Neo-Integrative Worldviews
* Article: The rise of neo-integrative worldviews Towards a rational spirituality for the coming planetary civilization? By Roland Benedikter and Markus Molz.
URL = https://fsi-live.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/Rise-of-Neo-Integrative-Worldviews-1.pdf
Description
"This chapter provides an introductory overview of contemporary developments in the field of worldviews related to neo-integrative efforts. The current constellation in the European-Western hemisphere is witnessing a significant increase in ‘spiritually’ informed paradigms that claim to be at the same time ‘rational’. Though these paradigms sometimes deploy ambiguous concepts of ‘spirituality’ and ‘rationality’, have very diverse features, are not infrequently opposed to each other and are of varying quality, their common core aspiration can be said to be, in the majority of cases, integrative, inclusive and integral. These terms imply an attempt to reconcile spirituality and rationality, transcendence and secularism, as well as ‘realism’ and ‘nominalism’, with the goal of building a more balanced worldview at the heart of Western civilization than the ones we have had so far, which have by and large been biased either towards secular nominalism, on the one hand, or religious transcendentalism on the other. To put the current attempts at and developments toward integrative worldviews into perspective, this text first lists some of the most important features of the current worldview constellation in the Western hemisphere; second, problematizes some of the paradigmatic attempts towards integrative, inclusive or integral thought of the present, including some transitional movements between the late 1960s and today; and third, outlines a view of some of the currently most influential tendencies and trajectories towards integral worldviews, i.e. towards the conciliation of rationality and spirituality. The result of our critical investigation of this topic is that, if deployed appropriately, i.e. in full accordance with the rules set by contemporary academic scrutiny, integrative worldviews may provide at least potentially useful ‘layers of stratification’ (Thomas Fararo) as tools complementary to the ones we have in mainstream science and culture, in order to facilitate the build up of a more balanced civilizational paradigm appropriate to the needs of the upcoming first ‘planetary civilization’ (Michiko Kaku, Jennifer Gidley). Adapted to the bigger picture of the pressing questions of today, neo-integrative worldviews may potentially contribute (self-)critical blueprints for dealing inclusively with some of the most important challenges of our time."
Excerpts
Four Challenges for Neo-Integrative Worldviews
Roland Benedikter et al. :
"As seen through the lens of the majority of recent attempts at a neo-integrative worldview, these challenges consist, in more detail, of the following.
(1) A ‘philosophical’ mood that is leading to a specific contemporary cultural psychology of proto-integral transition. This psychology can be described as, so to speak, Immanuel Kant’s ‘antinomy of pure reason’ pushed into extreme forms of ‘unifying diversity’ under contemporary radically pluralistic conditions: if everything can be judged from very different viewpoints that are in principle equally valid and legitimated (as in Kant’s law of perfect antinomy), and therefore if everything becomes indistinguishable as it is impossible to decide between the paradigmatically available benchmarks, because everything is equally valid and legitimate, then a proto-integrative or even pre-integral situation is already factually created. This is because, within this situation, a balance between conflicting viewpoints becomes necessary to save the principle of equality, and thus the system as such.
This is a core mood within the present zeitgeist, which precisely denotes that this zeitgeist is already moving beyond postmodernism– which stipulated that no integrative picture whatsoever was possible anywhere beyond Kant’s antinomy.
In fact, the zeitgeist of the present is already moving beyond this verdict.
(2) A rapidly growing insight into the intense intertwinement of the societal ‘software’ factors of political, cultural, spiritual and religious typologies of discourse which are synchronically present in mature modern societies. This consists, more generally, in a new multi-dimensionality– or ‘constituent patchwork mind-set’ – in the public application of their respective system logics. The specific contemporary challenge further consists in:
(3) The growing impact of the societal ‘hardware’ factors of demography and technology on the (structurally differentiated) rationality of ‘open’52 Western societies on micro-, meso- and macro-levels alike. This is meant in the sense that, while the discourse of demography is unleashing increasing effects on the on-going hybridization of public discourses and identities53 due to its capacity to ‘neutralize’ opposing patterns of cultural and religious confrontation, the discourse of technological progress is characterized by an increasing dichotomy, if not by a new constitutive dialectics, between ‘old mechanistic technologies’ and ‘new liberation technologies’.54 This dichotomy seems, at least to a certain extent, to be in process of shaping the role of technology in postindustrial societies, especially when compared with its social role and impact in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Among other aspects, unlike their predecessors, contemporary liberation technologies are trying to contribute to the development of an open-source society within and beyond the current mediatic attention economy, dedicated to more integrative and balanced development, production, distribution and application of technological knowledge for– and in the service of– the large majority of citizens, instead of privileging the elites.
(4) Taken together, the specific combination of these software and hardware factors of contemporary paradigm development seems to be creating, as one result of their hitherto unprecedented intertwinement, a new structural pluri-dimensionality of what has been called the sphere of ‘public reason’ (according to the connotations of this term established by German philosopher Jürgen Habermas56). This new pluri-dimensionality is not predominantly occasional (or contextual); it is beginning to create de facto not only ontological but also systemic effects. Among other things, the public reason of Western societies, in contrast to the 1980s and 1990s, today privileges plurality, decentralization and diversity at all levels of social organization and action, while protecting some core principles of coherence such as justice, individual and collective rights and equal access to the features of the system as integrative features for all citizens. Simplifying a little, we could say that the public reason of the West is today concerned with the acceptance of radical pluralism in all its forms and stages of development while still, as a consequence, adhering to the principles established by the French Revolution: freedom, equality, fraternity. The alleged maturity of this public reason does not reside in one aspect or the other, but precisely in its capacity to combine both. Doubtless this capacity is still not integral in the full sense, but its trajectory is certainly towards becoming integral."