Friday, July 19, 2013

The real endo/exo story

From this ongoing IPS thread and a continuation of this and this post:

My recent posts on Wilber's basic and transitional structures (here and following), plus the above ruminations, are starting to gel a bit more. Wilber has the worldview levels as transitional, in that they transcend and replace. Weiss thought that Gebser saw them more as discreet and discontinuous. The latter is more in line with Luhmann and Bryant, in that they are exo-relations between autonomous substances, not so much transcended and replaced but discreetly and discontinously autonomous, interacting with each other via structural coupling in asemblages. Recall that for Luhmann this also applies to our bodies and minds, which would include even Wilber's basic 'cognitive' structures.


However Wilber's inkling about transcend and include is correct but more likely via what Bryant is calling endo-structural relations between elements. These elements are not autonomous substances and are transcended and included. They are not the same as the Buddhist aggregates, which per above are more in line with Wilber's transcended and included basic structures.
What is the endo-relational structure is those virtual "powers, attractors, singularities or tendencies" that do not enter into the actual. The actual is the ground of the exo, the virtual of the endo. In a very real (pun intended) sense this corresponds to the absolute or causal with the relative or caused traditional dichotomy. But as we see, for OOO this distinction is not transcendent but transcendental, since even the virtual real is immanent.

And it is in this sense that it corresponds with the emptiness of emptiness doctrine, for even the virtual lacks completely independent existence, requiring constructed elements to survive and maintain its own constructed autonomy. A virtual substance might not be reduced to its exo-relations but it surely interdepends on them for its continued existence. No exo-relations, no endo-relations.
But this is not the end of the story. There's more on endo-relations to come, as one of my mentors (in)famously (re)iterated.

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