Proto-Phenomenology in the Early Modern Eastern Tradition

This post continues the series on the historical development of proto-phenomenology and intersubjective thought and methodology from ancient times to the present.  You might want to start with the post on proto-phenomenology in the ancient and medieval Eastern world if you haven’t already.

Most of the philosophical groundwork for Eastern Philosophy was established in what we can now consider to be ancient times.  The distinction between “ancient”, “medieval”, and “modern” is based largely on a Western conception of the historical development of society, culture, and ideology, but these terms do have analogous meanings in the Eastern world in a certain sense.  The so-called axial age, wherein societies grew into larger civilizations and were forced to confront new challenges and had to come up with more comprehensive worldviews and lifeways than had previously been available, occurred at roughly the same time within the Eastern and Western worlds.  This period started from approximately 600 BC and lasted until perhaps around 400 AD, and this includes the rise and initial development of most of the major world religions, spiritual traditions, and philosophical foundations, including those of the Eastern and Western worlds.  Although there are human developments older than the axial age, what came out of these centuries is most relevant to this project and thus this is what we are referring to with the term “ancient”.  We can call “medieval” that which occurred thereafter, wherein these religions, traditions, and philosophies were further developed and refined, and this age came to an end with the rise of globalization and the advent of modern science in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.

We can consider anything that occurred after that to be “modern”, all the way up to the present day.  There is, however, a somewhat arbitrary distinction that we can make between “early modern” and “late modern”.  In the West, we’ll consider “early modern” to end somewhere in the middle of the Nineteenth Century because that is when several intellectual movements started that are relevant to the development of phenomenology.  In the East, “early modern” probably lasts until these practices were first integrated with Western philosophy and science so as to produce the spiritual and transpersonal approaches to psychology.  Thus, we can consider Early Modern Eastern philosophy to go from approximately the Seventeenth Century through the early Twentieth Century.

This period of Eastern philosophy is situated centuries after the main texts of Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism were written and also after multiple levels of derivative interpretation and commentary were also formulated.  It is after the Age of Discovery, but before Western culture became more or less ubiquitous throughout the world and before modern science became the predominant mode of maintaining political, economic, and military power.

This period can be characterized mostly by the continuation of the classical religious and spiritual movements mentioned above and their further development within the context of special organizations such as monasteries, sanghas, ashrams, and retreat centers.  These were driven by masters, who would train initiates in the time-honored traditions, rituals, and philosophical frameworks.  There were masters who taught students how to gain better control over their minds and how to raise to higher levels of consciousness.  All of this occurred in ancient and medieval times as well, but each generation had the potential to improve upon the practices of the past and to develop ways of achieving the even deeper levels of mindfulness and even greater self-transcendence than had previously been possible.  These masters would often say that their practices were ancient and that they were only continuing traditions that were developed long ago by the founding sages, but there was some development and refinement and further explorations of the possibilities of altered states of consciousness that had never been practiced before in ancient or even in medieval times.  The vibrant schools that did these things and developed these transformative practices in more detail and got results in exploring consciousness and expanding human potential and the most notable instances of this occurred in the generations immediately prior to the integration with modern science.

The innovations that occurred in this region of the world and in this general time period were not often published, but they were beyond what one could learn merely from reading.  The abilities are not entirely captured in the ancient scriptures nor in the medieval commentaries.  These were practices that you pretty much had to be physically present for and you had to learn from masters from within those institutions.  The early modern Western world, wherein science was being developed, modern infrastructure was being built, innovative governance methods were being conceived, and socio-cultural changes were rapidly occurring, could not have handled practices like these, at least not out in the open.  It would not have been possible for this stuff to have been out in the wild of the rest of the world during the early modern period since they would have been altered beyond recognition.  These practices had to be refined and developed further within these Eastern institutions, which were sometimes, though not always, esoteric in nature.

There are some specific thinkers and advancements in theory in practice that are worth mentioning here.  In Japan, Zen master Hakuin Ekaku systemized, categorized, and created a rigorous training program around the numerous koans, which usually take the form of dialogues, questions, or statements and which are used to provoke a student’s progress in the Zen tradition.  Hakuin said that enlightenment could be achieved through great faith, great doubt, great determination.  In Tibet, the Great 5th Dalai Lama established the unity of spiritual, religious, and political life with ritual connection to the Buddha and a special connection to nature as the way to achieve enlightenment.  The Hindu practices of yoga, Vedanta, and Tantra had also continued from ancient times, and in the early Twentieth Century, Sri Aurobindo systematized these practices and further developed methods for achieving altered states of consciousness in his Integral Yoga.

