holons have instrumental value (also called extrinsic value). That is, all holons have value for others. All holons have part-value, or partness-value (as part of a larger whole, and that whole and its members depend upon each part: each part is thus instrumental to the existence of the whole, each part has extrinsic value, value not just in and for itself but for others). And the more part-ness-value a holon has—that is, the greater the number of wholes of which that holon is a part—the more fundamental that holon is for the Kosmos, because the more of the Kosmos there is that contains that part as a necessary constituent. (From which it follows, as we put it earlier, the more fundamental, the less significant, and vice versa.)
Likewise, as a part (in communion), each holon exists in a network of care and responsibility. Like rights, responsibilities are not something added to holons. Networks of responsibility simply define the conditions necessary to support the whole of which the part is indeed a part. The greater the depth of a holon, then the more networks of communion it is involved in, and thus the greater its responsibilities in communion (correlative with its greater rights of agency).
Thus, each and every holon in the Kosmos has equal Ground-value as a pure manifestation of Spirit or Emptiness. Further, as a particular wholeness, each holon possesses intrinsic value, depth value, which is valuable precisely because it internally embraces aspects of the Kosmos as part of its own being (and the more aspects it embraces, then the greater its depth and the greater its intrinsic value, the greater its significance). And finally, as a part, each holon possesses extrinsic or instrumental value, because other holons external to it nonetheless depend upon it in various ways for their own existence and survival (and the more networks and wholes of which the holon is a part, then the greater its extrinsic value, the greater its fundamentalness: its existence is instrumental to the existence of so many other holons).
My point in mentioning this example now is simply that this type of multidimensional environmental ethics is completely subverted by the flatland holism so prevalent in the Gaia-centric approaches. The fact that all holons have equal Ground-value is confused with the notion that they must therefore all have equal intrinsic value ("bioequality"), and this completely paralyzes any sort of pragmatic action at all.
It is much better to kill a carrot than a cow, even though they are both perfect manifestations of Spirit. They both have equal Ground-value, but one has more intrinsic value because one has more depth (and therefore more consciousness). And the Eco camp's general attempt to "save the biosphere" by privileging it and leveling any distinctions in it (bioequality) paralyzes any actual pragmatic steps that might be taken to reform our anthropocentric stance.
It gets worse: in a flatland world, intrinsic value is given only to the web-of-life or the system as a whole (the great interlocking order)—and thus we are all fundamentally, basically, profoundly, nothing but strands in the wonderful web. This attempt to introduce "wholeness" actually instrumentalizes all of us, instrumentalizes each and every individual living being, because now living beings only have part value, extrinsic value, instrumental value. Holism always instrumentalizes everything! (Another example of the paradox of damage inherent in flatlandism: trying to holisticize everything converts everything into parts, into fragments, with no individual wholeness value, no intrinsic value apart from the wonderful web.)
In short: this approach confuses equal Ground-value with equal instrinsic value ("bioequality"), which leaves only the biosphere as a whole with instrinsic value, and this converts every individual living being into merely a part, a strand, an instrumental means to the glorious web: leaves, that is, ecofascism.
As I said, I believe in many cases the original intuition is true and good, namely, all holons have equal Ground-value (I believe that is the primary intuition behind the noble attempts to deanthropocentrize ethics). But in unpacking this noble intuition merely in terms of a flatland holism (the Right-Hand path, which always embodies a qualitative distinction that denies all qualitative distinctions: in this case, "bioequality"), we end up instrumentalizing everything: precisely the fundamental Enlightenment paradigm most responsible for despoiling Gaia is still claiming, in its new guise, to save that which it is inexorably destroying.
Thus, a correct and often noble intuition of the World Soul and Eco-Noetic Self is misinterpreted in terms of a flatland holism that, in leveling qualitative distinctions, paralyzes actions that would further the descent of that World Soul. And in this case it is still true: that which is not part of the solution is most definitely part of the problem.

ego and Eco: the ascenders and the descenders

There is nothing that can cure the senses but the soul; And nothing that can cure the soul but the senses.
— oscar wilde

