INTRODUCTION Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 PART II Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 PART III Page 1 Page 2 PART IV Page 1 Page 2 APPENDIX A APPENDIX B NOTES Notes 1-15 Notes 16-35 Notes 36-44 Notes 45-56

Part I. INTRODUCTION--Systems Theory versus Hermeneutics: Why Both Are Important (page 3)

Where Is Ecological Awareness?

     For example, you and I can live next door to each other, but if you speak Serbian and I don't, then you and I do not share much of a cultural "we." In that instance, you are outside my I; you are also outside my circle of friends (or intimate we's); and you are even outside my entire circle of spoken communication--in that regard, you are "all Greek" to me, or outside any we-boundary of mutual understanding. What you and I do share, however, is geographical or physical proximity, and therefore we are both parts of, for example, the same local ecosystem--we share an exterior social system, but not all aspects of an interior culture.

     In other words, it seems pretty obvious that I do not have to share any sort of mutual understanding with my next door neighbor, nor with the insects around me, nor the worms under my house, in order to belong to the same ecosystem.¹⁰ But I do have to share a mutual understanding in order to be a member of a given culture. This is why you and I can both be parts or strands in the same ecosystem web and yet not parts or members of the same culture--that's the difference between LL "membership" and LR "strand-ness"--or the difference between intersubjectivity (shared interiors, shared signifieds) and interobjectivity (shared exteriors, shared signifiers)--again, the difference between hermeneutics and ecology.

     For those used to knowledge by description, or knowledge at a distance (or knowledge by sight), this is often hard to recognize, for the tendency is to want to picture or see culture in terms of simple location in physical space: culture must be somewhere that I can see with my eyes (e.g., culture must be over there by that stream, or by that tree, or the sum total of that stream and that tree and that mountain). Using monological knowledge by sight or distance, the cultural dimensions (and interior dimensions in general) are difficult to prehend, so let's do a "walk-through" on this one.

     It is true that all exteriors have interiors, but those two dimensions don't overlap in physical space, because the interiors do not exist in physical space. Cultural interiors are phenomenologically composed of items such as mutual understanding, shared values, fused horizons, interpretive spaces, shared feelings. While a rock might fall in a gravitational field, mutual understanding does not. Thus, "same geographical space" and "same cultural space" simply do not map in any one-to-one fashion. They are most definitely interrelated (all quadrants are), and it is certainly the case that in the real world, the cultural or collective interiors (the cultural dimensions) always have exterior correlates (or social systems), so that a collective holon is always a sociocultural holon. (The social and cultural dimensions together is what is usually meant by the terms "collective," "communal," or "societal" holon--or a " we/its"; which, of course, is really an I/it/we/its). But the interiors of those holons are not in a phenomenological relation of identity with exteriors, any more than are, say, the weight of a rock and the weight of suffering.

     ("Visual ecology," which relies on exterior perception--and is often found in males--has a harder time understanding interiors than does "prehensive ecology," which relies more on an orientation of felt-connections and touch, and is often found in females. The former relies on third-person modes of inquiry, the latter, on first-person modes. The former is therefore usually seen in deep ecology, systems ecology, and ecomasculinism, the latter in cultural ecology and ecofeminism--which is why ecofeminists have often been sharp critics of systems ecology as being a distancing and abstract affair. Both approaches are important, as we will see, in that one addresses primarily social systems, the other, cultural shared-prehensions. The point for now is that, indeed, they do not agree with each other, because they are intuiting different dimensions of the sociocultural holon, the males typically operating with third-person plural, the females, first-person plural--or, if you will, the exteriors and the interiors of "Gaia.")