Photo by Justin Merced on Unsplash

0 Read More

Proto-Phenomenology in the Early Modern Western Tradition

This post continues the series on the historical development of proto-phenomenology and intersubjective thought and methodology from ancient times to the present.  You might want to start with the post on proto-phenomenology in the ancient and medieval Western world if you haven’t already.

Starting in the Seventeenth Century, the development of Western Civilization started accelerating with the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment.  There were many factors that were rapidly changing society and the major thinkers of this era attempted to break free from ancient and medieval belief systems that had become stale and sterile.  New ways of thinking were being developed, and this included the focus on observation and analysis of the mind and of mental processes, often from a first-person point of view.  Some of the most significant thinkers of this era engaged in proto-phenomenological thinking, analysis, and discourse so as to better understand the nature of consciousness and the foundations of knowledge itself.

Some commentators have argued that Galileo, one of the fathers of modern science, also had proto-phenomenological lines of reasoning in his work.  Galileo gave reasons for why science should only be concerned with phenomena that are objectively measurable, such as the size, shape, location, and motion of objects, and subsequent scientific research has largely followed the broad framework that he outlined.  His work also included some descriptions of his inner world, which served to help readers in following his line of reasoning and also as a first step to identifying the things within our inner world, things that we experience regularly, that are also a part of the outer world because they can be objectively measured, explained, predicted, and controlled through replicable experiments.  It was necessary for him to first set the scene with his first person descriptions, which included some things that his audience can easily relate to, in order to then focus on a narrower scope of things that are quantifiable and that can be studied scientifically.  His descriptions of the inner world and its relation to the outer world were useful for some people who were trying to understand the scientific method.

Rene Descartes is one who was questioning the foundation of knowledge and how it is possible that he could know anything with utter certainty.  As detailed in his Meditations, he realized that he could doubt nearly everything.  Indeed, he could doubt the existence of the physical world in its entirety.  When he began to introspect, this is where he found something that he could not doubt: that he was thinking.  He realized that if he tried to doubt that he was thinking that this very act of doubting would then be another thought and so he realized that he had absolute certainty of some of the events that were occurring within his own mind.  He then used this foundational knowledge to realize that he exists, since there must be a thing that does the thinking, and that this thing is himself.  This led him to the famous dictum cogito ergo sum, which means “I think, therefore I am”.  Descartes’ line of reasoning that led to the cogito has been criticized by many, and indeed there are many questions of selfhood and personal identity that he takes for granted and that deserve to be analyzed on their own terms, but it is very significant that he realized that he could have utter certainty of something that he is clearly and directly experiencing within his own mind.  There are undoubtedly similarities between Descartes’ work and some schools of Eastern philosophy, notably the process of meditation that begins with universal skepticism and then involves the use of introspection so as to achieve a clear realization of the self.  Although the evidence of a causal link between the two is scant, it is interesting to speculate that he might somehow have been influenced by Yogic or Daoist or Buddhist philosophy.

As the scientific revolution was underway, people began to more seriously consider the differences between reality and appearances.  These sort of questions can only be adequately addressed through a careful consideration of what bits of knowledge might be objective vs. subjective, the latter of which can often become intersubjective knowledge when scientifically and philosophically minded people discuss these matters and come to a better understanding of the relation between conscious experience and the external world.  John Locke was one of the first of this era to emphasize the question of reality vs. appearance.  He hypothesized a conceptual distinction between primary and secondary qualities, in which the primary are properties of objects that are independent of any observer, such as solidity, extension, motion, number and figure, while the secondary are properties that produce sensations in observers, such as color, taste, smell, and sound.  And so we can see that Locke’s primary/secondary distinction is largely analogous to the objective/intersubjective distinction.  For Locke to make a judgment as to which qualities are primary or secondary, he had to rely in part on reflections of his own conscious experience and then to generalize his findings so as to produce hypotheses with regards to how the mind works.  In continuation of this proto-phenomenology, his hypotheses were then analyzed and scrutinized by successors including George Berkeley and David Hume, who then underwent their own explorations and formulated alternative hypotheses regarding the relation between reality and appearances.  Berkeley provided thought experiments that involve empirical analysis and that rely on descriptions of phenomena (sensory data) and how the supposed objects that we tend to think of as external to consciousness inevitably are constantly changing and are entirely relative to our minds.  Likewise, Hume analyzed empirical data and sensory data, but he came to more skeptical conclusions as to our ability to apprehend reality through our senses, given what he saw as the inherent limitations of our minds.

