Integral Humanism

Description

Erik Haines:

" The path I have been working out is what I call the new integral humanism—post-secular, integral-pluralist, in service of human flourishing. It is, in its constitutive elements, the synthesis of Maritain’s integral humanism with Dallmayr’s integral pluralism, grounded in Habermasian post-metaphysical thinking, operating with Integral Facticity and Enactive Fallibilism as epistemological discipline, and held within the Canadian intellectual tradition that has carried these resources since the founding generation of Canadian universities through Watson, Armour, Sweet, Bradley, McGrath, Trott, Grant, Taylor, Saul, and the Catholic critical-theological tradition through Davis, Lalonde, Despland, and Baum.

The new integral humanism is integral in Maritain’s sense: it grounds political and social life in the irreducible dignity of the human person against both bourgeois individualism and totalitarian collectivism. It is integral in Wilber’s sense, meaning post-metaphysical: it draws on the developmental and methodological architecture of AQAL while submitting that architecture to the discipline of Habermasian post-metaphysical critique. It is pluralist in Dallmayr’s sense: it commits to the irreducibility of the other before any synthesis, hierarchy, or framework has decided what the encounter will yield. It is post-secular in the precise Habermasian sense: it neither privatizes religious-spiritual claims nor exempts them from disciplined critical examination, but holds them in their full substantive depth within the post-metaphysical conditions of intersubjective discourse. Finally, it is grounded in the lived-experience auto-ethnographic methodology IACT operationalizes: Enactive Fallibilism acts as the discipline that tests frameworks against the resistance of the lived body, treating the body’s feedback as data that falsifies unsustainable systems and ensuring the framework remains in-progress and revisable rather than claiming completeness.

The new integral humanism, at its core, is grounded in a lived-experience auto-ethnographic methodology operationalized through IACT. Within this framework, Enactive Fallibilism serves as a vital discipline, testing systems against the resistance of the lived body. By treating somatic feedback as empirical data that can falsify unsustainable frameworks, it ensures that the project remains a revisable, in-progress endeavor rather than a closed or complete system.

Positioned as a fourth political theory, this new integral humanism acknowledges Aleksandr Dugin’s diagnosis that twentieth-century ideologies have reached exhaustion. However, it establishes its legitimacy through a radically different grounding. Whereas Dugin’s project is anchored in ethnos, civilizational identity, and traditionalist metaphysics—effectively foreclosing the integral pluralism introduced in Dallmayr’s Democracy to Come—the new integral humanism commits itself to the post-secular, post-metaphysical threshold required for participation in democratic public life. While both projects inhabit the fourth-political-theory landscape and share certain diagnostic lenses, their fundamental groundings remain in substantive opposition.

Returning to the themes of the introduction, I revisited Iain McGilchrist because the digital public sphere has granted his work a visibility that was absent during my initial 2010 reading. I engage his project with both the pleasure of witnessing a meticulous mind and the analytical scrutiny made possible by the IACT framework, Lukácsian critique, and the combined work of Habermas, Gramsci, and Dallmayr. The structural and political diagnostic presented in this essay does not require devaluing McGilchrist’s significant contributions. Indeed, The Master and His Emissary (2009) largely survives this critique as a robust exploration of how cognition is structured by attention and embodiment. In contrast, The Matter With Things (2021)—alongside its supporting institutional infrastructure—fails the test. Its metaphysical extension provides the philosophical-anthropological fuel for the reproduction of romantic liberalism, a process that remains invisible to the framework itself. Raymond Tallis’s identification of a “reductionist critique of reductionism” offers the necessary entry point, while the resources developed in Sections V through VII provide the way through. Ultimately, the new integral humanism—in conversation with Michel Bauwens’s P2P research and the Žižekian-Hegelian insights gathered in Rosy Cross—points the way out, leaving the constructive labor for the work that follows."

