Gregg Henriques’s Threefold-Based Metapsychology
Description
Jonathan Rowson:
"Gregg Henriques’s Metapsychology: the tree, the coin and the garden.
Finally, in the present day, there is a figure familiar to the liminal web, Gregg Henriques, Professor at James Madison University, who has created a model featuring some fundamental threeness that amounts to “The Unified Theory of Knowledge” or UTOK. I don’t sense any enemy motivating Gregg’s work - he comes across as a friendly guy who is generous in spirit and he has always been kind to me. But he is trying to solve a problem with his model and that is (primarily) ‘the problem of psychology’: there is no agreement on what the subject matter of psychology should be - is it a science of behaviour or a therapeutic practice to help us live a good life (whatever that is) or something in between?
Not everyone agrees the problem of psychology is problematic, and Bayo Akomalafe for instance has indicated that sometimes our problem lies precisely in our attempt to solve a problem. Any solution is rarely an end point, and usually creates a new kind of problem. There are similar issues with the lack of a clear object of inquiry in many other disciplines - do Sociologists agree on what society means (consider the divergence in Harris, Guattari and Archer above; all of whom are sociology adjacent). There are other examples (economics, theology, philosophy) but the problem of psychology is arguably a little different because, as Gregg puts it, “psychology is where the conceptual softness of natural science begins”. I am not even sure that is true because Physics for instance deals with matter and energy but neither can easily be defined. But Psychology deals with human interiority as it manifests in the exterior and relational world, so that “conceptual softness” calls into question the legitimacy of a subject based on inferences between different kinds of world, and all that flows from it in terms of strength of evidence and quality of intervention (i.e. What makes you think I should lie on this couch? Why should I tell you about my childhood? Are you sure I can’t eat the marshmallow now and go on to live a great life later?) Gregg believes he has solved the problem of psychology by outflanking it with a comprehensive onto-epistemological framework that applies beyond psychology.
I have known of Gregg’s work for a while, but only recently bought his book UTOK: The Unified Theory of Knowledge, published by Sky Meadow Press. I was struck that on the very first page of the first chapter, there is a mention of a book by Donald Davison (which I had never heard of, despite studying Davidson as an undergraduate) called Subjective, Intersubjective and Objective (2001) where he states:
I want, first of all, to stress the apparent oddity of the fact that we have three irreducibly different varieties of empirical knowledge (ie the subjective, the objective, and the intersubjective). We need a overall picture which not only accommodates all three modes of knowing, but makes sense of their relations to each other. Without such a general picture we should be deeply puzzled that the same world is known to us in three such different ways.
Gregg begins the book there because that is what he has set out to do, and what he believes he has achieved. He deals with the objective world through his ‘tree of knowledge system’, the subjective world through his Iquad coin, and the intersubjective world through his UTOK Garden. (I confess, I’m still a bit confused about why he chose a coin to represent subjective states, even after reading about it).
I have noticed the UTOK story evolving even in recent years but I believe in its current state it looks something like this:
- Graph retrieved from UTOK’s Three Philosophical Pillars (2023)
I won’t explain the diagram, which is mostly self-explanatory, but the injunction described on the back of the book as a ‘mantra’ is “Marry the Coin to the Tree in the Garden under God” which I think is a way of saying that there are lots of kinds of things in the world and they can all be known, but they have to be known differently and there is a legitimacy to that way of knowing which the framework is there to elucidate."
(https://jonathanrowson.substack.com/p/the-threeness-of-the-world-3)
Discussion
Jonathan Rowson:
"What I want to say now is delicate and risks offending Gregg and his many fans, which is not my intention. However, there is a reason that I began this series with an open question about what metaphysics is and is for, and a reflection on maps and territories, and both feel relevant now.
Let me put it like this: I admire Gregg’s work and I like him, but I don’t vibe with his framework.
My intellect can see the extraordinary effort, diligence, insight and dharmic tenacity required to do the work that was clearly his to do - to see someone labouring on the task life has set for them is always admirable and often a model of what maturation and fulfilment looks like. However, I also have a viscerally negative aesthetic reaction to it. I feel, rather than think, that a framework like this is as much part of the world’s problems as it is part of any ‘solution’.
Why would I say such a thing?
