Integral History

Running Head: Integral History

Integral History: The Kosmic Address.

Victor Shiryaev

ITH 5006

Jordan Luftig

John F. Kennedy University

Winter 2010

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Integral History

Abstract

Every methodology, everything we do is always already rooted in some perspective. Integral

Theory states that only acknowledging this fundamental assertion, we can become more

flexible in perspectives-taking and can effectively recognize the multi-faceted nature of our

existence. In this paper I make the attempt to define the kosmic address of history, based on

the AQAL methodology. There are lots of schools of history, they all make claims to deal

with history, but is their history – same? I argue that they all have different perspectives on

different facets of reality, so that the final kosmic address of history they deal with is different

in every case. By defining their places in AQAL framework we can start to shape a first

integral approach to history in general, both philosophically and methodologically.

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Integral History

During the 20th century, history seemed to have lost the ground, the very foundation of

its existence. Because history lost objectivity. Post-modernists claimed that positivist history

was dead, since it was not factual (exactly opposite to what positivists claimed), but rather

narrated interpretation. Total relativism lead thinkers to state no objectivity was possible at

all. But very soon post-modernists themselves became history.

Post-structuralists claimed that “all histories are equally representative of reality and

therefore equally fictitious” (Green & Troup, 1999, p. 300); they also claimed that narrative is

always the interpretation, that is, a historian is always already seeing his subject from a

certain perspective. Does it mean, though, that history came to its end? As mentions Jörn

Rüsen, the editor of the series called Making Sense of History, “what in fact did abruptly

come to an end was historical theory” (Rüsen, 2008, p. ix).

At the same time, “each analysis of even a single instance of historical memory cannot

avoid questions of the theory and philosophy of history” (Ibid., 2008, p. x).

That is, there is a strong need for such a theory and for such a philosophy. Different

historians attempt to create a new philosophical basis for history, drawing from systems

theories, chaos and complexity theories, and so on.

For example, structuralists (e.g. the Annales school) tried to find the universal mental

structures, that manifest in human behavior and societies. They claimed the existence of some

universal patterns, the constructions that could help to understand history. For example,

Fernand Braudel proposed a new model of historical time, consisting of three layers of time:

time of events (classic history), time of cycles (economic, population, civilizational history),

and the geo-time (geology and geography) (Galtung & Inayatullah, 1997).

One of the most remarkable contemporary integral attempts I believe was made by

John Lewis Gaddis, the historian of the Cold War, in his book The Landscape of History:

How Historians Map the Past (2002).

Another integrating attempt was undertaken by Johan Galtung and Sohail Inayatullah

in their book Macrohistory and macrohistorians: Perspectives on individual, social, and

civilizational change (1997), where they reviewed and compared twenty of the world’s

greatest macro-historians of all times.

What macrohistory is can be defined by its features: macrohistory is nomothetic and

diachronic, in that it tries to find the major regularities, mechanisms of history, and it does it

by tracing processes through time. It rarely deals with primary data itself, using proper names

and events only for the illustration.

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Integral History

Everything happened in the past can be a subject of historical enquiry. Lately there is a

positive tendency to recognize the multiple facets of history, for example, by including such

subjects as history of art, history of women, or oral history into the field. It is interesting to

mention that even as recent as 60 years ago historians wouldn’t use such phenomena as art,

language, money, or family as subjects of historical analysis.

I agree, all the phenomena happened in the past can find their respective place in the

historical frame, but on what foundation does this frame stand? I argue that the best

foundation available now is Ken Wilber’s AQAL.

As Inayatullah (1997) suggests, there are at least ten factors that every macrohistorical

theory should acknowledge and embrace: a) episteme and context; b) causes and mechanisms;

c) stages and patterns; d) role of the transcendent; e) units of analysis; f) the metaphor of time;

g) the role of the vanguard; h) exit from the worldview; i) view of future; and j) view on

historiography.

In my opinion, Integral Theory and the AQAL approach could be best applied to

macrohistory. There is no macrohistory without the post-/metaphysical foundation, and

AQAL provides the best post-metaphysical framework available today. In my previous paper

on this subject I dealt with causes and mechanisms; stages and patterns; role of the

transcendent; units of analysis; exit from the worldview; and view of future, as those are

understood by Integral Theory. In this paper I deal primarily with the episteme and context,

by which I understand the worldview and the perspective, and touch the topic of units of

analysis, as they cannot be separated from the perspectives.

