Notes 45-56

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

     ⁴⁵ We are members of a culture when the ways that we touch each other are internal aspects of the phenomenological space that we each mean when we say "we." Of course, aspects of that cultural nexus are internalized by--and are indeed internal to--the compound individual, especially during development; e.g., G. H. Mead's particularized and generalized other. See note 38.

     ⁴⁶ Interobjective examples of communication include exchanges of molecular scents between bees and flowers, exchange of cytokines between cells, exchange of gluons between quarks, etc. Generally speaking, it is only with developmental waves of orange or higher that communication becomes intensely self-reflexive, but communication in general is simply the way that various indigenous perspectives touch each other, and hence communication goes all the way down.

     ⁴⁷ We saw the same thing, in singular form, in befriending "aliens" in the psyche--outsider "its" or third persons moved inside the first-person circle. In this case, it is first-person plural, not singular.

     Notice also that, wherever natural languages contain words such as "we," they are asserting the existence of exactly such a phenomenological space (a first-person plural space), an assertion fully accepted by a calculus of indigenous perspectives.

     ⁴⁸ The postmodern pluralist, who situates truth in local cultural contexts, self-contradictorily denies cross-cultural realities while allowing cross-individual realities, whereas they both face the identical problem: how two individuals anywhere can reach mutual understanding is the only mystery here. How two people from different cultures can understand each other is trivially different from how you and I can understand each other: the extraordinary leap is between any two minds, not any two cultures. If there are enough cross-individual realities between holons to constitute a cultural identity (as claimed by the postmodernist), then there are enough realities between cultures to constitute a global context (as denied by the same postmodernists). The fact of the matter is, nobody understands how "you" and "I" become a "we," wherever that happens--and to privilege cross-individual cultural "we's," as the postmodernists do, while denying all others, is merely green-meme absolutism.

      In AQAL metatheory, the mystery of similar signification is handled by acknowledging another, prior Mystery--Spirit--which, in a metaphoric, not assertoric, fashion (see note 15), is the nondual Self of all inter-selves, the absolute Subjectivity in all intersubjectivity, which allows any understanding to occur at all. Any two sentient beings can know each other--not because you and I are part of a super-I, but because there is only one super-I (or I-I) that is identical in and as all individuals I's, the single nonlocal absolute subjectivity that inhabits all subjects, and thus brings them together, not by melting them down, but by showing their simultaneous nonduality.

      SES, endnote 1 for chap. 8:

      Notice that Emerson handles Habermas's "identical signification" in a very direct way: it is not that we merely assume identical signification in order to get the conversation going; it is that on the deepest level we share a common Self or Nature, namely, God, and that is why the conversation can get going! Habermas's omega-point of mutual understanding, while still true, is outcontextualized by Emerson's omega-point of mutual identity (and in this Emerson is in a long line of descendents from Plotinus through Schelling to Emerson, as we will see). For Habermas, the "who" of Dasein is found in the circling of the intersubjective circle; for Emerson, the "Who" is simply God.

      Thus Emerson refers to the Over-soul as "that common heart of which all sincere conversation is the worship." Holderlin: "...we calmly smiled, sensed our own God amidst intimate conversation, in one song of our souls."

     Notice that one song of our souls is not the same as being cells of the same body--"one song" and "one body" are very different. The former is the harmonious intersection of souls in a nexus-song; the latter is parts of an organism--partners versus parts. Gaia is a song, not an organism.

     ⁴⁹ Technically, there is a difference between "shared intersubjectivity" and "shared subjectivity." The only way there is a direct sharing of subjectivity is through tele-prehension (which does exist, in my opinion--in at least the three forms that were outlined--and those forms definitely contribute to a hermeneutic circle; in fact, they ground it). But a hermeneutic circle also consists of the various inter-subjective exchanges, such as signs and symbols, and those represent shared intersubjectivity, not directly shared subjectivity.

     The amazing and mysterious thing about any "we" is that shared signifiers/syntax can evoke/resonate similar-enough shared signifieds/semantic such that one I can come to recognize another I, in each other. The "mechanism" of this intersubjectivity, as noted, is an I-I common in and to all I's. This I-I, however, is of such a different type than any finite I, that it cannot be used as the basis of a philosophy or theoretical psychology, because it is radically empty (or shunya) of all such possible qualifications or conceptualizations. This I-I reveals itself as a nondual realization, not a theoretical foundation. See notes 15, 48, 50, 51, 54, 55.

