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 III. THE CRUCIAL IMPORTANCE OF HERMENEUTICS: What Is a "We"? (page 1)

A Circle of Friends

     You and I are talking. We are friends. This means we already share some sort of background culture (such as a network of shared language). In other words, you and I are already in some sort of a first-person plural phenomenological space, or a specific "we-space." Your inside-interior singular ("I") and my inside-interior singular ("I") have come together in a space that we both call "we."

     You are attempting to explain to me an experience that you had last night. As you begin to convey this information to me, at first I do not understand the whole picture; I must listen and attempt to interpret what you are saying. At some point, presumably I will get it, I will understand, and we will share that understanding. At that phenomenological point or nexus of mutual understanding, you and I share a "we." Your horizon of meaning and my horizon of meaning overlap at that point. Both of us will therefore say things like, "Is this what you mean? Yes? Then we understand each other, right?" "Yes, we understand each other."

     We understand each other: two "I's" have overlapped or intersected in a "we."

     At this point, I am not primarily concerned with whether or not two people--any two people--can ever really understand each other. The typical pluralist attempts to interject at this point and claim that people occupy incommensurate lifeworlds and thus mutual understanding and similar signification are not possible ("all interpretation is misinterpretation"). With the integral approach, however, we don't attempt to invalidate another person's claim in that rude a fashion; rather, we back up to a wider horizon and simply notice that people are already going around and saying "we understand each other," and therefore we are not primarily concerned with whether that claim is objectively true or not, but in understanding a universe where that claim can occur, because it is definitely the case that that claim is already occurring, and at this point we are trying to listen to existence, not judge it.

     So, you and I are now "part" of a "we." But this "we" is not a super-I that subsumes you and me into a single organism that then controls everything we think and do. In other words, you and I are inside this "we" but you and I are not internal to it. That simple understanding is the key to the relation of individual and collective (in both the LL and the LR; we will return to the LR with our discussion of Luhmann; at this time, it is the LL we are listening to).

     When you and I say that we understand each other, or that we feel things together, or that we share certain values, and so on, then you and I are inside the hermeneutic circle of a cultural we, or inside a shared horizon of meaning, value, understanding, and so forth. You and I are inside a we-boundary.

     For example, if we belong to a circle of friends, we know exactly who is in that circle, and who is outside that circle. We even call them "insiders" and "outsiders." If an outsider attempts to enter this circle of friends uninvited, the circle reacts as if it had an immune system of its own--like all holons, the we-circle protects its boundaries vigorously. Of course, we might decide to enlarge our we-circle to include more and more sentient beings, but we do so by, indeed, enlarging the "we," not damaging it. A damaged or broken we-boundary is, like any broken boundary, not a transcendence but a pathology.

     In other words, you and I are inside a cultural holon, with its own event horizon and its own phenomenological boundary. Like all interior boundaries, you cannot see this we-boundary in the exterior, sensorimotor, Right-Hand world. But you and I both know exactly where this we-boundary is.

     So you and I are inside a "we," a we that has a definite boundary. But you and I are not internal to this "we." You and I are not actual components, subholons, or parts of this "we"--you and I are not limbs of a leviathan such that 100% of you and me are all dragged across the floor when this monster "we" decides to walk. You and I are members, not strands--our individual "I's" are partners in a we, not parts of a we. (We are members of a cultural holon, not components of it: you and I are inside, not internal, to the we.)

     So what is internal to this "we," or what are the actual components of this present "we"? The suggested answer, which the rest of this excerpt will explore, is: You and I are inside a "we" when our intersections are internal to it.

     Here's a quick walkthrough: you and I are phenomenologically inside this hermeneutic circle, in that you and I both assert that we are within a circle of friendship. But we are not internal to it (we do not feel that we are components of a super-I that pulls all our strings). What is internal to this "we" are all the present and past intersections--literally, the inter-subjectiveoccasions--that are contained in the phenomenological space defined by the specific ways in which you and I use the word "we."