Episteme and Perspective

The major revelation of the post-modernism, the relativity and contextuality of every

position, should definitely be acknowledged by the historians.

For example, Peter Burke writes that “more and more historians are coming to realize

that their work does not reproduce ‘what actually happened’ [the phrase of a famous

“positivist” historian Leopold von Ranke] so much as represent it from a particular point of

view” (Burke, 2004, p. 290).

Indeed, if we attempt to deconstruct any of the narratives, the last “Rubicon” will be

the perspective of the author. Wilber states in his Excerpt D (2002), that “a subject perceiving

object is always already in a relationship of first-person, second-person, and third-person

when it comes to the perceived occasions”.

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Integral History

That is, to define the place of the concrete historical approach in the Integral

Framework, we need first to define its author’s “kosmic address” (Wilber’s another

revolutionary idea). And the kosmic address starts with the altitude and the perspective

(Wilber, 2007, p. 69).

Basically, every perspective is a vector. The initial point of the vector is the subject of

the perspective, and the direction of the vector is the perspective of the object.

How is the initial point of perspective defined? In AQAL framework, in my opinion, it

is a two-fold phenomenon, which includes both horizontal and vertical dimensions. While the

horizontal dimension would be the geo-cultural context, the vertical dimension would be the

developmental altitude of the historian itself.

As Jörn Rüsen wisely suggests, “historical memory is not an arbitrary function of the

cultural practices used by human beings to orient themselves in the world in which they are

born, but . . . such memory covers special domains in the temporal orientation of human life.

These domains demand precisely those mental procedures of connecting past, present and

future, which became generalized . . . as that specific field of culture we call ‘history’”

(Rüsen, 2002, p. ix).

Developmental psychology states that those “mental procedures” themselves are

subjected to development through transcendence and inclusion. And it was not until recent

years that historians started to address these issues. In fact, one of the volumes of the

aforementioned series “Making Sense of History” – Narration, identity, and historical

consciousness (2005) closely deals with this question.

As Jürgen Straub, the editor of this volume, states in the foreword, “an empirically

based ‘epistemology’ that can categorize human thought into different, mutually irreducible

domains of ‘rational faculties’, in order to then investigate them in their elementary and

complex forms, could thus be conceptualized not least as a psychology of historical-narrative

acts of meaning-construction” (Straub, 2005, p. xv).

To summarize, the kosmic address of the historian itself is a very important variable

(the initial point of the vector), a very important parameter to understand the worldview he or

she embodies, because as Jürgen Straub notes in regard to the post-modernist critique of

history, “historical realities are constructs…. The historical construction of meaning thus

includes every act that somehow leads to the construction and representation of realities that

we consider specifically historical” (Straub, 2005, p. 46); and this construction of meaning

always already comes from the intersection of the horizontal and vertical, of the socio-

cultural context and developmental altitude of the historian.

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Integral History

But it is only one side of it. After defining the premises on which the historian bases

his meaning-construction, that is, after defining the kosmic address of the subject, in order to

get a whole picture, we need to define the kosmic address of the object of this historian’s

inquiry, the object the vector is pointing at. And that is where Integral Methodological

Pluralism comes to the fore.

The Zones

Since every reader of this paper is certainly well acquainted with the Integral Theory, I

will not go into details, rather than just stating that the integral episteme recognizes the four

major dimensions of reality (i.e. the Quadrants), as they are the interior and the exterior of the

individual and the collective (Wilber, 2000b).

And what is history in its general sense if not the unfolding space-time interactions of

individual and collective holons (in both the objective and the cultural domains)?

By individual and collective holons I understand the notion first coined by Arthur

Koestler, and extended by Ken Wilber. “Reality as a whole is not composed of things or

processes, but of holons” (Wilber, 2000b, p.43), which are wholes that are parts of other

wholes. Individual holons are manifested by all the four quadrants, while social holons are

composed of only the two lower quadrants. Individual holon in case with history of human

kind is, of course, a human being. Social holon is therefore a social or cultural phenomenon of

human collective.

Now, the most interesting assertion is that if you take any of the holons in any of the

quadrants as the object of your (historical or not) inquiry, you can look at them from their

own inside or outside, which gives you the so called “eight primordial perspectives” total

(Wilber, 2007, p. 34). As Clint Fuhs explains in regards to the outside and the inside views in

his paper named An Integral Map of Perspective-Taking, “after every quadrant-domain enters

full awareness, development yields another critical dimension, altering the mode in which

each domain is viewed. This distinction, which allows individuals to view each domain from

the inside or the outside, renders the four quadrants into 8 distinct zones” (Fuhs, p. 10).