Immanuel Kant became familiar with some broadly diverse opinions regarding the relation between reality and appearances, some of which he found quite reasonable, and he sought to synthesize them into a more comprehensive worldview.  He began his career using the methodological framework of Gottfried Leibniz, which involved speculative metaphysics without much use of introspection and dressed up as systematic proofs, but Kant realized the inherent dogmatism in such approaches.  Instead, Kant’s methodology is partially based on the logical analysis of the experiential terms we commonly use (like time, space, order, unity, manifold, dream, apprehension, rule-governed, representation, temporal, succession, synthesized, imagination, produced, reproduce, enduring, identity, etc.) and trying to figure out, in complex and often disjointed detail, what things must exist in order to facilitate our experiences as such.  He asked his audience to consider what are the necessary conditions for these types of experiences, including the ability to perceive and to conceptualize things.  Kant formulated a novel solution to these related questions, which is known as transcendental idealism.  This is the hypothesis that we only have access to our immediate experiences (the phenomena), and the reality that lies outside of our consciousness (the noumenon) is not knowable.  Kant figured 1) that we have innate structures in our minds that determine our experience of time, space, substance, causality, and necessity and 2) that somehow these interact with any noumenon that might exist external to our minds and 3) that the product of this interaction is our immediate experience.  Kant argued that this experience is all we will ever know and that we will not be able to know the nature of the noumenon with regards to time nor space nor causality, etc.

It was in Kant’s time that the word “phenomenology” began to be commonly used in philosophical contexts, although it had a different meaning than the one Husserl and his successors would later assign to it.  According to A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism: “During the Nineteenth Century, the word denoted a descriptive as opposed to a hypothetical or analytic approach to a problem”.[i]  But there is similarity between these different senses, since in most cases one would not be able to adequately approach a problem descriptively unless they are describing raw data from immediate experience.  Kant’s immediate successors went back to relying heavily on metaphysical speculation and the construction of grand systems that were far outside of any possible first-person experience, and they would sometimes consider their own work to be phenomenological.  A prominent example of this is Phenomenology of Spirit by Georg Hegel, which puts forth a complex and rather whimsical system of absolute idealism, with associations to logic, historical analysis, sociology, and political science.  Hegel’s work is comprehensive, but his system of dialectical logic has been criticized as fundamentally illogical and most of his assertions are also lacking in any kind of empirical evidence.  Arthur Schopenhauer attempted to return to transcendental idealism, but his version equates the noumenon with a blind and insatiable metaphysical will.  Thus, he saw the phenomenal world that we directly experience as being a product of this will.  Schopenhauer’s work was speculative and not very phenomenological, but his emphasis on the will and on desires and insatiable drives did serve as food for thought for later generations of existentialist thinkers.

Each of these Early Modern Western philosophers found the need to describe their conscious experience to some extent in their works and they mixed these descriptions with their reasoned arguments for epistemology and metaphysics so as to formulate generalized hypotheses or theories that their readership could relate to.  These thinkers did practice forms of proto-phenomenology, but they did not emphasize their first-person descriptions of consciousness as much as the mature phenomenologists did, nor were they very systematic or methodical about this aspect of their work.

[i] Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism, p. 2.

