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?

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The Limit of Explanation

From Anthropoetics:

The Limit of Explanation: Following the "Why" to its Epistemological Terminus
By Marina Ludwigs

In this essay I will examine the theory and praxis of explanation and demonstrate the unsustainable character of its claims and underlying presuppositions. My involvement in this project stemmed originally from my interest in contributing to a development of a formal methodology in the humanities. The methodology of the sciences is well established today and is based on a set of accepted tenets that serve as guidelines in scientists’ pursuit of theories. As Michael Ruse puts it:

Surveying science and the history of science today, one thing stands out: science involves a search for order. More specifically, science looks for unbroken, blind, natural regularities (laws). Things in the world do not happen in just any old way. They follow set paths, and science tries to capture this fact. Bodies of science, therefore, known variously as ‘theories’ or ‘paradigms’ or ‘sets of models’ are collections of laws (PS 39).

Among the governing principles, scientists single out explanation, prediction, testability, and non-falsifiability as the most salient. Explanation usually comes first, as nearly all scientific quests start as attempts to explain physical phenomena. It has a symmetrical facet--that of prediction. In other words, to understand an empirical phenomenon from a scientific point of view means to have cognizance of a certain law-like physical regularity such that the phenomenon can both be explained and predicted. The distinction between the two activities bears the pragmatic character of what the questioner knows first: that the phenomenon has already occurred--and thus he has to furnish its explanation--or that necessary antecedent conditions obtain--in which case, he can deduce its occurrence. Thus the sight of a baseball flying in the direction of a window makes me anticipate the sound of shattered glass coming closely on its heels, while if I see and hear a window being broken, I immediately start looking for its human or natural source (my familiarity with this phenomenon would include the implicit knowledge of the law of the conservation of momentum and the low shock-resistance of glass).

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Integral Pluralisms and Cultural Pragmatics

I'm not sure if Dallmayr knows of Ken Wilber's work, but there seems to be no mention of the bald bastion of the Trans anywhere... It's truly hard to imagine he wouldn't have at least come accross mention of 'Integral Methodological Pluralism' somehwhere. Very suspicious indeed.

Integral Pluralism: Beyond Culture Wars

by Fred Dallmayr, Integral Pluralism: Beyond Culture Wars, University of Kentucky Press, 2010, 231pp., $40.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780813125718.

Reviewed by Kenneth W. Stikkers, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

In his most recent volume, Integral Pluralism: Beyond Culture Wars, Fred Dallmayr again demonstrates, as he has throughout his distinguished career, his passionate commitment to making ours a more just and peaceful world. His central concern in this work is that, with postmodernism's steady move toward pluralism and emphatic rejection of totalizing monisms of every sort, there is a danger of cosmic incoherence whereby "individual lives likewise become incoherent and unintelligible" (1) and rendered incapable of effective engagement in the world. Dallmayr warns us:

Pluralism harbors a danger that curiously approximates it again to the monistic temptation. Carried to the extreme of radical fragmentation or dispersal, pluralism -- despite its protestations -- shades over into an assembly of fixed and self-enclosed monadic units exhibiting the same monadic units exhibiting the same static quality as its counterpart (8-9).

Such fragmentation, he further suggests, is a major source for today's "culture wars."

As an antidote to radical, atomizing pluralism, and as a middle position between it and tyrannizing monism, Dallmayr offers "integral pluralism," which he finds well exemplified already by classical pragmatists such as John Dewey, but especially by William James in A Pluralistic Universe. Integral pluralism entails "mutual embroilment, interpenetration, and contestation . . . differential entwinement without fusion or segregation" (9). The universe is taken as incomplete, but its pieces maintain real, although sometimes antagonistic, relations to one another. Other, non-Western thinkers whom Dallmayr offers as exemplars of integral pluralism are the philosopher of religion, Raimon Panikkar, whom Dallmayr discusses throughout this volume (and with whom this reviewer was privileged to study), Mahatma Gandhi, who receives a full chapter (Chapter 7), and two other, recently deceased Indian thinkers, little known in the West, Daya Krishna and Ramchandra Gandhi (a grandson of Mahatma Gandhi), who are the central subjects of the concluding chapter (Chapter 8). This reviewer is very appreciative of being made aware of these last two thinkers, and Dallmayr's interesting account of them has prompted him to read them first-hand.

Moreover, each of the above figures, including Dewey, is used to demonstrate the importance of religion for integrative pluralism. The Indian thinkers are especially exemplary because they articulate religious sensibilities that are integrated with the secular, in contrast to Western tendencies toward dualism, and thus steer between the dangers stemming from such dualism, namely, the politicizing of religion on the one hand (e.g., America's religious right and Islamic and Zionist extremisms), and the privatizing of religion and withdrawal into the solitude of religious consciousness, on the other.

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Harryman is Warming to Slavoj Zizek…

From Integral Options Café:

Another festival of Slavoj Zizek articles appeared this weekend, all of it from Europe, where people actually read philosophy. Oh yeah, he's a Marxist, sort of - with a heavy dose of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Hegelian philosophy - so that explains why no one on this continent is paying any attention to him.

Apparently Zizek's 'the world's hippest philosopher,' as the Telegraph UK suggests - or as Der Spiegel claims, 'The Most Dangerous Philosopher in the West.' I get the sense that the person who wrote the Der Speigel article is not a fan…

So, from what I can tell (I really need to read some of his books/articles), Zizek is a social constructionist, and a constructivist - but the construction of self is an empty space, with identity always located somewhere else. And knowing this, as many postmodernists do, their deconstructions and "critiques" of capitalism and society are simply another commodity in the marketplace of ideas.

Anyway, all three articles are in support of Zizek's newest book, Living in the End Times.

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