The immanent beyond

From “Transpersonal psychology and the paradigm of complexity” by Sean Kelly:

“Wilber’s paradigm is insufficiently spiced, as it were, with the essential ingredients of complex thinking. His understanding of holarchical integration (the higher includes the lower) gives expression to only half of the holographic principle (which implies that the lower also includes the higher). […] Vision-logic, as Wilber conceives of it, is more or less identical with the Hegelian dialectic and its process of 'sublation' (aufheben). Morin [...] faults Hegel for considering contradiction a transitory 'moment' of the Aufhebung, a moment which is ultimately annulled in the 'synthesis' of the third term (see Morin 1982, 289). Wilber’s vision-logic is subject to the same strictures, particularly insofar as it subserves the idealist metaphysics associated with the root metaphor of the Great Chain of Being.”

And this one is of relevance to the general theme of the IPS forum:


“And yet Morin does recognize that, though the human condition is irrevocably 'this worldly and bound to the fate of the Earth,' it nonetheless 'also involves a quest for the beyond. Not a beyond outside of the world, but a beyond relative to the hic et nunc, to misery and misfortune, an unknown beyond that is proper to the unknown adventure' (ibid., 135). It is in this sense of transcendence as an immanent 'beyond' that Morin is able to envision the possibility, and even the necessity, of a third type of religion—not a religion of salvation, but a religion of fellowship, freedom, and love. [...] Such a religion 'would be without revelation (like Buddhism), a religion of love (like Christianity), of compassion (like Buddhism), although without the salvation of the immortal/risen self or deliverance through the dissipation of self.'”