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     ¹ Thus, phenomenologists who claim that consciousness is always intentional (or always a consciousness of something), are still caught in a monological prejudice that abstract subjects perceive abstracted objects. They are "half-way" right, so to speak, which is that all manifest consciousness is always consciousness of. But that is still a low-order abstraction mistaken for the reality of the situation, which is that a first person is always already in a series of relationships with other first, second, and third persons, and awareness, consciousness, and feelings arise within those networks, not outside of them.

     ² To be more specific, we have to use an expanded form of the integral calculus. To summarize the essentials: we have been using a two-term expression, such as 1p x 1p (zone #1) or 3p x 1p (zone #2), to represent the zones, but a three-term expression gives more of what is actually involved (see Excerpt D, Appendix B, "An Integral Mathematics of Primordial Perspectives"). Thus:

     Zone #1 is 1p x 1-p x 1p, which means a first person takes a first-person approach to first person realities (as with phenomenology or hermeneutics). Zone #2 is 1p x 3-p x 1p, which means a first person takes a third-person or objective approach to first person realities (as with structuralism). Zone #3 is 3p x 1-p x 3p, which means a third person takes a first-person or inside view of third person realities (as with Maturana and Varela' autopoiesis). Zone #4 is 3p x 3-p x 3p, which means a third person takes a third-person approach to third person realities (as with systems theory). We sometimes summarize these as, respectively, 1 x 1 x 1, 1 x 3 x 1, 3 x 1 x 3, and 3 x 3 x 3.

      These are explored in more detail in the next excerpt, using a four-term expression in both singular and plural, as well as second persons; e.g., 1p(1p) x 1p(3-p*pl) x 1p(1-p) x 2p(1/p), which means my first person has a objective view (i.e., as seen by a community of third-person plural) of your interior as seen from within. See Excerpt E, Appendix, "An Integral Mathematics of Primordial Perspectives (part 2)."

     ³ This does not mean that "abstractions" are less real than sensations; by any meaningful definition, they are usually more real. They are a higher level of experience (in the continuum sensory experience, mental experience, spiritual experience). The dichotomy "experience vs. thought" (as if experience is direct, thought indirect) is a dualistic nightmare, and privileges sensory experience over mental experience, a regressive move. Unfortunately, Varela shares the standard phenomenological prejudice that thinking is a move away from immediateness, whereas it is simply a higher wave of immediateness. This higher wave can be used to represent other realities, but that does not make it less real, simply more sophisticated. Idealism in general denies the split between thought and experience, claiming that both are experiences of consciousness; in this regard, I agree entirely. See One Taste, Sept. 10 entry; also chap. 2 of Eye to Eye, CW3.

     ⁴ Needless to say, this phenomenology, which we are simplistically representing as 1p x 1p, can in fact get quite complicated, for within my own I-space there is an I-I, a proximate-I, an I/me, a distal-me, and a mine (among numerous others). These can all be indicated with a more sophisticated integral calculus, using not just two terms (1p x 1p) but three or four. For example, 1p(1p) x 1p(3-p) x 1p(1-p x 1/p), which means my first person has a third-person view of my first person's interior (stop), which is an objective or third-person view of my own interiors. These are explored in Excerpt E, Appendix, "An Integral Mathematics of Primordial Perspectives (part 2)." For this present Excerpt, the simple two-term expressions (e.g., 1p x 1p, 3p x 1p, etc.) will be used to convey the general ideas.

     ⁵ Notice I use "behavior" of an "interior" holon. The word "behavior," which classically refers to the UR, is the "objective" or third-person component of structuralism, the "outside" part of the "outside-interior" approach. We will explore this further in Integral Semiotics, Excerpt E.

     ⁶ See note 2.

     ⁷ The probability wave in this case is the internal agency or structure of that interior holon—i.e., the probability wave here is synonymous with the internality of the agency, where "internality " means the rules, patterns, or regularities of those subholons following the agency or structure of the dominant monad of the individual holon or the regnant nexus of the cultural holon. To describe the holon's agency or structure is simply to describe a probability space whose definitions are those ascribed to the structure—i.e., the probability space is the phenomenological space in which subholons that are internal to the interior holon arise.

