Integral History the Kosmic Address
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Transcript of Integral History the Kosmic Address
Integral History
Running Head: Integral History
Integral History: The Kosmic Address.
Victor Shiryaev
ITH 5006
Jordan Luftig
John F. Kennedy University
Winter 2010
1
Integral History
Abstract
Every methodology, everything we do is always already rooted in some perspective. Integral
Theory states that only acknowledging this fundamental assertion, we can become more
flexible in perspectives-taking and can effectively recognize the multi-faceted nature of our
existence. In this paper I make the attempt to define the kosmic address of history, based on
the AQAL methodology. There are lots of schools of history, they all make claims to deal
with history, but is their history – same? I argue that they all have different perspectives on
different facets of reality, so that the final kosmic address of history they deal with is different
in every case. By defining their places in AQAL framework we can start to shape a first
integral approach to history in general, both philosophically and methodologically.
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Integral History
During the 20th century, history seemed to have lost the ground, the very foundation of
its existence. Because history lost objectivity. Post-modernists claimed that positivist history
was dead, since it was not factual (exactly opposite to what positivists claimed), but rather
narrated interpretation. Total relativism lead thinkers to state no objectivity was possible at
all. But very soon post-modernists themselves became history.
Post-structuralists claimed that “all histories are equally representative of reality and
therefore equally fictitious” (Green & Troup, 1999, p. 300); they also claimed that narrative is
always the interpretation, that is, a historian is always already seeing his subject from a
certain perspective. Does it mean, though, that history came to its end? As mentions Jörn
Rüsen, the editor of the series called Making Sense of History, “what in fact did abruptly
come to an end was historical theory” (Rüsen, 2008, p. ix).
At the same time, “each analysis of even a single instance of historical memory cannot
avoid questions of the theory and philosophy of history” (Ibid., 2008, p. x).
That is, there is a strong need for such a theory and for such a philosophy. Different
historians attempt to create a new philosophical basis for history, drawing from systems
theories, chaos and complexity theories, and so on.
For example, structuralists (e.g. the Annales school) tried to find the universal mental
structures, that manifest in human behavior and societies. They claimed the existence of some
universal patterns, the constructions that could help to understand history. For example,
Fernand Braudel proposed a new model of historical time, consisting of three layers of time:
time of events (classic history), time of cycles (economic, population, civilizational history),
and the geo-time (geology and geography) (Galtung & Inayatullah, 1997).
One of the most remarkable contemporary integral attempts I believe was made by
John Lewis Gaddis, the historian of the Cold War, in his book The Landscape of History:
How Historians Map the Past (2002).
Another integrating attempt was undertaken by Johan Galtung and Sohail Inayatullah
in their book Macrohistory and macrohistorians: Perspectives on individual, social, and
civilizational change (1997), where they reviewed and compared twenty of the world’s
greatest macro-historians of all times.
What macrohistory is can be defined by its features: macrohistory is nomothetic and
diachronic, in that it tries to find the major regularities, mechanisms of history, and it does it
by tracing processes through time. It rarely deals with primary data itself, using proper names
and events only for the illustration.
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Integral History
Everything happened in the past can be a subject of historical enquiry. Lately there is a
positive tendency to recognize the multiple facets of history, for example, by including such
subjects as history of art, history of women, or oral history into the field. It is interesting to
mention that even as recent as 60 years ago historians wouldn’t use such phenomena as art,
language, money, or family as subjects of historical analysis.
I agree, all the phenomena happened in the past can find their respective place in the
historical frame, but on what foundation does this frame stand? I argue that the best
foundation available now is Ken Wilber’s AQAL.
As Inayatullah (1997) suggests, there are at least ten factors that every macrohistorical
theory should acknowledge and embrace: a) episteme and context; b) causes and mechanisms;
c) stages and patterns; d) role of the transcendent; e) units of analysis; f) the metaphor of time;
g) the role of the vanguard; h) exit from the worldview; i) view of future; and j) view on
historiography.
In my opinion, Integral Theory and the AQAL approach could be best applied to
macrohistory. There is no macrohistory without the post-/metaphysical foundation, and
AQAL provides the best post-metaphysical framework available today. In my previous paper
on this subject I dealt with causes and mechanisms; stages and patterns; role of the
transcendent; units of analysis; exit from the worldview; and view of future, as those are
understood by Integral Theory. In this paper I deal primarily with the episteme and context,
by which I understand the worldview and the perspective, and touch the topic of units of
analysis, as they cannot be separated from the perspectives.