Every of those perspectives, enacting different domains of existence from either inside

or outside, require its specific methodology. To put it in historical terms, if you want to know

the size of Chang'an, the ancient capital of China, in 750 A.D. (when it was the biggest city in

the world), you don’t start with researching Taoist thought. Those are two completely

different domains.

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Integral History

Basically, what the 8 methodologies proposed by Wilber do is that they give us

perspectives on perspectives on perspectives. For example, hermeneutics is the inside view of

the interior view of the collective (Wilber, 2007, p. 40). However, practice shows that it is

usually more complex than just that.

But what happens in history, is that very often a specific historical approach claims to

have a universal applicability, thus violating the principle of non-exclusion, postulated by

Wilber in “Excerpt B” (2002b). And this is what Inayatullah calls the “knowledge

imperialism”.

So, the appropriate methodology. Or, as one of the prominent sociologists, Pitirim

Sorokin, put it: “the key in writing history is finding the appropriate unit of analysis and the

appropriate form of science” (Galtung & Inayatullah, 1997, p. 198).

I totally agree.

Difference in Notation

In the following part of this paper I will try to explicitly use the integral mathematics

of primordial perspectives notation as it is formulated by Clint Fuhs in An Integral Map of

Perspective-Taking. I believe his notation system is better than the original one proposed by

Ken Wilber in both the “excerpt c” of the Kosmos Trilogy (2002c) and the Integral

Spirituality (2007).

For example, Wilber states that Varela’s approach to biology can be formulated as 3-p

x 1-p x 3p, and at the same time notes that it can be formulated as 1-p x 3-p x 3p as well,

which is very confusing (2007, p. ). Also, Wilber doesn’t use the second-person, since for him

second-person is automatically the first-person plural.

Fuhs’s system, on the other hand, is more precise and accurate, since it differentiates

in its notation the perspectives (i.e. quadrivia, “1p” and “3p”), the exterior/interior distinction

(i.e. the quadrants, “1/p” and “3/p”), and the inside and outside views (i.e. “1-p” and “3-p”

respectively, indicating the zones) in a very clear way.

It is also important to note here that what all of the following perspectives aim at is

history in its multi-faceted complexity, but every perspective ‘highlights’ only one (or a few)

facet, and that is why I believe IMP is so important.

Outside View of the Exteriors of the Collective

Let us deal now with some of the historical approaches to better illustrate the

difference of methodologies and importance in distinguishing them.

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Integral History

There are many different schools of historical method: the empiricists, the Marxist

historians, the Annales, the psychohistory, the oral history, the so called “history from below”

and so on (Green & Troup, 1999). They all claim to write history. They use different

methodologies (simply because it is the way they think they can explore history best), but

they rarely acknowledge the fact that their “units of analysis” lay in completely different

domains.

For example, what we usually understand by history in fact is the approach of the

empiricists (positivists), which is nothing but an outside view of the exteriors of the individual

and the collective. Using Wilber’s integral calculus we may formulate it as 3p x 3-p x 3p. A

more precise Fuhs’s notation formulates this approach as

1p(1p) x 1p(3-p) x [3p(3/p) + 3p*pl(3/p*pl)]

which reads as “[my] historian’s outside view perspective of the behavior of it and its”.

It represents the typical Right-Hand path, originating in the scientific revolution of the

modern; it is based on the belief that knowledge should be derived from observation of the

material world. And it is, “without doubt, the most influential school of historian thought over

the course of this [last] century” (Green & Troup, 1999).

Leopold von Ranke, famous for his phrase that historians should simply “write what

actually happened”, was instrumental in establishing empirical approach. He claimed that

historians should only refer to original sources, and that true history can be derived only from

objective research. For example, he rejected the use of the memoirs and letters as historical

evidence – which is exactly the violation of the non-exclusion principle.

As a child of modern, this approach was severely criticized by the post-modernists,

who pointed out on the total lack of interiority and inter-subjectivity in the empirical method.

At the same time, since empiricists have always emphasized the methodology, it is their

methods that all other historians use while working with the original sources, and it is their

methods that provide the best tools for shaping the outside view on the exteriors of the

collective.

