The Horns of Integral Pragmatics

What I propose and emphasize by constantly returning to integral pragmatics is the possibility for co-enacting a “new” mode of intimacy with the utterances we make.

The Walls of Jericho

I put the word new in the quotation marks because I believe that this mode is old enough to have seen the first geniuses of both a spoken word and a written word in the history of humankind. I, nevertheless, say “new” because it seems we either lost our connection with this mode or haven’t found it yet. For some reason we tend to distance ourselves from the embodiment of our Logos or Word; and yet we shall always remind ourselves: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

In the alchemical lab of our Imagination the seed of the Word manifests as God’s will and energy. Through becoming one with the Word we re-unite with the miracle of Oneness with the Spirit as it manifests inseparably from reality. The Word uttered always brings aliveness to our being; and instead of looking straight at things we stare into the abyss in front of us and our consciousness embarks on a journey through the realms of the living and the dead, following the footsteps of infinity, swimming in the clouds of timelessness, and reaching out to express as non-locality.

The sacred way of speaking the Word is totally different from the profane way of speaking words. Peter Kingsley explains the difference between “talking about” and “talking from” in the magnificent article “Raven’s Appearance”:

There is the profane way of talking, which is to talk about things. And if you care to notice, you will see that in the modern Western world we always talk about something. There is the word; then there is the point of reference for the word, which is always separate from the word itself. And this, of course, is the basis for nearly all modern linguistics.

But according to people such as Parmenides there is another way of talking. This other way is that instead of talking about, you talk from. If you sense oneness you talk from oneness; and that oneness is communicated through the magic of the word in a way that our minds may find incomprehensible but that, even so, fascinates and endlessly obsesses them. For these people were magicians. The founders of logic and science in the West were sorcerers. They knew what they were doing even if, now, no one knows what they did.

If we intuit the infinite, if we intuit the eternal, if we intuit the timeless, the transcendent, the Divine, we are bound to wake up in the echoing thunder of silence. This silence is the original face of our selfhood; and it quietly floats in our Hearts. The silence explodes with ecstasy, and when it does, the Word manifests. You see, the Word is inseparable from the silence, the Word is connected to the silence, the Word is silence revealed itself.

We can spend years and decades talking about words but unless we talk from the Word we never reach the realm of profound pragmatics. We can infinitely chase our own tail of signifiers and signifieds but no matter what we do unless we open our minds and hearts wide enough to courageously embody the Word, our talking will always remain talking about philosophy instead of being philosophy, talking about poetry instead of being poetry, talking about science instead of being science, talking about art instead of being art. Philosophy is the Love of Wisdom; in its pragmatics it’s the Word uttered itself to itself and echoed in the Hall of sentient Mirrors.

I have always intuitively sensed the appearance of the intimacy with the Word in the writings of Ken Wilber. The striking difference between him and his philosophy and those who talk about Wilber and his philosophy is in the embodiment of the Word—Logos. The seed of this vision of integral pragmatics that I want to convey to you has been sown by a little and seemingly evanescent utterance of profound importance, the utterance delineating Integral Semiotics in Wilber’s Integral Spirituality (pp. 286-287):

James was a genius and a pioneer in so many ways, and the fact that he took states of consciousness as seriously as he did was extraordinary; but monological is monological, and in that instance he merely extended the imperialism of the philosophy of the subject. Fortunately, James’s sheer genius pushes him beyond his own self-imposed limitations. His empiricism is always open to hermeneutics, the representational paradigm is supplemented with Peircean pragmatics, and—above all—his is a soul in which Truth and Goodness and Beauty are still a holy and unbreakable trinity.

But radical empiricism is still empiricism. That is, radical empiricism is radical monologicalism. Stages in zone #2 and the constitutive nature of zone #4 are alien to him. Had he availed himself of more of the work of his contemporary James Mark Baldwin, how different it all might have been. This imperialistic empiricism is the worm in the core of this otherwise extraordinary work.

It’s interesting to note that, in fact, Charles Peirce himself criticized James for exactly this central problem. James and Peirce were lifelong friends, despite their little tiff over James’s appropriation of the term “pragmatism” from Peirce, who coined it. (Peirce subsequently changed the name of his philosophy to “pragmaticism,” which was “a term,” he said, “so ugly as to discourage theft.”) Despite their friendship, Peirce felt James’s approach of “pure empiricism” was deeply flawed. Peirce—who, as noted, is generally regarded as America’s greatest philosophical genius—nailed James with a simple sentence: Perception is semiotic.