0 Read More

Proto-Phenomenology in the Ancient and Medieval Eastern World

Based on the generalized definition of proto-phenomenology given in the prior post, we can find very rich examples of this in Eastern Philosophy as well.  In fact, we can say that the so-called “mindfulness revolution” started in the ancient Eastern world.  The Eastern philosophical tradition is geographically centered in both India and China and also the nearby countries whose culture is heavily influenced by one or both of these two cultural epicenters.  By contrast, the Western world includes the Middle East, Europe, and Northern Africa.  Eastern philosophy is quite diverse and is probably best understood in terms of the different philosophies that emerged and developed since ancient times within religious and spiritual traditions of Hinduism, Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism (the latter can best be described as quasi-religious, but has a religious dimension nonetheless).  There was certainly some degree of borrowing and cross-pollination of ideas among these philosophical traditions, and there is also significant diversity of opinions within each of these four, but we can nonetheless approach this by analyzing each of them individually.  Of these four, it is quite evident that Hinduism, Daoism, and Buddhism each have their own schools of meditation, introspection, and reflection for the purpose of developing greater understanding of what might (or might not) be called the self and its relation to the greater whole.  Confucianism is the only one of the four that does not seem to involve much proto-phenomenology, except insofar as Neo-Confucianism borrows from Daoism and Buddhism.  As such, we will focus more closely on the unique proto-phenomenological innovations and practices that are evident within each of the other three.

It is likely that the oldest proto-phenomenology in the world can be found within certain versions of Hindu philosophy, and the best examples of this can be seen in some of the Upanishads and also in the Yoga Sutra, which is the philosophy that underlies the practice of Yoga, which involves both mental and physical processes acting in unison.  A prominent example is the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, known to be one of the earliest to have been composed, which states that one perceives and understands the true self (atman) as a result of being calm and concentrated.  The earliest method of yoga is described in the Maitri Upanishad, and this involves breath control, withdrawal of the senses, meditation, concentration, inquiry, and absorption.  The “eight limbed” or “raja” yoga is codified in the Yoga Sutra and it defines yoga as cessation of mental fluctuations.  This is accomplished through the following: ethics and personal restraint, discipline, posture, breath control, sense withdrawal, concentration, meditation, absorbed concentration, and this process culminates with the sense of “I”.  According to An Introduction to Hinduism, the three most important features of yoga philosophy, as it relates to the exploration of consciousness and what we can consider to be a certain type of proto-phenomenology, are: 1) Yoga is a discipline or range of disciplines, constructed to facilitate the transformation of consciousness, 2) Consciousness can be transformed through focusing attention on a single point, and 3) The transformation of consciousness eradicates limiting, mental constraints or impurities such as greed and hate.

Daoist practice also often involves systematized meditation that can be understood as form of proto-phenomenology.  This involves concentration, observation, and visualization.  Introducing Daoism provides the following analysis:

The earliest form of Daoist meditation described in the texts is a form of concentration: the quietest simplicity encouraged by the Dao De Jing, which comes with a general withdrawal of the senses and a reduction of mental input.

This book goes on to describe what can be called mindfulness or awareness meditation as:

…a form of practice that encourages openness to all sorts of stimuli and leads to a sense of free-flowing awareness.  It often begins with the recognition of physical sensations and subtle events in the body but may also involve paying attention to outside occurrences.  Early Daoist examples of this practice appear in the Zhuangzi, which describes the fasting of the mind as a replacing of ordinary sensory patterns with pure qi-mentation and sketches of practice of sitting in oblivion with its complete forgetfulness of self and others.[1]

Buddhism started the emphasis on understanding the mind as the most important path toward peace.  The Dhammapada, which is one of the most central Buddhist texts, says that the mind is the greatest ally and the greatest enemy.  The most notable versions of Buddhist philosophy and practice feature ways of provoking the mind to enable self-transcendence and open a path to enlightenment.  One notable innovation within Buddhist meditation is the strong emphasis on how one must release their desires in order to achieve enlightenment.

Buddhism was undoubtedly based in part on Hinduism (where some aspects were embraced and others were rejected) and there are varieties of Buddhism that were also influenced by Daoism.  There are several schools and movements within Buddhism that involve meditation.  This includes vipassana, which is a form of meditation that seeks insight into the true nature of reality, and samatha, which is a meditative practice that aims for tranquility of the mind.  Yogacara is a school of Buddhism that emphasizes consciousness through which one supposedly realizes the non-self.  Yogacara promotes the viewpoint that all conceptions of the world are constructed arbitrarily and that fundamentally all of the little bits of perception are not inherently connected.  Within this school “…perception is regarded as essentially a process of imagining, in which the mind generates mental constructions that are perceived as a world”.  Buddhism also features 37 “qualities that contribute to awakening”, which are understood to be useful for meditation, and are grouped into 7 sets.[2]  The Zen tradition involves special transmission of methods, practices, and ideas outside of the scriptures and with no dependence upon words or letters.  The highest truth is considered to be inexpressible and communication is often either non-verbal or uses nonsensical statements to indirectly convey ideas.