Episteme and Perspective
The major revelation of the post-modernism, the relativity and contextuality of every
position, should definitely be acknowledged by the historians.
For example, Peter Burke writes that “more and more historians are coming to realize
that their work does not reproduce ‘what actually happened’ [the phrase of a famous
“positivist” historian Leopold von Ranke] so much as represent it from a particular point of
view” (Burke, 2004, p. 290).
Indeed, if we attempt to deconstruct any of the narratives, the last “Rubicon” will be
the perspective of the author. Wilber states in his Excerpt D (2002), that “a subject perceiving
object is always already in a relationship of first-person, second-person, and third-person
when it comes to the perceived occasions”.
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Integral History
That is, to define the place of the concrete historical approach in the Integral
Framework, we need first to define its author’s “kosmic address” (Wilber’s another
revolutionary idea). And the kosmic address starts with the altitude and the perspective
(Wilber, 2007, p. 69).
Basically, every perspective is a vector. The initial point of the vector is the subject of
the perspective, and the direction of the vector is the perspective of the object.
How is the initial point of perspective defined? In AQAL framework, in my opinion, it
is a two-fold phenomenon, which includes both horizontal and vertical dimensions. While the
horizontal dimension would be the geo-cultural context, the vertical dimension would be the
developmental altitude of the historian itself.
As Jörn Rüsen wisely suggests, “historical memory is not an arbitrary function of the
cultural practices used by human beings to orient themselves in the world in which they are
born, but . . . such memory covers special domains in the temporal orientation of human life.
These domains demand precisely those mental procedures of connecting past, present and
future, which became generalized . . . as that specific field of culture we call ‘history’”
(Rüsen, 2002, p. ix).
Developmental psychology states that those “mental procedures” themselves are
subjected to development through transcendence and inclusion. And it was not until recent
years that historians started to address these issues. In fact, one of the volumes of the
aforementioned series “Making Sense of History” – Narration, identity, and historical
consciousness (2005) closely deals with this question.
As Jürgen Straub, the editor of this volume, states in the foreword, “an empirically
based ‘epistemology’ that can categorize human thought into different, mutually irreducible
domains of ‘rational faculties’, in order to then investigate them in their elementary and
complex forms, could thus be conceptualized not least as a psychology of historical-narrative
acts of meaning-construction” (Straub, 2005, p. xv).
To summarize, the kosmic address of the historian itself is a very important variable
(the initial point of the vector), a very important parameter to understand the worldview he or
she embodies, because as Jürgen Straub notes in regard to the post-modernist critique of
history, “historical realities are constructs…. The historical construction of meaning thus
includes every act that somehow leads to the construction and representation of realities that
we consider specifically historical” (Straub, 2005, p. 46); and this construction of meaning
always already comes from the intersection of the horizontal and vertical, of the socio-
cultural context and developmental altitude of the historian.
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Integral History
But it is only one side of it. After defining the premises on which the historian bases
his meaning-construction, that is, after defining the kosmic address of the subject, in order to
get a whole picture, we need to define the kosmic address of the object of this historian’s
inquiry, the object the vector is pointing at. And that is where Integral Methodological
Pluralism comes to the fore.
The Zones
Since every reader of this paper is certainly well acquainted with the Integral Theory, I
will not go into details, rather than just stating that the integral episteme recognizes the four
major dimensions of reality (i.e. the Quadrants), as they are the interior and the exterior of the
individual and the collective (Wilber, 2000b).
And what is history in its general sense if not the unfolding space-time interactions of
individual and collective holons (in both the objective and the cultural domains)?
By individual and collective holons I understand the notion first coined by Arthur
Koestler, and extended by Ken Wilber. “Reality as a whole is not composed of things or
processes, but of holons” (Wilber, 2000b, p.43), which are wholes that are parts of other
wholes. Individual holons are manifested by all the four quadrants, while social holons are
composed of only the two lower quadrants. Individual holon in case with history of human
kind is, of course, a human being. Social holon is therefore a social or cultural phenomenon of
human collective.
Now, the most interesting assertion is that if you take any of the holons in any of the
quadrants as the object of your (historical or not) inquiry, you can look at them from their
own inside or outside, which gives you the so called “eight primordial perspectives” total
(Wilber, 2007, p. 34). As Clint Fuhs explains in regards to the outside and the inside views in
his paper named An Integral Map of Perspective-Taking, “after every quadrant-domain enters
full awareness, development yields another critical dimension, altering the mode in which
each domain is viewed. This distinction, which allows individuals to view each domain from
the inside or the outside, renders the four quadrants into 8 distinct zones” (Fuhs, p. 10).