     As we were saying, while the interior spaces always have exterior correlates, they do not map onto those correlates in a topological fashion. Even "ecological consciousness," or a concern with the web of life, is itself generated in interior spaces of increasing identity, not exterior spaces of apprehended objects. Precisely because phenomenological "I's" and "we's" do not follow the laws of sensorimotor, exterior, physical, or geographical spaces, you and I can indeed be members of the same ecosystem but not of the same culture. Two human beings can live in the identical ecosystem, but one of them has an awakened ecological awareness and therefore evidences a care and compassion for all sentient beings, while the other human has no such ecological compassion whatsoever--which shows that ecological awareness itself is not a product of ecosystems.

     Nor does this apply only or even especially to humans; the culture of wolves and the social system of wolves are not located in the same phenomenological spaces. The culture of apes and the social system of apes do not follow the same rules--trees and mountains and streams weigh so many kilograms, ideas and values and feelings do not. What many ecologists mean by "living in accord with nature" is not actually living in accord with sensorimotor exteriors, but developing interiors that can have compassion for all exteriors and interiors. But all of these "I" and "we" identifications and affiliations are established by interior identities, values, and shared perceptions--not physical, ecological, or geographical location. They are Left-Hand, not Right-Hand, identities and boundaries, and hence they do not follow the laws of physics or ecology--they don't disobey them, either; they simply do not reside in physical phenomenological spaces.

     (Where do they reside? Well, you tell me: right now you are aware of various I's and we's. Can you point to any of them? Can you point to mutual understanding? Can you point to shared values? Does mutual understanding fall in a gravitational field at the same speed as an apple? Does it fall at all? If having a human being adopt an ecological mode of awareness is not something that can be found in an ecosystem itself--since different people in the same ecosystem do not necessarily share the same values--then where do ecological values and ecological awareness exist? Since a tree does not take the role of other and hence cannot itself develop ecological awareness, what does "thinking like a tree" really mean? If cultural membership cannot be reduced to social strand-ship, then where can I find it? Ecological awareness is not living in accord with all sensorimotor its, but living in solidarity with all sentient I's, an awareness itself not found in any ecosystem as such.)

     We will pursue this relation between collective interiors and collective exteriors at length in the next excerpt, and suggest that any truly "integral ecology" would want to include both. For now, we simply note that most eco-theories, systems theories, and complexity theories unfortunately collapse intersubjectivity into interobjectivity and therefore confuse members with strands--this is one of the major criticisms we will soon explore.

     To return to shared interiors: Several "I's" can be "inside" a "we" (or can be members of a we) if they share a set of values, ideas, linguistic practices, group identities, background contexts, fused horizons, and so on. Of course, there are many different types and degrees of "we's": a familial we, a friendship we, a tribal we, a philosophical we, a workplace we, a national we, a humanitarian we, an all-sentient-beings we, and so on (the higher reaches of Kosmic we-ness or solidarity will be explored below). Likewise, there are sub-cultures within a culture that are outside of "my friends" but still within a larger "we" of, say, our nationality.

     All of those shared interiors involve the extraordinary mystery of how first-person singular "I" and second-person singular "you" enter into a first-person plural "we" (and how "you" as an alien object or "it" become a "thou" in a hermeneutic circle of understanding and care). This is why the extraordinary mystery of a "we" seems to hold the heart of the Kosmos hidden in its embrace....

Insides and Outsides of Exteriors

     When it comes to the exteriors, or the third-person dimensions of being-in-the-world, the insides and outsides of holons are usually easier to spot, simply because they generally do have some sort of mass-energy boundary (either a physical boundary with most individual holons, or a systems boundary with social holons; this includes gross, subtle, and causal mass-energy boundaries; and it includes "information" considered as data bits or "b/its" in a system).¹¹ Here we are indeed talking about physical, geographical, and ecological boundaries--boundaries, more or less, that you can see in the exterior, physical world--such as inside and outside of my physical organism, or inside and outside of a local town, or the inside and outside of a galaxy.