I want to pause here for a moment, take a deep breath and state that for the last two years I have been a semiotician to the marrow of my bones. Semiotics is a way to recognize the almost religious reverence for the Word that manifests as a movement of the unmoving, as a birth of the unborn. The entire universe after the Big Bang represents the Word extended through time and space. Now, having said so, I shall continue this magnificent quotation:

In other words, perception is always already an interpretation. At least in part. Failing to see this is the common mistake of naïve phenomenology and naïve empiricism in all their forms. Understanding this also let Peirce point out two further problems, which people simply will not understand if they don’t get the first problem with monological empiricism itself. Namely, it let Peirce say of James, “Of course, he is materialistic to the core.” And further: “He inclines toward Cartesian dualism.” Whenever I mention this to fans of James, they usually express shock, which tells me that they haven’t gotten the postmodern revolution, because otherwise it makes perfect sense. But for those who fail to understand this, James is even seen as somebody who overcame materialism and dualism, whereas he merely embodied their subtler monological forms. Peirce went on to humorously say of James’s implicit materialism that this is so “in a methodological sense, but not religiously, since he does not deny a separable soul nor a future life; for materialism is that form of philosophy which leaves the universe as incomprehensible as it finds it.” What Peirce means is, what monological delivers is incomprehensible; perception itself is actually semiotic.

Now we come closer to the part which is most important to our reasoning. Let’s take a look:

We can also see, further, why James—as well as virtually all meditation and phenomenology—is, as often noted, modernist in essence, and why Peirce was a great postmodernist about a century ahead of his time (who else could see natural laws as natural habits, without falling into magenta magic?). Peirce maintained that all perception is already an interpretation, and interpretation is triadic in structure: it demands a sign, an object (referent), and an interpretant. You can see the similarity with Ferdinand de Saussure, who maintained that the sign is composed of a signifier and signified in a system of interpreted differences. Peirce coined the term “semiotics”; Saussure called what he was doing “semiology.” AQAL has drawn on both of them: there is a sign (signifier plus signified), referent, semantic, syntax, and pragmatics.

Here we have to look at the bottom of the page to find a short footnote with the utterance that forever changed my relation to the Word as it is written or spoken or read or done:

To give a quadratic view: the sign is composed of UR-signifier and UL-signified (and yes, à la postmodernism, there are often huge gaps between them, resulting in deferral of meaning). Integral Theory defines a sign as “any aspect of reality that signifies another, to another.” Signs exist in systems of semantics (LL) and syntax (LR), held together by pragmatics (whose telos is to integrate the 4 quadrants of any semiotic occasion: and all occasions are semiotic, although only higher animals have linguistic forms of semiotics: the 4 quadrants go all the way down, taking semiotics with them). . . .

Ever since I have read this footnote my life has never been the same. As I was reading the words “signs exist in systems of semantics (LL) and syntax (LR), held together by pragmatics (whose telos is to integrate the 4 quadrants of any semiotic occasion . . .)” the subtle tingling in my body and the space of clarity in my mind signified that the treasure is found.

I have expressed elsewhere my point of view that the third tier of development and evolution of consciousness described in the Integral developmental theory is the first truly Pragmatic Tier. In a gesture of connecting the dots I have linked Wilber’s testimony that the AQAL framework itself is a product of the Indigo stage of consciousness (a third-tier stage) with the statement that pragmatics’ telos is to integrate the four quadrants of any semiotic occasion. This means that the true nature of the four quadrants, the true nature of these primordial perspectives reveals itself only as an embodiment of the Word coming through a third-tier structure of consciousness.

Indigo is the first stage of consciousness which in its utterances, the utterances that manifest not just as a verbal-linguistic activity but as a kosmocentric activity, is able to hold the four quadrants in a single gesture of integration. Before that stage, every utterance we make is bound to be a fragmented aspect of a text within text within text within the boundaries of one dimension of consciousness. To understand and grok and grasp the difficult transverbal reality beneath these words I want to extend my philosophical hand so as to reach Vasily Nalimov, a truly unsung hero of our time. Vasily Nalimov understood consciousness as essentially a text reading phenomenon. He intuited very well the power of Logos—the power of the Word—and spoke from the silence and timelessness. The grand narrative of our life is a holarchy of semiotic occasions that forms the scripture with the Holy text breathing within and without.

I emphasize integral pragmatics but my words sometimes are misinterpreted as utterances of an isolated theorizing mind—but I am not a Pharisee and not interested in a book knowledge and in talking about. When I reach the space of clarity through which I can reconnect with integral pragmatics I see that human beings are lost in massive textbooks of their own minds. The dissociation of the words and actions is being established. The intuition of the immediacy of the Spirit-in-action’s tetra-manifestation becomes forsaken. A seed of integral intentionality which has the potentiality to reach a luminous mindbody becomes lost in the swamps of smaller vortexes of karma. The Integral Word instead of being spoken is being stuck at the throat chakra level of incessant mumbling; and the energy never reaches the forehead and the crown chakras (and often lower chakras as well). The micro-orbit is never fully completed. The Beauty fades away. The hopes get broken. Alienation insists. The Word is forgotten. The Man isolates himself in the web of texts he created.

My task is to do my best to bring the message which reveals the possibility for a passionate embodiment of the Word—the Word that has the sound of the Horns of Jericho. It shakes your destiny and frees your throat and liberates your fate. The influx of authentic pragmatics results.