Some commentators have analyzed Eastern philosophy and compared it to Twentieth Century Western phenomenology and came to the conclusion that there former includes examples of fully developed phenomenology no less than the latter and that thus it does not deserve the “proto” prefix that we are using herein.  The comparison can again be made to protoscience (what we would retroactively refer to as such), which was practiced in a haphazardly and did not achieve reliable results.  When more systematic and methodological forms of scientific practice were developed and could generate reliable results, this then became modern science, or simply “science” (with no prefixes or qualifiers). The line of reasoning is that some schools within Eastern philosophy should be considered to be fully-fledged phenomenology because they are methodological and because they can provide reliable results.  This point does seem to have merit and we do want to avoid being Western-centric, but most published definitions of the philosophical and methodological sense of “phenomenology will refer to the work of Edmund Husserl and his successors.  This definition of “phenomenology” (with no prefixes or qualifiers) is problematic, but at least we have “proto-phenomenology” as an adequate term that allows us to refer to schools of thought that are functionally similar to some Husserlian and/or post-Husserlian phenomenology, but that were composed before his time.

[1] Kohn, Livia Introduction to Daoism, p. 138-14. Routledge, 2009.

[2] Harvey, Peter. An Introduction to Buddhism, p. 321. Cambridge University Press, 2013.

0 Read More

Proto-Phenomenology in the Ancient and Medieval Western World

Phenomenology is usually considered to have begun in the early Twentieth Century with the work of Edmund Husserl, but the central ideas had already been in development by earlier thinkers.  Meditative practices and intersubjective philosophical discourse can perhaps be seen as proto-phenomenology, and these are as old as recorded human history.  Indeed, we find much of this in ancient Greece, India, and China, and we have evidence that these early schools of thought did influence the development of mature phenomenology.  Just as there was some degree of physical and biological protoscience in these ancient and medieval times and places, likewise there were very early developments in intersubjective inquiry in Eastern and Western philosophy that we can recognize as relying on similar lines of reasoning as we currently use as we seek to understand the structures of consciousness.  The following subsections will broadly cover proto-phenomenology as it developed in different regions of the world through ancient, medieval, and early modern times.

Proto-phenomenological lines of reasoning might be as old as language itself, but our records would only go back as far as recorded philosophical works that made their way down to us.  The earliest examples that we can find of self-reflective thought come from inscriptions on temples from ancient Egypt that essentially say “know thyself”, which is one of the simplest and most famous maxims in all of philosophy.  A few isolated inscriptions notwithstanding, Western philosophy is usually understood to have originated with the ancient Greeks, and indeed we can find some proto-phenomenology in some of the most influential works of this period.  These philosophers applied their thought, inquiry, and discourse to all aspects of life and to everything that they encountered.  They analyzed a broad diversity of subjects, including the natural world, the heavenly bodies, living things, logic, rhetoric, ethics, fundamental causes, and the nature of being itself.  As they were thinking, conscious beings, it is quite natural that they would also have turned their inquiry inward, so as to try to understand the essential structures of consciousness itself.  And as they were a part of communities of people who had inner feelings, interests, and needs, it is natural that their discourse would have attempted to develop and refine their understanding of the inner experiences of their interlocutors and how all of this relates to the natural world in which they lived.

Plato and Aristotle are the two giants of ancient Greek philosophy because of their prolific and extremely influential works on a wide variety of topics.  If we look carefully then we can find examples of proto-phenomenology in their works.  Several commentators have compiled comprehensive overviews of Plato’s and Aristotle’s philosophy and we can start with a certain consensus interpretation for this assessment.   Although the examples of proto-phenomenology in these works are admittedly rather scarce, the fact that we do find examples of introspection and intersubjectivity in the works of the most influential classical writers gives more weight to the notion that such lines of reasoning are at least as old as classical philosophy.

