I'm in the process of finishing my studies, pursuing the parallel path of an internship at day and my graduate thesis at night, the latter corresponding loosely to what has been called 'the dark night of the soul'. Just kidding ;-)

Nevertheless, I get pretty frustrated covering all bases (boooring), reviewing literature and including what's been said. I'm a guy, a masculine piece of shit, and I want to transcend! Screw including, embracing, connecting! I want to lift off and soar through the uncharted, empty space of being.

Then again, it's also true that I just need to finish the fuckin' thesis and get over it, so I can get on with the transformation of the self and the world, and properly find out who I am to be, proceeding to be all that, whatever it is to be - and stuff.

Anyway, my monkey mind can get carried away with all this, and in fact it just did this past half hour. I love to listen to my own rambling and laugh at me - such an annoying, yet sweet little child.

So here's a rant I just dropped in Thesis.doc, and will probably be taking out again when I reread it tomorrow. Better capture it here and have something to smile at, before I get all serious and rational again. Pffff.

Minimal context: my thesis is about the action-structure debate in sociology, which refers to (I claim) the relationship between creativity and constraint, the past and the present. Think Henri Bergson, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, and good ol' Ken Wilber.

=<[
Any theory, approach, account or perspective on the action-structure debate which tries to get rid of ambiguity and present an all-encompassing explanatory account of human agency, is bound to be deterministic to some degree. "If there is one genuine necessity inherent in human agency and social action, it is the necessity of ambiguity." (Dawe, 1979: 388) Choosing certainty over (a certain amount of) ambiguity is to lose the creative, open-ended qualities of human agency to a deterministic, simplifying theory. Any ontology that is to deal in a satisfactory way with human agency as a whole, then, will need to find room for ambiguity, probability and all those other eternal enemies of the scientific drive towards explaining the nature of what is, of providing a theory of everything. This is never, never, never possible. To be human is to accept both temporary, contingent knowledge and unconditioned, creative ambiguity. All that can be pinned down is necessarily in the past and therefore incomplete of the present, which is by its very nature boundlessly novel, until it manifests, until perception pins down the probability space into wave or particle, this or that, labels it, categorizes it, makes sense of it, and stores it away in memory, continually, endlessly.

The very act of theorizing, of labeling, of writing this down, is both an expression of human agency and a wholly inadequate, incomplete simplification of it. To recognize this, operate upon it and consciously let go of knowns, of theories and labels and ideas, is to transcend the apparent duality inherent in being human. To recognize the past within the present, consciously let go of it and lean into the unknown of what is arising moment to moment, is the ultimate principle. And to write this, to read this, to make sense of this, in effect is to negate this, to prove this wrong, unless the inadequacy of the words and the knowns is recognized. Utterly paradoxical, negating itself at every turn, the neverending story of humanity unfolds, poised upon the brink of ‘the inward turn', a revolution of new thinking, only to arrive again, and see with new eyes: it is always-already this.
]>=

Let me know whether you laughed or cried. I hope the lack of context on the rest of my thesis is no obstacle to soaring with me for a bit. Transcend kicks include's ass anyway, right ?!

;-)