Every of those perspectives, enacting different domains of existence from either inside
or outside, require its specific methodology. To put it in historical terms, if you want to know
the size of Chang'an, the ancient capital of China, in 750 A.D. (when it was the biggest city in
the world), you don’t start with researching Taoist thought. Those are two completely
different domains.
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Integral History
Basically, what the 8 methodologies proposed by Wilber do is that they give us
perspectives on perspectives on perspectives. For example, hermeneutics is the inside view of
the interior view of the collective (Wilber, 2007, p. 40). However, practice shows that it is
usually more complex than just that.
But what happens in history, is that very often a specific historical approach claims to
have a universal applicability, thus violating the principle of non-exclusion, postulated by
Wilber in “Excerpt B” (2002b). And this is what Inayatullah calls the “knowledge
imperialism”.
So, the appropriate methodology. Or, as one of the prominent sociologists, Pitirim
Sorokin, put it: “the key in writing history is finding the appropriate unit of analysis and the
appropriate form of science” (Galtung & Inayatullah, 1997, p. 198).
I totally agree.
Difference in Notation
In the following part of this paper I will try to explicitly use the integral mathematics
of primordial perspectives notation as it is formulated by Clint Fuhs in An Integral Map of
Perspective-Taking. I believe his notation system is better than the original one proposed by
Ken Wilber in both the “excerpt c” of the Kosmos Trilogy (2002c) and the Integral
Spirituality (2007).
For example, Wilber states that Varela’s approach to biology can be formulated as 3-p
x 1-p x 3p, and at the same time notes that it can be formulated as 1-p x 3-p x 3p as well,
which is very confusing (2007, p. ). Also, Wilber doesn’t use the second-person, since for him
second-person is automatically the first-person plural.
Fuhs’s system, on the other hand, is more precise and accurate, since it differentiates
in its notation the perspectives (i.e. quadrivia, “1p” and “3p”), the exterior/interior distinction
(i.e. the quadrants, “1/p” and “3/p”), and the inside and outside views (i.e. “1-p” and “3-p”
respectively, indicating the zones) in a very clear way.
It is also important to note here that what all of the following perspectives aim at is
history in its multi-faceted complexity, but every perspective ‘highlights’ only one (or a few)
facet, and that is why I believe IMP is so important.
Outside View of the Exteriors of the Collective
Let us deal now with some of the historical approaches to better illustrate the
difference of methodologies and importance in distinguishing them.
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Integral History
There are many different schools of historical method: the empiricists, the Marxist
historians, the Annales, the psychohistory, the oral history, the so called “history from below”
and so on (Green & Troup, 1999). They all claim to write history. They use different
methodologies (simply because it is the way they think they can explore history best), but
they rarely acknowledge the fact that their “units of analysis” lay in completely different
domains.
For example, what we usually understand by history in fact is the approach of the
empiricists (positivists), which is nothing but an outside view of the exteriors of the individual
and the collective. Using Wilber’s integral calculus we may formulate it as 3p x 3-p x 3p. A
more precise Fuhs’s notation formulates this approach as
1p(1p) x 1p(3-p) x [3p(3/p) + 3p*pl(3/p*pl)]
which reads as “[my] historian’s outside view perspective of the behavior of it and its”.
It represents the typical Right-Hand path, originating in the scientific revolution of the
modern; it is based on the belief that knowledge should be derived from observation of the
material world. And it is, “without doubt, the most influential school of historian thought over
the course of this [last] century” (Green & Troup, 1999).
Leopold von Ranke, famous for his phrase that historians should simply “write what
actually happened”, was instrumental in establishing empirical approach. He claimed that
historians should only refer to original sources, and that true history can be derived only from
objective research. For example, he rejected the use of the memoirs and letters as historical
evidence – which is exactly the violation of the non-exclusion principle.
As a child of modern, this approach was severely criticized by the post-modernists,
who pointed out on the total lack of interiority and inter-subjectivity in the empirical method.
At the same time, since empiricists have always emphasized the methodology, it is their
methods that all other historians use while working with the original sources, and it is their
methods that provide the best tools for shaping the outside view on the exteriors of the
collective.