On the face, Plato’s worldview is quite antithetical to empiricism.  At times he seems rather confused regarding the relation between sense perception and knowledge, wishing to acknowledge that things in nature are constantly in a state of flux and that language is inherently imperfect and that perception is not reality because the mind must reflect on impressions to attempt to apprehend existence.  At times he seems to say that all knowledge is remembrance of things previously known and at times it seems he allows some form of knowledge from perception indirectly, but on this point he is inconclusive.  There are instances where he seems to allow that firsthand experience leads to new knowledge, such as in his famous analogy involving the prisoners in the cave who can see only shadows, wherein one of them escapes and is then able to experience the broader world for the first time.  In regard to knowledge of abstractions, he says that comparison, understanding of number, and knowledge of existence are essential to any more concrete knowledge and he acknowledges that such universal knowledge could not come from perception through any sense organ.  One interpretation of Plato is that he is arguing that such knowledge is understood to come to mind as a result of some inner experience(s) such as introspection and reflection.  If so, then this could perhaps be an example of proto-phenomenological thinking.

Aristotle’s work is partially reliant on empiricism and also includes much metaphysical analysis and speculation in a haphazard sort of manner that can now be considered a type of protoscience.  His work On the Soul is a prominent example of this, as it includes theories regarding the causes of biological and psychological phenomena.  Since these theories are partially based on psychological self-descriptions, we can also consider this work to include some proto-phenomenology.  The analysis of the categories of being given in Aristotle’s Metaphysics can be interpreted as an analysis of the essential building blocks of thought and how these can correspond to philosophical logic.  If so, then this would certainly be another example of attempts to build and refine intersubjective knowledge in Aristotle’s work.  In addition, his Nicomachean Ethics can be seen as having proto-phenomenological underpinnings because the ethical theory given therein depends upon the connection between first-person experience and moral judgments, since one would have to know their own emotions in order to be able to judge how these play into the doctrine of the golden mean.

We can likewise find examples of proto-phenomenological thinking in slightly later Greek language works from classical antiquity.  Euclid’s geometric axioms are fundamental to everything given within the Elements and these were not themselves derived logically but instead they were given and justified on the grounds of personal experience.  And so the implication is that one has intuitive understanding of these axioms on the basis of their own intuitive understanding, which can be seen as being derived from the structures of first-person conscious experience that is common to all.

A central element taught by ancient Stoic philosophers is to understand one’s own emotions so that they can be controlled.  In general, the Stoics taught that the path to happiness can be found when one accepts each moment as it presents itself and by not allowing oneself to be controlled by the desire for pleasure nor the fear of pain.  They key is to use one’s mind to understand nature and to live in harmony with it and to cooperate with others to maintain fairness and justice.  The philosophy of Stoicism teaches people to calmly survey their own emotional landscape and to develop emotional intelligence so that they can find ways of acting more rationally.  As Marcus Aurelius said, “These are the characteristics of the rational soul: self-awareness, self-examination, and self-determination. It reaps its own harvest…It succeeds in its own purpose…”.  We can recognize any effort to develop emotional intelligence as being in the realm of intersubjectivity.

Medieval Islamic philosophy also featured many examples of intersubjective thinking.  The geographical extent of the term “Western world” sometimes varies based on the context.  Herein, this term is understood to include the Middle East and all philosophy that was a product of the Islamic civilization.  If we consider the culture and philosophy of the classical Islamic civilization, there is no doubt that it is heavily inspired by ancient Greek philosophy, and the influences from ancient Indian or Chinese philosophy is far less significant or even unnoticeable.  Thus, as far as the development of philosophy goes, the Islamic civilization is considered Western.

The most influential Islamic philosophers of Medieval times were Avicenna and Averroes, both of whom were very heavily influenced by Aristotle and who were both known for interpreting and expanding on earlier works.  As with Aristotle, some of the work of these philosophers can be seen as proto-phenomenological.  For example, Avicenna came up with a thought experiment that involves imagining one’s self outside of one’s body and still having self-consciousness.  This is a certain way of going about proto-phenomenology that is a sort of precursor to Descartes’ cogito.  Averroes took Aristotle’s On the Soul and further emphasized the psychology of it, giving more firsthand experiential accounts and descriptions of thoughts and feelings that can be seen as further attempts to develop intersubjective knowledge.