     Those boundaries, of course, are all interdependent. But "interdependent boundaries" does not mean "absence of boundaries"; it means their mutual inter-relatedness. All boundaries are interfaces of both differentiation from the Other and touching or relating to the Other, because all agency is agency-in-communion. But the differentiation is just as important as the relatedness. Complex living organisms have an immune system that recognizes and differentiates self and other; if that immune system breaks down, you do not have a nice mystical oneness but a dead organism. To transcend boundaries is not to break them but include them. Right now we are looking at the natural boundaries themselves and how they autopoietically distinguish themselves from others--in this case, the inside and outside of exterior boundaries.

     The inside of an exterior holon means anything going on inside the boundaries of an (individual or social) holon as seen and described in third-person, exterior, it-language--things like the mitochondria in a cell, the flora and fauna in an ecosystem, the ribonucleic acid in a nucleus, data bits (or "b/its") in an information network, the planets in a solar system, and so on.

     Take the structure and components of your neocortex: your brain is "inside" you (or inside your physical organism), but this inside is described in objective, third-person, exterior terms (such as frontal lobes, neural pathways, serotonin, synaptic reuptake, etc.). If you actually want to see your brain, you have to get a mirror, cut open your skull, and look at your brain (a feat many people find difficult). But you can see your own immediate feelings, images, thoughts--your own mind--right now, simply by feeling your own feelings, your own interior.

     This is the difference between you looked at from an exterior point of view (as an "it" or "organism," with a "brain" inside the "organism," and the "organism" part of an "ecosystem," and so on--all of which are third-person terms and perspectives), and you looked at from an interior point of view (as "I" or "mind" or "feeling"--an immediately present awareness that can only be captured in first-person terms and vantage points). Both are important, but right now we are talking about the exteriors of you, and how those exteriors have insides and outsides.

     The outside of an exterior holon means anything on the outside of that holon's boundary (or external to its autopoietic regime). Outside an individual mitochondria is the rest of the cell. Outside of an individual organism is the local ecosystem. Outside of a social holon (in Luhmann's sense) there are other social holons. Outside of a given ecosystem there are other ecosystems, and so on. Those are all the outsides of the exteriors (all of which are described in third-person singular or plural terms and accessed only via third-person perspectives and modes of inquiry).

     The main examples that we have looked at so far are the insides and outsides of an interior and exterior holon, each of which can be subdivided into singular and plural, giving us the 8 primordial perspectives of figure 2. What we will be doing in the rest of this excerpt is walking through each of these perspectives in a very simple, step-by-step fashion. I realize that for some readers this will be didactic, boring, and repetitious, and for that I apologize in advance. But my experience is that, although these perspectives are already present and already operating in native language speakers, most people only know them in an intuitive, diffuse way, which means that these perspectives are not being utilized in a conscious, explicit fashion, and therefore they tend to, shall we say, cause trouble (especially in philosophers, who should know better). Most people, for example, have never looked closely at what happens when two "I's" come together in a "we," and what a miracle that truly is.

     We will therefore circle back to these primordial perspectives, each time iterating the essentials with a new twist, so that hopefully the wisdom deposited in these naturally occurring perspectives will become consciously available for a more integral methodological pluralism. Once we walk through these, we will be able to return to items such as autopoiesis, systems theory, hermeneutics, meditation, and ecology, and better understand how they relate to each other in a Kosmos that is already allowing them to occur.

We's and Its

     Here is our first brief walkthrough:

     Let's take a simple holon, such as a cell. "Cell" is merely a word, a signifier, for some sort of happening or occasion. From the exterior (or seen from without in a third-person fashion), we call it "cell" and describe what can be seen of it (under a microscope, for example). This exterior cell (which means, the cell and its components seen from without) contains numerous molecules, polymers, organelles, proteins, and so on--in other words, the inside of the cell contains molecules, proteins, organelles, etc.

     But the interior of the cell contains no proteins, molecules, or organelles at all--it contains sensations, prehensions, proto-experiences, rudimentary feelings, and so forth (a la Whitehead, Hartshorne, Leibniz, Buddhism, etc.). The exteriors of cells (UR) are seen and described from a third-person vantage point; but the interiors of cells (UL) are only seen and felt from a first-person (or proto-first-person) perspective: from within (as an "I" or proto-"I"), not from without (as an "it"). So there is the inside of the interior, and the inside of the exterior--and they are quite different (but equally real) phenomenological realities enacted or brought forth by different indigenous perspectives.

