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Transcend and Include: The Integral Attitude to Competing Perspectives
By Adam J. Pearson
When I was younger, I tended to think in a very limiting way. I didn’t realize just how limiting it was at the time because I simply didn’t know better. When I thought in this narrow way, I would first buy into one view of the world and cling to it as Truth with a capital T. I would then attack any other model that seemed to threaten or compete with my chosen belief system. This went on for years and years as I moved from philosophy to philosophy and religion to religion. I found myself embroiled in endless debate and fighting a draining war that could never be won. For every particular viewpoint is like a single star in a galaxy of billions upon billions of other models.
This futile process continued until I realized just how draining, exhausting, and limiting this approach to knowledge really was. Instead of seeing the valuable insights offered by all of the perspectives and simultaneously acknowledging their limitations, I would cling to the insights of one model and blind myself, to deny, or try to rationalize, its limitations. In short, I would think in exclusionary terms (ie. either this viewpoint is fully true or that one is, and if one’s right then the other is absolutely wrong). It took me many years before I saw that exclusionary thinking wasn’t the only way to think.
Here’s the positive and liberating news; another way is open to us: integral thinking. This shift from exclusionary thinking to integral thinking marks what Dr. Clare Graves once called “a momentous leap in human consciousness.” Even now, this approach, which I first began to encounter in Ken Wilber’s Integral Meta-Theory and Dr. Graves, Cowan, and Beck’s Spiral Dynamics feels fresh, new and exciting, and I continue to benefit from it day after day. In this brief article, I’ll say a few words about what it means to study new perspectives or models with a focus on transcending their limitations and including and integrating the partial truths that they contain.
As I suggested earlier, when I held on to ‘either/or’ thinking, I felt exhausted, often frustrated, and drained. This was no coincidence; it happened for good reason, namely, that desperately fighting to make one limited model of reality true and all others false is a futile waste of time and energy. For one thing, it is an expression of a false belief because no model, theory, or belief system is ever complete or final. I held on desperately to particular models because I wanted to have an absolute truth I could cling to, like the French philosopher Descartes in his Meditations. I wanted the security of having that. And it was this very tendency to blind myself to the idea that all models contain both truths and limitations that kept me stuck in exclusionary thinking.
The crucial fact that exclusionary thinking tends to ignore is that every belief system or model is like a picture frame and what is outside the picture frame is always far greater than what it is inside it.
The practical implication of this fact is that if I assume that my model is final and absolutely true while yours is not, then I am quite simply wrong. No model has a monopoly on truth, no singular model has the ‘final word’ on all topics or includes all possible valid insights or partial truths. The progress of all science rests on this idea, in fact, for the absolutizing of any given model is literally the death of science. Science proceeds by transcending the limitations of prior models while including their valid, but partial truths. And our general ways of thinking about everything from spirituality to science to art to politics and beyond can follow the same wise trajectory.
Consider this: What if we were to use all of the time and energy we invest to make this other other perspective ‘wrong’ to instead find out what’s right, true, and valuable within it and integrate that with what we already know to be true? What if we acknowledge the valuable partial truths in the model, integrate them with the valid insights from all other perspectives, and transcend the limitations of all of the models?
This is the fundamental question of the integral vision in a nutshell. The goal of integral thinking is sweeping in scope, namely, to bring together the best of all premodern, modern, postmodern, and contemporary visions of reality and unify and integrate them to reveal their interconnections. In this way, instead of trying to pit one viewpoint against another, we will include the valid features of all viewpoints into the most-inclusive model of which can conceive. Moreover, as we develop this ever-evolving, ever-expanding, and ever-dynamic integral model, we can jettison and transcend whatever is limiting, unhealthy, or false within all models. It’s an ambitious way to think, but a supremely valuable one precisely because it aims to include the valuable features of all competing viewpoints. The integral approach does not relativize and equalize all viewpoints, and thus squash all of their differential strengths and weaknesses into a depth-less Flatland, but it does give every voice a fair hearing.
As my wise friend Eliot Bissey put this point, “the integral approach involves four components:
“Transcend and include and negate and destroy. Transcend the limitations. Include the healthy, valuable, or partially true aspects. Negate the unhealthy aspects. Destroy, break down, or move beyond the boundaries that limit our thinking. As we level up, we discover the next set of limitations, boundaries, healthy and unhealthy aspects. And the process begins again: transcend, include, negate, and destroy.”
Suppose I am advocating one view of the world is true and you are advocating a competing alternative view. We could, of course, waste valuable time and energy trying to prove ourselves right and each other wrong in closed-minded debate. Or we could dialogue collaboratively and try to find out what are the valid, but partial truths within both of our viewpoints and what are the limitations of both of our ways of thinking.
By transcending the limitations and including the truths in our two original viewpoints, we arrive at a more inclusive, more integral, more encompassing and much broader perspective. This new model is necessarily vaster and more encompassing than either of the two models with which we we started. It includes more of reality and transcends more of the limitations of both previous perspectives. If we keep doing this with all knowledge we encounter, our understanding will necessarily grow richer, broader, and more-inclusive. And we will be empowered by this wider and more inclusive viewpoint.
As thinkers such as Ken Wilber have wisely pointed out, transcendence and inclusion are how all growth, development, and evolution proceed. Every new level of complexity both transcends the limitations of the earlier level and includes the less complex structure into itself. Molecules transcend and include atoms; tissues transcend and include molecules; organs transcend and include tissues; physiological systems transcend and include organs; organisms transcend and include systems; relationships transcend and include organisms; ecosystems transcend and include organisms and their environments and so on. This pattern of simultaneous transcendence and inclusion (integration) holds for every set of complex forms we consider in the universe. Our systems of thought are no exception.
We want our growth, development and education to proceed; we don’t want to be stuck in a stagnant and limiting perspective. Therefore, I find tremendous value in applying this idea of transcendence and inclusion to everything I learn and encounter in daily life. I like to ask: what valuable truths can I integrate from this, and what limitations can I transcend? How can I honour what’s valuable in this approach that I seem to disagree with? These questions are helpful on an epistemological knowledge, but also on an interpersonal level. When you talk to someone with a goal of valuing the truths and insights in the perspectives that they share, they get to feel validated and you get to learn from them. When everyone is at least partially right, everyone gets to feel validated and all valid truths get incorporated in an ever-expanding perspective with an integral focus.
In short, the more we transcend and include from all of the models and perspectives that are offered to us, the more comprehensively we’ll be able to tackle the challenges we encounter and the more empowered we’ll be to make more informed decisions.
Read More from Adam Pearson at http://philosophadam.wordpress.com/
Source: https://philosophadam.wordpress.com/2015/01/29/transcend-and-include-the-integral-attitude-to-competing-perspectives/