Inside View of the Interiors and Exteriors of the Collective

Since late 1960th, the opposite approach began to take shape, which is usually referred

to as “history from below”, for it emphasizes the lived experience of the ordinary people, and

reconstructs history based on what they saw and wrote in their diaries, memoirs, or political

manifestos (Burke, 2004). For example, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a Harvard professor, received

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the Pulitzer Prize in history for her book A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard based

on her diary, 1785–1812 (1991).

Ulrich doesn’t just research the life of Martha Ballard, but rather tries to follow all her

decisions, choices and connections in order to describe the early 19th century history of what

is today the state of Maine from inside. Thus – the inside view on the interiors and exteriors of

the collective (and individual). Using Wilber’s integral calculus it is possible to formulate this

historical approach as 3p x 1-p x 3p, by which I understand here the attempt to reconstruct the

exteriors/interiors of the collective as perceived by the first-person of the actual participant of

the event.

In Fuhs’s notation it can be precisely codified as follows:

1p(1p) x 1p(3-p) x [{1p΄(1p) x 1p΄(1-p) x {3p*pl(1/p*pl) x 3p*pl(3/p*pl)}} + {1p΄(1p) x

1p΄(3-p) x {3p*pl(1/p*pl) x 3p*pl(3/p*pl)}}];

which is the researcher’s “outside” reconstruction of the historical first-person actual witness

both inside and outside views on the interior and the exterior conditions of his or her

environment.

Every school of history has its own methods of historical inquiry, but sometimes those

methods are raised to the level of the only epistemology (e.g. as in the case with empiricists),

so I believe it is important to note that the “history from below” approach never violates the

non-exclusion principle and never pretends on knowledge imperialism.

On the other hand, it has some methodological issues with the other two principles of

IMP – enfoldment and enactment, for the “history from below” approach has not yet outlined

its borders and specific application. It led Jim Sharpe to ask in New Perspectives On

Historical Writing (Burke, 2004): “Where, exactly, is ‘below’ to be located, and what should

be done with history from below once it has been written?”

Inside view of the Interiors of the Individual

Another method of historical inquiry (which is often referred to as psychohistory) was

pioneered by a prominent developmental psychologist, Erik Erikson. Erikson tried to use

psychoanalysis to interpret individual’s behavior. He wrote quite a few works on this subject,

analyzing Luther, Gandhi, and Hitler among others, and trying to define the possible tensions

in their unconscious leading to the actual facts of their later biographies.

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Integral History

This perspective can be labeled as the inside view (psychoanalytic interpretation) on

the interiors of the individual, or Wilber’s 1p/3p x 1-p x 1p. I add the third-person perspective

here because any interpretive process requires reconstruction, that is, the objective look at the

contents of the interiors.

In Fuhs’s notation psychohistorians’ perspective may be formulated as follows:

1p(1p) x [{1p(1-p) x 3p(1/p)} + {1p(3-p) x 3p(1/p)}]

It can be read as “my first-person perspective of both my first-person inside and

outside views on his interiors”, which is exactly the approach Erikson chose: to understand

history through combining hermeneutical and structuralist approaches to the individual’s

interiors.

Erikson saw psychoanalytic method as a historical method, arguing that “the history of

humanity is a gigantic metabolism of individual life cycles”, which can be understood through

inquiry into individual’s biography (Green & Troup, 1999).

Psychohistorians in general want to study both the behavior and the motivations of the

individual and of the groups in the past, and there were quite a few attempts to do so.

However, this historical method is not very well welcomed by the traditional

historians, since “psychoanalytic interpretations are by their nature individual and subjective”

(Ibid., p. 66). At the same time Green & Troup agree that psychohistory has much to offer,

since it can help “reveal the rational roots of apparently irrational behavior, and assist in

explanation of the extreme situations of history” (Ibid., p. 67).

The important call of the psychohistorians is that we need to recognize and respect the

Left-Hand dimension of historical reality (to use Wilber’s words), and to include

subconscious as well as conscious to the field of our studies, on the principles of non-

exclusion, enfoldment, and enactment.

Inside and Outside Views of the Interior of the Collective

The last historical approach I want to discuss in this paper is cultural history. As Peter

Burke, a prominent cultural historian, states in his book What is Cultural History? (2008),

cultural history deals with the symbolic and its interpretation. And in its modern shape it has

both the inside and the outside approaches.

