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The Meaning of a Structure

      The notion of a "structure" is by no means confined to structuralism. In fact, the general idea of "structure" is used by virtually all schools of biology, psychology, and sociology, among others. The Oxford Dictionary of Sociology defines structure as "A term loosely applied to any recurring pattern...." The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology gives: "An organized, patterned, relatively stable configuration." No serious theoretician doubts that those types of structures exist.

     Structuralists simply specialize in studying those recurring patterns, those Kosmic habits or configurations. As we saw in Excerpt A, adequate structuralists generally define a structure as a " holistic, dynamic pattern of self-organizing processes that maintain themselves as stable configurations through their ongoing reproduction." As we also saw in Excerpt A, for AQAL metatheory, that the simplest way to look at these patterns is as a probability space. The "structure" of an individual agency and/or a cultural nexus-agency is simply the probability of finding, in a particular locale of the interior dimensions of the AQAL matrix of indigenous perspectives, the behavior that is described or defined as "within the structure." Whatever else a "structure" might be, the least objectionable way to define it is simply as a probability space. Technically, then, for integral metatheory, structuralism means an exterior description in third-person "it"-terms of the probability of finding a particular "I" or "thou/we" behavior in a particular spacetime milieu of the AQAL matrix.⁷

      (Of course, there are only so many words to go around, and "structure" is commonly used in a very broad sense to mean any form, pattern, or agency in any of the quadrants—interior or exterior, individual or communal. Sheldrake, for example, uses "structure" in defining morphic resonance; Maturana and Varela use it in describing structural coupling; psychologists use it in describing stages of development; sociologists use it in defining aggregate behavior; neurologists use it for tissue formation, and so on. When I refer to a structure as being a probability wave, I am using "structure" in the broad sense, referring to the enduring pattern or regime of any holon in any quadrant—such as the structure of a molecule, the structure of a town, the structure of the green meme, and so on. "Structure" in the narrower sense means an interior structure, particularly those elucidated by the paradigmatic practice of adequate structuralism. Hopefully context will make it clear which use is intended—because if not, then my and your communicative intersections will not be internal to a "we" and thus you will have no bloody idea what I am talking about. Like probably just happened with that sentence.)

Structuralism Compared with Systems Theory

      Notice again the terms that adequate structuralists use when referring to a structure: "a holistic, dynamic pattern of self-organizing processes that maintain themselves as stable configurations." Already you can see that those are third-person "it" terms. In fact, all of the structures proposed by structuralists (such as the rules of chess, the turquoise meme, formal operational cognition, the relativistic-pluralistic value structure, the construct-aware self, fourth-order consciousness, the green meme, the preconventional stage, etc.) are not described in first-person terms but in third-person terms; but those third-person terms (or signifiers) take as their referent first- and second-person interiors. That is a crucial point. The structuralist primarily studies behavior but is not a behaviorist; and the structuralist primarily describes systems but is not a systems theorist.

     The reason is that structuralism is the study of an interior as seen from outside its own phenomenological boundaries (in a third-person stance)—but of necessity, within the boundaries of a larger "we" (or a first-person plural stance)—hence, the objective, third-person, outside, "scientific" study of first-person interior realities (individual or cultural).⁸ Systems theory does not attempt to get at a "we" (nor are the types of "we's" that it is inextricably involved with highlighted by its own methodology)—in no case does typical systems theory access the interiors of first- and second-person event horizons. That is why we say that structuralism is the study of the behavior of interior wholes (3p x 1p); systems theory, the behavior of exterior wholes (3p x 3p).⁹

      When researchers engage in the social practice of systems theory, they are particularly interested in describing the behavior of observable systems; they are describing the exterior behavior of compound individuals such that their relationships or exterior interactions are internal to a social system or nexus-agency. They might take an "inside" view of this exterior system (such as Luhmann's social autopoiesis) or a more traditional "outside" view (such as standard systems theory), but at no point do they attempt to get at the first-person (singular or plural) dimensions of the holon. They look at the inside or outside of the exteriors, not at the inside or outside of the interiors.

      In short, the typical systems theorist does not attempt to get at the "I" or the "we" of a holon, but only at the "it" and the "its" of a holon. The autopoietic as well as traditional systems theorists are not trying to describe the feelings, prehensions, desires, impulses, insights, luminosities, raptures, satoris, or samadhis of any holon anywhere—and, frankly, as systems theorists, could not possibly care less. And if they are interested in such interiors, they immediately translate them into third-person terms and refer to subjective interiors as consisting of data processing modules, information transfer through neural nets and synaptic pathways, linguistic processing units, cognitive computations, digital data bits, and so on. I am not saying those things don't exist, simply that those things are the insides of exteriors, not the insides of interiors.