     ⁵⁰ "Solidarity" generally means "cultural tradition," and tradition obviously means some sort of past history, which is why I define it, in that sense, as kosmic habit in the LL. But for AQAL metatheory, solidarity in the present moment is also established by the many forms of tele-prehension, such as immediate harmonic resonance, and those are not technically in the past or in tradition, but in the immediacy of the now-moment. Thus, solidarity does indeed involve tradition in many ways; but it is also grounded in the present vividness of various forms of tele-prehension.

     Of course, where one most sees the past or traditional components of hermeneutic-solidarity is when one is attempting to interpret the communicative signs and symbols of holons no longer present--e.g., reading a book by an author who is dead or discovering a lost civilization. Here one is forced to rely on merely reconstructive approaches--or using third-person artifacts to reconstruct a facsimile of first-person realities. Reconstructive approaches (and the reconstructive aspects of other approaches) fall generally within zone #2--the outsides of the interiors--and as such are discussed in the next excerpt ( Excerpt D), but they need to be acknowledged at this point.

     Hermeneutics with living sentient beings is an attempt to know and understand the interiors of another holon or sentient being, an attempt that draws on some version of both mode #1 (such as harmonic resonance) and mode #2 (or various types of communicative exchange, linguistic and otherwise). Whereas harmonic resonance might give me some sort of empathic access to the interiors of others, communicative exchange is an attempted reconstruction of their interiors from within the horizons of the interiors themselves (although in a mediated mode; i.e., a reconstituted result of an exchange of tokens or signifiers of some sort)--with the assumption that I share enough of these types of interiors that at some point I will have a fairly authentic resonance with those interiors (approaching even a harmonic empathy). In short, through an exchange of third-person tokens (or signifiers), I attempt to understand second-person realities ("you") not as an object or "it," but as a subject or a first-person "I"--a bearer of consciousness, meaning, and intentionality--to the point that we can rightly speak, with the hermeneuticists, of a shared horizon (which means: shared-insides-interiors), where your "I" and my "I" overlap in significant ways. This might even evoke a harmonic first-person-to-first-person empathy as part of authentic, mutual understanding. In either case, "I" and "you" share a "we."

      I include hermeneutics (with living beings) and collaborative inquiry in zone #1 (even though they both draw heavily on zone #2 as well, or communicative exchange), because they are grounded ultimately in teleprehensions of harmonic resonance and transcendental Self. They may start reconstructively or structurally, but usually end with felt meaning as direct resonance. (Otherwise there is no stopping the chain of signification and we would never be able to say, I know what you mean--hermeneutics would only be structuralism.) See notes 15, 48, 49, 51, 54, 55.

     ⁵¹ Provided that, within the blue space we are enacting, we also have some sort of actual shared experiences (such as a root canal). Shared experiences are therefore important in mutual understanding, but they presuppose both vertical and horizontal solidarity, both of which come to rest in teleprehension.

     In other words, an overall AQAL view brings together orange-modernist shared life-experiences, green-postmodernist cultural contexts, second-tier developmentalism, and third-tier transcendental Self (teleprehension)--all of which shed light on the important notion of solidarity.

     ⁵² Likewise, the present moment comprehends the previous moment, but not vice versa--which, as we have often seen, is Whitehead's micro-holarchy built into the structure of all experience, although we expand prehension to tetrahension. The word "comprehend" works beautifully in this regard: the senior occasion com-prehends the junior, but not vice versa. Each moment's tetrahension comprehends the previous moment's tetrahension: kosmic karma in all four quadrants.

     ⁵³ See A Sociable God (CW3) for an initial discussion of legitimacy and authenticity in solidarity. Cultural legitimation (or worldview legitimation) is the inside-interior-plural (LL) correlate of social systems integration (or outside-exterior-plural; LR). Legitimation, as I often repeat, is as important a topic as one will ever find. What stops legitimation from being merely a conventional agreement, however, is that it is set in webs of validity claims inherent in indigenous perspectives (see note 43). For AQAL metatheory, this allows us to take advantage of the important work of the postmodernists and hermeneuticists but without succumbing to their quadrant absolutisms.

