Daniel O'Connor is the mastermind behind
Catallaxis! - one of the first generation of integral blogs still around on the web. In his most recent post,
A Critical Integralism for the Challenges of Our Time, Daniel (also of
Integral Ventures, LLC)is making available a free, creative commons licensed, e-book on critical integral theory.
Daniel O'Connor | Integral Ventures, LLC
This work represents an inquiry into the essential nature of human action in all its forms and fields. By human action, I mean to suggest a rather comprehensive scope of inquiry into anything and everything people do,
regardless of how conscious or subconscious, purposeful or spontaneous,
independent or interdependent these actions might seem. The myriad
forms of this human doing—from writing, speaking, and
conversing to giving, taking, and trading, to working, playing, and
creating to learning, developing, and evolving—serve as creative
expressions of, and logical complements to, the equally comprehensive
notion of human being. In short, human action encompasses what we do, how we do, why we do, and ultimately who we are as we do.
My approach to the philosophy of human action, or praxiology, might be best described as a process of integral reconstruction. As a reconstruction,
my intent is to clarify and formalize the tacit knowledge and intuitive
competencies that must, logically, be presupposed by all people in
order for them to act in any situation. To whatever extent such
universal presuppositions might be validated, these would, logically,
serve as necessary premises for all subsequent inquiries into, and
hypotheses about, the many fields of human action, from economics and
business to politics and governance to sociology and social work to
journalism and activism. Thus, my focus of inquiry is that intuitive
knowledge without which people could not act as they really do and,
correspondingly, those essential premises without which we cannot know
what human action really is.
As a distinctively integral reconstruction, my intent is to
emphasize those essential premises necessary for a philosophy of human
action that honors the full potential and variety of the human
experience, which necessarily includes our experience of the worlds
beyond humanity. Just as the adjective integral offers us two complementary definitions—comprehensive or essential—so
too does the process of integral theorizing offer us two complementary
approaches with two corresponding results. In contrast to a comprehensivist approach to integralism characterized by the construction of an inspiring, encyclopedic meta-narrative, I prefer an essentialist approach characterized by the distillation of a compelling, universal meta-paradigm.
Nevertheless, by focusing deeply on the quintessential features of all
human action in real-world contexts, I propose in this work the broad
contours of a meta-paradigm—an integral aperspectival-apractical meta-paradigm,
to be precise—with the potential to enact a seemingly infinite
plurality of differential perspectival-practical narratives at least
suggestive of a meta-narrative, the specifics of which are by
definition beyond anyone’s sole capacity to articulate. It is therefore
so much the better that I, at least, won’t be enticed to try.
Therefore, this work actually represents two interdependent lines of inquiry into the possibility of an integral philosophy of human action and an action-oriented integral philosophy.
In pursuing these lines of inquiry, I gratefully incorporate and, where
necessary, reformulate the extraordinary insights of three primary
theorists—Chris Argyris, Jürgen Habermas, and Ken Wilber—whose
collective body of work already contains much of the content needed for
such a reconstructive inquiry. Having engaged with this collective body
of work since 1994, both in theory and in practice, I bring to this
effort a commitment to help fulfill what I see as the latent potential
in each of their brilliant philosophical programs. Granted, in my
preliminary effort to articulate a form of integralism that is as
realistic as it is idealistic and as fallibilistic as it is humanistic,
with a pragmatic focus on the way people can, should, and already do
act in the world, my contribution may be little more than a
clarification of my own novel vision of the nexus between Argyris’s action science, Habermas’s critical theory, and Wilber’s integral theory.
Nevertheless, the logic of this vision and its demonstrated capacity to
reconstruct established views within these fields should justify the
effort required of you, the reader. More to the point, the real promise
of the critical integral praxis I call Awareness-in-Action is
in its potential to define the common core of all the various forms and
fields of human action, so that those of us concerned with such matters
might learn how to respond more effectively to the interdependent
economic, political, social, and ecological challenges of our time.
Click Here to Download
This copyrighted work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
No comments:
Post a Comment