      The structuralist, like the systems theorist, is working (at least in part) with a knowledge by description, or a third-person description of a holon's behavior. But, unlike the systems theorist, the structuralist is working with the behavior of an interior holon—the behavior of an "I" or a "we," not an "it" or a system of "its."¹⁰ Structuralism studies the interior "I" or "we" holons from the outside by following their behavior over time—where "behavior" means the aspects of these interior holons that manifest in exterior behavior (verbal behavior, cognitive behavior, moral behavior, the moves that chess pieces make, etc.).¹¹ This means that at some point the structuralist must have some sort of access to those interior holons, or else the structuralist will actually have no idea what he or she is measuring, studying, or describing. A systems theorist, on the other hand, can study the traffic patterns of automobiles in a city, the behavior of an ecosystem, the formation of an ant colony, or the behavior of system of gases, with a little or no requirement to get "inside" the prehensions of those compound individuals. Simply following the relationships of their exterior interactions is basically all that is required (hence, a third-person of third-person).

      A structuralist is also studying and describing configurations of behavior (either in an individual or a cultural holon). Those behaviors—such as verbal behavior, or the behavior of human organisms when they congregate in church, or the actions they take when they exchange money at the market, or play a game of chess—will indeed have exterior correlates (because all holons have four quadrants; and, of course, those physical exchanges are links or nodes in various ecosystems, social systems, geopolitical systems, and so on). But those exteriors also have interiors that cannot be reduced to or captured by those exterior exchanges, and therefore those interiors cannot be adequately known by description, only by acquaintance. Hence those interiors themselves cannot be accessed by systems theory, ecology, autopoiesis, behaviorism, or complexity theory, but only by introspection, meditation, phenomenology, hermeneutics, tele-prehension, collaborative inquiry, and so on (i.e., the inside-interiors accessed only by methodologies of zone #1).

     Once that acquaintance is made, by whatever means, those interiors can continue to be explored from the inside by, for example, phenomenology or hermeneutics (1p x 1p) or from the outside by various forms of structuralism or anthropology (3p x 1p). That is what we mean when we say that the structuralist proceeds by developing a knowledge by description of realities known only by acquaintance; and this is where structuralism runs into, and needs, phenomenology and hermeneutics, for they alone actually supply the "1p" of the "3p x 1p."

To Kill Culture and Consciousness

     For example, if I am going to try to study the structure, grammar, or syntax of the Greek language, I simply must learn Greek. Having done so, I can enact and bring forth a generalized linguistic worldspace where I can exchange meaningful tokens and communicate with others in that linguistic world—I have established some sort of background solidarity within which mutual understanding can transpire: I am ushered into the interior domains of that enacted world (via hermeneutic shared horizons). I now have access to various " we's" in that cultural space, and therefore I can study those we's from the inside or the outside.

     As a structuralist, I will choose to study them from the outside (but within the overall interior spaces of the we). Once on the interior of that linguistic/cultural space, I am not interested, as a structuralist, in trying to get to know individuals personally, or trying to interpret their particular meanings and values; rather, I am trying to stand back a little bit from the language itself and trying to spot any rules or regularities that it is following—just like the rules of chess. But I would not be able to follow these linguistic patterns merely from the exterior, because I would not know when a person is making a meaningful utterance or a meaningless noise (and therefore I would not know what to include in the grammar structure and what to exclude: I would not know what is internal meaning versus what is merely inside noise). This is why systems theory has never been able to account for linguistics.

     What I will find, as a structuralist, is that linguistic signs themselves do indeed follow patterns—patterns that are stable over long periods of time, patterns that represent the Kosmic habits of the intersections that people speaking the Greek language have developed over the centuries (and millennia), patterns that embody some of the many ways that sentient beings can touch each other within the felt spaces of shared horizons—and patterns that are sedimented, in this case, in the structure of the Greek language (which is to say, patterns that represent the probability of finding a particular type of linguistic behavior in a particular spacetime locale of the AQAL matrix, to put it in 3p terms; or patterns that represent the ways that two or more souls can feel their togetherness within the horizons of mutual care and understanding, to put it more 1p terms).