      This also allows AQAL metatheory to resonate with central features of the world's greatest living philosopher, Jurgen Habermas. The foundation of Habermas's work is the notion of three major validity claims (truth, truthfulness, rightness), which underlie everything from his formal pragmatics to his sociology and politics. Those three claims are, of course, acceptability conditions of the Big Three of I, we, and it (although I do add one validity claim not covered by Habermas--functional fit--to give four validity claims--the four quadrants--although Habermas would see functional fit as a variation on truth; but I differentiate truth into singular and plural representations, because phenomenologically they are quite different: how I relate to an object, and how I relate to exchanges with objects, is different).

      One critic of AQAL claimed that Habermas's validity claims were "tacked on" to AQAL in an ad hoc fashion, whereas it is pretty obvious that the validity claims of I, we, and it are intrinsic in the AQAL framework, all the way down (and were developed without any reference to Habermas). In fact, one of the advantages of AQAL in relation to Habermas's work is that it provides a framework prior to his framework (with both frameworks being post-metaphysical). Using AQAL or IOS we can see, for example, how Habermas's validity claims extend down and into nature (the quadrants go all the way down), an understanding lacking in Habermas, which has prevented him from being able to use his framework to generate an environmental ethics in any way other than as communicative exchanges among humans. Using AQAL, we can see the validity claims (or, if you prefer, their precursors) extending all the way down into "lower forms" of nature, and thus the communicative accord reached between humans is but the tip of an inter-holonic network found in atoms, ants, and apes.

     ⁵⁴ Not to mention also sharing the ultimate grounding of intersubjectivity or solidarity, namely, the nondual empty Spirit that a causal/nondual paradigm discloses as inhabiting the agency of all holons, top to bottom (see note 55). For all those reasons, atoms have not just an exterior similarity of form but an interior similarity of feeling-prehension (or an atomic solidarity), and that is what is so crucially important for them being able to register each other's existence at all, because in AQAL metatheory, the interior agency of each holon creates an opening or clearing in which each holon can arise to and for each other; each holon's agency is a paradigm or enactive action that brings forth, co-creates, or tetra-enacts a phenomenological worldspace, worldspaces that can overlap and allow communication because, and only because, the agency of each holon intersects the Agency of all, and does so in each particular case at a particular level of Spirit's own depth: harmonic resonance is depth resonating with similar depth, echoes of Spirit's self-prehension in the world of its own forms. See SES: "The agency of each holon establishes an opening or clearing in which similar-depthed holons can manifest to each other, for each other: agency-in-communion (all the way down)" (CW6, p. 570).

     ⁵⁵ Solidarity and Post-Kantian Internality. If the forgoing discussion is true enough, we arrive at a post-Kantian approach to the problem of "knowing an other" (or how a "subject in here" can know an "object out there"). For example, notice (in fig. 1) the sequence of holons in the Upper-Right quadrant: atoms, molecules, cells, organisms, organisms with neural cords (e.g., shrimp), organisms with brain stems (e.g., lizards), organisms with limbic systems (e.g., horses), organisms with neocortex (e.g., apes).

      Conventional epistemologies face the following problem: how can I, as a subject, know anything about, say, a rock, a tree, a rose, or any other object out there? The knowing subject is generally of a different nature than the known object, and thus the jump from one to the other in the act of knowing is difficult or even impossible to explain. And at some point, don't we run into the forever-unknowable thing-in-itself, which is ontologically hidden from me in principle?

     But with a holonic view, because each holon transcends and includes its predecessors (both interiorly and exteriorly), then in many cases, the knowing subject contains as part of its interior makeup some of the same types of holons that it is seeking to know exteriorly. The scientist, for example, who is peering down his microscope at an amoeba (a single-celled holon), which exists "out there," also contains various types of single-celled holons in his own insides. The scientist, like all holons, is a compound individual, compounded of all of its evolutionary predecessors--i.e., compounded of all the enduring holons or Kosmic habits that evolutionarily gathered together as subholons to produce ever-greater individual unities in increasingly complex holons--resulting, in this case, in the scientist, who now contains in his own insides subatomic particles, atoms, molecules, cells, neural cords, brain stem, limbic system, neocortex....