In the Sufi variant of Islamic thought, there were writers such as Rumi who came up with a theory of the stages of moral and intellectual development.  This includes: 1) the commanding self, 2) the regretful self, 3) the inspired self, 4) the contented self, 5) the pleased self, 6) the self pleasing to God, 7) the pure self.  Within this system, at level 3 one is able to begin to introspect just a very little and in the later stages this happens more and more, and a greater reality can be understood.  This can perhaps be seen as a precursor to aspects of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, specifically to the transcendental reduction and to introspection and reflection.

In Medieval Europe, Scholastic philosophy was derived largely from the works of Plato and Aristotle and was heavily based on the interpretation and commentary of the Islamic philosophers that immediately preceded it.  In many ways, Scholastic philosophy was conservative and did not break much new ground.  Certainly, in the realm of proto-phenomenology, this era of Western philosophical development was less innovative than those that had come before it, but there were some advancements from among the Scholastics that proved influential in more recent times.  Notably, they are credited with coming up with the notion of intentionality, which is one’s mental disposition towards something.  Since intentionality involves the relation between the conscious mind and external reality, this analysis can be seen as an example of proto-phenomenology.

0 Read More

My Recent Talk with Gregg Henriques about Social Science and UTOK

A few days ago, I spoke with Dr. Gregg Henriques about the “Unified Theory of Knowledge” and what efforts are in progress to close one of the two sides of the so-called “enlightenment gap”. I wrote about this in a post a few months ago. Gregg frames the enlightenment gap as having two sides: first, that the age of enlightenment and the scientific revolution never adequately defined the field of psychology and the concept of mind and second, that these movements also failed to provide adequate, coherent, reliable, and broadly encompassing social sciences.

Many people, including myself, believe that Gregg has pretty much nailed the first half of this, especially with his collaboration with other notable psychologists such as John Vervaeke. These people seem to have constructed a framework that makes sense of psychology and the mind over and above any that was previously put forth.

I like how UTOK has key ideas for showing the unity of knowledge and how he planes of existence are related to each other (matter, life, mind, culture) and how there are these 4 main branches of science corresponding to each one (physical, biological, psychological, social). Several of the key ideas expand the mind plane (7 of the 8, since one of them is the TOK overall) and include graphics and diagrams explaining the basics of how the human mind works and how the mind plane is related to the adjacent planes of life and of culture. That would be BIT and JUST respectively. I like how this integrates various psychological theories and shows how there is some truth to many of them, including behaviorism, psychoanalysis, cognitive science, and certain conceptions of phenomenology, and these are brought together into a coherent and seemingly comprehensive system.

The key ideas of UTOK are great, but I think that the culture plane of existence could have its own set of key ideas.  The social sciences cover our interactions with each other and the 3rd person sociological, anthropological, political, and economic knowledge of the world in which we live. I figure that each of the other 3 planes probably deserve their own set of key ideas. For matter and for life, there are people out there who would be qualified to put together such lists.

For culture, which corresponds to the social sciences, I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit and I want to know if anyone has put together a list of potential key ideas, which perhaps somewhere down the line could be narrowed down to something like 8-10 key ideas, each with their own diagram, that would essentially explain the basics of human culture and society. UTOK has the Justifications Systems Theory, but that alone does not fully explain all of the nuances of culture, language, politics, and economics. I think we would need this to further close the second half of the enlightenment gap.

I imagine this would likely start with a list that would include different models put forth by different thinkers of recent decades. There would be some overlap and some competing ideas in there, but perhaps a qualified working group of experts could synthesize these models and produce this short list to comprehensively and coherently make sense of human culture and society. This way, we could use this as a starter course for people to understand the cultural, economic, and political systems that they are living in and that are going on all around them. And some of these people might then be able to participate in the efforts to address societal issues and work toward improvement. We want this to be intelligible and useful for community and society development and in addressing social pathologies and in society-wide therapy.