     Here's a simple example. This is a strong version of a we/its (a sociocultural network); not all collective holons are this obvious or precise, but as an example, this is illustrative.

     You and I decide to play a game of chess. The game of chess uses a checkerboard and 16 pieces. Each piece is defined by the types of moves it can make and its relation to the other pieces. These are the "rules" of chess--the regime, pattern, or structure of the game. You and I are inside or "in" a game of chess, not when everything about you and me follows the rules of chess, but when our interactions in this game follow the rules of chess. If you or I break the rules, we are "out" of the game. Thus, you and I are in a game of chess when our interactions are internal to the game: it is our transactions that follow the rules of chess, not you or I.

     And, finally, chess itself is not an I, nor is it composed of I's; it is composed of the intersections of I's.

     (In fact, as individuals, you and I remain external to the game of chess even when we are in a game of chess, because not all of our existence follows the rules of chess, even when we are playing it. My metabolism, my fantasies, my physical fidgeting--and millions of other things about me--do not follow the rules of chess. Only my intersections with you in this bounded spacetime locale follow those rules. So when you and I are playing chess, we are, as compound individuals, external to the game. Our intersections, however, are internal to the game; when our intersections are internal to the game--or when we follow the rules--then you and I are in the game, i.e., we are members or players of this particular game; and somebody not playing this game is both external to and outside of the game, even if they are watching.)

     The rules of chess, although they are now fixed, were not always so. The rules of chess have a history. These rules are not natural laws written on the face of matter, but they have, over the years, become regular patterns, forms, or habits that now govern all those who want to play that particular game. When you and I come together to play chess, we are inside the game when our intersections are internal to it, and that internality includes the entire history of chess as it actually unfolded in real time and then settled into the stable pattern now called "chess."

     Our ways of being-together are much like chess. The ways that you and I come together into any "we" are determined in part by the history of that "we." That "we" is not itself an "I," but neither can it be reduced to "I's." But one thing is certain: this "we" has a life of its own.

     This we has a life of its own. When you and I come together, we have a history. There is nothing you and I can do to change that history. There was that time that you got drunk and threw up on Mrs. Jones; the time that we went over to Sue's house and John was already there; and, of course, that unfortunate incident with the chicken. The history of this we helps determine how you and I understand each other, what our shared experiences are, the types of meaning that we can share, and so on. Somebody outside our circle will have a very hard time understanding us, yes?

     This "we" is a series of intersubjective exchanges that, as a network or collective holon, indeed has something of a life of its own. Every time we get together, the history of this "we" precedes us; it is there, tucked into our present moments together (just as every previous I is tucked into my present I). The study of our friendship is the study of the history of this "we," the study of our culture together. Every time we get together, our history thickens; every time we get together, this "we" deposits another layer of Kosmic habits (or probability waves expressing the ways that we tend to be-together in that locale of the AQAL ocean). If we have been together a very long time, we might say things like, "Our friendship fits likes an old shoe"--a worn habit, but a wonderfully worn habit, comfortable and warm and caring, a groove in the Kosmos we have traveled together, finding so much more of ourselves as we do so.

     The mutual understanding that you and I share; the value spheres that we have operated within; the fused horizons that contain our mutual prehensions; the ways that we anticipate each other--all of these only make sense against the cultural background of the "we," this "we" that has a life of its own, and a history of its own. This life-history of our "we" does not exist apart from you and me, but neither can it be reduced to, explained by, or deduced from our individual histories.

     You and I as compound individuals are inside this circle of friendship, but the only aspects of us that are internal to this circle are the exchanged (and/or tele-prehended) aspects. We have been summarizing this by saying that, among other things, what is internal to a "we" are the intersections of its members. (This is the LL correlate of Luhmann's LR conclusion that what is internal to a system is not organisms but communication.)