My deepest fear is that I am inadequate, and so I tend to set high standards for myself. Lately, however, I’m starting to see through that and recognize it when I do it. Sometimes. Because while it’s true that I do recognize it more often and in that way I’m being liberated from it one step at a time, it’s also true that I’ve moved to level two in setting high standards for myself by having read about Enlightenment. Thanks a lot, Ken! So let me go back a few steps and tell you a little bit about my attitude towards me. I’ll just give the word to my habitual self, who can tell you all about me. “Hi. I’m Diederick’s habitual self. Over the past twenty-four years, I’ve come to know Diederick as a pretty ok guy. He’s quite smart and he’s got a good sense of humour. At the same time, he’s not as good-looking as I would’ve liked (I mean, I’ve had to stick with this guy for a quarter century with much more to go, and I have to look at him every day), but then again, he’s got some other things going for him. He listens well and he can be pretty sensitive to others’ needs. “Nevertheless, there’s one thing I’m not at all happy about. You could say it’s his weakest spot – as far as I know. If you really drill down into the guy and have a look at his inner workings, you’ll find out what he’s trying to hide so desperately. We’re having a good talk here, and I know you can be trusted with this, so let me spare you the effort of finding this out for yourself by telling you. “Diederick is really a very lazy, weak person. There, I’ve said it. You’re surprised, I can see that. It’s not all that obvious, but it’s true. And the reason it’s not obvious is... me! I’m sticking out for the guy and making sure he deals with it. If it weren’t for me, the guy wouldn’t even get out of bed in the morning! And even though he’s got me yelling at him and telling him to get his lazy white ass out of bed, it’s still a big, nasty battle day after day. “It tires me, I can tell you, but he needs me so I stick around. I have a heart of gold, even if I do say so myself (he never does, the ungrateful bugger). Anyway, he gets out of bed, but that’s not the end of it. Then I have to tell him to have breakfast properly, to brush his teeth (he often doesn’t do that in the morning – and it shows). Clean up your dishes after you, shave, pack lunch so you won’t have to spend five euro’s buying some, don’t take the underground – walking is much healthier, and cheaper too. “I think you get the idea, so I’ll stop there, even though I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of what I need to tell him to do. Generally speaking, if I don’t set the standards for him, tell him what to do, how much to achieve in a given day, then it doesn’t happen. He just doesn’t do it! And so I often need to threaten him, too. Not that I like it, but he’s asking for it. So I tell him what’ll happen if he doesn’t do this, what people will say if he doesn’t finish that, how disappointed I will be if he doesn’t live up to my expectations of him.” That’s about enough for now, Mr. Habitual Self! It’s really not true you know, that I’m weak and lazy at heart. But I seem to have gotten that idea while I was growing up and I believe it most of the time. Fortunately, and with much help of my girlfriend, I’ve started seeing through me and recognize the pattern. So a lot of the time, I catch myself doing it, while I’m doing it. And as soon as I see me act on that belief, it loses 99% of its power over me. I suppose it’s because that which is seeing it doesn’t believe I’m weak and lazy. Deep down – even deeper than this belief is, and that’s saying something – I just know it’s not true. So I’m improving, and my meditation practice is helping me be more aware of what’s going on inside of me, so there’s definitely a whole lot less battles going on inside of me. In fact, I was just hoping I could hand my current habitual self his resignation letter and appoint myself the new habitual self, when I caught me at it again. Again, I find myself caught up in the belief that deep down, I’m inadequate, that it’s not enough. Only this time, the belief has upgraded itself to level two. And I know who to thank for that. It’s someone you may know. Ken Wilber, a.k.a. the big bald guy. Don’t get me wrong, I love his writing and it’s had the most profound impact upon me for the past few years. But that’s where the trouble is, too. They say that one of the most important things in this life is to hear about the possibility of Enlightenment, of a way out, of stepping off the wheel altogether by recognizing what you truly are and always have been – not this, not that, nothing, all of it, ‘just this’. Anyway, that’s not what this is about. If you want to know more about that, I suggest you check out Wilber, or books on buddhism, or sufism, or mystic christianity, or whatever. The point is, that now that Ken told me about Enlightenment, my belief that I’m secretly inadequate and weak has just been boosted to the next level. Although I can deal with the level one belief pretty well now, by recognizing it and choosing not to act on it, this second level is a lot more subtle. Basically, it means that even if I live a great life, I brush my teeth, turn my passion into my work, be all I can be and read all the philosophical classics, too... it’s still wholly inadequate, it’s a big illusion, it’s not enough. ‘Cause there will still be this ‘me’ thinking about what a great life he’s having, brushing his teeth, working, reading, loving, being. But, as Wei Wu Wei so rudely, yet skillfully points out: Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9% of what you think, and everything you do, is for your self. And there isn’t one. The thing is, I believe this is true. And I’m starting to commit myself to find out. What else can you do?! So there you have it. After seeing through the belief of inadequacy and starting to outgrow the need to set high standards for myself, I have now set the very highest standard you could possibly think of for myself. Which is, paradoxically, to get rid of that same self. It can’t be right. But I sure as hell believe it. Often. So when do I not believe this? In two ways, one of which I hope will ‘solve’ this problem for me, ‘cause as I pointed out, I don’t think this ‘next level’ belief of inadequacy is entirely healthy (the basic point may be, but not the way I’m handling it). The first way of not believing this is by going completely mental and not seeing any way out. Chaos, suffering, stuckness. The second way of not believing is different, although it sometimes follows from (as in, comes after) the previous one. Big breath, and all of a sudden it’s clear again. Just running around in my monkey mind, making up ways of driving me crazy. This is the way of acceptance, of seeing things as they are and seeing through them. If I were given the choice, I’d go with this one. Much better. But I’m not given the choice, and it often takes me days of chaos before I see through it all again and rest in being, breathing in, breathing out. So, what to do? How do I help me? I guess I just do what I’m doing right now. Do your things, meditate, write this stuff down, talk to friends, meditate some more, and watch the play. Lovely.