     ⁸ This can technically be stated more accurately as a first-person study of the third-person dimensions of second-person interior realities (where "second person" is as we defined it technically: a third person that can be, or is, within a first-person plural space). Thus, structuralism is a type of 1p x 3-p x 2p. (See notes 2, 4). Even more specifically, we would have 1p(1p) x 1p(3-p) x 2p(1-p x 1/p), which means my first person has a third-person or objective approach to your second person's interior (i.e., your first-person experience of your first person). See Excerpt E, Appendix, "An Integral Mathematics of Primordial Perspectives (part 2)."

     ⁹ In terms of an integral calculus of indigenous perspectives, structuralism is essentially a "third-person of first-person" ( 3p x 1p), as opposed to behaviorism and systems theory, which are a "third-person of third-person" ( 3p x 3p, singular and plural, respectively). Phenomenology and hermeneutics are essentially a first-person of first-person ( 1p x 1p, singular and plural, respectively). Although hermeneutics includes the exchange of third-person signs and outside tokens of interiors, successfully it results in either a direct or reconstructed shared-insides-interior, or "we" (first-person plural). This is the feel of the holon from within an "I" or "we" (first-person singular or first-person plural). See notes 2 and 8 for more details.

     ¹⁰ Hermeneutics is the study of those interior "we's" from the inside of those "we's" (1p x 1p); structuralism is the study of those interior "we's" from the outside of those "we's" (3p x 1p); systems theory (and ecology) is the study of their exteriors from without (3p x 3p). We are also calling those a first-person of first person (1p x 1p, inside-interior), a third-person of first person (3p x 1p, outside-interior), and a third-person of third person (3p x 3p, outside-exterior), respectively. Is there a study of the third-person exteriors from within, not without? Yes, and we have already introduced it: it is autopoiesis, or "biological phenomenology," which attempts to describe the "view from inside the organism" (in a first-person-like perspective) but does so only in third-person terms such as "autopoietic structures" (which gives us the inside view of the exteriors, or simply the inside-exterior, 1p x 3p). See endnotes 2 and 8 for more details.

     ¹¹ To put it in technical terms, structuralism is the study of the outside and exterior of a holon in an attempt to discern the interior patterns or structures driving the holon's behavior, and it essentially stops at an outside description or definition of the structure (or internality codes) of those interior holons driving the behavior.

     All of those words—interior, exterior, outside, internal—are used in their technical sense. As we have seen, "outside" and "exterior" are not the same thing—"exterior" always means Right-Hand or "physical," or appearing in the sensorimotor world; "outside" means the outside of a holon in any of the four quadrants; in this case, "outside" means the outside of an interior holon: an I or a we/thou studied in a third-person or outside fashion; and "exterior" means its behavioral component in the sensorimotor world (such as my verbal behavior—the physical words I speak—as I talk to you about our interiors). "Internal" means the internality code of, in this case, the interior holon, or the rules and patterns followed by holons that are constitutive of—i.e., internal to—the "I" or "we." Structuralism is the study of a holon's outside/exterior landscape in an attempt to discern the structure of its internal/interior landscape: butnot its "inside" landscape—"inside" a holon is anything inside the boundary of the compound individual or the compound network, whether it is an essential part of that holon or not (e.g., the invading parasite is inside the cell but not internal to the cell)—and structuralism is interested specifically in what is interior and internal, not what is inside—i.e., it is interested in the internality codes, agency, or structures of interior (subjective or intersubjective) holons as they express themselves in observable behavior. For example, structuralism wants to know the rules of chess, it does not want to know who is playing chess today—it wants to know what is internal to the game, not who is in the game—the structure of chess, not its players: internal, not inside.