Here is the short list of culture plane “key ideas”:

  • De jure vs. de facto language games, since it explains the difference between mere sociology and economics and politics (note that this connects into BIT and JUST). This connects into the notions of legitimacy, justice, and interacting with an institution or transpersonal organization.  This is partially driven by the dynamics of our innate moral algorithms, known as moral foundations theory, as articulated by Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind.  This includes purity, harm, fairness, authority, loyalty, and liberty.  Context shifts across different algorithms for morality account for irrationality and emotion hacking and power differentials.
  • Sara Ness’ recently published Relating Languages hypothesis, since it explains the roles people play in conversations and the relation to behavior. Note that this is related to personality theory.  https://ness-sara.medium.com/the-relating-languages-or-why-we-dont-all-just-get-along-a523576543a5
  • Basic micro-economic supply and demand stuff, which connects into aspects of UTOK. This would include basic notions of rational self-interest and game theory dynamics.
  • A macro-economic model showing the relationship between businesses, governments, markets, resources, and individuals. Perhaps this https://media.springernature.com/original/springer-static/image/chp%3A10.1007%2F978-3-030-26626-4_5/MediaObjects/469869_1_En_5_Fig7_HTML.png or this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macroeconomics#/media/File:Circulation_in_macroeconomics.svg.  This would inform choices such as where do we expend resources and how much long term vs. short term consideration do we have.  This would also include considerations for resource usage, growth, sustainability, etc.  This is related to how Kate Raworth speaks of four fundamental mechanisms in the economy: the market, the state, the household, and the commons.
  • Spiral dynamics, since it explains the way societies develop and the relation to individual development. This also connects to Max Weber’s sources of legitimate authority, which are traditional, rational-legal, and charismatic.
  • Lene Rachel Andersen’s Bildung Rose, which includes aesthetics, production, technology, science, ethics, and narrative and how these are all connected to power. This also has connections to Tomas Bjorkman’s 3 main measures of society (fairness, efficiency, meaning).  In other words, just as we can identify the primary personality traits of a person and the developmental lines, there might also be such phenomena with regard to cultures, societies, nations, and civilizations.  This would also be dynamic, as it would explain how communities and nations in poverty cycles vs. middle class vs. wealthy can improve and develop or, in some cases, regress.
  • Francis Fukayama’s theory of political development and political decay depending on 3 factors: a competent administrative state, a robust rule of law, and accountability that is often in the form of democracy. All of these lie in the collective imaginary.  This is related to the question of what is an institution, what is a collective imaginary institution, how does it get established, how do we interact with it, and a greater explanation of how the law is implemented within bureaucracy and the political system as it depends upon people’s ingrained behavior patterns, people watching each other to make sure they follow rules, and the written records that determine what has happened and what should happen.  Elected officials, bureaucrats, judges, lawyers, and voters have some influence over this, but their influence is limited because it drives off what is written across many sources and what people believe and how they interact with what they read.  This is what people refer to when they talk of complex and entrenched social organizations being “the machine”.
  • I couldn’t find this anywhere, but I imagine someone has already published on this: Perhaps there would also need to be something analogous to the influence matrix because societies have this tradeoff between freedom and security and whether to be more active or more passive and this can take into account the impact on the inner group and outer groups and this sort of consideration is constantly happening for political leaders in how to respond to perceived threats and how to engage in diplomacy and what to prioritize domestically. This could perhaps be related to ethnic group in-group/out-group dynamics explained in Mark Moffett’s book The Human Swarm.
  • The socio-cultural dynamics explained in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, which explains the structural functional organization in society necessary for ideas and trends to go viral.
  • Joseph Tainter’s civilizational rise and collapse lifecycle.
  • Social class conflict dynamics along the lines of some neo-Marxist theories, which probably explains some things, but only to a limited extent because there are so many other dynamics at play.

I’m only listing these as candidates that might be considered for an eventual set of key ideas to make sense of the culture plane of existence. We can note that several of these existing theories would lead to competing truth claims, so they would need to be synthesized somehow. Similar to how Gregg showed how there is some truth to Freud and some truth to Skinner within the greater UTOK, I imagine there might be some truth to the theories put forth by a range of thinkers from Smith to Marx to Fukayama.  Ideally, we could narrow this down to a few key ideas, each of which would have their own diagram, and we could create educational videos and animations explaining how all of these ideas come together in a comprehensive and coherent way to produce the socio-political-economic-cultural landscape that we are living in.  Also, ideally this would be both understandable and inspiring to people and would help people understand the world around them so that they can work to improve it.  I can say that this is how I felt with regard to my own mind after going through the UTOK courses that Gregg put together.  It seems like we could do something similar for this crazy thing we call culture.  If anyone knows about similar efforts underway or would like to collaborate with me on anything close to what is described here, please email me brandon@enlightenedworldview.com

0 Read More