     Likewise, the outsides of the exterior cell include its physical environment, its ecosystem, its interobjective networks, the biosphere, and so on. Those can all be seen in the exterior, sensorimotor world. But the outsides of the interior of the cell include other interiors, interiors that do not exist in the exterior or sensorimotor world, but exist only in the phenomenological world of intersubjectivity or inter-interiority.

     We gave an example of this as it appears in humans. "You and I are friends" means that you and I share a "we," it does not mean that we live next door--you can live in Antarctica and still be my good friend. "Next door" is merely the outside of my exterior; but friendship is not a geographical or sensorimotor relationship, but a hermeneutic relationship, a circle of meaning and value--a circle of "we," not a circle of "its," systems, mass, energy, or food chains.

     Thus, when my being-in-the-world is viewed from a third-person perspective, my individuality appears as a biophysical organism with a triune brain and various objective processes, organ systems, neurotransmitters, hormonal communication networks, metabolic pathways, and so on (all of which are simply my existence viewed from a third-person stance, or my existence as I manifest in a third-person mode). When my existence appears in that exterior or third-person mode--which means, as an organism located in sensorimotor or physical space--then outside of my organism are my local physical surroundings, including other nearby organisms, my local ecosystem, and my proximate social system (such as the town in which I reside in my physical or exterior mode). As an individual physical organism I am inside that exterior system--I am inside an "its" or a network of "its"--I am inside a local ecosystem, inside a town, inside a galaxy, and so forth.

     But inside my interiors are feelings, awareness, values, and identities, as well as shared interiors, including you as a friend, wherever you are physically located. We could both be part of the identical biosphere and still not be friends--and you might have a nice ecological consciousness and I have a mean egocentric consciousness, both supported by the same ecosystem. As we have been saying, cultural membership and social strand-ship are located in different dimensions of being. Those dimensions do indeed arise together, but not in physical space; they arise together in the AQAL matrix, whose interior dimensions do not rigidly line up with gravity, trees, towns, or rocks. That is why reducing the world to social and eco systems is to kill culture and consciousness.

     Here is the next step of difficulty in an integral calculus of native perspectives. Whereas the outside of my exterior includes other exteriors (such as my house, my town, my local ecosystem, etc.), the outsides of my interiors involve other interiors.

     We already saw the example of "interior objects," which are outside of my I but still in an interior space. Here is another example: phenomenologically, if I look around my interior spaces of awareness, I will find that outside of my "I" are other "I's" in my culture--other people or cultural members (such as second-person holons--you's or thou's) who can potentially share the same meaning, understanding, and cultural contexts with this first-person holon (or I). When I view these other people in a third-person mode, I can indeed see their bodies or organisms existing "out there" in the exterior or sensorimotor world; however, I cannot see, feel, or find their interiority "out there" in the physical world, because interiority appears or arises (or is enacted) only when I adopt a first-person mode of awareness. After all, out there in the exterior world is that guy, who only speaks Serbian, standing next to you, my long-time friend. I can see both of your bodies in the exterior world, but I can only see or understand your interior or your "I" as part of this inside-we, so that "you," but not "him," are someone that I feel or know from within the hermeneutic circle. "You," as a you, cannot even be seen "out there," which houses only the third-person aspects of our togetherness. Only third persons exist or stand forth in the exterior or sensorimotor world; first persons exist or stand forth only in the interior worlds.

     When any "you" and any "I" have a possibility of reaching a shared or mutual understanding (an intersubjective or cultural event of the LL dimension), then "you" have been converted from an alien or foreign "it" or third-person object (which is merely an outside of my exterior) to a second-person entity, a bearer of consciousness and meaning with whom I am now beginning some sort of communication, dialogue, intersubjective exchange, shared prehension, or mutual feeling.