     ¹² This is important because structuralism ( 3p x 1p) is, so to speak, the study of the interior landscape (the look of a feeling), whereas systems theory ( 3p x 3p) is the study of the exterior landscape (the look of a system). The "study of" or the "looking at" part is essentially similar in both (namely, a third-person, objective, or 3-p approach, which is why the first term in both is " 3p"), but the landscape—the "studied" or the "looked at" part—is quite different (namely, an interior field of felt-meanings, 1p, versus an exterior field of observed processes, 3p). Put one last way, structuralism is a knowledge by description of a knowledge by acquaintance; systems theory is a knowledge by description of a knowledge by description—the look of a feeling versus the look of a look. As we will see in the text, the positive gift of the third-person approaches (or the third-person component in any approach, which both structuralism and systems theory possess), is that they alone disclose holism or "big picture" views. Structuralism is interior holism, systems theory is exterior holism.

     ¹³ My italics. Michael Foucault, p. 57. Although I fully agree with the conclusions of that paragraph, Dreyfus and Rabinow are not, of course, using the words "internal," "external," or "exteriority" with precisely the same technical definitions I have given them. The same goes for the other "inside" and "outside" quotes given in this section; I agree with their general conclusions even if they use slightly different semantics. Most of the authorities, for example, use "inside," "interior," and "internal" as being essentially synonymous, whereas those are specific dimensions for AQAL. Nonetheless, the strong general agreement should be obvious.

     ¹⁴ Michael Foucault, p. 57, 51. My italics.

     Within zone #2, the only major problem with Foucault is that he often confused emergent and repressed. That is, whenever Foucault found a truth that he felt was being ignored or denied, he tended to assume that it was not present because of some sort of oppression—some sort of exclusion and rarefication rules—whereas it often was not present simply because it had not yet emerged. This is the classic error of retro-Romanticism, the assumption that something important is missing because it is repressed: it was once present, but has been lost, and we need to recover it; whereas often, important truths are not present because they have not yet emerged in development: they were never present and then repressed, but they can become present with further growth. As Plotinus put it, sin is a not a "no," but a "not yet." This is the difference between "repressed goodness" and "growth to goodness" models (see One Taste).

     The ways in which Foucault embraced retro-Romanticism, and then strongly repudiated it, are explored in Boomeritis. Basically, as critics have amply documented, this confusion led him to initially read modernity as nothing but a nightmare, which is both factually and interpretively incorrect, as Foucault himself came to acknowledge.

     ¹⁵ Michel Foucault, p. 79, 85.

     ¹⁶ That this form of poststructuralism was essentially a narcissistic move is explored in Boomeritis.

     ¹⁷ What we see in all of this is indeed the history of postmodernism in a nutshell: starting from a zone #2 structuralism, in constant tension with zone #1 hermeneutics and phenomenology, then handling that tension not by integrating the two zones but by sliding into an incoherent social systems theory (zone #4) of deconstructive surfaces with no interiors at all—incoherent because it was supposed to account for intentionality and interiority, whereas it merely pronounced them nonexistent, exactly as systems theory does from the start, except that systems theory had the good sense not to claim that it was capturing interiors, whereas postmodernism claimed to elucidate them (but merely deconstructed and erased them). At the point that postmodernism began denying the existence of any form of interiority or depth—that is, any form of first-person realities—it had erased all "1p" components from any mode of inquiry (at which point books and articles began appearing showing that Derrida and systems theory were quite similar), and thus postmodernism had erased not only hermeneutics and phenomenology (1p x 1p) but also structuralism and neostructuralism in any form (3p x 1p)—because it has erased and deconstructed 1p in any form—and thus it handed the world a sloppy version of 3p x 3p, which could not account for even its own truth claims; and, in the academia where it now ruled, was forced to assert its power merely by threat: postmodern pluralism had come to exemplify the power-over knowledge that it had begun its history by so nobly criticizing.

      AQAL metatheory suggests that one of the main reasons for this is that typical postmodern poststructuralism was driven by the pluralistic-relativistic probability wave (e.g., the green meme), and thus moved beneath the cognitive currents of second tier, which would have allowed it to develop integral methodologies tying all of these important moments together. Foucault, almost alone, had always been driven by yellow cognition, and thus he alone of the major postmodernists agitated toward integral formulations, as explained in the main text.