Maybe it’s professional envy. Perhaps Gregg’s comprehensive vision of being and knowing replete with images and metaphors is too close to what I set out to do when I co-created an organisation premised on threeness almost a decade ago (Perspectiva’s official name is Perspectives on Systems, Souls and Society). And maybe the fact that Gregg has fleshed out his framework, and I haven’t, creates some intellectual ressentiment that makes it painful to look at it, and now here I am acting out like a child throwing toys out of a pram saying: “I don’t like it. I don’t want it.”
Maybe, but here’s another possibility: When I wrote Tasting the Pickle as my Covid-survival project in 2020 I described my essay and the table that reflected its main elements as “the last cigarette of a cartological hedonist”. I felt I was done with intellectual map-making as a premise for societal transformation, and I still feel that way today.2 Yet I can say that for about five years now my intellect has felt free of the compulsion to describe the world cartologically; emotionally, psychologically and spiritually I am in a very different place. That same feeling extends to seeing metacrisis as a term we use to get beyond crisis thinking.
I am all for intellectual frameworks, I love good theoretical models - UTOK is one of them. I believe in wide-boundaried thinking which means I have an appetite for maps and models that might appear over-elaborate, but are perhaps just necessarily complex. The Swiss prophet Jean Gebser might be right that the mental/rational structure of consciousness is in its deficient mode, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need mental models or rationality. It does mean however - and I think this is what I am feeling - that we need to learn to see through the world, to develop (and I know that may not be the right word) what Gebser called ‘diaphanous awareness’ and a-perspectival knowing which does not mean thinking that is without perspective, but free from any particular perspective which suggests a kind of epistemic agility, seeing and knowing and thinking as a cosmic art form that is optimally responsive.
All of which is to say: it’s fine to bring a conceptual model into the room, but treat it as a guest you are excited to get to know who might help you to know yourself better, not as a landlord you have to justify yourself to in perpetuity.
A good map is a good tool but it is rarely a good lens, and it is definitely not an evolved, enacted, encultured, extended nervous system in a historical context. I think it’s our job as thinking and learning people to metabolise a variety of conceptual maps, but metabolising is the key, not reifying or oracularising (coinage!). Good frameworks like the ones we have considered here are nutritious intellectual food, and we should take them in. But what should happen then, I think, is a process of conceptual sublimation whereby the models become like digested food that manifests as energy that our bodies need to dance and it becomes part of our perceptual orientation and arises as trace elements that are integrated into our enactive dispositions; it is through those dispositions - how we are ready, willing and able to act - that we intuitively and spontaneously respond to the world as we find it, as it find us.
I am slightly (and perhaps unreasonably) triggered by Gregg’s framework because it is ultimately a descriptive ontology. The model is useful on its terms, but I see it as a kind of conceptual idolatry at a time when we need to get better at creating generative ontologies. There is a risk of cartology becoming cartophilia and then, imperceptibly, cartosclerosis sets in, and before we know it we are lost inside the map.
Descriptive ontologies focus on cataloguing, classifying, and analyzing existing entities and relationships. Generative ontologies seek to produce new realities. Both are required, and the former can even be a kind of training for the latter.3
A descriptive ontology says: this is how things are, we can see the world through it.
A generative ontology says (or rather enacts, enables, instantiates…): In light of how the world presents itself to us at the moment, here is how we can think of things, here, now, and for the purposes at hand (informed in some cases by years of metabolising descriptive ontologies). Generative ontologies are closely related to moral imagination which I have described before as perhaps being a sine qua non for the peaceful resolution of conflict. We have to see anew.
Coming back to Archer for a moment, we might say that while institutional structures are slow to change, descriptive ontologies are more like culture while generative ontologies are more like agency. And it’s complex as always. ‘Systems, souls, and society’ feels like a generative ontology in our still rather materialist culture and for some spiritual-bypassing sub-cultures, because it is trying to shape reality and change the conversation. And yet a critic could say it’s a descriptive ontology like any other. And that would be ok, because nobody should feel status anxiety about their ontology.
Part of the challenge is that it feels like ontology and epistemology are not really where it’s at. While we need to be aware of them, perhaps they are not really quite the solid ground we are looking for, and can’t ever be. Maybe the challenge is deeper and even more difficult, not with knowledge and truth as much as with beauty and goodness. What if the world’s heart is breaking and we all have to break with it? What if the very idea of territory makes no sense, and our only maps are in the granularity of the pieces of wood that have become our liferafts at sea?"
(https://jonathanrowson.substack.com/p/the-threeness-of-the-world-3)