Visionary Realism
= "a big-picture philosophical framework developed by Nicholas Hedlund." [1]
Description
Nicholas Hedlund:
"The framework developed in this thesis, visionary realism, can be intellectually and socially beneficial by offering a big-picture understanding of the reality of the world, identifying the root causes of our complex contemporary crises (i.e., the metacrisis), and articulating transformative potentials for a more eco-socially sustainable, ethically just, and existentially meaningful future. This thesis aims to be impactful at a foundational level of social transformation, contributing principles that can potentially underlabour for a more flourishing planetary society. Drawing on sociological studies of the history of philosophy and culture, it is argued that metatheories are the most powerful causal forces and leverage points for transforming worldviews, and in turn, social systems.
This research thereby explores the causal roots of the metacrisis in the modern Western worldview and the metatheories from which it was forged. Visionary realism offers an alternative and potential resolution of the fundamental cultural problem fields of modernity, articulating principles to inform a new worldview. As an integrative metatheory, visionary realism can be applied to any discipline or field, including community and organizational development, politics, economics, climate change, psychology, research, and education. Of these, it may most clearly have a beneficial impact in research and education. Articulating key principles for new forms of inter- and transdisciplinary research, visionary realism can foster coherence and integration in the face of the complexity of 5 contemporary problems. A visionary realist approach to research and education can likewise undermine the post-truth culture and associated institutional decay by offering a realist alternative that can revindicate a strong notion of truth, inclusive of epistemic relativity. Thus, this thesis can be of beneficial impact for effective dialogue and judgmental rationality in the face of widespread disagreement and polarization in the public sphere.
Visionary realism also lays the ground for a new science of interiority, wherein the human and social sciences could reclaim their purchase on objective knowledge, with far-reaching implications. Moreover, visionary realism articulates a philosophy of education that cuts across disciplines, emphasizes the developmental dimension of education and the educational conditions for social emancipation, integrates knowledge and wisdom, and assumes a role of visionary participation that is aimed at collective flourishing. Such an integrative approach can help to influence the future of scholarship and education (including research methodology, pedagogy, and curriculum), especially in philosophy and the social sciences. The beneficial contributions of this thesis could be catalyzed, in addition to the traditional mediums such as academic journals and books, through applied collaborations between academics and non-academics that demonstrate advantageous results in addressing complex, real-world problems. The impact of this research could also be emboldened by the dissemination of key ideas through popular books, as well through media such as podcasts and documentary films. Ultimately, the principles developed in this research have the potential to ripple through culture and social systems, improving our relationship to our fellow humans and to the imperiled ecological systems upon which we depend for our survival."
(https://www.eudaimoniainstitute.org/post/what-is-visionary-realism)
Discussion
The Neo-Kantian Coupling of Subjectivity and Interiority
Nicholas Hedlund:
"Modern Western thought has largely inherited Immanuel Kant’s strict separation of the knowing subject from the ontological reality of what is known. Kant confined interiority to the realm of mere subjective experience, accessible only via the mind’s transcendental structures, thereby banishing phenomena of mind and spirit from the domain of objective reality. This neo-Kantian legacy treats subjectivity as the epistemic domain of the knower and relegates interiority to it, implicitly denying that consciousness, culture, or spiritual insight could correspond to anything real. Visionary realism directly challenges this assumption, decoupling interiority from subjectivity. Drawing on Bhaskar’s ([1979] 2015) critical realism, visionary realism maintains that interior phenomena possess ontological intransitivity—they exist relatively independently of our awareness of them. Instead of being absolutely unknowable or strictly subjective and non-generalizable, interiority is both an intransitive ontological domain of reality and a transitive epistemic mode of participatory access to it, as knowledge (e.g., science and philosophy) is constellationally contained by being (e.g., social reality). This recursivity in the social domain does not amount to a kind of self-referential paradox in which ontology is reduced to epistemology (what Bhaskar calls “the epistemic fallacy”) but adds a degree of relativity to the notion of ontological intransitivity that necessarily is justified in a process-relational ontology. Once an object or structure has come into being (at t1), whether in the social or natural world, it is both determined and determinate as well as inalterable (at t2)—that is, it is existentially intransitive (Bhaskar 2016, 46–47). Such an entity or structure may be partly causally constituted in a causally interdependent, recursive manner (as in social and human science), and therefore only relatively intransitive in a causal sense, but not an existential one. In short, scientific knowledge (in the transitive dimension) of a social reality is partially constitutive of the social reality it describes such that the transitive and intransitive dimensions remain categorically distinct but not discrete.