Inside View of the Interiors and Exteriors of the Collective
Since late 1960th, the opposite approach began to take shape, which is usually referred
to as “history from below”, for it emphasizes the lived experience of the ordinary people, and
reconstructs history based on what they saw and wrote in their diaries, memoirs, or political
manifestos (Burke, 2004). For example, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a Harvard professor, received
8
Integral History
the Pulitzer Prize in history for her book A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard based
on her diary, 1785–1812 (1991).
Ulrich doesn’t just research the life of Martha Ballard, but rather tries to follow all her
decisions, choices and connections in order to describe the early 19th century history of what
is today the state of Maine from inside. Thus – the inside view on the interiors and exteriors of
the collective (and individual). Using Wilber’s integral calculus it is possible to formulate this
historical approach as 3p x 1-p x 3p, by which I understand here the attempt to reconstruct the
exteriors/interiors of the collective as perceived by the first-person of the actual participant of
the event.
In Fuhs’s notation it can be precisely codified as follows:
1p(1p) x 1p(3-p) x [{1p΄(1p) x 1p΄(1-p) x {3p*pl(1/p*pl) x 3p*pl(3/p*pl)}} + {1p΄(1p) x
1p΄(3-p) x {3p*pl(1/p*pl) x 3p*pl(3/p*pl)}}];
which is the researcher’s “outside” reconstruction of the historical first-person actual witness
both inside and outside views on the interior and the exterior conditions of his or her
environment.
Every school of history has its own methods of historical inquiry, but sometimes those
methods are raised to the level of the only epistemology (e.g. as in the case with empiricists),
so I believe it is important to note that the “history from below” approach never violates the
non-exclusion principle and never pretends on knowledge imperialism.
On the other hand, it has some methodological issues with the other two principles of
IMP – enfoldment and enactment, for the “history from below” approach has not yet outlined
its borders and specific application. It led Jim Sharpe to ask in New Perspectives On
Historical Writing (Burke, 2004): “Where, exactly, is ‘below’ to be located, and what should
be done with history from below once it has been written?”
Inside view of the Interiors of the Individual
Another method of historical inquiry (which is often referred to as psychohistory) was
pioneered by a prominent developmental psychologist, Erik Erikson. Erikson tried to use
psychoanalysis to interpret individual’s behavior. He wrote quite a few works on this subject,
analyzing Luther, Gandhi, and Hitler among others, and trying to define the possible tensions
in their unconscious leading to the actual facts of their later biographies.
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Integral History
This perspective can be labeled as the inside view (psychoanalytic interpretation) on
the interiors of the individual, or Wilber’s 1p/3p x 1-p x 1p. I add the third-person perspective
here because any interpretive process requires reconstruction, that is, the objective look at the
contents of the interiors.
In Fuhs’s notation psychohistorians’ perspective may be formulated as follows:
1p(1p) x [{1p(1-p) x 3p(1/p)} + {1p(3-p) x 3p(1/p)}]
It can be read as “my first-person perspective of both my first-person inside and
outside views on his interiors”, which is exactly the approach Erikson chose: to understand
history through combining hermeneutical and structuralist approaches to the individual’s
interiors.
Erikson saw psychoanalytic method as a historical method, arguing that “the history of
humanity is a gigantic metabolism of individual life cycles”, which can be understood through
inquiry into individual’s biography (Green & Troup, 1999).
Psychohistorians in general want to study both the behavior and the motivations of the
individual and of the groups in the past, and there were quite a few attempts to do so.
However, this historical method is not very well welcomed by the traditional
historians, since “psychoanalytic interpretations are by their nature individual and subjective”
(Ibid., p. 66). At the same time Green & Troup agree that psychohistory has much to offer,
since it can help “reveal the rational roots of apparently irrational behavior, and assist in
explanation of the extreme situations of history” (Ibid., p. 67).
The important call of the psychohistorians is that we need to recognize and respect the
Left-Hand dimension of historical reality (to use Wilber’s words), and to include
subconscious as well as conscious to the field of our studies, on the principles of non-
exclusion, enfoldment, and enactment.
Inside and Outside Views of the Interior of the Collective
The last historical approach I want to discuss in this paper is cultural history. As Peter
Burke, a prominent cultural historian, states in his book What is Cultural History? (2008),
cultural history deals with the symbolic and its interpretation. And in its modern shape it has
both the inside and the outside approaches.
