Dialectical Thinking as an Approach to Integration

The Development of Dialectical Thinking as an Approach to Integration

By Michael Basseches

This article offers a description of dialectical thinking as a psychological phenomenon that reflects adult intellectual development. While relating this psychological phenomenon to the various dialectical philosophical perspectives from which the description is derived, the article conceptualizes dialectical thinking as a form of organization of thought, various aspects of which can be identified in individual adults' approaches to conceptualizing a range of problems, rather than as one particular stream of intellectual history.

The article provides a range of examples of dialectical analyses, contrasting them with more formalistic analyses, in order to convey the power, adequacy, and significance of dialectical thinking for the sorts of challenges that this journal embraces. It suggests that events in all areas of life demand recognition of the limitations of closed-system approaches to analysis. Approaches based instead on the organizing principle of dialectic integrate dimensions of contradiction, change and system-transformation over time in a way that supports people's adaptation when structures under girding their sense of self/world coherence are challenged. Higher education and psychotherapy are considered as examples of potential contexts for adult intellectual development, and the conditions that foster such development in these contexts are discussed.

The article as a whole makes the case for consciously attempting to foster such development in all our work as an approach to integration.

Read the Entire Paper Here: Integral Review - Issue 1 (2005)

New Evolutionary Landscapes

The Mountain Path, or New Evolutionary Landscapes

by Jeremy Johnson

Excerpt: We've fragmented our consciousness. But in a more multi-dimensional vision of human evolution, perhaps to fragment is also to venture towards a new whole.

Evolutionary cycles tend to go through relatively stable periods, followed by chaotic extinctions, from which life bounces back in new complex wholes.

It may be that the cosmos has a universe pull, a natural tendency to work in such an archetypal pattern of expansion and contraction. Teilhard believed it was the force of love that pulled us into greater complexity and consciousness, the force of the future itself, tugging life like the moon does the sea. Perhaps in the mind of an angel, the future and the past are not divided by the linear arrow of human time, but instead overlap and fold upon each other so that they are interpenetrating and intersecting at infinity. The eternal and the temporal are woven right into each other, so that our dimension is merely nested in infinity.

In the course of human evolution, many of us are theorizing and speaking about "evolving ourselves." But if we want to dance with the angels on the head of a pin, we are going to have to begin to think like angels ourselves. How are we going to speak of multidimensionality without beginning to at least open up to it?

Read More @ Single Eye Movement

Integral Theory Conference - Enacting an Integral Future

It seems William Harryman of the outstanding Integral Options Café blog is the official blogger for the 2nd biannual Integral Theory Conference that began tonight July 29, 2010 in Pleasant Hill, California. The theme of the conference is ‘Enacting an Integral Future’ and it will continue until August 1, 2010.

Because Bill is, to our minds, one of the best bloggers out there, please visit his site and follow along as he, no doubt, will provide regular and insightful dispatches from the goings-on in Pleasant Hill.

From Integral Options Café:

Have you ever been to a conference and had the feeling that everyone is so enthusiastic about the topic or the theory? There's a kind of celebratory atmosphere - that's what the opening ceremony tonight for the Integral Theory Conference generated in the attendees.

It's contagious. [Although not for me, I'm very tired - sleep is contagious for me, so I apologize for any typos or errors in this.]

But tonight's presentation was more than cheer-leading, or celebrating - both Mark and Sean described this as the "get to work" conference, while the 2008 iteration was the "get to know each other" conference.

To that end, Sean Esbjorn-Hargens, Mark Forman, and David Zeitler (a core faculty member at JFKU), each spoke on the defining and differentiating of integral theory that has been occurring in the absence of new work from Ken Wilber (whose illness prevents him from finishing several books that are 2/3 complete).

Follow William’s Reports: HERE