These days, ~C4Chaos is pretty much determining my life as it is lived on the web. He tells me where to drag my cursor's ass and directs me into virtual black holes, such as the famous ZPod:KB101, and the Dilbert blog. I must say I do enjoy it, shame on me, leeching off his C-ness.

Anyway, I was checking out a post on the Dilbert blog yesterday, in which the author was arguing that with science and evolution running the show, free will has been bumped out of the picture. Illusion, superstition, a product of circular reasoning. I could not constrain myself and had to respond to the stimulus he was offering, so I sort of disproved the argument that is to follow by its being conditional upon Scott Adam's bait. That's pretty evil, really.

Oh and I'm posting this here, 'cause ~C told me to and, with his free will, constrained me into this. Thanks, ~C(for Constraint) ;-)

------------------------

In a way, you could say free will vs. evolution is about free will vs. conditioning. Another way of looking at this is creativity vs. constraint.

If you want to be taken seriously, you'll need to deal with conditioning and constraint. If you insist everything's free will, you're lost already, in my view. It's too naive.

So the question could be rephrased as: assuming constraint is real, in what entity, property or process does it reside? The answers people have given to that pretty much tell the story of sociology, which deals with the relationship between the individual and society - very relevant.

Marx focused on the economic base, which for him gave rise to -and constrained- the superstructure of society, including politics, morality, religion, etc. Although he believes free will is possible to the extent that he believes in revolution, he negates his own position by making that free will dependent upon certain historical developments, such as the Enlightenment and the development of the capitalist mode of production. Whenever you're going to make free will dependent upon anything else, that is, specifying the conditions under which it occurs, then you're lost, for you've just given primacy to conditions and constraint.

Then came the postmodernists who said 'no man, there is not one Truth about these things, everything should be seen in context, there are as many truths as there are people, so all truth is relative!'. Which really means no-one can tell you what's right or wrong, do whatever you like. Doesn't really say much about free will or constraint, just collapses everything into relativity, leading to nihilism and narcissism, I'd say.

One way I'm trying to look at free will vs. constraint (I'm writing my graduate thesis on this), is by relating it to time, as in the past and the present. I'm not saying this is the ultimate truth, but that it may contribute to finding a more adequate perspective on the issue.

In a way, lived time is nothing but a chain of 'present moments' fading into the past. That is, each present moment resembles the past moment (sometimes very much, sometimes a bit less). However, it is also always a little new, even if it would be just that you've grown a heart-beat older.

You could say that each present moment builds upon the inheritance of the past. You've always had two legs, you can't all of a sudden grow a third one. This is a constraint of your body, which exists in time (and space of course). However, even though there's an inheritance of the past that is in many ways a constraint on the present moment, it also allows for (sometimes more, sometimes less) novelty. This moment is also not exactly the same as the previous, something's different.

I'd argue that, to the extent that a person can be aware of the present, he can exercise free will. Not free will as in everything is possible, because it needs to build upon the options bequeated to the present by the past. Nevertheless, in the present moment there's room for taking a new direction, doing things a little different.

This would have to do a lot with habits, both physical and mental. A habit is really an inheritance of the past, and if you're not aware of it, your present behaviour or thoughts will be determined by this habit, by memory, by the past.

Nevertheless, when you become aware, in the present moment, of these habits (reflection in action, 2nd order learning), you can do it differently. You could say this is choice, free will, I don't care about the words. Right now, you can reflect on you and decide whether your thoughts and behaviour are going to be in line with the past (which is really living in the past, allowing yourself to be constrained and conditioned) or whether it's going to be a tiny little bit different.

The crucial mediating factor between free will in the present and the constraint of the past, then, lies in awareness, or the ability to reflect upon your behaviour, your feelings and your thoughts. This is a uniquely human capacity. And that's why only human's have 'free will' in the sense of being able to reflect, act, reflect and act a little differently. This is learning, this is living, this is free will.

So in the end, it's really both. Find the space between stimuli and response, and you're free. Live on auto-pilot and have the response follow from stimuli through habits of the past, engrained in memory, and you're unfree. It's as simple as that, for me.