     Overall, then, the items that are internal to this we-circle include the present intersubjective exchanges (or intersections) of its members, the patterns or habits governing those intersections, and the past history of those intersections. You and I are inside a "we" but not internal to a "we," a "we" that enfolds all of our yesterdays of togetherness and the habits they have deposited, to result in the actual patterns of the nexus that comes to define this particular "we" that has a life of its own. Any "we" is carried in the sum total of its members but can be reduced to none of them.

     So it is that every time you and I come together, and touch each other from within the circle of our shared horizons, this "we" precedes us, thick and rich and luscious with its own history, a history that provides the context for every word that you and I will utter, frames an event zone for every feeling we can share, surrounds us with a shroud of mutual comprehension in a sea of otherwise alien encounters. This "we" precedes us, enfolds our intersections in its warm horizons, a sheltering sky of mutual understanding, within which our being-together moves.

     This "we" is not someplace else; it is not above us, prior to us, or outside of us--it is carried in you and I, but cannot be reduced to you and I, nor deduced from you and I. It is a whole that is more than the sum of its intersections--which is why it has something of a life of its own. I cannot, by myself, change this we; neither can you; we can only dance this dance together, this miracle of care and grace arising in the Kosmos of our being-together.

Nexus

     The many ways that we use the word "we" include its present form and feel, and, enfolded in that, its entire history--what is internal to a "we" is not you and I but all of the past "we's," all of the past intersections of mutuality. This is why the hermeneutic mode of knowing is often called " historic-hermeneutic"--this present-we can only be understood in light of its ancestors.³³ Just as what is internal to any "I" includes its own past "I's" (prehensive unification), what is internal to any "we" includes its own past "we's."

     (Here again is the "tetra-hension" operating in all four quadrants, which is part of the very essence of Kosmic karma in all domains: all holons, in all quadrants, transcend-and-include their past.)³⁴

     This "we" is a nexus. A nexus is simply another word for a network, a collective, a communal holon, a system, but it gives special emphasis to the relational space of togetherness that constitutes collectives. Since "nexus" has fewer established connotations than "system," I will generally use that term, although they both essentially refer to a collective holon, or an aggregate acting as a functional (LR) or meaningful (LL) whole.

     To get the technical definition out of the way first: a nexus is the space of inter-individual or inter-holonic occasions (not trans-holonic and not intra-holonic)--that is, a space of inter-compound individual occasions (whether intersubjective or interobjective--the LL is any intersubjective nexus, the LR, any interobjective nexus). Compound individuals exist in networks or systems or communions with other compound individuals (agency is always agency-in-communion); a nexus is the phenomenological space of these communions or intersections. As we have seen, compound individuals are inside a system or nexus, but not internal to it. What is internal to a nexus are not individuals but their intersections. (And those intersections are nestled in their own history, are enfolded in this we/its that has a life of its own.)

     Put simply, a nexus is any space in which two holons touch in any fashion. (And that is true all the way up, all the way down). As we will see, this nexus or intersection network can include all sorts of communicative exchanges (chemical, hormonal, emotional, spiritual, linguistic, tele-prehensive, etc.); it has interior and exterior features (e.g., cultural membership [LL] and social systems [LR], or intersubjectivity and interobjectivity, or first-person plural ["we"] and third-person plural ["its"] dimensions--or again, inter-signifieds and inter-signifiers).

     The word "nexus" itself has three major meanings, all of them excellent for this purpose. A nexus (from the Latin nectere, "to bind") is (1) "a means of connection, a link, or tie"; (2) "a connected series or group"; and (3) "a core or center." On the "connection" side, synonyms are "context, relation, reference, coherence"--all of them central to what a nexus is and does. On the "center" side, synonyms are "seat, hub, heart"--which is exactly what a nexus is, the heart of our being together. Not being swallowed by one big monster, but the profound ways in which we find ourselves by finding each other. In a nexus, we remain as individuals but are nothing without each other.