     ¹⁸ Michel Foucault, p. xii. See SES, endnote 12 for chap. 7, for further discussion of Foucault, part of which reads:

      His early archaeology of actualexistence was a neostructuralist reworking of the traditional structuralist's analysis of possibletypes of experience, but it still placed emphasis on the exterior surfaces and structures of discursive formations and the transformation rules (of rarefication and exclusion) that individuated serious speech acts. This neostructuralism scorned any attempt to get at the interior meaning of the discursive formations (which is the ultimate exterior or monological move: you absolutely never have to talk to the bearers of the linguistic formation because you don't even care what their utterances mean; this is simply the endgame of structuralism taken to an absolutism: just the exteriors of the structures, with no hermeneutic touch or feeling, at which point it veers into systems theory). In his later and more balanced view, the discursive episteme was replaced by the dispositif, or overall context of social practices (encompassing, as it were, the episteme), whose meaning could still only be seen in the coherence (all structuralism is holistic), but whose "insides" also had to be hermeneutically entered. "This new method," comment Dreyfus and Rabinow, "combines a type of archaeological analysis which preserves the distancing effect of structuralism [the exterior, objectifying, 3p component], and an interpretive dimension which develops the hermeneutic insight that the investigator is always situated and must understand the meaning of his cultural practices from within them [the 1p component supplied by zone #1]."

     ¹⁹ If you do, you are taking a 3p stance to them and thus have just stepped into zone #2, or structuralism by any other name, an objective third-person description of interior first-person realities. Meditative traditions access a type of structural phenomenology when they outline stages of meditative development. Indeed, that type of structuralism (or a third-person map of first-person meditative states and stages) is part of their power and usefulness (and their emancipatory interests, as explained in the main text).

     But those meditative stages are brought forth by one specific paradigm—the lineage spiritual practice—and thus a particular meditative paradigm does not disclose numerous other developmental lines and their stages.

     For the same reason, the traditions often excel in a certain line of development (cognitive, meditative, spiritual) but score very poorly on other lines (psychosexual, affective, musical, mathematical, social skills, interpersonal, etc.).

     Because other lines and their levels are not well understood, neither is the phenomena of "levels and lines," where a person can score quite high in some lines, medium in others, and low in still others. All progress is therefore judged according to the single developmental line enacted by the meditation paradigm. (This often has grave consequences.)

     Likewise, the extremely important phenomenon of "states and stages" (in which states of consciousness are interpreted by different stages of development) is also not well grasped by any of the traditions.

      Finally, the phenomenal meditative stages are essentially subjective, not so much intersubjective. Those meditative stages are the result of practitioners watching the interiors of an individual consciousness, not the interiors of a group. That is, they don't watch the group itself over time; they watch individuals in the group over time. They don't watch the cultural nexus-agency, only the individual agency. They do not watch interactive capacities or intersubjective capacities, and thus they do not dig into the intersubjective background. Those can only be spotted, not by following individuals over time, but the group patterns of behavior over time, something that no spiritual tradition did (or even suspected; this is a postmodern realization; i.e., cultural contexts molding perception). Moreover, since, in most cases, everybody in a premodern tradition was of one culture, this made it all the harder for the traditions to spot cultural contexts.

      The phenomenal stages in meditation (as offered by various traditions) are fairly simple: they are classes of enacted phenomena, classes that, paradigmatic experience in that tradition indicates, emerge in a generally sequential, stage-like, or wave-like fashion (according to the traditions themselves). But they are not the rules or patterns underlying the phenomena. Those patterns are spotted by a more sustained third-person approach to interior realities, an approach specialized in by the sophisticated forms of modern developmental psychology (whose major drawback was that their data faded out around centauric levels, and thus they did not, at first, study the higher stages and waves of development; but the stages they did access were elucidated in extraordinary detail based on both subjective and intersubjective assessments).

      For all of the above reasons, you will find interior stages of meditative development such as those outlined by St. Teresa, the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, the ten Zen ox-herding pictures, Abhinavagupta, vipassana, the Sefirot, and so on (which is the stage structuralism of the premodern Great Chain); but you will not find interior stages such as those discovered by Jane Loevinger, Lawrence Kohlberg, Clare Graves, etc.