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from http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2006/04/free_will.html#comment-16043642

Warning: this is a pretty theoretical, technical post. Please don't waste your time on it if you know that's not your cup of tea ;-)

In the context of my thesis (I should write a post with an overview on its subject - I'll put that on the list), I've been looking into the difference between dualism and duality. None of the dictionaries I checked make any meaningful distinction between these two, but I know they are sometimes used to refer to two qualitatively different kinds of relationship between two entities, properties, phenomena - I'll stick to the term phenomena for now. Although I've spent some time researching this on the web, as well as in sociological literature (for my thesis), another warning is in place: this is still far from clear to me! What follows are some thoughts on what I've found. Any thoughts, knowledge or leads would be much appreciated.

In philosophy, the term dualism is often used to refer to an asymmetric, vertical (in the sense of ‘higher' and ‘lower') relationship between two phenomena. A well-known example is the dualism between the ideal and the real. Other examples: spirit-matter, absolute-relative. A duality, on the other hand, refers to a symmetric, horizontal relationship between two phenomena, such as male-female, divergence-convergence.

Using these definitions, it makes a big difference whether you use duality or dualism. Take the relationship between mind and matter. Call it a duality, and you're saying these are two (horizontal) aspects of reality, without expressing a preference or asserting the primacy of one over the other. Call it a dualism, and you're saying that there is an asymmetrical, vertical relationship between the two. You'd be asserting the primacy of either mind over matter or vice versa. Now these two positions are very different!

Source: D. H. Th. Vollenhoven (http://www.aspecten.org/vollenhoven/vollen_index.html, unfortunately only in Dutch) and some other exotic Google results - there do not seem to be many sources that deal explicitly with the difference between dualism and duality. Or they're not online (unlikely). Or I didn't find them (more likely).

In sociology, the terms dualism and duality have been used in very different ways, although the distinction between them is not necessarily less dramatic than in philosophy. I'm most familiar with their use in debates around individual-society, creativity-constraint, subjectivism-objectivism, and voluntarism-determinism (which are closely related). Here, a dualism would refer to the relationship between two independent phenomena. A duality, on the other hand, refers to two interdependent, mutually constitutive phenomena. The analogy that is often used is that of the head and tail of a coin.

Let's take individual-society. As a dualism, they are taken to be independent phenomena. To be sure, they interact, but it's more like two coins bumping into each other. As a duality, it's really one coin with a tail and a head, and existence of the one implies the existence of the other. Individual and society are intimately interwoven. Their relationship is internal, rather than external as with a dualism. Obviously this is quite different from the way duality and dualism are used in philosophy. But equally obviously, in sociology, using the one or the other makes quite a big difference.

Source: Anthony Giddens (1979, 1984), Margaret Archer (1995), Colin Hay (2002).

All of this has started me thinking about some aspects of the work of Ken Wilber. There are some interesting questions around a possible absolute-relative dualism in his work, but that's not what I want to pursue here. Rather, I've been thinking of the horizontal aspects of his work: the four quadrants. I'm assuming readers are somewhat familiar with his work. If not, there are plenty of sources to read up on this (e.g. here).

Horizontally, Wilber distinguishes between subjective-objective and individual-collective, which generate four fundamental perspectives, four kinds of truth, the four quadrants (intentional, behavioural, social and cultural). Now for the big question: -ity or -ism? Since these are four, we should probably introduce a new term first. A list of what's possible word-wise, mixing Greek and Latin roots, -ity's and -ism's: unity, monism, dualism, duality, triality, trialism, tetrality, tetralism, pentality, pentalism/pentism, and so on (the ones in italics were made up by me, so as far as I know they're not used much, let alone acceptable).

To come back to that big question, is Wilber promoting a tetralism or a tetrality? I suppose it breaks down into the following question: Do the subjective-objective and individual-collective relationships represent a dualism or a duality? And then the next question would be: with reference to the philosophical or sociological use of them? I'd like to stick with the sociological one. Then the question becomes a little more clear (finally):

Are Wilber's four quadrants really ‘four sides of the same coin' (holon, in his terminology), or do they refer to independent (related, obviously, yet independent) aspects of reality? Asking the question like this makes me inclined to answer they are ‘four sides of the same coin', which would make it a tetrality in my (fckd up) terminology.

I might as well go rambling on for a little bit, see where this might go. The four quadrants as a tetrality would suggest that the relationship between the four aspects of reality is internal. However, in the analogy of the coin, you can only look at either head or tail at any one time. In the same way, you could suggest that you can only take one of the four perspectives on the holon -on reality- at a time. An ontological duality/tetrality would therefore logically generate an epistemological dualism/tetralism. In normal language: even though a coin has 2 (or in this case, 4) sides, you can only look at (know) one side at a time!

