Why Metaphysics Matters - Dialectics East & West

A lively discussion about why metaphysics matters in our current Metamodern era

Dialectics: East and West

            A new structure of consciousness emerged approximately 3000 years ago. Jean Gebser (1985) called this the Mental structure of consciousness. It gave humans the capacity to create concepts, and to create abstract categories. Plato recognized how powerful this type of reasoning could be. He identified the primary conceptual Ideas as “the language of the gods.” He used the term diaresis to describe what the conceptualizing and categorizing mind could accomplish. Diaresis means “to separate.” Plato recognized the power of the mind to separate out abstract categories from ordinary experience. He elevated the Ideas (the right hand quadrants of the matrix of existence) above ordinary forms of experience with his parable of the Cave. In this story, ordinary men were imprisoned in a cave of shadows cast on the walls, ignorant of the realm of pure Ideas outside the cave. The ideas were the source of the light of truth and freedom, whereas ordinary phenomena were merely shadows cast on the wall of a cave.

            Today we use the word “dialectic” to describe a fundamental feature of the conceptualizing, categorizing mind—that it moves back and forth between dichotomies, searching for a resolution. 

 Since the metaphysical schema of the categories of theoretic mind are ultimately contradictory, reasoning takes on a kind of back-and-forth movement as it searches for a resolution to paradox. This often takes on the form of a “third term.” If for example, I have the category of “man” and the category of “woman” I can use the third term “human” as a higher inclusive category. Some of the most fundamental categories, however, are inherently contradictory. In logics, they take on the form of A, ~ A (not A), and cannot be resolved by a simple inclusion. When, for example, we consider the set [man, woman], we can easily see that the set “human” is an inclusive term. Similarly, I can easily use the inclusive term “counting numbers” to stand in for the set [ 1,2,3 ….]. What happens, however, when we consider the set [A, ~A]? Do they merely cancel themselves out like matter and anti-matter in a sci-fi novel? What happens to our reasoning process when A is a valid proposition, and ~ A is also a valid proposition? Dialectic is the kind of back and forth movement that happens when we attempt to hold both A and ~A as valid truths. Plotinus described this movement as the “up-ward” path, because he recognized how the dialectic mind could shift “upwards” into a higher level of abstraction- what we call a meta-level. For example, we adjudicate the tension between competing theories by building a meta-theory that contextualizes them from a higher, more complex system of abstractions. This up-wards shift into a higher order abstraction (or more complex proposition) could (apparently) synthesize the contradiction in the lower level terms. When people say that classical western philosophy is merely “footnotes to Plato” they are pointing out the form of reasoning that has persisted. My term for this form of reasoning is the synthetic-dialectic—what Hegel identified as the cosmological principle of “sublation,” what Gebser characterized as the “pyramidal” structure of reasoning,  and what Ken Wilber would popularize with the phrase “transcend and include.” This “up-ward” or “synthetic” movement was one way the Mental structure of consciousness reasoned its way away from its fractured metaphysical basis. It is as if our modern minds forgot the original “sin” of diaresis, or separation, and looked for reparation and healing in the direction toward more orders of abstraction and higher and higher levels of hierarchical complexity.

The Mental structure of consciousness emerged in a few major city-centers and travelled along the great trade routes at the intersection of eastern and western cultures. Its native language was the Indo-European language family that travelled throughout the world, along these trade routes, transforming cultures along the way and seeding the great religious traditions with Platonism in the Judeo-Christian worlds and Indian scholasticism in the Buddhist worlds. However, while the Platonists propagated the “up-ward” path, the eastern scholastics took the opposite turn toward the “down-ward” path. As a result, instead of building their philosophical systems on synthetic approaches to the dialectic, they built equally impressive scholastic systems through deconstructive approaches to the dialectic.[1] [2] Plotinus had praised the dialectic as the “up-ward path.” By contrast, Nagarjuna’s fourth lemma bemoans the “endless oscillations” of the dialectical mind. (Kakol 2009) In the east, deconstructive approaches supported deeper insights (versus higher abstractions) gleaned from sophisticated states of focused attention in advanced meditation.  In the west, synthetic approaches supported insights gleaned from sophisticated controlled experiments. Although the approaches steered people in opposite directions, we can draw a parallel between the outcomes. In the west, the synthetic approach produced higher meta-theoretical complexity, used to explore the nature of the universe. In the east, the deconstructive approach produced deeper meta-cognitive views used to explore the nature of mind. [3]

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[1] The astute reader will know where this is all going. There is a dialectic between the synthetic and deconstructive methods, and it is this meta-historical dialectic that Whitehead’s process philosophy broke open and led the way for Harthorne’s process metaphysics which represented the first new dialectical approach in the history of mind. I will take up this part of the story in the next section of the paper. In the final section of the paper I will describe how Peter Kakol, went on to capture the historical implications of Hartshorne’s work with respect to the dialectic between eastern and western dialectics.

[2] Gebser predicted that a new structure of consciousness, called the Integral structure, was already evolving, and it is exactly around this lynch-pin of the dialectic that the new structure makes a radical shift. Gebser emphasized that the Integral structure would not have the “pyramidal” form – which is his metaphor for the synthetic-dialectic movement. However, Gebser seemed ignorant of the eastern “deconstructive” dialectic which was equally characteristic of the Mental structure of consciousness, and therefore doesn’t address it in his writing. Although not synthetic or pyramidal in form, it would be a mistake to construe the eastern approach as a feature of the new Integral structure of consciousness, as it is still an outcome of the dialectical tension that results from a metaphysics of ultimate contrasts. Future Gebser scholars should take note of this crucial distinction.

[3] There are many different ways to “go meta.” John Churchill, for example, is mapping the higher stages (yanas) of meditation onto levels of development he calls “meta-cognitive” stages. These are insight stages that do not complexify reality, rather the insights that are gained cut through complexity (the mental elaborations) and deliver a more immediate, direct perception of reality as it is. For a discussion on direct perception as adequate participation, see my paper at Integral Review