     It is through a third-person look at these first-person realities that syntax and grammar can be elucidated in descriptive terms, which is nothing more than an elucidation of what Greek speakers are already doing anyway. This does not mean that the Greek language ( langue) can be studied apart from, or in isolation from, everyday spoken Greek ( parole), or that somehow its overall "structure" (synchronic) is isolable from its history and development (diachronic)—both mistakes the pioneering structuralists tended to make. As we will see in Excerpt E (subheading "Integral Semiotics"), the structure of a language (its syntax) cannot be isolated from its actual utterance and meaning-generating contexts (its semantic), both of which are linked in a pragmatics with the interior intentionality and exterior behavior of its speakers. (As we will also see, this allows us to draw on the work of Jürgen Habermas and his formal pragmatics, which is the only sophisticated linguistic theory that attempts to be integral, and which largely succeeds up to turquoise.)

     When structuralism attempts to study, say, the developmental line of values in a human being (e.g., red values, blue values, orange values, green values), it must have some sort of understanding—hermeneutic understanding—of just what those values are and what they mean, or else it simply will not be able to tell when a particular behavior is internal or external to a game. Structuralism is indeed going to study those values from the outside, and from the exterior, but only after, on the interior, it has figured out their general meaning and how to spot it. If, like systems theory, structuralism addressed merely the exterior behaviors, it would collapse all interior intentionalities into single place markers, and then treat the behavior of a human and the behavior of a truck as the same thing: one unit in the anonymous system.

     This is why we say that approaches such as systems theory, ecology, and social systems inadvertently kill culture and consciousness. As approaches that wonderfully exemplify zone #4 (or "3p x 3p"), they are ill-equipped to handle the "1p" or interior realities of sentient beings, and thus the actual "sentient" dimensions of sentient beings are missed by ecology and systems theory. Let's look at that point more carefully....

Ecology Contrasted with Structuralism

     What I would like to do in this section is present several different examples of why you and I can share the same ecosystem—or exterior landscape—and not share the same interior landscape.¹²

     Systems theorists are fond of saying that systems theory deals with the "whole of reality" and thus it covers all the holistic bases. For example, they point out that dynamic systems theory can even be used to successfully describe the traffic patterns in large cities. And that is true—the flow patterns of the automobiles follow specific patterns that systems theory captures well. But systems theory cannot tell you if the driver (i.e., the intentionality) of a particular automobile is red, blue, orange, green, and so on—and yet those interior domains contain the key not only to much of human existence and motivation, but to all of the feelings of sentient beings throughout the Kosmos. If all we do is describe the traffic patterns of sentient beings—using ecology, systems theory, chaos and complexity theory—then we have indeed reduced all first-person consciousness to third-person objects, its, and artifacts: we have killed all culture and consciousness.

     I am not saying that the automobiles don't follow those systems patterns; I am saying those systems patterns are only part of the story. As for the interior story—whether in a cell, a deer, an ape, or a blue meme—we have to look elsewhere, not to replace those approaches but to complement them.

     The specific problem here is that, although all holons have (at least) four quadrants, so that all interiors have exterior correlates, nonetheless a very similar set of exterior physical realities can support significantly different interiors. For example, let's say somebody is in a theta brain-wave state (an exterior-objective state in the brain or UR), which has been demonstrated to support states of artistic creativity, certain types of meditation, and increased learning speeds (in the UL). But, as biofeedback pioneer Elmer Green put it, "If somebody is in a theta state, we can't tell if they are meditating or figuring out creative ways to rob a bank."

     In other words, similar exterior landscapes can support quite different interior landscapes, because there is no simple one-to-one mapping of interiors onto exteriors. They inhabit phenomenological spaces that are not photographic negatives of each other, but follow their own often-quite-different, if not separable, topographies. All of the methodologies listed on the interior or Left-Hand quadrants in figure 2 (such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, and structuralism) are attempting to elucidate these interior, non-physically-local phenomena, in both human and non-human sentient beings.

     Of course these interiors are inseparably connected with exterior realities, including exterior social systems and ecosystems, but the threads of connection are not topological; the thinnest communicative thread will let a person in Moscow and a person in Iceland develop a very strong friendship (a strong LL or cultural "we"), even though they are otherwise physically separated by thousands of miles and dozens of local ecosystems. Conversely, I can live next door to you, in the identical ecosystem, and still not be friends.

     In a nutshell, solidarity and geography are not the same thing; sharing values and sharing physical space are not equivalent.

     Just as with theta brain states (which are the objective exteriors of an individual) and the often different interior states of consciousness they can support, you and I can be in the same "theta ecological system"—the same objective exterior network—and yet you are meditating and I am figuring out how to rob a bank. The same ecological system can support a Gandhi and a Charles Manson. To say that the ecosystem is the primary and fundamental reality—and that both Gandhi and Manson should simply live in harmony with the ecosystem—is actually to say that "ecosystem" and "living in harmony with it" are NOT the same thing—which is exactly my point.