This would not prevent you from switching the coin, switching perspectives, but it would prevent you from taking multiple perspectives at a time. Now that makes sense intuitively, since I think I only take one perspective at a time more generally, but what does that mean for taking an ‘all-quadrant' approach to something? I guess it can only mean you subsequently take four different perspectives on the thing. So there would be no such thing as an ‘all-quadrant perspective', as that would imply taking multiple perspectives in a parallel, rather than serial way. That's not necessarily a crazy assertion, but I need to think a little more on the implications of that.

I know all of this may seem a bit crazy to you. However, it is very helpful to me to spell this out and actually I'm really hoping someone can help me out a little. I'll sit on this for a while and see what else comes up.

The rain is coming in in waves. Big droplets are running down the window. And I'm in here, looking out mournfully at the greyish blanket covering the city, just about to call it a day and start my brisk 20-minutes walk home. A very subtle message indeed. So I'll just stick with the comfy office chair, the water and the life-saving coffee for a little longer and stare at a screen while pounding away on the keyboard. Mindfully, of course.

Not that it matters a whole lot. Let's pretend this would not be Hamburg, Germany, and the weather would actually be mildly favourable towards my not owning an umbrella. And let's stretch our imagination (at the risk of tearing it like cheap alu-foil, but bear with me) and suppose I had arrived at the place I temporarily call ‘home'. I would change into something more comfortable, somewhat fashionable even - in my book... Then I'd get some groceries, eat some dinner, read a little from The Simple Feeling of Being or I Am That, meditate and turn on my computer to work on my thesis.

Depending on my subjective impression of the ratio between Meaningful Work Done, and Motivation Slash Self Discipline Or The Lack Of It, somewhere between ten or eleven at night I'd switch off my pc and take a shower. Brush my teeth, maybe read a little more and meditate again, or just repeat the mantra of ‘Fuck all that' and proceed to induce the blissful forgetfulness of deep sleep. Only to wake up instantly to the sound of those friggin' birds outside my window, at around six thirty, maybe seven o'clock, and then it's all ‘get dressed meditate have breakfast walk to work work lunch work' again. And that would bring us full circle to the present moment of looking out the window mournfully, about to call it a day.

Pretty exciting life I got going for me, don't you think? Actually, I must confess I enjoy it greatly though. The rhytm keeps me going, baby, and the habits, and the relative quietness of the monkey mind, and the opportunity to read and meditate and sleep and think. All of this is good. So yes, it's boring. But it's also temporary. ‘Work' is actually an internship from February to June, and my thesis eats up my spare time, so by summer I'll have finished my internship and my thesis and I can finally graduate and get on with it already.

So these six months are really somewhat of an extended retreat for me. And I think I'm enjoying it!

Most of the time.

And now I'm off, ‘cause it stopped raining... for now. And you'll know how I'll be spending my evening ;-)

In the natural sciences, the previously dominant mode of thinking from Parmenides to Aristoteles to Newton took the world to be a complex system of lawful cause-and-effect. The object of science was to look unto the world objectively and report the truth about the things it saw. Atoms everywhere, running around mindlessly, bumping into each other. Quantum theory took the fun out of that game by proclaiming the wave-particle duality and showing that 'things', such as atoms, were really more like relatively stable patterns, statistical regularities (and then only at the level of aggregrate phenomena). "For quantum theory taught that, at the microlevel, what was usually deemed a physical thing, a stably perduring object, is itself no more than a statistical pattern - a stability wave in a surging sea of process." (Rescher, 1996)

I'm writing my thesis on the action-structure debate in sociology, and what I find striking is that if you take the story above and apply it (somewhat metaphorically, perhaps) to the social sciences, you start seeing all kinds of fascinating things. The social sciences seem to be pretty caught up in the language of things and objects - no longer purely in the modernistic Newtonian sense, but it does emphasize stability over change, substance over process, structure over action, order over chaos. What happens when you apply some of this quantum thinking to the social sciences?

