Eros and agape

Balder started an IPS thread on this here. It contains only a few posts of the FB discussion, so see that for more commentary. My comment is included below.

We could approach this question from other angles, or parabolas if you prefer curves. In Wilber's involutionary myth (see excerpt A, footnote 26), the process is indeed a linear trajectory in both directions but in alternating space-time frames: Spirit involves 'downward' in space-time and then evolves back 'upward' in space-time. Granted Wilber notes the reverse trip back up also follows the laid down morphogenetic gradient on the return so as to allow for creative and novel evolutionary forms. But that is a red herring because the template is still one of only one of those things happening at a time in the holon of everything space-time. And this dynamic is exactly of the nature of what above comments have noticed, one of a linear dialectic that presupposes a holon of everything Spirit at both ends of the dialectic, or a deus ex machina pulling the strings. Also see Frank Visser's Integral World essays on evolution.

Now if we take Desmond's post-dialectical metaxological notion of the mutual interpenetration of involution and evolution (or any typical complementary pair), they are always occurring simultaneously in space-time. He argues against a Hegelian dialectic, which inevitably subsumes difference in a never-ending series of higher integrations and unitary sameness. This is what Bruce and others are pointing out in AQAL/IT theory. Whereas for Desmond the 'between' in/of in/evolution is the glue that both binds and separates them is a different relationship that that of the sort of Hegelian dialectic Wilber and other developmentalists use.

This notion is not unique to Desmond, for we see it playing out in many different varieties, the polydox theologians (like Keller and Faber) as but one other example. And no, they are not 'green' or merely pluralists averse to eros, but rather see how this eros/agape dynamic plays out in the 'between.' If we use Desmonds metaxological frame, the univocal is modernism's obsession with monism, the equivocal is postmodernism's (pomo) obsession with pluralism, the dialectical is AQAL/IT's obsession with the sublation of difference into the same. But there is a post AQAL/IT/integral frame emerging, a post-postmodern (popo) of a different kind expressed by the above that is often confused with pluralism and pomo by the dialectical integralites. It is a development of a same/different kind, one where we get off the dialectical-developmental wheel and truly enter a so-called second tier. There are plenty of harbingers of this nascent emergence, and they ain't AQAL/IT's kind of integral. It is a space-time where eros and agape hold hands as equal partners (gay or otherwise), and both are changed in the process.