     Integral Methodological Pluralism finds all of those worthy of inclusion in any integral model.

     ²⁰ What structuralists call "transformation" is what we would call "holistic translation." Structuralists call the coherency codes of a structure "transformational" because all structures enact a phenomenological world by taking the chaotic, incoherent, "blooming buzzing confusion" of experience and transforming it into a coherent whole, a unified perception (which then appears to awareness to be pregiven, or simply "the way things are," when "the way things are" is actually a construction of structures). AQAL metatheory agrees entirely with that assessment; but for AQAL, the word "transformation" usually applies to vertical shifts in structures, not what a particular structure is doing, which is generally called "translation." What structuralists are pointing out is that every translation is a miniature transformation, in that a structure is a higher-order pattern enacted upon lower-order perceptions. Still, for AQAL, that is more accurately called holistic translation, but this is essentially a semantic issue.

     ²¹ "Autopoietic" is the 3p descriptor; if its referent is within a model of the objective organism, that is the UR theory of Maturana and Varela ( 3p x 1-p x 3p); when the referent is interior feelings and awareness, that is UL structuralism proper of, for example, Carol Gilligan ( 1p x 3-p x 1p). See endnotes 2, 4, and 8.

      "Autopoiesis" is not a term generally used by structuralists, but as the Piaget quote makes obvious, the meaning is essentially the same. Still, in most cases, I reserve "autopoiesis" for the RH approaches, where it originated. As for "transformational," see endnote 20.

     ²² As for Piaget's main cognitive stages (sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational): As developmental psychologists know, Piaget presented three main stages of cognitive development: sensorimotor, concrete operational (conop), and formal operational (formop). Preoperational is not itself a true stage, but the first phase of conop. It has become common, however, to refer to Piaget's "four" main stages, which is fine as long as we know what we are doing.

      Piaget's stages are ones that I still use, in a very general way, but only for the cognitive line of development, and then only for the lower half or so of the spectrum of consciousness (beyond formal operational is centauric vision-logic or higher mind, then illumined mind, intuitive mind, overmind, supermind; see fig. 5). Piaget's major misjudgment, most critics now agree, was attempting to subsume all developmental lines within the cognitive line alone, which simply does not allow for the empirical fact that different lines show sometimes pronounced differences in rate of development and dynamics of unfolding (see The Eye of Spirit). But Piaget's brilliance in meticulously investigating—and theoretically formulating, within a Hegelian/Kantian scheme—the development of cognitive worldviews, moral sense, space and time construction, levels of self sense, and so on—all within a largely nonreductionistic, holistic, constructivist, developmental/evolutionary, self-organizing paradigm—was a monumental contribution.

     ²³ This is healthy or constructive postmodernism as opposed to the more common fragmented or deconstructive postmodernism. Both of them postulate that the world is not given but interpreted and constructed. The healthy postmodernist outlines the structures that human beings must possess in order to be able to construct their world, many of which must be universal if human beings universally construct their worlds. The unhealthy postmodernist also outlines a theoretical system of what must be universally present and necessary in order for knowledge to be constructed, contextual, and pluralistic, and this system, like that of structuralist, is said to be true for all people—i.e., it is said to be universally true that people interpret reality, that knowledge is contextual, that intersubjectivity molds all knowledge, and so on—but the pluralistic postmodernist claims that there are no universals and that universals are oppressive. In other words, both of them are presenting structures and claims that are said to be universal; one of them is open and honest about the claims, the other is not; or, at the least, appears deeply confused about the truth-status of the pluralism that is claimed to be universally binding on all peoples and all cultures. Basically this amounts to a type of transparent universalism versus hidden universalism, the latter being the core of boomeritis. For an editorial on this state of affairs, see Sidebar F, "Participatory Samsara," posted on this site.