     In other words, the crucial item, often unnoticed, in ecological approaches is that we can indeed live in harmony with nature or not live in harmony with nature, which means that nature is not the determining factor, which means that ecological consciousness cannot be explained by ecology.

     This is not a trivial item about a few interiors; it applies to sentient beings across the board. Interior landscapes and exterior landscapes are indeed different aspects or dimensions of the same occasion—but the "different" is as real as the "same." To take a pertinent example: in human beings, truly ecological values do not begin to emerge until the green wave of consciousness development, and they do not flourish until yellow. Prior to those waves of interior development, worldcentric ecological consciousness is not present—it is "over the heads" of beige, purple, red, and blue.

     Worldcentric or global ecology is over the heads of purple-meme or tribal consciousness, which, as Clare Graves pointed out, "has a different name for every bend in the river but no name for the river." Likewise global ecological awareness is beyond red-egocentric, and beyond blue mythic-membership. Only at green does such an awareness emerge, and only at yellow does it flourish—none of which can be accounted for or explained by ecology itself. In other words, the very realities that allow ecological consciousness to emerge are not accounted for by ecology. (Which is why reducing reality to ecology is actually to devastate ecological realities.)

     Since these stages of interior development leading to the capacity for ecological consciousness are elucidated only by structuralism, it follows that exterior ecology depends on interior structuralism in order to be effective at all.

     Me and my blue interiors belong to the local Lion's Club; you and your yellow interiors belong to the local Integral Institute. We have already seen that this means that you and I share interior culture up to the level of blue; and thus we can converse within a meaningful "we" up to the blue level of discourse, because the signs and tokens that we exchange will have similar-enough referents up to the blue worldspace (and thus we will share a cultural solidarity up to that point). But green and yellow symbols, words, and signs will be "all Greek" to me; their referents are literally over my head, and therefore although I can hear their signifiers they have no real meaning for me. I am inside no "we" such that my intersections are internal to the patterns of those phenomenological spaces. I literally cannot see what you are talking about. Your yellow values include a worldcentric or global ecological consciousness; my blue values do not. We live in the same ecosystem, but only one of us has ecological awareness.

     Any truly integral ecology would surely want to take all of those facts into consideration. In order to have sustainable economies living in harmony with ecosystems, human beings must have interior levels of development that can hold ecological consciousness: there is no sustainable exterior development without correlative interior development, no exterior landscape that can survive without an interior landscape capable of holding it. It does no good to emphasize the worldcentric Web of Life if people are still at egocentric and ethnocentric levels of interior development—which an alarming 70% of the world population is.

     Notice that deep ecology, for example, which is a wonderful statement of the necessity of a transformation of consciousness in order to realize ecological interrelatedness, makes the following types of statements, to paraphrase Arne Naess: "A human being's sense of self-identity can expand from an identity with the individual organism, to an identity with the family or tribe, to an identity with an entire nation, to an identity with all of humanity. But it can also go one more step and find an identity with all of life, and that is where deep ecology starts."

     Agreed. But deep ecology has absolutely nothing more to say about those actual stages of interior transformation—egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric to Kosmocentric—stages that have in fact been studied in extraordinary detail by developmental structuralists. Deep ecology simply asserts the goal without evidencing an understanding of the path to that goal. And the reason for that lacuna or crippling omission, we were saying, is that ecology is essentially a zone #4 methodology, but the interior stages on the way to an ecological goal are elucidated only by zone #2 paradigms. Obviously an effective ecology would include both, because otherwise ecology promotes a goal with no path, a noble ideal with no means, a wonderful ambition supported only by vaporware and exhortations and recriminations, not effective practices.

      A truly integral or AQAL ecology would take all of these factors into account. Integral Ecology is being forged by several of my colleagues at Integral Institute (e.g., Michael Zimmerman, Sean Hargens, Chris Desser), an approach that includes not only the intricate webs of ecosystems but the interior stages/structures of consciousness that allow the emergence of ecological awareness which itself wants to protect ecology. In our opinion, anything short of an AQAL or integral approach to ecology is likely to fail, not because it is wrong but partial. On the other hand, using an AQAL framework and its Integral Methodological Pluralism allows an integration of most of the major schools of ecology, each of which has an important piece of the overall integral puzzle. (We will return to integral ecology in Excerpt E.)