In this view, experiences of mind, soul, and spirit are not “nothing but” private constructions; rather, they are real, emergent dimensions of the natural world with their own causal structures that can be studied objectively. This shift opens the possibility of a naturalistic yet non-reductive science of interiority, recognizing that interior phenomena cannot be fully explained away as neural activity or social convention."
More information
- PhD: VISIONARY REALISM AND THE EMERGENCE OF A EUDAIMONISTIC SOCIETY: METATHEORY IN A TIME OF METACRISIS. NICHOLAS HANCOCK HEDLUND. UCL INSTITUTE OF EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON 2021
URL = https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10169200/7/Hedlund_10169200_thesis_revised.pdf
"This thesis aims to support the conditions for the emergence of a eudaimonistic, freeflourishing planetary society by helping ignite the potentials of metatheory as a transformational cultural force vis-à-vis our complex twenty-first century challenges. I argue that metatheory in its appropriate form provides indispensable intellectual scaffolding for the crucial psycho-spiritual, cultural, and social transformations demanded by these interconnected global challenges, or what I call the metacrisis. I advance these aims, first, by reflection on the nature, role, and function of metatheory in geo-historical context, articulating a vision for the revindication of metatheory as integrative metatheory 2.0; and, second, the development of the contours of a particular metatheory through an exploratory-dialogical encounter between what are arguably amongst the most comprehensive and sophisticated integrative metatheories arising in the wake of postmodernism: namely, critical realism, founded by Roy Bhaskar (1944–2014), and integral theory, founded by Ken Wilber (1949–). Thus, in this thesis, I deploy the methodology of hermeneutical dialectics and the method of immanent critique to forge a non-preservative synthesis of aspects of these two metatheories into a new metatheory—a visionary realism—that might help us to better understand and wisely respond to the metacrisis. I then apply this visionary realist framework to sketch the contours of the metacrisis at large, analyzing and synthesizing the philosophical, cultural, and psychological aspects of the metacrisis to identify key principles and holistic solution patterns that may inform deliberate social transformation."
* Article: Toward a Unified Science of Spiritual Experience—Visionary Realism and the Ontology of Interiority: Philosophical Commentary on Chatlos’s Framework of Spirituality. Nicholas Hedlund. Zygon journal of science and religion.
URL = download
"By integrating elements of Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism, Ken Wilber’s integral theory, William James’s radical empiricism, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s participatory epistemology, and Rudolf Steiner’s subtle empiricism, visionary realism outlines key ontological and epistemological challenges to studying interior realities such as consciousness, culture, and spirituality. Visionary realism critiques the reductionist tendencies of physicalism (scientific materialism) and the neo-Kantian conflation of subjectivity and interiority, reclaiming interiority as an emergent, ontologically real dimension of the natural world that, while epistemically relative and fallible, can, in principle, be understood objectively—namely, in an ontologically realist and transfactual manner. This article advances an expanded or integrative empiricism—radical, deep, and subtle—that integrates subjective, intersubjective, and objective methodologies to legitimize spiritual experience as a domain of rigorous scientific inquiry. It further explores the nested relationship between a science of interiority, a science of spiritual experience, and the emerging academic field of soul studies. This integrative framework seeks to bridge science, philosophy, and theology, offering transformative responses to the meaning crisis and the larger global metacrisis by fostering a secular spirituality capable of re-enchanting the disenchanted world."