Unified Theory of Knowledge
Description
"In 1998, the famed sociobiologist and naturalist Edward O. Wilson published 'Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.' As suggested by the subtitle, 'consilience' refers to a unified picture of human knowledge. For Wilson, that meant a vision that allows for a coherent, comprehensive view of our place in the cosmos that stretches across time and complexity from physics to sociology in the sciences and does so in a way that is commensurate with the creative expressions of our potentials afforded by the arts and humanities.
The Unified Theory of Knowledge (UTOK) offers a vision of consilience much as was hoped for by Wilson. However, it succeeds where Wilson failed because it solves the problem of psychology and affords a much more effective alignment with the humanities. It also is commensurate with many of the deep insights of the ancient wisdom traditions, and it embraces a nondual naturalistic-spiritual worldview.
The UTOK consists of eight key ideas that both solve the problem of psychology and set the stage for a unified approach to psychotherapy. It is a metamodern vision that seeks to include and transcend the Culture-Person sensibilities that have evolved over the eons. Specifically, it embraces the indigenous-folk sensibilities of relational-natural embeddedness, premodern formal mythic narratives that afford meaning-making on the scale of civilizations, modernist liberal democratic ideals that emphasize the power of science and reason, and postmodern deconstructive critiques that seek justice and caution against singular grand narratives. Both embracing and transcending these sensibilities, the UTOK is a constructive, integrative pluralistic metamodern vision of consilience that bridges the sciences and humanities and brings them together in a mutually inspiring dialectical dance that orients toward wisdom in the 21st century."
(fb, September 2023)