     It's not a paradox. When you and I as compound individuals are inside a hermeneutic circle, those aspects of ourselves that are exchanged (and/or tele-prehended) are nothing outside that circle of exchange (they do not exist outside of their being exchanged, since they are the ripples in the exchange itself). This is captured well in the word "transaction"--buying and selling, for example. Anytime somebody purchases something, somebody else has, at the same time and in the very same act, sold something. You simply cannot find an act of buying without an act of selling--they are two perspectives on the same transaction--but the transaction cannot be reduced to either of them. This relational or transactional (or tetra-enactional) exchange is the "stuff" of any collective holon or we/its.³⁵

     (In Excerpt E, in our discussion of Luhmann and social autopoiesis, we will see that the same thing holds for ecological systems and interobjective networks, although those networks, of course, are best enacted and illumined via third-person plural perspectives and paradigms. For those interested, here's a quick technical summary: Systems are composed not of individuals or organisms but of their exchanges or communications: what is internal to the system is the communication, not the organisms. Organisms are not strands in a Web, their intersections are. Organisms are members of a system, their transactions are components or parts of the system. Organisms are partners, their interactions are parts, links, nodes, or strands in a network. Organisms are inside an ecosystem, not internal to it; their intersections, however, are internal to the ecological nexus and are the "stuff" of ecosystems, the stuff of systems that represent the exterior-collective or third-person plural dimensions of being-in-the-world--and whose interiors are not ecosystems, webs, or interactive processes but the intersubjective feelings of their prehensive members best captured not by systems but by hermeneutics, first-person plural. This approach to a truly integral or AQAL ecology is radical and unprecedented; we will explore it extensively in later sections. We will use "nexus" and "network" to refer to both cultural and social holons--or the interiors and exteriors of collective holons--while also keeping in mind the relevant differences.)

     The many "we's" that saturate our lives are often very obvious, both from within and from without. When five friends (other than you and me) come together, for example, and sit in a living room and talk, we already know that you cannot see their "we" in the sensorimotor world, since it is an interior boundary. You might, however, directly experience that we-boundary in your interior if you try to join that circle of friends and are excluded--your interior feelings might be hurt if you are rejected from the circle--and thus you can feel that we-boundary whenever you try to cross it.

     If this circle of friends allows you and me to join, then seven of us are now inside this particular circle of friendship. Every time the group allows somebody new to enter this circle of we, the we-nexus itself will govern, not the new individual or member, but the new member's intersections with us. To step inside our group is to begin to understand and follow the patterns of our group, patterns that govern the flow of our mutual understanding--you are inside the group when your interactions are internal to the group.

     Likewise, if somebody is born into a particular circle of we, that we-nexus will govern, not all of the aspects of the compound individual, but those aspects that traffic in the intersection space--the cultural space--the intersubjective space--whose nexus governs, gives meaning to, and provides the first-person plural space in which (and by virtue of which) any mutual understanding can occur at all.

     This cultural or intersubjective nexus has, of course, an almost infinite number of dimensions. As we will see, there is a sense in which culture has streams (which have waves) and states (which don't); and types and tokens, grades and clades, hierarchies and heterarchies, groves and grooves. And, of course, any "we" has correlate "its"--any cultural nexus is wedded to a social nexus or system (although never in a simple geographical location, as we have often seen). But any way you look, listen, feel, or resonate with this occasion, a "we" is not only more complex than we imagine, it is more complex than we can imagine--that infinite hall of mirrors, an endless envelopment of nexi within nexi, raw fields of feeling within fields of feeling, forever.

     That you and I are friends means that we already exist in several larger "we's" (i.e., we are inside of, not internal to, several other cultural holons or nexuses). These other cultural holons might include shared interests, a religious orientation, a national identity, a shared language, and all the innumerable contexts that are handed to us as Kosmic habits of the many intersubjective circles with which we are enmeshed.