Clifford Geertz, a famous anthropologist that inspired most cultural historians in the

last generation, defines culture as “historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in

symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which

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men communicate, perpetuate and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life”

(cited by Burke, 2008, p. 37).

Wilber (2002c) states that cultural domain can be understood from inside by

hermeneutics, and from outside – by using cultural anthropology.

It is important to note here, that the approaches of historians who are members of the

nexi of the particular culture are by default different from the approaches of historians who do

not belong to this culture, because in the latter case the shared interiors of a ‘we’, which is

1p*pl(1/p*pl), change into the shared interiors of ‘them’, which is 3p*pl(1/p*pl). And I argue

that the knowledge retrieved by the member and the agent of the cultural nexi is qualitatively

different from the one retrieved by the ‘outsider’, however hermeneutical approach he or she

can enact.

Cultural historical perspective from the inside and the outside, as viewed by the

member of this culture, can be codified as

1p(1p) x [{1p(1-p) x 3p*pl(1/p*pl)} + {1p(3-p) x 3p*pl(1/p*pl)}]

Respectively, cultural historical perspective from the inside and the outside, as viewed

by the ‘outsider’, can be codified as

1p(1p) x [{1p(1-p) x 3p*pl(1/p*pl)} + {1p(3-p) x 3p*pl(1/p*pl)}]

Also, there are two other major concerns here, as in the case with the “history from

below”: the principles of non-exclusion and enfoldment.

Burke notes that “the cultural historian gets to parts of the past that other historians

cannot reach”, so the methodology he or she uses is specific of this particular approach (the

non-exclusion principle). At the same time, the field of cultural history is not exactly

concrete, since “it is increasingly difficult to say what does not count as ‘culture’” (Burke,

2008, p. 2).

The latter concern can be extrapolated on both non-exclusion and the enfoldment

principles in general, because different disciplines ‘live’ inside different zones only on paper.

In reality it is very hard to differentiate outside and inside approaches and to claim the use of

only one methodology for one zone. Even integral scholars themselves understand zones and

methodologies differently (Fuhs; McIntosh, 2007; Wilber, 2007).

Conclusion

To conclude this paper I want to talk more about the Integral Methodological

Pluralism. In the beginning of the third millennium two things became very obvious. First,

ontology and epistemology are extremely important, for it is only the empiricists who can still

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continue to reconstruct the past without understanding of what past (and reality in general) is.

Second, the constant attempts to mix methodology with epistemology and even ontology

show us that we need a clear framework that can help to distinguish the three.

In regard to those concerns I believe nothing has as much to offer as the Integral

Approach. In this paper I offered a condensed overview of some of the fundamental post-

metaphysical constructions of the Integral Theory. To briefly summarize them here:

Reality cannot be reduced to either exteriors or interiors, but is rather a whole comprised of

the interior and the exterior of the individual and the collective. Thus, the quadrants.

History then, as everything happening, can be viewed as space-time interactions of the

individual and the collective in both objective reality and cultural subjective domain.

The basic “brick” of reality is a holon, or a whole that is a part of some other whole.

The quadrants, even though they exist, are never experienced per se, but rather are enacted

through a certain perspective. Since holons are found in every quadrant, and can be viewed

from either inside or outside, the total amount of the major zones of reality is 8; each one of

them requires its specific epistemology and methodology. To choose the appropriate

methodology one needs first to define kosmic address of a holon being viewed, and then to

follow the perspective on the principles on non-exclusion and enfoldment, however

complicated it can be.

At the same time, each perspective has two sides – the one that is seen, and the one that

sees. Since every expression in integral calculus starts with 1p(1p), to have a truly integral

picture in every case we need not only to define the kosmic address of the object, but also of

the subject (historian, in our particular case). As I have stated in the first part of this paper,

the subject’s kosmic address can be found at the intersection of its horizontal (geo-cultural)

and vertical (developmental) axes; the kosmic address of the subject can help to clarify the

way subject enacts its perspective. Thus – the enactment principle.

Field of history is very complex, and there are no easy solutions to the problems

history faces. History is virtually everything we know about collective and personal past. The

way we deal with it in general, the way we enact our ‘kosmic habits’ defines the way we are

in this world. Actually, history is all we have, since every moment becomes history next

moment, and the only thing which is not history is the ever-present Creativity, always pulling

forward, always on the very edge, as a lens connecting present with the past.

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