Vision-Logic
Discussion
Gary Hampson:
"Vision-logic is a neat term (in both senses) as it creatively embraces a number of postformal features simultaneously, evoking a “magic synthesis” (Wilber, 2000a, p. 259, n. 27). Gidley (2006) indicates that academic research often privileges logic over imaginative vision and consequently does not achieve such a “psychoactive” outcome. It's perhaps also a quintessentially postformal term in that it is a neologism constituted by a dialectic between two contrasting formal concepts—vision and logic. It is thus variously analogous to William Stern's (1938) unitas multiplex, Benedikter's (2005) productive void, Goethe's delicate empiricism (Seamon, 1998), Foucault's (2003) epistemologico-political, Dewey's (1919/2004) end-in-view, Bussey's (2006) critical spirituality, Gangadean's (1993) meditative reason, Steiner's (1910/1983) spiritual science, and also, perhaps—in more condensed or expanded forms—to Derrida's différance (as dialectic between difference and deference), Gebser's (1949/1985) integral-aperspectival, Hafiz's God in drag (1999) and Zhuangzi's (n.d.) Transformation of Things (as exemplified by Zhuangzi's dialectical narrative regarding a person's dream that they were a butterfly, in question with an alternate understanding that the butterfly was dreaming the person). The term is inherently “unstable” from a formal perspective, but paradoxically generative and vitalising from a postformal perspective in that it can facilitate a spark of cognitive transformation in the reader if the context of the reader is such that the concept is sufficiently trusted and given space to internally reside, so to speak.
A characterisation might be to assign logic the role of Wilberian horizontal translation, the “flatland” of the plan view of ex-plan-ation; and, conversely, vision the role of Wilberian vertical transformation by means of identifying the (Erotic) creativity inherent in the image of imag-ination (see Wilber, 1995, pp. 59-61). From this perspective, the neologism is metaphorically holonic which adds to its generativity. Meanwhile, from a dialectically-oriented mode of cognition, vision-logic can deepen into a plurality of vision-logics (a plurality still encompassed by the term as genus). This could include such domains as: [a] Visions and versions of different logics—including: many-valued logics (Malinowski, 1993), including fuzzy logic (Novák, 1989; Zadeh, Klir, & Yuan, 1996), and the related: fuzziology & social fuzziology (Dimitrov & Hodge, 2002), and vagueness (Williamson, 1994), [and] dialectical logic (Adorno, 1990; Ilyenkov, 1977); [b] The logic of different visions—the rectitude of plural imaginations—including (post)modern imaginations (Kearney, 1998), the embodied imagination (Johnson, 1992), the theoretic imagination (Weick, 1989), the scientific imagination (Holton, 1998), the geometrical imagination (Hilbert & Cohn-Vossen, 1952), the sociological imagination (Mills, 1959/2000), [and] the philosophy of imagination (Warnock, 1976)."