     Some aspects of these intersubjective networks are foreground, some are background; some manifest, some latent; some interpretative, some pre-interpretative; some conscious, some unconscious, preconscious, subconscious, superconscious; some content, some context; some pre-linguistic, some linguistic, some trans-linguistic.

     (The cultural contexts and backgrounds were, of course, Heidegger's specialty, and I have drawn on much of his pioneering work, especially as refined by Hans Georg Gadamer, the greatest of the hermeneutic philosophers, and Gadamer's interpreters, such as David Hoy. I have also extensively critiqued Heidegger; basically, I believe that, even within his own paradigm, he failed to grasp the importance of waves and streams--and thus badly misjudged the discourse of modernity--and he poorly interpreted the nature of both intersubjectivity and interobjectivity. We will return to this below).

The Hermeneutic Circle

     The study of we's is the study of culture. In the particular example we have often been using--namely, our friendship, which is a mini-culture defined by the sum total of the ways that you and I and use the word "we"--as that friendship grows, the history of these we's starts to become a Kosmic habit in this particular hermeneutic circle (i.e., in this particular spacetime locale of the AQAL matrix). You and I are inside this hermeneutic circle but not internal to it.

     The hermeneutic circle is the phrase many theorists use to describe a "we," which is a wonderful choice. "Hermeneutics" is the art and science of interpretation; the name is from the Greek Hermes, who was the god of invention and commerce, but also the messenger and the scribe of the other gods. In order to understand messages, you have to interpret them--and notoriously, messages from the gods need interpreting (none more so than from the renowned oracle at Delphi, whose most famous advice has survived to this day: "Know thyself"). But interpretation is wildly slippery, and thus Hermes was also a trickster god--he was, in fact, also the god of invention, cunning, and theft. So let me ask you: if you were in a foreign land and had to rely on an interpreter in order to understand anything that was going on, would you want a trickster and a thief as your only connection to the world?

     Well, as the postmodernists have amply warned us, that is what interpretation turns out to be in any event--a trickster and a thief. While the phrase "all interpretation is misinterpretation" (or "all meaning is indeterminate and undecidable") is a typical postmodernist absolutism, it captures a partial truth well enough. That partial truth, as I would put it, is this: much of communication is an exchange of exterior signs and words in an attempt to share interior realities and experiences, and while exterior signs are third-person occasions, interior realities are first-person occasions--and thus something incredibly important is always going to get left out, which leaves a "gap" or "hole" of indeterminacy that can never be filled by words or signs--leaves, in fact, a sliding series of gaps and holes that sabotage interpretation at every step, at every twist and turn in the road of any message that arrives, whether from the gods, mortals, or mice.

     Much of postmodernism--from Lacan to Derrida to Lyotard--is an attempt to trace these holes. Communication is not a simple case of sharing units of obvious and definite meaning, but a series of semi-meanings surrounded by a sea of holes and trickster gaps, where absolutely nothing is what you think it is. (Lacan--especially if you read him correctly, which is as comedy--showed that much psychopathology can be traced to the infant's tragic attempts to chase these holes. Needless to say, ha ha, the result is anguish.) Hermes is the trickster, the joker, the jester--and the only person who can interpret Hermes is... Hermes, since he is the only scribe.

     In other words, it's holes, all the way up, all the way down.

     (I mean that seriously. No holon--at any level, atoms to apes--can signal its interior adequately with exterior signs, whether chemical networks, hormones, or words. It is teleprehension that ultimately grounds intersubjectivity, not communication, as we will see. The postmodernists missed that essential element, which left them with nothing but holes, hence their notoriously self-contradictory stances. But the partial truths they brought forth were indeed profound, and the first was: words don't mean what they say they mean. Hermes is a trickster and a thief.)