My point, then, is that the World Soul is very often being correctly and profoundly intuited but not very gracefully interpreted. It tends to be interpreted as either a Higher Self or a Gaia-self, both dualistic to the core, and both trying to convert the other by proselytizing their wounds. They represent respectively not Eros and Agape, but Phobos and Thanatos.
It comes to the same thing to say that, to the extent that individuals in modernity even attempt a genuine spirituality, they still tend to fall into either a purely Ascending Higher Self, or a purely Descending biospheric self.
The Ascenders have recourse to various forms of Gnosticism, Theravadin Buddhism, a type of Advaita Vedanta, a "higher Inner Voice," the inner Holy Spirit, archetypal psychology, the care of the Soul, contacting the Higher Self—all of which are true enough and altogether important; but in their partiality, in their exclusively Ascending bent, they attempt to get out of flatland by denying it altogether: Phobos, the fear-laden hand of earth-denying, community-denying, body-denying, sensory-denying escape.
The Descenders, on the other hand, have recourse to the visible, sensible God/dess—but that profound truth, cut off from its complementary Ascending current, degenerates into Gaia-centric, egocentric, highly individualistic and "anti-authoritarian" stances, desiring to preserve themselves in the free play of uncoerced shadows. By becoming one with the Shadows and seamlessly inserting ourselves into a denatured nature, salvation will finally be found—and if it doesn't seem to be working, just insert harder.
The idea still seems to be that if I can just French-kiss the Shadows, I will see the Light. All transcendental occasions are reduced to this-worldly embrace: Thanatos, the dead and heavy hand of reduction and regression.
And these purely Descended approaches absolutely despise the Ascending paths, and blame them for virtually all of humanity's and Gaia's problems. But not to worry, the loathing is mutual: the Ascenders maintain the Descenders are simply caught in self-dispersal and outward-bound ignorance, which is the real source of all humanity's turmoils.
The Ascenders and the Descenders, after two thousand years, still at each other's throat—each still claiming to be the Whole, each still accusing the other of Evil, each perpetrating the same fractured insanity it despises in the other.
The Ascenders and the Descenders. Still crazy after all these years.
at the edge of history The great quest of postmodernity, I will argue, is for the bodymind integration of the centaur anchored in worldcentric vision-logic, and there are signs everywhere that this is in fact occurring. But most important, from within and beyond the centaur are now emerging glimpses of the Over-Soul as the World Soul (and I believe the evidence for this, too, is quite compelling).17
But Spirit's misinterpretation does not further its descent; its flattening and leveling in monological terms sabotages its very birth and blessing. We cannot integrate the Ascending and Descending currents in the emerging World Soul, but merely play them off against each other in a brutal torment of chosen ideology.
But the crucial components have already been won through for us. The breakthrough to Nonduality has already been accomplished by Plotinus in the West and Nagarjuna in the East (and not them alone). And the evolutionary understanding of Nonduality has already been won by Schelling in the West and Aurobindo in the East (and not them alone). What they (and their many descendants) have accomplished is already the foundation for a World Federation and a council of all beings. And whereas they were, in their times, the rare and isolated, the average mode is now catching up with them: their paths can be ours, collectively, now.
Much work, of course, remains to be done. But the foundation is there, it has been won through for us; the basics are in existence. These roads are open to us: roads present but untraveled; paths cut clear but not chosen.
Can we not embrace these roots? Can we not see Spirit as the Life of Evolution and the Love of Kosmos itself? Does not the Good of Spirit, its Eros, release both Nature and Mind from the torments we have inflicted on them in vain attempts to make them each the source of infinite value? Does not the Goodness of Spirit, its Agape, embrace both Mind and Nature in a loving caress that heals the self-inflicted wounds? Does not the refluxing movement of God and the effluxing movement of the Goddess embrace the entire Circle of Ascent and Descent? Can we not round out the original insights and see that Spirit always manifests in all four quadrants equally? Is not Spirit here and now in all its radiant glory, eternally present as every I and every We and every It? Will not our more adequate interpretations of Spirit facilitate Spirit's rescue of us?
As Plotinus knew: Let the world be quiet. Let the heavens and the earth and the seas be still. Let the world be waiting. Let the self-contraction relax into the empty ground of its own awareness, and let it there quietly die. See how Spirit pours through each and every opening in the turmoil, and bestows new splendor on the setting Sun and its glorious Earth and all its radiant inhabitants. See the Kosmos dance in Emptiness; see the play of light in all creatures great and small; see finite worlds sing and rejoice in the play of the very Divine, floating on a Glory that renders each transparent, flooded by a Joy that refuses time or terror, that undoes the madness of the loveless self and buries it in splendor.
Indeed, indeed: let the self-contraction relax into the empty ground of its own awareness, and let it there quietly die. See the Kosmos arise in its place, dancing madly and divine, self-luminous and self-liberating, intoxicated by a Light that never dawns nor ceases. See the worlds arise and fall, never caught in time or turmoil, transparent images shimmering in the radiant Abyss. Watch the mountain walk on water, drink the Pacific in a single gulp, blink and a billion universes rise and fall, breathe out and create a Kosmos, breathe in and watch it dissolve.
Let the ecstasy overflow and outshine the loveless self, driven mad with the torments of its self-embracing ways, hugging mightily samsara's spokes of endless agony, and sing instead triumphantly with Saint Catherine, "My being is God, not by simple participation, but by a true transformation of my Being. My me is God!" And let the joy sing with Dame Julian, "See! I am God! See! I am in all things! See! I do all things!" And let the joy shout with Hakuin, "This very body is the Body of Buddha! and this very land the Pure Land!"
And this Earth becomes a blessed being, and every I becomes a God, and every We becomes God's sincerest worship, and every It becomes God's most gracious temple.
And comes to rest that Godless search, tormented and tormenting. The knot in the Heart of the Kosmos relaxes to allow its only God, and overflows the Spirit ravished and enraptured by the lost and found Beloved. And gone the Godless destiny of death and desperation, and gone the madness of a life committed to uncare, and gone the tears and terror of the brutal days and endless nights where time alone would rule.
And I-I rise to taste the dawn, and find that love alone will shine today. And the Shining says: to love it all, and love it madly, and always endlessly, and ever fiercely, to love without choice and thus enter the All, to love it mindlessly and thus be the All, embracing the only and radiant Divine: now as Emptiness, now as Form, together and forever, the Godless search undone, and love alone will shine today.