     You have therefore become a second-person holon who has entered my intersubjective field and thus is no longer an outside in my exterior space but an outside in my interior space--which means, a holon in my interior space that I am beginning to orient to as another I, as a sentient being with whom I have not yet shared some sort of meaning or value, but with whom I might. I can therefore start speaking to you directly (which is the definition of "second person"--"the one spoken to"). At that point--and before we have actually entered into communication--you are outside of my I and also outside of any immediate "we" of understanding--so we remain Other to each other. But if you and I start communicating and reach some sort of mutual understanding, then both "you" and "I" have become part of a "we"--a hermeneutic circle--a circle of shared insides of the interior spaces: some aspects of "you" and of "I" are now inside a we-boundary. Outsides of exteriors ("it") have become outsides of interiors ("you") which have become shared insides of interiors ("we")--there is thus a "fusion of horizons" (so that they are no longer Other to each other), and a mutual prehension arises in the midst of previously alien encounters.

     nThus, from an outside-exterior "it" (or totally alien person to be instrumentally treated as an object or third-person it), to an outside-interior "you" (or second-person sentient being with whom I seek some sort of mutual contact via a shared horizon), to a "thou" in a "we" relationship (or shared insides of our interiors)--in short, from "it" to "you" to "we"--such is the progression of care and compassion across boundaries of increasing encompassment, in this mysterious miracle of a "we" residing in the heart of the Kosmos.

     What all of this means will become clearer as we proceed, I hope.

Summary

     We began this excursion by outlining 4 of the main perspectives embedded in natural languages--I, we, it, and its (fig. 1). Each of those holons can be looked at from its own inside or its own outside, giving us 8 major indigenous perspectives associated with any actual occasion (fig. 2). These 8 indigenous perspectives turn out to be the vantage points from which 8 of the most basic and significant paradigms or modes of human inquiry have been launched--such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, empiricism, autopoiesis, and systems theory (fig. 3).

     We then noted that the two most influential forms of systems theory--autopoiesis and complexity--claim to cover the "inside view" and the "outside view" of phenomena, but actually cover only the insides and the outsides of exteriors, not the insides and outsides of interiors. In other words, both autopoiesis and complexity theories are third-person paradigms (or modes of inquiry). When I engage systems theory as a social practice, I am highlighting and bringing forth some of the third-person dimensions of being-in-the-world. The view from the inside of those third-person occasions is called "cognitive," "enactive," or "autopoietic," and the view from the outside of those third-person occasions is called "systems," "rational," or "complexity" (among others).

     As important as those modes of inquiry are, they clearly neglect and marginalize the interior indigenous perspectives of first- and second-person occasions. The best of the autopoietic theorists, such as Varela, have recognized this and have moved to incorporate first-person realities into a more integral endeavor with such paradigms as "neuro-phenomenology," which, as the name itself suggests, is a union of third-person ("neuro-") and first-person ("phenomenology") modes. We will look at these more inclusive attempts at length in a later excerpt ( Excerpt E, "Nature's Web").

     What we need to do in the remainder of this excerpt is to continue to look more closely at the neglected first- and second-person perspectives that are belatedly being acknowledged by these theorists. Before we look at autopoietic organisms and self-organizing systems--or how a third-person "it" joins with other "its" to form a social system--we need to listen more attentively to the contours of the interior dimensions as they present themselves to caring ears, and not be in such a rush to view them through the lens of exogenous perspectives.

     What are the contours of these phenomenological domains--these "event horizons"--and what paradigms or social practices have been used to most effectively enact, bring forth, illumine, and disclose these domains? How can we honor, acknowledge, and incorporate these paradigms into new meta-paradigmatic practices and metatheories to help usher in an Integral Age at the Leading Edge....

     It is to these different phenomenological worlds that are spontaneously arising within a Kosmos of indigenous perspectives that we may now turn.