     And yet here was virtually all previous philosophy simply assuming that words meant what they said they meant. This naive assumption--that words mean what they say they mean--postmodernism labeled "metaphysics," "presence," and "logocentrism," and went on to point out (correctly, I believe) that all of those notions are deeply confused. "Metaphysics," in that what philosophy took to be "meaning" is really "indeterminacy," and what it took to be "signification" is really a "sliding chain of signifiers" never reaching what they claim to reach--and thus the old metaphysical approaches had to be thoroughly and radically deconstructed. "Presence," in that, as Derrida put it, "nothing is ever simply present," which means nothing is what it means ("interpretation is misinterpretation"). And "logocentrism," in that all previous approaches had privileged the spoken word over the textual word--and thus had assumed that meaning could in fact be controlled by the first-person speaker, whereas meaning cannot be controlled at all.³⁶

     (Notice that many of the great comedies--in literature and film--are based on this endless play of words and the limitless number of misunderstandings that are inherent in words and signs themselves, precisely because meaning can never be fully controlled or contained--it's holes all the way down. From Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Ernest to Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First?," this sliding chain of trickster signifiers has been played to the hilt for the radical humor inherent in this ridiculous situation we call communication. Gaps, holes, indeterminacies, sliding meaning, inherent misinterpretation--from Aristophanes forward....)

     Those are all partial truths that most definitely deserve a seat at the integral banquet. But partial truths they are--in fact, none of the above truths could be communicated at all if they were completely true. (If all interpretation is misinterpretation, postmodernism itself could never have been understood by anybody. Postmodernists would have opened their mouths and out of them would have come holes, not meaning; gaps, not criticisms; absences, not presences--and the sum total of postmodernism would have been a thunderous silence, whereas postmodernism was, without doubt, the noisiest, wordiest, loudest, textiest, most logocentric philosophy ever advanced. Never have more words been written about why words don't work. Never have so many owed so much to so little.) Nonetheless, for an integral approach, the postmodern critique of metaphysics joins the modernist critique of metaphysics as two compelling reasons to re-interpret the higher reaches of human potential in post-metaphysical ways. But notice also that post-metaphysical does not mean anti-metaphysical, which is why any genuine post-metaphysics would be both post-modern and post-postmodern (or post-orange and post-green--which we will return to in Excerpt F).

     But it is the partial truths of postmodernism that we have to thank for highlighting this amazing hermeneutic circle, this extraordinary thing called "we," a thing that is indeed a mystery in so many important ways. The slippery nature of interpretation and mutual understanding is captured well in the notion of a "circle," because each time I interpret what I think you mean, the circle of understanding has shifted, the "we" has morphed. It really is like a hall of mirrors, where each reflection is reflected an almost infinite number of times. Every time I interpret what you mean and then talk back to you, you must interpret that, which I then interpret, which you interpret--and around we go in the hermeneutic circle that is literally endless, and dizzying, and mysterious.

     But you understand what I mean about this "hall of mirrors" analogy, yes? You see, we understand each other well enough. These "we's" are there, and you and I know they are there. We know when we are in them, and we know who is inside them and who is not. These "we's" are a mixture of the understandable and the forever unknowable, but they are not total lies. The Kosmos clearly allows them to arise; and you and I cannot believably deny their existence because even if we agreed that they do not exist, that agreement would be a "we."

     (As with all phenomenological realities, they are realities impossible to doubt or deny at the moment of their arising. This is the intersubjective form of the impossibility of denying an "I." If modernism was founded on the impossibility of denying an "I"--an impossibility upon which the whole of phenomenology is correctly founded--then postmodernism was founded on the impossibility of denying an intersubjective "we"--an impossibility upon which the whole of hermeneutics and post/structuralism are correctly founded. Since the postmodernists are so nasty about the Cartesian certainty, which nevertheless none of them successfully doubted, let us playfully return the favor and call this the Lyotardian certainty, which nobody can successfully doubt, either. Both certainties are radically correct within the hori-zones they address, because by the time you have touched something, you cannot believably deny you have touched it, and all interiors are known by touch.)

     Because these "we's" are impossible to actually doubt or deny, let us listen to them a bit more attentively....