(https://www.erikhaines.org/p/on-enchanted-flatland-iain-mcgilchrist)

Discussion

The place of Integral Humanism in the Catholic tradition

Erik Haines:

"The second and oldest pillar is the scholastic and personalist tradition. Thomas Aquinas gave “integral” its technical, philosophical sense, distinguishing between subjective, potential, and integral parts. For Aquinas, integral parts (partes integrales) are those necessary components that must concur to constitute the completeness of a whole. In his Summa Theologiae (specifically within his treatises on mereology and the architecture of the virtues), he originally illustrates this not through cold, artificial structures, but through the organic unity of a living body composed of its essential limbs—such as the head, hands, and feet—using this concept as working machinery to analyze how virtues like prudence or temperance require a constellation of allied, cooperative capacities to be fully realized.

Seven centuries later, when Jacques Maritain published Humanisme intégral in 1936, he took integral in exactly that Thomistic sense of completeness against existential fragmentation. Maritain outlined a humanism of the whole person, material and spiritual at once, set against both the liberal-individualist dissolution of society into self-seeking parts and the collectivist erasure of the person within the mass. His lay philosophy proved foundational for Catholic social doctrine. Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio (1967) drew on it to formulate integral human development—the good of the whole person and of every person—which Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate (2009) placed at the center of the Church’s critique of global capitalism.

Long before the political resurrection of the term, the word integral was the battleground of a defining twentieth-century theological dispute within French Catholicism. Thinkers like Maurice Blondel, in his pioneering work L’Action (1893), and later the Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac, in his landmark study Surnaturel (1946), fought for what was called an “integral” Christian philosophy. They opposed the dominant neoscholastic manual theology, which had severed reality into two separate, self-contained tiers: a realm of “pure nature” (natura pura) governed by natural law, and a supernatural realm of grace added on top as an extrinsic supplement. Blondel and de Lubac argued that this dual-order framework truncated human experience, rendering the supernatural irrelevant to concrete life. Instead, they claimed that human nature is integrally and intrinsically oriented toward God, possessing an innate desire for the supernatural that cannot be satisfied by natural ends alone. This nouvelle théologie aimed to restore the organic, integral unity of the cosmos, but it faced fierce resistance from traditionalist neoscholastics who feared that collapsing the boundary between nature and grace would compromise the gratuitousness of God’s gift. This theological debate set the stage for how the concept of the “wholeness” or “integral” would be structurally closed or kept open in the decades to follow.

Today, this neoscholastic desire for a closed, unified order has returned in the form of a muscular, post-liberal political theology known as Catholic integralism. While the Harvard legal scholar Adrian Vermeule is its most prominent theorist with his framework of “Common Good Constitutionalism,” he is part of a much broader intellectual ecosystem. This network includes popular columnists like Sohrab Ahmari, political theorists like Patrick Deneen and Gladden Pappin, theologians like Chad Pecknold, and monastic intellectuals like Pater Edmund Waldstein of The Josias. These contemporary integralists explicitly reject the liberal separation of church and state, holding that civil authority must recognize the spiritual supremacy of the Catholic Church and utilize the vast coercive power of the modern administrative state to promote a substantive, objective moral order. Rejecting the classical liberal myth of procedural neutrality, they argue that political life should be ordered toward humanity’s supernatural end."

(https://www.erikhaines.org/p/a-short-history-of-the-integral-left)

More information

• Book: Jacques Maritain, Integral Humanism: Temporal and Spiritual Problems of a New Christendom, trans. Joseph W. Evans (University of Notre Dame Press, 1996 [1936])

Erik Haines recommends:

"The first copy & introduction I read to Maritain integral humanism was the revisited version that got printed in the 90s: https://www.google.ca/books/edition/Integral_Humanism_Freedom_in_the_Modern/KwmMswEACAAJ?hl=en

That said, the best overall read on how the Church as evolved on the topic though would be to read & follow Clemens Sedmak work: https://nanovic.nd.edu/people/clemens-sedmak/

I loved his "Enacting Integral Human Development": https://www.google.ca/books/edition/Enacting_Integral_Human_Development/ERvcEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0 "