I’ve been struck by the hubris inherent in the integral movement, as its focus is a “theory of everything.” After all, doesn’t it seem a bit grandiose to claim we can at least organize everything? Not just some, many or most things, but everything? Is it even possible to know everything, to step outside our limitations and be, well, unlimited?
This is why I made a case in the earlier Postmetaphysical Thinking series that Derrida’s approach to the absolute allowed us to use the idea as an inspiration without falling prey to the fallacy of making it into a definite something. To arrive at the infinite is impossible. (Yes, even in meditation; the experience just seems infinite to our puny minds.)
So do we throw the baby of holons and AQAL out the window because of the grand aim of putting it in the context of a TOE? No, we can still utilize it without putting it in that context. We can re-frame it as a theory for anything, which seems like a small adjustment but in fact is a major shift in emphasis. In that regard I offer Mark Edward’s comments on the subject below. This is copied from his comments in the ARINA Laszlo forum, which is on-going now through the Integral Review (www.integral-review.org).
Mark says:
A theory of everything probably ends up being a theory of nothing. Not in the mandalic logic sense of nothing but in the lack of ability to know the difference between a bar of soap and a bag of brussel sprouts sense of nothing. I think that a TOE as both Wilber and Laszlo describe it is simply too grandiose and to universalising to even consider as desirable let alone possible. To be sure Wilber has more of the inside story and Laszlo more of the outside story but our humble imaginings about the Kosmos, gorgeous and enticing as they may be, will ever remain partial in the sense that the moon reflected in a dew drop is partial (apologies to Dogen). In the sense that our theories are to everything as a photo of the night sky is to Everything. In the sense that my toe is a TOE. We need to remained determinedly humble about this endeavour and remember that some of the most brilliant insights into how fundamental elements of the world we inhabit are connected have ended in total and unexpected, on the part of the progentators in particular, disaster (can I quietly point the finger at Einstein and Marx and Friedman here). As far as I am concerned my interest is in looking for patterns that might lead us ever so modestly towards a Theory For Anything or a TFA. This is a localised and modest cousin to the TOE in that it looks at any event rather than every thing. My curiosity runs towards trying to understand “this person” rather than “every person” or “this organisation” rather than “every organisations”. Perhaps, in the Zen spirit of iconoclastic intimacy, I should call my pattern seeking endeavours a “Theory For Just This” (TFJT) although I sense that at the heart of all that lies a deeper quest for atonement, maybe a hankering for a “Theory For Justice” (TFJ). If I were a polar explorer maybe I would be hankering after a “Theory For Just Ice” but the way things are today that would be inadvertantly be taken as the amphetamine junky’s daily task of scoring some crystal.
But seriously – a TOE!! Isn’t it just a little over the top given when we don’t even know if a social holon possesses two quadrivia or four quadriviumusii. It’s very properly an embarrassment to even mention such a thing. I will never ever reference Wilber’s or Laszlo’s books that include this “theory of everything” nonsense in their titles. Not because I don’t think that metatheorising, multiparadigm theory buidling, integral indexing, overarching construct validation or general system theory construction aren’t wholesome and worthwhile pursuits but because a Theory of Everything is what God had before the Big Bang (Light) happened and look what came of that. It’s about the hubris of the thing. I am not speaking of humility before the powers that be, the reigning paradigms of the market-sanctioned worldview, or the retro-eco-meanie-greeny-memey set (I am a card carrying member of the Greens political party in Australia). We need to be humble before the facts themselves, before the experiences themselves, before the cultures, the people and the things of whom we theorise. We need to be metatheorise without putting on airs and graces whenever we conceptualise those mysteries in some rational form.
There’s a show from Canada called “Corner Gas” I believe, I’ve never seen the show but the promos have this old guy saying something like, “I have never ever exagerated about anything in the entire history of the whole planet”. A Theory of Everything is like that. Is intellectual humility a GREEN trait? I’m not sure. But a sense of proportion about metatheory and its limits is most definitely post-Turquoise (with poka dots).