Here’s an excerpt of the essay I recently posted on the Integral World site.
“The concept of integral is an umbrella term that can encompass different interpretations, though I believe that they share a commonality: that they are multi-perspectival, i.e. aim to combine not just one worldview, but several, or meta-paradigmatical, incorporating more than one just one paradigm. The term transdisciplinarity is also closely related: it is not only the juxtaposing of different disciplines in one research project, but an attempt to transcend the partial approaches into a unity, an attempt to go beyond the different disciplines. Transdisciplinarity, as contrasted with multi, or inter, starts from the object itself, and from our intersubjective relation to it. The choice of research methods derives from the here and now of that relationship, rather than from any prior institutional history of disciplines.
As my own contribution, I would like to offer some more perspectives to the concept of integral.
The Place of the Integral Approach
Let’s have a look at the first figure:
| Parts | Wholes | Includes | |
| Difference | Postmodern approaches | Integral Approaches | Subjects and Objects |
| Similarity | Analytical Sciences | Systemic Sciences | Objects Only |
We can recognise two axes: one distinguishes attention for the ‘whole’, from attention to the ‘parts’; the other distinguishes attention to similarities and ‘structural unity’ between different phenomena, from attention to difference.
All four approaches are valid approaches in our attempt to understand ‘reality’.
The classic materialist approach is based on the reduction of any phenomena to its constitutuent parts, which are then studied separately. The idea of course is that such analysis is eventually followed by a synthesis, but the synthesis is always secondary, and for all practical purposes is often abandoned, since scientists have become hyper-specialised in their disciplines, and have difficulty understanding other specialised domains. It is still the mainstream approach in the hard sciences, and very important in the social sciences as well. The result is a fragmentation of our knowledge and worldviews. However, whatever it’s limitations the reductionist method is the condition for the others to exist, as it provides the raw material of factual data and knowledge.
Current emphasis on the whole gives us the systemic sciences such as cybernetics, the system sciences proper, autopoiesis theory, chaos and complexity theories. In such an approach, a part is only considered through its function for the whole. Furthermore, it is geared towards the objective, there is no attention for its separate subjectivity, intention, will, etc… As in the systems approach to distributed networks for example, the subjective intentions of the agents is
From the world of philosophy have come the postmodern approaches. This approach stresses that any worldview is dependent on perspective, that no part of a system can understand the whole. Therefore, it rejects ‘grand narratives’ for their hubris of taking an imagined godlike position of a part claiming to be able to know the whole. Postmodern approaches, also called poststructuralist, reject structuralist approaches, which look at structural unity, and like the systemic sciences, do not stress the subject, which they mostly consider to be an essentialist construction. Postmodern approaches stress ‘difference’, no ‘process’, no ‘object’, no ‘subject’ exists apart from the field or system it is part of, and in fact, is defined by its difference from the other things in the same field.
The Integral approach can be seen as a reaction against the limitations and unforeseen effects of the previous methods. Unlike analytical science, it focuses on the whole. Unlike systemic approaches, it always includes the subjective component. Unlike postmodern approaches, it does not shy away from integrative ‘grand narratives’. But it has also learned from the other approaches: that no attention to the whole can violate the truth of its parts, from the systemic sciences, that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, from the postmodern, that the integral is just another limited perspective, albeit a useful one. Integralism should therefore never be seen as a totalising, ‘imperialistic’ approach, but as another, integrative, multiperspectival way to look at the world. In fact, it can be said that any individual is an integrator, is a different composite, of his/her understanding of reality. But the specific effort, methodology, of the integral forces its practitioner to a more conscious effort to integrate as large a portion of truth as he possible can. Moreover, because it also knows the limitations of any individual perspective, it stresses that dialogic methods, involving intersubjective meeting of minds, can yield greater relative truth still.
To conclude, in my understanding, an integral approach is one that:
- respects the relative autonomy of the different fields, and looks for field specific law
- affirms that new levels of complexity causes the emergence of new properties and thus rejects reductionisms that try to explain the highly complex from the less complex. It tries to formulate level-specific laws
- always relates the objective and subjective aspects, refusing to see any one aspect as a mere epiphenomena of the other; it is subjective-objective in that it always relate the understanding of the objective, through the prism of a recognised individual perspective
- in general, attempts to correlate explanations emanating from the various fields, in order to arrive at an integrative understanding; in this sense it is a hermeneutic discipline focusing on creating meaning.”