Sunday, October 12, 2014

More on eros/agape

Continuing from this post, and in response to some FB posts:

I prefer Mark Edwards' notions on eros/agape and agency/communion. See his "Through AQAL Eyes" series at integral world for his distinctions. For him eros/agape is the ascending/descending currents in each line in each quadrant. But the individual and social have their own holons, each with 4 quadrants and 8 zones, each with both agency and communion aspects on the interior and exterior. So he too makes the same distinctions you mention David, but expands it in the above way.

In terms of ascending and descending currents though (eros/agape), he sees them as occurring simultaneously, where when any particular line in any quadrant ascends or evolves it also descends or involves by the integrations of the junior levels. Granted Wilber says this too, but he also has the 'universal' involution/evolution holon of everything theme,* where one happens first, then the other. It is the latter metaphysical frame which tends to infect the more practical frame of transcend and include, or eros/agape dynamic, for each level. Hence that infection expresses in what several others are noticing, the Hegelian dialectical notion of subsumption of the lower in the higher.

Wilber addresses this in his differentiation for ground value and relative value, the former showing we are all equal in the eyes of Spirit, but the latter showing the difference in level value. But again, his metaphysical Spiritual dimension (highest levels) tends toward the subsumption of All in Spirit, which in various places he defines in the traditional modes of his favored shentong Buddhist tradition. In practice this doesn't always or even usually lead to practical expressions of agape-loving the ground value of each holonic level. Or at least it is tainted by a superiority complex with hints of disdain or even disgust, e.g., the green meme.

* Also see Edwards' criticism on the holon of everything (aka assholon), how it reifies involution/evolution in this metaphysical way. This is a common criticism of the popo postmetaphysicists. Or as I now call it, paraphysics, a metaphysics of the between (or LP's adjacency).

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