Clifford Geertz, a famous anthropologist that inspired most cultural historians in the
last generation, defines culture as “historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in
symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which
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Integral History
men communicate, perpetuate and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life”
(cited by Burke, 2008, p. 37).
Wilber (2002c) states that cultural domain can be understood from inside by
hermeneutics, and from outside – by using cultural anthropology.
It is important to note here, that the approaches of historians who are members of the
nexi of the particular culture are by default different from the approaches of historians who do
not belong to this culture, because in the latter case the shared interiors of a ‘we’, which is
1p*pl(1/p*pl), change into the shared interiors of ‘them’, which is 3p*pl(1/p*pl). And I argue
that the knowledge retrieved by the member and the agent of the cultural nexi is qualitatively
different from the one retrieved by the ‘outsider’, however hermeneutical approach he or she
can enact.
Cultural historical perspective from the inside and the outside, as viewed by the
member of this culture, can be codified as
1p(1p) x [{1p(1-p) x 3p*pl(1/p*pl)} + {1p(3-p) x 3p*pl(1/p*pl)}]
Respectively, cultural historical perspective from the inside and the outside, as viewed
by the ‘outsider’, can be codified as
1p(1p) x [{1p(1-p) x 3p*pl(1/p*pl)} + {1p(3-p) x 3p*pl(1/p*pl)}]
Also, there are two other major concerns here, as in the case with the “history from
below”: the principles of non-exclusion and enfoldment.
Burke notes that “the cultural historian gets to parts of the past that other historians
cannot reach”, so the methodology he or she uses is specific of this particular approach (the
non-exclusion principle). At the same time, the field of cultural history is not exactly
concrete, since “it is increasingly difficult to say what does not count as ‘culture’” (Burke,
2008, p. 2).
The latter concern can be extrapolated on both non-exclusion and the enfoldment
principles in general, because different disciplines ‘live’ inside different zones only on paper.
In reality it is very hard to differentiate outside and inside approaches and to claim the use of
only one methodology for one zone. Even integral scholars themselves understand zones and
methodologies differently (Fuhs; McIntosh, 2007; Wilber, 2007).
Conclusion
To conclude this paper I want to talk more about the Integral Methodological
Pluralism. In the beginning of the third millennium two things became very obvious. First,
ontology and epistemology are extremely important, for it is only the empiricists who can still
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Integral History
continue to reconstruct the past without understanding of what past (and reality in general) is.
Second, the constant attempts to mix methodology with epistemology and even ontology
show us that we need a clear framework that can help to distinguish the three.
In regard to those concerns I believe nothing has as much to offer as the Integral
Approach. In this paper I offered a condensed overview of some of the fundamental post-
metaphysical constructions of the Integral Theory. To briefly summarize them here:
Reality cannot be reduced to either exteriors or interiors, but is rather a whole comprised of
the interior and the exterior of the individual and the collective. Thus, the quadrants.
History then, as everything happening, can be viewed as space-time interactions of the
individual and the collective in both objective reality and cultural subjective domain.
The basic “brick” of reality is a holon, or a whole that is a part of some other whole.
The quadrants, even though they exist, are never experienced per se, but rather are enacted
through a certain perspective. Since holons are found in every quadrant, and can be viewed
from either inside or outside, the total amount of the major zones of reality is 8; each one of
them requires its specific epistemology and methodology. To choose the appropriate
methodology one needs first to define kosmic address of a holon being viewed, and then to
follow the perspective on the principles on non-exclusion and enfoldment, however
complicated it can be.
At the same time, each perspective has two sides – the one that is seen, and the one that
sees. Since every expression in integral calculus starts with 1p(1p), to have a truly integral
picture in every case we need not only to define the kosmic address of the object, but also of
the subject (historian, in our particular case). As I have stated in the first part of this paper,
the subject’s kosmic address can be found at the intersection of its horizontal (geo-cultural)
and vertical (developmental) axes; the kosmic address of the subject can help to clarify the
way subject enacts its perspective. Thus – the enactment principle.
Field of history is very complex, and there are no easy solutions to the problems
history faces. History is virtually everything we know about collective and personal past. The
way we deal with it in general, the way we enact our ‘kosmic habits’ defines the way we are
in this world. Actually, history is all we have, since every moment becomes history next
moment, and the only thing which is not history is the ever-present Creativity, always pulling
forward, always on the very edge, as a lens connecting present with the past.
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Integral History
References
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