     Thus, when scientists attempt to know various entities in the exterior world, they generically are not faced with an ontological divide between knowing subject and known object, because their own internal makeup contains similar types of holons. Most importantly, from a quadratic view, this means that humans not only contain, for example, single cells in their own makeup--cells whose exteriors can be seen in a microscope--but humans also contain in their own makeup the interiors of cells, or cellular prehensions, which are an intrinsic part of the felt consciousness of a human holon. Therefore, even if largely preconscious, the human scientist shares a cellular culture or cellular solidarity with cells in the exterior world, and this cellular solidarity is part of what allows any knowing of cells to occur in the first place. The gap between subject and object (including object as thing-in-itself) is fundamentally bridged theoretically: they share, at that level of the AQAL matrix, a cellular intersubjectivity or cultural solidarity that allows knowing and understanding to occur. (And likewise at other levels: atomic solidarity, neural cord solidarity, etc.)

     The "hard problem" as generally stated--i.e., how to explain the leap from exterior or material objects to internal qualia or feelings--is generated when theorists only pay attention to the exteriors of objects (and not also their interiors), and thus they attempt to "heal" a "split" between subject and object by coming up with an explanation of how exterior matter jumps to interior qualia, whereas there is no jump, not like that. The interior of the scientist whose exterior is perceiving an exterior cell is simultaneously resonating with the cell's interior; this part of the "hard problem" is not solved by explaining the jump from the exterior material cell to the interior qualia of the scientist, but by realizing that the "jump" is already healed in the reality of the scientist, whose own interiors and exteriors are simultaneously arising together.

     That is, to know myself in a first-person mode and to know myself in a third-person mode--which clearly I can do, since I am aware of me--is the same hard problem as to take up a first-person knowing of a third-person cell. The hard problem, in this sense, is not really the relation between interior mind and exterior matter, but the relation of first-person to third-person wherever they appear. I am simply suggesting that the mediator in both of those is first-person plural: the cell is actually a sentient being, a thou, and therefore any exterior contact with that sentient being sets in motion a simultaneous interior resonance at the same level--namely, a cellular solidarity possessed by both the cell and the scientist--and that inter-interiority is a crucial ingredient of any sort of knowing at all.

      (Can prehension occur in the other direction, cells to scientist? Yes, cells know the scientist, but only as cells. There is no neocortex/formop solidarity, for example. Also: note that if I don't contain rocks or mountains, I contain the holons that they contain.)

     This, incidentally, is how a postmodern notion of intersubjectivity can coexist with the existence of a mediated scientific objectivity (or interobjectivity). For most forms of postmodernism, the existence of intersubjectivity rules out any form of objectivity, whereas for an integral, second-tier, or meta-paradigmatic approach, both intersubjectivity and objectivity arise inseparability as simultaneous dimensions of the quadratic nature of the moment-to-moment AQAL lattice. To say the scientist and the cell share cultural solidarity that can only be felt from within (and is interpretative in many of its displays), is not to say that they do not also share exteriority, which is "objective" in any meaningful sense of that word. (This "both/and" yellow cognition is "all Greek" to green cognition, which, we might suppose, is why it rarely appears in postmodern pluralism.) In short, as I have suggested elsewhere, on the relative or manifest plane, the "mind-body" problem is handled by tetrahension (it cannot be handled by Whiteheadian prehension alone, for reasons we have discussed throughout this presentation).

     As for the "ultimate" mind-body problem, it can only be handled by satori. (See Integral Psychology, ch. 14.) That is, to put it metaphorically: knowability of the Kosmos can occur because there is ultimately but one Knower in all holons; i.e., knowability can occur not only because of tetrahension (or tetra-resonance), which includes cultural solidarity as one of its four pillars, but because the same dimensionless, unqualifiable, unspeakable Spirit is the empty center of the agency or subjectivity of all holons, the nondual Subject that is the ultimate, nonlocal, instantaneous ground of all intersubjectivity. Kosmic solidarity simply means that we--that you and I--are ultimately of one culture with all sentient beings, top to bottom, and hence we can, in our varying degrees, resonate with other sentient beings authentically. Their authenticity (or truthfulness) can resonate with my authenticity (or truthfulness), so that not only is there objective truth, or one subject faithfully knowing an object, but a shared truthfulness or presentation of self-being, such that my subject does not simply know an other as an object, as an it, as a third-person thing, but my subject resonates with that subject, with that sentient being, with that thou, and hence we share a slice of cultural solidarity at whatever depth our songs are harmonizing.