Structures, persons, organisations, ideas - these are all probability spaces, 'stability waves in a sea of process', the point of intersection between energy-potentiality and actuality-reality. Organisations are interwoven, interdependent network-weavings of energy-information, dynamic exchanges, spaces of interactional touching. Dynamic equilibria, static dynamics. Heraclitus said 'panta rhei', everything flows. The world as 'real, lived experience' flows. Our past is a huge wave, and we're riding its crest, ever falling into the future. Our past carries and constrains the present. Negative freedom: freedom from the past, from constraint, from conditions. Positive freedom: freedom to create, to act, to come into being in the present. We are ourselves probability spaces, constantly bifurcating, past or present? Will I be who I was, who I've been? Who am I? When I become conscious of the ways in which my past is in me, here, now, I become free of it. Consciously, here, now, I become free to let come, to become. There is a stimulus in the present. Bifurcation point: extrapolate from the past, from karma? Stand in the space between stimulus and response, in the present, the space of dharma - what do I do, who am I? Will I be myself or will I be my Self? The choice is mine. Yes, if I am conscious, free from what I am conscious of, free to be Self instead of self. No, I am conditioned by what I am, by the past self that is in me, by my karmic inheritance. Who have I been, who am I, who am I to be, now, and now, and now?

Ok, so I just let go of myself there for a bit. I'm just thinking out loud, trying to plant a bomb of paradoxical meaning and questions. Blow what I know, what remains is the question.

?

"Novelty, as empirically found, doesn't issue by jumps and jolts; it leaks in insensibly ... All the old identities at last give out, for the fatally continuous infiltration of otherness warps things out of every original rut." (William James, A Pluralistic Universe, 1909)

Right on the money, William! Today, while doing some work on my thesis, I experienced exactly this. Reading, thinking, searching, wondering, suffering, thinking some more, and then all of a sudden, there's this one inconspicuous thought. And from it follows another, slightly less inconspicuous thought, and another one, and before I know it (literally!), I'm writing, drawing a diagram, thinking some more, writing again, and then I sit back and I smile. Oh yes, do I smile! Because I can literally feel it in my body: I'm on to something here. The thin veil that was blurring my vision on the central topic of my thesis, is suddenly ripped apart, torn to shreds by the strength and clarity of the insight. A flash, a flurry of energetic activity in my brain, and I'll never look upon this issue as I did before.

I'll explain, and in the process of doing so I will simultaneously make good on my promise of giving an overview of what my thesis is about. I don't suppose everyone will find this interesting, but I'll just write this on the premise of ‘whoever comes are the right people' an Open Space Technology principle loosely adapted to my current purposes ;-).

My thesis deals with what is called the ‘agency-structure debate' in social theory. Agency refers to the capacity of social actors to make a difference in the world. Structure refers to the enduring rules, patterns and institutions that provide the social context within which action takes place. Why is it a debate? Because agency allows us to influence our social context, and therefore structure (i.e. an organization) is an effect of agency (i.e. our actions). However, the argument runs the other way, too. Because social structures limit and constrain our actions, in that they influence -or in a stronger version, determine- the actions we take in the social world. That is, agency (i.e. our actions) is also an effect of structure (i.e. an organization). Common sense suggests that both are partially true, yet how is that possible? How does that work? This is the central topic with which the agency-structure debate in social theory is concerned.

And now for a ‘brief' historical intermezzo. Understanding the historical origin of the two positions in this debate helps us gain a more grounded perspective on it.

Although we take it very much for granted, our notion of individuality is historically situated. That is, even though I take it for granted that I take myself to be an individual, this has not always been the case:

"'Individual' meant ‘inseparable', in medieval thinking ... Slowly, and with many ambiguities, since that time, we have learned to think of ‘the individual in his own right', where previously to describe an individual was to give an example of the group of which he was a member." (Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution, 1961)

In fact, only with the historical development of the division of labour could a true ‘individuality' in the sense in which we know it start to emerge. The division of labour, after all, gives rise to a differentiation of biography and experience which creates the sense of difference with others.

‘So what about agency?', you might ask. Let me quote Alan Dawe (1979) on this:

"In short, medieval man lived within a fixed, static, and immutable world, unquestioningly accepting it and his place in it as preordained and aware of himself only as part of his group. Moreover, the world was thus given because it was divinely authored. The medieval conception of man was of a being who was but one manifestation of divine nature and will, inseparable and indivisible from it. Clearly, when the only world view available to the closed, static, undifferentiated community of the medieval village was that the essence of and the agency behind all things lay in divine creativity and authority alone, there was no room for any conception of a distinctive human nature and agency." (For those versed in the language of Spiral Dynamics, this is the blue value system.)

