This post represents a move to stretch beyond early post-postmodern conceptions of the limits of reason, which can be seen as having been birthed in a worldview vilifying the whole epoch of the Enlightenment as a flatland, devoid of nuance, absent of ability to consider deeper structure, or the environment upon which it reason constructed itself, absent of consideration of it's own people, of affect.
To rehabilitate reason into a role more relevant to the challenges we face as we face the world and her various crises, this post considers the role of what Juan Pascual-Leone (1990) and Ortega y Gasset (1980) describe as the wisdom of 'vital reason'. Vital reason here is described as insightful practical rationality embracing forms that are mutually contradictory but jointly needed, in a transcendental view of the totality which extends through evolution into the possible of the person. To get to the heart of what vital reason might look like, Kant will be excavated and resuscitated for a rich elucidation on the nature of will, and the extent to which reason, refracted through the lens of will, becomes informed by consciousness revealed as transformative integration of cognition and affect in such a way as to tolerate ambiguity and nurture insight into emotional life, relationship and prosocial awareness.
Pascual-Leone has written a brilliant chapter for Sternberg's book on wisdom, intelligence and creativity, a book that, across it's many esteemed authors such as Paul Baltes, Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi, Gisela Labouvie-Vief and Daniel Robinson does much to emphasise the centrality of integration of the constituents that make up wisdom, in the overall picture of the definition of wisdom that emerges from the text.
Wisdom itself is a complex psychological construct, and the evolutionary hermeneutics through which we might explore it's origins reveals minimal agreement in a field articulated through spiritual text and philosophical treatise, reaching back through history to the Platonic Dialogues. A recent Delphi method study bringing together expert consensus on the meaning of wisdom sees an increasing emphasis placed on social-self awareness, empathy, emotional regulation and complex postformal thought including tolerance for paradox and uncertainty, and reflective tendency. These qualities can be seen as optimally developed within a human lifespan, but my research on wisdom, mindfulness and late stage ego development aims to address in part the question of whether age is (n)either necessary or sufficient for the development of wisdom.
Juan Pascual-Leone articulates a fully fledged account of the ontogenetic development of consciousness on his way to articulating a model of wisdom that may or may not be age-associated, in his chapter: 'An essay on wisdom: towards organismic processes that make it possible'. The chapter goes well beyond a view of the organism, to ground in an ontology birthed via intertwining Husserl, Heidegger, Kant and Jaspers. It's interesting to note that Pasucal Leone credits to Jaspers much of what Wilber credits to James Mark Baldwin, in Integral Theory.
Pascual Leone draws on Kant with intriguing complexity to theorise an adult model of agency or will. In 'Religion within the limits of reason alone' Kant outlines the will as jointly constituted by:
1. Willkur - 'act-of-will';
2. Wille - 'judgment-of-will';
3. Gesinnung - 'disposition-of-will'.
The act-of-will is an effortful cognitive orchestration led by the sense of 'want' or desire, as a radical (Kantian transcendental) act of free choice.
The judgment-of-will is a repertoire of metacognitive schemes related simultaneously to the persons life project and ethics base. Here some processes will be of pure affective drive, which mobilises mental energy through to prefrontal cortex executive decision making, which ideally is aligned to affective drive in an automatised way (where affects and cognitions cohere without effort).
The disposition-of-will is the ground for this automation of alignment of cognitive and affective drive, the personality constructs that provide the structure for metaexecutive processes.
In adult development, an early stage that aligns with Nietzsche's 'will to power' is articulated by Pascual-Leone as the 'will-to-will' (referring to Heidegger's same concept). Here a person seeks choices from a polar object set, lacking insight into contingencies and nuances, choosing actions in a way that is virtually entirely dependent upon sociocultural or mentor models, for guidance. At this stage, motivationally misleading states may arise as a dynamic synthesis, where the judgment-of-will (emotions) drives a violation of the longer term disposition-of-will, which holds the ethical framework of the personality.
The next developmental stage identified by Pascual-Leone is the stage of the development of wisdom, the ultraself, the level of vital reason, also called the 'will-not-to-will' stage. Here the earlier dialectical contradictions between the wills, experienced in the space of declining ability in mental energy and mental interruption (as occurs from the mid-thirty age bracket onwards, in humans) is proposed as precipitating a mental reworking of the different processing strands, of emotional, affective, cognitive and socially related self-streams.
The ultraself emerges not from direct interaction with the Other, but moreso from internal process birthed from the need to resolve dialectical contradictions (the interior space of the transcendental movement, having distinct superordinate self organisation).
The ancient Greeks called this higher and more integrative mode of processing reason.
Kant and constructivist thinkers ever since also call it 'reason', constrasting it with simple understanding.
'....[Of vital reason] Scheler posited that a heightened affective awareness of life's resistances, when attentively experienced in an open yet detached manner (letting oneself into the nearness of reality by bridging with feeling the gap between contradictory aspects) is at the origin of spiritual (ie ultraself) growth and valid cognition ...Scheler describes it as the mental attitude whereby inferential and existential/affective aspects of...situations offering resistances to praxis are 'susupended', suspended in the sense of being tuned down to mere actualities by an aware but detatched 'releasement' (Heidegger) toward a pure (uninvolved) existential awareness (blended cognition and affect) of the ongoing situation.
Heidegger calls this qualitiatively different attitude meditative thinking , and he contrasts it with 'calculative thinking'.'
Here the self-soul emanates through three subrepertoires: feelings about the Other, with communion of the self as central construct, passions of the self, understood as good bad-valuations leading to affective expression, and the ethos of the soul, which is the site of ethical motives and possible acts. At this level, affects are inextricably recognised as bound with cognitions, and thinking becomes so open to reality that thinking becomes thanking (Heidegger) expressed as metasystemic, bold, causal abstractions. Here the will is engaged only as necessary on vital grounds (hence, 'vital reason'), a pure resting-in-itself, releasing itself to inner and outer reality.
Truly, madly, deeply and with great equanimity, not-two.
Vital, alive, and be-loving, reason.
Ref:
Pascual-Leone, J. (1990). An essay on wisdom: towards organismic processes that make it possible' in R Sternberg (Ed) Wisdom: It's Nature, Origins and Development. New York: Cambridge University Press.
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