the one that was to come

Today's world of modernity gone slightly mad: Myth for the peasants, flatland naturalism for the intelligentsia. It is more than a little ironic, then, that it was science, Descended science, that in the closing decades of the twentieth century would rediscover the self-organizing and self-transcending nature of evolution itself. More than a little ironic that in uniting the "two arrows" of time it would make Eros the single and all-pervading principle of manifestation. More than a little ironic that it would pave the way for an evolution beyond rationality, since it has clearly demonstrated that evolution stops for nobody, that each stage passes into a larger tomorrow. And if today is rationality, tomorrow is transrationality, and there is not a single scientific argument in the world that can disagree with that, and every argument in favor of it.
And so there we stand now, at rationality, poised on the edge of trans-rational perception, a scientia visionis that is bringing here and there, but ever and ever more clearly, to all sorts of people in all sorts of places, powerful glimmers of a true Descent of the all-pervading World Soul.

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Credits

The author thanks the publishers who granted permission to reprint material copyrighted or controlled by them:
From Evolution: The Grand Synthesis by Ervin Laszlo, © 1987 by Ervin Laszlo. Reprinted by permission of John White.
Figures 24 and 28 from The Self-Organizing Universe: Scientific and Human Implications of the Emerging Paradigm of Evolution by Erich Jantsch. Reprinted by permission of Elsevier Science Ltd, Pergamon Imprint, Oxford, England.
From Communication and the Evolution of Society by Jürgen Habermas, © 1979 by Beacon Press. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press.
From The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea by Arthur O. Lovejoy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), © 1936, 1964 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Reprinted by permission of Harvard University Press.
From Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity by Charles Taylor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), © 1989 by Charles Taylor. Reprinted by permission of Harvard University Press.