And when the first ‘conceptions of a distinctive human nature and agency' did begin to rise with the division of labour, the feudal powers of the church easily repressed them. For a time. Because when Copernicus and Galileo started looking and thinking for themselves, defying the church-mediated, all-encompassing agency of God, the period known as the Enlightenment commenced (and with it, the emergence of orange, in Spiral Dynamics). And the key point here, is that there were two basic reactions against these historical developments, giving rise to the two positions in the agency-structure debate. I'll quote from my thesis-in-progress:

"The birth of the structural perspective is to be understood as a response to the problem of order following from ‘the collapse of the old regime under the blows of industrialism and revolutionary democracy' at the beginning of the nineteenth century (Nisbet, 1966). The Enlightenment celebrated the idea of progress by means of human reason and the noncompromising criticism of traditional institutions and values. At the same time, the new industrialism eroded the traditional communal bonds that were taken to be the cement of society. In light of these developments, the conservative reaction sought to restore order by constraining an increasingly fragmented and atomized society of individuals through the structure of the social system." (Diederick Janse, 2006)

Basically, the conservative reaction was that ‘the end was nigh'. It must have been a time of great upheaval and uncertainty, so it's not that hard to understand the call for order, constraint and social conformity (a blue response to the rise of the orange value system). This call gave rise to the perspective which focused on structure and constraint. Not surprisingly, the second perspective was essentially a progressive reaction to the same historical developments. Again, I'll quote from my thesis-in-progress:

"While from the structural perspective, the Enlightenment eroded and threatened social order, the agency perspective celebrates the human potential for progress by means of reason and science. ‘The dominant objectives of the whole age [i.e., the Enlightenment ...] were those of release: release of the individual from ancient social ties and of the mind from fettering traditions.' (Nisbet, 1966) Rather than being divinely ordained, history and society are human accomplishments.

Nevertheless, it was recognized that this was an ideal to progress towards, rather than the actual sitation, for the institutionalized and constraining products of the ‘ancient social ties' and ‘fettering traditions' were very real. The central problem addressed by the action perspective is therefore ‘how human beings can regain control over what are, at root, their own social products' (Dawe, 1979, emphasis in the original). The way forward, from this perspective, lies in the unceasing actualization of the potential for human agency." (Diederick Janse, 2006)

To sum up, the ‘structure' position dealt with the problem of order and focused on structure and constraint, while the ‘agency' position dealt with the problem of control and focused on human agency, intentionality and creativity.

So far, so good. During a period of over a century, sociologists have been trying to get a grip on this issue by analysing which of the two positions was ‘right', or more recently, how both could be right and what the relationship between the two is. To date, they haven't agreed on a satisfactory way to deal with it. In part, this is because the debate is not just theoretical, it's also normative; it deals with different views of human nature. Another reason for the lack of consensus, however, is that the issue is heavily intertwined with a few other fundamental debates in social theory, such as individual-society, subjectivism-objectivism, voluntarism-determinism and creativity-constraint. Many accounts fail to distinguish between them, and as a consequence, the agency-structure debate is more like a Gordian knot than a ‘mere theoretical issue'.

My thesis aims at ‘cutting the Gordian knot' by taking a processual perspective. Well, that's the pretentious-optimistic version of it, at least. More realistically, I'm trying to make a contribution by showing how most of the existing approaches to the issue are based on a logic, or a way of thinking, which emphasizes stability over change, substance over process. There have been calls in sociology to make sense of the debate by incorporating time and process, only the metaphysical foundations of most approaches are unable to deal with time properly. This follows Henri Bergson's argument that the logic underlying most of modern science is heavily indebted to the Parmenidean philosophy, emphasizing the permanent and unchangeable nature of reality. Rather than seeing motion and change, it sees a trajectory of points, a series of static snapshots.

By drawing on the work of Henri Bergson, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze and Ken Wilber, I'm trying to outline a processual approach to the agency-structure debate. This processual approach owes much to Heraclitus, who said ‘panta rhei' - everything flows.

Until today, I thought I could do this by showing the interplay of agency and structure to be two aspects of the process of time. Structure would correspond to what Wilber calls ‘the karmic inheritance of the past', while agency would correspond to the creative novelty of the present. For more background on this, have a quick look at this earlier post, where I outline this in more detail.

I thought this would shine a different light on the whole action-structure debate, by showing how the past constrains us and the present allows us to change and create, to the extent that we're conscious of our habits of the past. However, although I believe this is true, I haven't been entirely convinced that this would really address the depth and span of the issues at stake in the agency-structure debate.