     ²⁴ For AQAL, most of the deep features (or self-regulating codes) of holons (in all domains) are not given ahistorically but rather are laid down in the process of evolution and development itself (i.e. all present synchronic codes were laid down diachronically). However, once laid down as evolutionary memory, they tend to become fixed Kosmic habits (or a priori structures) in their developmental domains, acting as teleonomic omega points for all future members of the class, which is why, in very general terms, ontogeny does recapitulate phylogeny. But even when a holon's deep features appear as a priori forms or Kosmic habits, nonetheless the surface features continue to be socially molded, historically fashioned, and often culturally relative. No part of a holon then—whether deep or surface—stands completely outside the molding hands of time and history and evolution (except, of course, for the Timeless itself).

     ²⁵ See boomeritis endnote 6 for some of the cross-cultural research on the universality of these stages.

     ²⁶ "Structure" in structuralism can refer to the structure of an individual psychological agency (UL) and/or the structure of a cultural nexus-agency (LL)—a subjective structure and/or an intersubjective structure—where the "structure" is the third-person descriptor of the probability patterns displayed by the first-person realities.

      But precisely because a "structure" is simply a postulation that attempts to account for certain phenomena brought forth by the social practice of adequate structuralism, these structures can be legitimately described and defined in any number of ways, as long as those ways conform to the enacted data or phenomena themselves.

     In fig. 2, "structuralism" is given for the outside of the individual interior, and "cultural anthropology" for the outside of the collective interiors. Structuralism can be, and is, used in both, but the complexities of collective holons render structuralism one of the many useful tools in cultural studies, whereas for the outsides of individual interiors over time, it has no successful rivals and thus is listed as the exemplar of zone #2 in first-person singular.

      For AQAL metatheory, as we have seen, a "structure" is simply one way to conceive the regularities of behavior that arise in a given probability space. From the "description" of the behavior one attempts to "define" the structure or agency at work (i.e., one attempts to define the patterns or Kosmic habits that have built up over time wherever a particular holon has appeared). The habitualness (or regularity) of the pattern constitutes the internality of that holon (i.e., its agency, regime, coherence code, regnant nexus, or governing pattern—the more habitual the holon, the tighter the pattern). The regime, coherency, code, or agency of the structure (the "deep" part of the structure) simply defines what is "internal" to that holon, and hence indicates the probability of finding a particular occasion within the holon's boundary in the relation subholon to holon.

     ²⁷ The phenomenologist attempts to describe the phenomena or chess tokens as clearly as possible; the hermeneuticist gets to know the players themselves; the systems theorist looks at all of the players and the tokens as equivalent exteriors in a social system connected via information; and the structuralist attempts to discern the hidden, invisible, internal patterns (conscious or unconscious) that the sentient beings in the system might be following. These Kosmic habits are part of the holon's karmic continuity—not "bad karma" but "good karma"—habits these sentient holons have settled into as the platforms for their own stability in the midst of the degradation, dissolution, and decomposition tugging at them in all four quadrants (which is another way to say that structures must tetra-evolve, as all holons do).

     ²⁸ Technically, a song is an artifact and as such cannot adequately be used as an example of an organism or compound individual; if we do so, we would have to say that the organism is a self-song: it is autopoietic. This is similar to saying that an organism is a system, which is acceptable but slightly misleading in that it is a system with a dominant monad, which is not what we usually mean by a system (and which is why "system" is mostly used for communal or collective, not individual, holons). There are similar problems with the metaphor of a song, which does not adequately apply to an organism or sentient holon, nor to a stream or line in a sentient being, but rather to an artifact of a sentient holon. Likewise, the interaction of those artifacts is a song sung by a choir, not a big organism. Gaia, for example, is not a big compound individual, nor a song sung by an individual, but a song sung by a chorus or choir of all sentient beings. That choral song, alas, is being sung off key, it is out of harmony, due to one species singing off-key loudly.... (another story). Individual organisms sing songs; Gaia is a chorus/choir, not itself another song sung by a big critter.

     There is, however, one sense in which interior developmental lines are indeed artifacts, namely, artifacts of the transcendental Self (e.g., koshas of the Atman). Still, that view introduces several complicating factors, in that artifacts of the self and artifacts of the Self involve relative and ultimate dimensions, respectively, which are apples and oranges in explanatory theory.

      I will continue to refer to developmental lines or streams as songs, simply because the analogy is so useful, but only with all of those qualifications.