Hermeneutics Contrasted with Structuralism

      Call this section "Acquaintance versus Description: You Had to Be There."

     Hermeneutics, because it is the inside story of interiors (1p x 1p), involves a knowledge by acquaintance, whereas the other three zones, because they involve outsides and/or exteriors, involve a knowledge by description (i.e., the other three zones all have at least one "3p" in them.) This is perhaps the single most importance difference between hermeneutics/phenomenology and the other three zones, and it is this crucial dimension, needless to say, that is devastated by any exclusive reliance on the other zones (from structuralism to ecology to systems theory). This is why a reliance on structuralism, important as it is, cannot carry the day (as no zone—nor quadrant, nor level, nor line, nor state, nor type—can alone). This is vital to recognize, because structuralists, like any other advocates of a particular paradigm, can themselves become involved in various sorts of absolutisms (including quadrant absolutism, zone absolutism, and stream absolutism).

     Me and my blue interior can read the book Spiral Dynamics, and I can memorize the descriptions and definitions of all the major structures and vMemes. I can memorize the words and signifiers that define beige, purple, red, blue, orange, green, yellow, and turquoise. If you ask me to describe turquoise, I might be able to do so perfectly. Does that mean that I am at the turquoise level or structure of development? Not at all. "Structures," as we were saying, are third-person descriptions (in "it" language) of first-person realities, and therefore I can memorize the descriptions without actually being acquainted with those realities. I have access to these "its" by description, but I only have access to the corresponding "I" realities if I myself transform to those levels, stages, or structures and thus know those realities by acquaintance.

     In short, knowledge by acquaintance involves transformation; knowledge by description involves translation.

     (This is another way of stating the problem with ecology, an inadequacy that also hobbles most of the "new paradigm" approaches, because many people are simply repeating the descriptions of highly integrated waves of consciousness, an enactive web of life, nondual awareness, and integral solidarities without having actually transformed to a knowledge by acquaintance of those integral realities.)

      Robert Kegan (whose books—including The Evolving Self, In Over Our Heads, and Languages of Transformation—are superb exemplars of adequate structuralism), points out that it takes an average of five years for most people to move through any major stage of development. Thus, for example, if I am at blue (and lack worldcentric ecological awareness), and you are two stages of development ahead of me, at green (and possess a well-developed ecological awareness), and you are attempting to convince me that I should adopt an ecological perspective such as yours, then all you will have to do is wait 10 years for me to develop to that level, and then I will agree with you.

      In other words, the idea that we can "dialogue" ourselves into ecological awareness; or that if we merely "learn" a new paradigm; or if we replace the mechanistic Newtonian-Cartesian worldview with a holistic worldview—all of those approaches are considerably off the mark. Precisely because those approaches lack the methodologies of zone #2, they are not cognizant of the stages of consciousness development that are necessary in order to be able to hold a truly worldcentric, holistic, integral worldview in the first place. As we were saying earlier, these approaches are, in effect, presenting a wonderful goal with no way to reach it; a noble vision with no path to attain it; an ecology that does little for ecology.

      Path-less paradigms, alas. (Which is to say, paradigm-less paradigms, since paradigms are paths, not maps, and these approaches present nothing but maps of a territory nobody knows how to reach.) But that is exactly the strength of adequate structuralism and the wonderful contribution of zone #2 methodologies. We will return to the exact nature of structural research below, in conjunction with Carol Gilligan's study of the stages of female moral development, and outline the gifts that structuralism brings to integral methodological pluralism, including an understanding of how to actually walk the path to worldcentric awareness (in ecology, politics, education, medicine...).

      In the meantime, there is indeed a profound difference between knowledge by description, which we can know by translation, and knowledge by acquaintance, which we can know only by transformation. Individuals can learn the 3p descriptions, maps, names, and definitions of higher waves of development (including ecological systems awareness) without actually transforming to those higher levels, and this may ironically prevent them from taking the steps necessary to actually awaken these higher levels in themselves (and thus be of actual service to Gaia). This is a constant problem with new-paradigm approaches that offer merely descriptions without development.

     And, for the same reason, it can be a problem with structuralism itself. Because it presents a wonderful series of 3p maps of 1p awareness, structuralism can inadvertently contribute to people merely memorizing the map and thus never discovering the territory. As usual, only when structuralism takes its place at the integral table can it be of service to a greater good. Structuralism can indeed describe the outsides of interior waves of consciousness, but those waves can be known from the inside only by acquaintance, only by transformation, only by direct touch in the living heart, a song that can be sung only from within.