     In the strong sense, I can know an other not just because our exteriors smash into each other (one third person colliding with another third person in the view from nowhere), but because "the one song of our souls" at that harmonic depth allows us even to be aware of each other. This is not a third-person collision on a flatland highway, but a first-person sentient being vibrating with the secret joy of meeting another first-person sentient being on the highway of our togetherness. We may forgive human rational males if they quickly put all of this into abstract third-person terms and then cannot figure out the hard problem, which, indeed, put in those terms, is not only hard but slightly psychotic: the hard problem as generally stated is simply the attempt to erase first persons from the Kosmos as quickly as possible and replace them with third-person exterior markers, presumably to avoid all that messiness that comes with first persons and second persons and relationship and commitment (:-), agentic males in flight from communion, staring down that microscope, wondering how we can know anything at all....

     Cultural solidarity means, among other things, that one first-person sentient being presents itself to another first-person sentient being, and in unison they resonate with their togetherness, which is not one truth meeting another truth, but one truthfulness touching another truthfulness. Cultural solidarity, Kosmic solidarity, means that the universe ultimately does not lie to me. Sentient beings are essentially truthful or you can't get a Kosmos to manifest in any sort of functional fashion at all. The Kosmos as a whole is many things, but a huge dysfunctional family it is not.

     In short, Kosmic solidarity is the ultimate or nondual solidarity, or the radical intersubjectivity of all holons established by their intersection with a single, spaceless, timeless Subject or Self, which is not "one" as opposed to "many" but one without a second, or radically nondual. Thus, on the relative plane, cells can know each other due in part to their cellular cultural solidarity; on the ultimate plane, they can know each other because there is but one Knower, a Kosmic solidarity that timelessly, instantly, eternally binds the interiors of the entire Kosmos together in the loving simultaneity of only this, only here, only now.

     For this presentation, I am focusing more on the relative plane of cultural solidarity, but the nondual plane of Kosmic solidarity ought not thereby be forgotten, because you simply cannot get intersubjectivity going in the first place without inter-Subjectivity. At the same time, remember that any such "ultimate" statements are metaphorical at best (see notes 15, 48, 49, 50, 51). We will return to this theme in Excerpt E, subsection "Integral Semiotics."

     ⁵⁶ In Whitehead's approach ("partial dialogical"), internal means an object is internal to a subject, and a prehensive unification is an internalization of networks of prehended objects. All intersubjectivity is thus built of objects that were once subjects. A more complete or integral formulation, however, includes one "we" being internal to another "we" in the ongoing tetrahension of this and every moment, and "we's" are not built of subjects prehending collective objects, but of subjects arising enmeshed with intersubjectivity as they arise (or in the simultaneity of their arising). The constraint of intersubjective structures is not placed on subjects because they prehend collections of objects that were once subjects; rather, the constraint is placed upon subjects as they arise as subjects: the prehending subject is constrained in the prehending, not merely by the prehended. Moreover, aspects of intersubjectivity are not objects that were once subjects, but subjects that never become objects, but remain as the meshwork with which prehending subjects arise. This is just another way of saying that Whiteheadian prehension, important as it is, gracefully captures only UL feeling-awareness (as it prehends itself and UR objects). You can "force" it to work for several aspects of intersubjectivity, but it requires epicycles; and even then, it decisively does not cover the simultaneity of tele-prehension (in either harmonic empathy or transcendental Self), the existence of which Whitehead explicitly denied (as David Ray Griffin has acknowledged; see "Do Critics Misrepresent My Position?, Appendix A" [posted on this site]). For all these reasons, Whitehead's prehension and internality will not cover solidarity; it's a monological dialogical, not a dialogical dialogical.