Until today. Because like I said at the beginning of this post (it's been a while, scroll back if you need to ;-), the veil that blurred my vision was finally ripped apart today, and I have a clear view of what's at stake now.

In a nutshell, I was basically reframing the debate from the horizontal dimension into the vertical dimension. Horizontal and vertical here refer to Wilber's use of it. For him, reality unfolds holarchically, which means there are different levels of unfolding, where a higher level transcends the lower levels, while at the same time including them (like russian dolls). Horizontal refers to the dynamics at one level: intra-level. Vertical refers to the dynamics between levels: inter-level. For more on this, pick up A Brief History of Everything, by Ken Wilber (that's the one I usually recommend as an introduction into his integral model).

What I came to see today, is that there is a horizontal and a vertical dimension to the agency-structure debate in social theory. Now disappointingly, this sounds very logical and obvious. However, I have been looking into this for months, I'm very familiar with Wilber's work, and I couldn't see this. I've tried seeing the horizontal and vertical components of the debate, but it just wasn't clear to me as it's so blurred and intertwined with all these other debates. The crucial point is that the agency-structure debate as it is known in social theory, needs to be unpacked into two debates. One deals with the vertical aspects, the other with the horizontal aspects. Simple enough. Here's an overview.



Horizontally, Wilber distinguishes between agency (N.B. this is a different use of the term ‘agency' than in my thesis, strictly speaking!) and communion. These are like yin and yang. (Wilber's version of) agency is about wholeness, stressing identity and autonomy. Communion is about partness, stressing relationship, conformity and dependence (in their positive senses as well). You'll probably have noted that agency is slightly more masculine (not male, but masculine), while communion is slightly more feminine. On the horizontal level, then, the agency-structure debate refers to wholeness and partness, autonomy and conformity. This makes perfect sense, as this is the closest to what most approaches have addressed when dealing with the agency-structure debate. That's why I'll probably use those terms for the horizontal dimension of the unpacked debate.

Vertically, Wilber distinguishes between self-transcendence (evolution) and self-immanence (involution). Transcendence occurs by means of increasing differentiation towards higher levels of complexity, while immanence occurs by means of increasing integrations towards higher levels of integrity. As explained in the post I linked to earlier, these also relate to the past and the present in a Whiteheadian manner. This is the crucial link to the agency-structure debate, not in its horizontal sense, but in the vertical one, relating to the inheritance of the past and the creative novelty of the present moment, building on the past but also going beyond it. Obviously I can't use the words ‘agency' and ‘structure' to refer to this, too. However, that's not a big problem, for some sociologists have argued that the agency-structure debate is ‘really about' creativity and constraint.

I always felt there was something to that, but it didn't square with some of the other conceptions of the agency-structure debate. Now I understand: creativity and constraint relate to the vertical component of the agency-structure debate.

So there you have it: the agency-structure debate unpacked into, horizontally, agency and structure, and vertically, creativity and constraint. I feel truly liberated as I can now differentiate between the two and integrate them at a higher level. There will be implications for social theory, but I first need to get my head around this properly (which I've started doing by writing this piece). Hopefully I'll be able to come back to you soon with some ideas on what this actually means in practice. I'll need to do that for my thesis as well, so I'll definitely get there at some point.

I'm pretty deep down the rabbit hole where this topic is concerned, so if the above was utterly incomprehensible and has made you feel like you want to kill or maim me, please let me know about that and I'll:
1) make sure I don't get near where you live
2) make an attempt at clarifying this

I'd also appreciate it if you left a comment. I know this is expecting a lot (for me it can be), so I'm helping you out by giving you some scripted options here:
A) The length of this post freaked me out and I decided I'd never come back here, let alone read this.
B) I think I read it, but the commonly-induced effect of having gained some level of understanding, evidenced by the experience of making associations and connections, is somewhat/entirely absent - I think you killed my brain.
C) I read it, it makes some level of sense, but I'm blacking out - I have nothing to say.
D) It falls short of being KenWilberesque, but I'll grant you this [...insert text here...].
E) Pure, shining, transcendental brilliance, and here's why [...insert text here...].
F) Send me your address, I'll send you a ticket so you can come and visit me, and [we'll get married/we'll have a couple of beers and watch Baywatch (strike through non-applicable answer).
G) [...abide in the present moment and manifest your luminous creativity by inserting custom reply here...]

Feedback, suggestions, death threats, leads or gifts would be much appreciated. Thanks for putting up with me ;-)