Catallaxis

My Integral Practice

2009-08-13T06:00:00-07:00

Daniel O'Connor | Integral Ventures, LLC In the context of personal development, an Integral Practice may be defined as an integrated set of developmental practices designed to enhance one's experience of life and support one's contribution to the world. I first encountered the idea of an Integral Practice in 1993, in the final chapter of a veritable encyclopedia of human potential: The Future of the Body: Explorations into the Further Evolution of Human Nature by Michael Murphy. Based on a breathtaking variety of research accumulated over the years, Murphy outlined in considerable detail about a dozen different types of metanormal human capacities that appear to be latent in us all, awaiting development through various transformative practices. With these metanormal capacities in mind and evidently drawing inspiration from Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga, Murphy proposed a contemporary approach to personal development that would integrate physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual practices into what he called Integral Practices, flexibly self-designed to gradually awaken one's latent human potential. This idea of Integral Practice and the research behind it was particularly appealing to me because, in 1993 at the age of 27, I had just completed an intensive wilderness sabbatical in which I engaged in my...

Integral Praxiology: Justification Considerations

2008-06-30T06:04:00-07:00

Daniel O'Connor | Integral Ventures, LLC Continued from Integral Praxiology: Integral Practices How exactly does one justify the thesis that a specific set of perspectives, practices, and propositions, however counterfactual it may appear in people’s worldly action, is nevertheless always already essential for their worldly action and, therefore, represents an integral knowledge possessed by all people, regardless of the extent to which they realize it? Appeals to authority or popularity simply will not suffice, for they are logical fallacies of the highest order and ironically supportive of the thesis they might seek to quickly dismiss. Beyond the demonstrative justification of integral reconstruction itself—that which I express in the course of my writing—there are at least two additional approaches to justification worth considering. The first method of justification is that of performative contradiction, which involves systematically contemplating and demonstrating that if people were to act in a manner that expressly violated any or all of the perspectives, practices, and propositions, then they would be engaged in some form of performative contradiction. This is a method advanced by Apel (1990) in his approach to speech act theory and the unrestricted communication community and employed further by Habermas (1979; 1990) in his formal...

Integral Praxiology: Integral Practices

2008-06-30T06:02:00-07:00

Daniel O'Connor | Integral Ventures, LLC Continued from Integral Praxiology: Integral Perspectives Having thus clarified what essential perspectives must be pre-supposed by people in order for them to act in any situation, I now turn to the second portion of the inquiry concerned with the essential practices that constitute such action. If my interest was limited to framing an integral meta-theory with the capacity to describe human action in its many forms, then Triadic Quadratic Perspectivism would suffice. But the conditions that must be pre-supposed by people in order for them to act in any situation must be more than descriptive in nature, as descriptive conditions take as a given whatever it is that is animating this multi-perspectival action. Any theory of human action that merely describes action, regardless of how integral that description may be, falls short of its inherent potential if it does not also prescribe action that can guide people toward a direct, personal experience of that which has been so clearly described. Moreover, any integral meta-theory comprised entirely of descriptors, whether they be perspectives, archetypes, holons, fields, or some other type of construct, seems to contain an inherent self-contradiction in that it does not account for...

Integral Praxiology: Integral Perspectives

2008-06-30T06:01:00-07:00

Daniel O'Connor | Integral Ventures, LLC Continued from Integral Praxiology: Introduction Inspired in part by Wilber’s (2007) recent proposals regarding Integral Perspectivism, my first proposal is to consider that action can only be understood from some perspective and that this leads to a worthwhile inquiry into what perspectives are possible and, furthermore, what perspectives are truly universal to all action. In other words, what perspectives must be pre-supposed by people in order for them to act in any situation? The first part of my answer is based on my interpretation of Jürgen Habermas’s (1979, 1984, 1987, 1992) Formal Pragmatics, which is the core of his Theory of Communicative Action and his Critical Theory of Society. Habermas (1979, p. 1) introduced this research program as an effort “to identify and reconstruct the universal conditions of possible understanding. In other contexts one also speaks of ‘general presuppositions of communication,’ but I prefer to speak of general presuppositions of communicative action because I take the type of action aimed at reaching understanding to be fundamental. Thus I start from the assumption that other forms of social action—for example, conflict, competition, strategic action in general—are derivatives of action oriented toward reaching understanding. Furthermore, as...

Integral Praxiology: Introduction

2008-06-30T06:00:00-07:00

Daniel O'Connor | Integral Ventures, LLC Integral Praxiology is an inquiry into the possibility of an integral science of human action. My approach to the study of human action is a form of integral reconstruction. As a reconstruction, my intent is to clarify and formalize the tacit knowledge and intuitive competencies that must, logically, be pre-supposed by people in order for them to act in any situation. In other words, I am attempting to make theoretically explicit those pre-theoretical perspectives, practices, and propositions that appear, on very close examination, to be governing the actions of people in the full variety of worldly contexts. As a distinctively integral reconstruction, my intent is to acknowledge and integrate all the essential pre-conditions necessary for a theory of human action that honors the full potential of the human experience. Hence, I will attempt to demonstrate that these distinctively integral perspectives, practices, and propositions are themselves pre-supposed by people in all their actions, however unrealized their full human potential may be expressed in these actions, and therefore unavoidable elements of this theoretical reconstruction. Integral Praxiology, therefore, represents an attempt to make theoretically explicit those pre-theoretical perspectives, practices, and propositions that appear to be governing the...