Transjectivity

Context

"Transjective Communitas: We may also get a feeling quality similar to Communitas, the interpersonal connection our ancestors may have felt in their religious rituals. However, we would expect a drastically widened circle of concern. Not just connectedness to our in-group, but to all of humanity, to other species, and to the ecosystem as a whole. This quality described by Vervaeke as “transjectivity” not only crosses Wilber's quadrants from singular to plural but bridges subjective and objective. Transjectivity may even open up a new sense of wholeness. Even though we can never grasp the ineffable, we may get a sense of it through a sort of non-dual all-at-once-ness."

(https://octopusyarn.substack.com/p/cosmo-local-coordination)

Description

Andrew Sweeny:

"Much philosophy over the past couple of centuries has been an attempt to overcome the trauma of Cartesian dualism, which is still the ‘standard grammar’ of our modern worldview. Despite René Descartes importance in the creation of the the modern world, the subject/object divide has to be understood as a radical illusion. It is therefore urgent to invent new terms which better correspond to today’s understanding.

This is one of the great values of John Vervaeke’s ‘Awakening to the Meaning crisis’: the introduction of fresh new language. Vervaeke has invented a word which is very useful here: transjective. This means that ‘relationship’ transcends—or is much more real than—the subject and object in itself. This term helps go beyond the endless culture war between the romantic and the empiricist, or the radical romantic who privileges the muddy pond of his own narcissistic subjectivity, and the radical empiricist who sees only dead mechanical processes.

To put it in Martin Buber’s formulation: the I/thou relationship transcends the I/it transaction. That is: the transjective space transcends both the ‘person’ and the ‘thing’. We need to understand that objects and persons are part of a living, breathing ecology of relationships, and that everything affects everything else. A transjective state allows us then to enter ‘the transcendent’ or even ‘the sacred’ world of relationship.

Our body, for instance, is neither a subjective experience nor a mere object or thing: it is, in Vervaeke’s words, a transjective emergence in an autopoietic bio economy. If this is too much of a Vervaekean mouthful, we can think of evolution: we develop fitness and evolve through natural selection and feedback loops in our environment. This means we cannot grow as an isolated individual—in fact the isolated individual doesn’t really exist. We are instead a transjective ecology of radical self-organizing complexity.

Navigating this tranjective space requires the both the elegance of general intelligence — the ability to think and act in multiple domains simultaneously — and the right use of our specialized tools. We are tool making and tool dependent creatures who by nature oscillate between general and specialized intelligence. To illustrate, Vervaeke points out the difference between a hand and a knife. A hand can be used for many things; however, a hand needs a knife to become powerful and effective at cutting—it would be hard to cut bread elegantly with your hand alone."

(https://andrewpgsweeny.medium.com/transjectivity-5f280ef1189b)