Integral

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Discussion

Jennifer Gidley:

"The genealogy of the term integral is somewhat contested among contemporary integral theorists and researchers. In the middle of last century cultural philosopher Jean Gebser (Gebser, 1949/1985) used the term integral to refer to a new, emergent, structure of consciousness. However, unknown to Gebser when he published his first edition of The Ever-Present Origin (Gebser, 1949/1985, p. xxix), Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo had begun in 1914 to use the terms integral knowledge and integral consciousness, in a series of writings later published as The Life Divine (Aurobindo, 1914/2000). Sri Aurobindo refers to integral knowledge as “a Truth that is self-revealed to a spiritual endeavour” (Aurobindo, 1914/2000, p. 661). This is also aligned to Gebser’s use of integral: “Integral reality is the world’s transparency, a perceiving of the world as truth: a mutual perceiving and imparting of truth of the world and of man and all that transluces both” (Gebser, 1949/1985, p. 7). What has not yet been recognised in the integral literature, to my knowledge, is that even before Sri Aurobindo began writing about integral knowledge, Steiner20 was already using the term integral21 in a similar way.22 Steiner’s earliest use of integral, to my knowledge, is the following comment he made on integral evolution in a lecture in Paris on the 26th May, 1906.

- The grandeur of Darwinian thought is not disputed, but it does not explain the integral evolution of man… So it is with all purely physical explanations, which do not recognise the spiritual essence of man's being. (Steiner, 1928/1978, para. 5) [Italics added]


Steiner also used the term integral in a way that foreshadowed Gebser’s use. Gebser (Gebser, 1949/1985) claimed that the integral structure of consciousness involves concretion of previous structures of consciousness, whereby “the various structures of consciousness that constitute him must have become transparent and conscious to him” (p. 99). Gebser also used the term integral simultaneity (p. 143) to express this. This echoes Steiner’s characterisation of “the stages on the way to higher powers of cognition … [where one eventually reaches] a fundamental mood of soul determined by the simultaneous and integral experience of the foregoing stages” (Steiner, 1909/1963, § 10, para. 5). [Italics added]

The term integral has been popularised over the last decade by Ken Wilber and to a lesser extent by Ervin László with their respective integral theories of everything23 (László, 2007; Wilber, 1997, 2000a). Much of the contemporary evolution of consciousness discourse that uses the term integral to point to an emergent, holistic/integrative and spiritually-aware consciousness—draws on the writings of Gebser and/or Sri Aurobindo, either directly, or indirectly through reference to Wilber’s integral theory (D. G. Anderson, 2006; Combs, 2002; Earley, 1997; Feuerstein, 1987; Montuori, Combs, & Richards, 2004; Murray, 2006; Neville, 2006; Roy, 2006; Swanson, 2002; Thompson, 1998; Wilber, 1997). An ecology of integrals, has been suggested including “six intertwined genealogical branches of integral: those aligned with Aurobindo, Gebser, Wilber, Gangadean, László and Steiner… among which there are varying degrees of commonality and contestation” (Hampson, 2007, p. 121)."

(https://www.researchgate.net/publication/47374341_Evolving_education_a_postformal-integral-planetary_gaze_at_the_evolution_of_consciousness_and_the_educational_imperatives)