Integral Philosophy

The Common Logical Roots of Anthropology, Politics, Language, and Spirituality

Johannes Heinrichs

• Publisher: Ibidem Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783838271484
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

This cumulative course on Johannes Heinrichs's philosophical works presents the essence of his previous publications: a rich, consistent, and novel monolithic system defying temptations by the zeitgeist. Starting with an emphasis on reflection as the basis of epistemology, Heinrichs also covers the mind-body dualism in an anthropology chapter, moves on to presenting summaries of his theory of democracy as well as his philosophical semiotics, followed by an outline of structural and integral ontology. An overview of ethical positions in the final chapter proves the fertility of Heinrichs's theoretical-reflection methods.Heinrichs (born 1942 in Duisburg/Rhine, Germany) developed a "reflection system theory" which is an original up-to-date development of German idealism, inspired by the multi-value logic of Gotthard Günther. His reflection theory of language presents an alternative to the current language analysis as well as to Chomsky's way of universal grammar. By his systematic approach, he opposes the mere historicism of most Western philosophers, also by the spiritual character of his very methodical philosophy. In spiritual respects, he is near to Sri Aurobindo.

Chapter 1
Epistemological Entry
Lived self-reflection and
methodical reflection

Subjectivism is a road of return to the lost knowledge. First deepening man’s inner experience, restoring perhaps on an unprecedented scale insight and self-knowledge to the race, it must end by revolutionising his social and collective self-expression.

(Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, p. 33)

Philosophy as self- and sense-reflection

Recognize yourself (in Greek: ΓνῶΘι σεαυτόν/Gnōthi seautón). This saying is engraved since 550 BC to a column of the lobby at the temple of Apollo in Delphi. The nuances of its meaning have greatly transformed over the history of Greek and Western philosophy: Recognize your life limits; recognize your limits of knowledge; recognize humanity as the measure of all things; and so on. Today we would say: Come to the senses of yourself. Self-reflection (in German Selbstbesinnung, a rather current expression in daily life) is at the same time sense-reflection—one of the simplest but most relevant to modern definitions of →philosophy,1 where sense-reflection must be performed not only amateurish spontaneously but methodically and even →scientifically, which means a continued methodical progress in cognition.

But where do we methodically begin? Just where we are already: Self-reflection has already begun in this conversation, be it oral or written!

We intend to reflect simultaneously on ourselves and on our philosophical foundations. “Philosophy” means literally “love of wisdom,” “love of the truth,” “quest for truth,” if possible, a methodical quest: whether we find the wisdom in question, even though most of us forget our original aspirations or are satisfied with fact-truths of our personal lives. For the rest of the questions, we must satisfy ourselves with an unscientific and pious, if not superstitious, way of thinking, which is often called belief, and cling to one of the traditional religions. But in a world that is so deeply shaped by the sciences, there must be a link between scientific thinking in the deeper questions of the individual life in the universe. Methodical philosophy should be able to provide this very link.

More people than ever are dedicated to truth in form of the so-called exact sciences. That would certainly be a historic step forward for humanity, if it were not accompanied by worrying indifference to truth and if not for the dominance of its oblivion among the “intellectuals.” Wittgenstein noted in his Tractatus logico-philosophicus (1921):

We feel that even if all possible scientific questions are answered, our life problems are not even touched (§ 6.5.2).

The right method of philosophy would actually be: nothing to say, what to say can be, so rates of natural science—something, what philosophy has nothing to do, and then whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical to demonstrate to him that he gave no importance to certain characters in his movements. This method would be unsatisfactory for the other—he would not have the feeling that we taught him philosophy—but it would be the only correct (§ 6.5.3).

Here it is still clear what Wittgenstein means by →metaphysics (what is not at all the case in the fashionable negative use of this word ever since)—any science that is not a natural science, or, according to Aristotle, ta meta ta physika: “what comes after physics.” In contrast to the Zeitgeist (“spirit of the time”) articulated by Wittgenstein, in the following, a metaphysical source for philosophy will be inferred: human self-reflection. This self-experience is the first and all-decisive metaphysical instance, what Aristotle, an empiricist himself, probably still did not think about: The prefix “meta” is excellently suited to mark the reflective setting “above” the knowledge of all other things. It has become a methodological standard for all modern philosophy since Immanuel Kant, and what is, curiously enough, denied by Wittgenstein and most of his “empiricist” colleagues of the Circle of Vienna in the critical time between the two world wars. The subjective condition of all experience was paradoxically denied—at least for methodical reasons.

Philosophy as a scientific pursuit of truth as a whole (i.e., holistic, integral context) is wholehearted and methodically clean. It must, therefore, at least to the same extent as the “exact” sciences and the humanities, develop as the discipline of unprejudicedness, and this in a particular and explicit way. Therefore a somewhat spiritual cult of sincerity belongs to its subjective conditions (irrespective of what the philosophical truth-seekers may think of spirituality for the rest).

Even what we know from the history of philosophy is nothing but a huge collection of prejudices. I am reminded often of the earlier philosophers whose life-dates are collected in the end of this book (see index of names). But never shall they serve as authorities in place of one’s own insight. This is by no means obvious. I draw a limit to that historicist philosophy that today constitutes the very vast majority of academic philosophy, but which is basically →philology, namely more or less “scientific” evaluation of previous texts. I call upon other philosophers, either for defining them or for mutual confirmation of arguments, for which I and hopefully we together are responsible. Only in this sense should the history of philosophy be of interest for us, merely as a quarry and aid for one’s own thoughts, never as an authority argument, that would have to be accepted credibly.

Our discussion of earlier thinkers must not serve as a subterfuge in educational “knowledge,” as a substitute for our own insight and as a mere matter of prestige. Paradoxically, one can make a greater impression with such educational knowledge—not only in his or her time—than with own insights. But philosophy is thus abandoned and denied, even if it has appearances for others.

The sentences which were said before, are they used, at least refuted? Is everything verifiable? Through experience? Through what kind? (Bertolt Brecht, The Doubter, poem)2

I will certainly take up with what has been said earlier by others. Therefore, the works of those others, whose work we can exploit, would help us. This, however, is never a substitute for the knowledge we gain from our own experience. Yes, philosophy is also an empirical science! Experience and logic alone are decisive in this as in any other science, except that philosophy—as a total self-reflection of its actions—must still justify the logic as well, if possible. The progress made by our ancestors is not decisive—helpful only partially—but it inspires our own insight and with that attitude alone we remain in philosophy.

Before evaluating the criticality of experience in philosophy, a word on the natural sciences: All of the natural sciences avoid in their objective research with all diligence and method to examine the subject for which those objects appear. This exclusion works very well, except for Heisenberg’s blur-relations, in which the measuring subject interferes at once with the observation of the object. The exclusion of the subject is the basis for the success of natural sciences. But to do philosophy with the same methodological exclusion would be redundant and cannot lead the examiner far. Also, a philosophy that runs after the natural sciences and “reflects upon their results” is fundamentally late. It cannot be holistic. At the beginning I mentioned the question as to how far psychology can be treated as a natural science and how far it is a philosophical discipline. What is decisive for the moment is the fact that philosophy has its own source of cognition and evidence—otherwise it would be a rather superfluous endeavor.

Consciousness of one’s own activity as a basic sense-experience

Critical philosophy relies mainly on a basic self-experience and →sense-experience, that is, on the experience of one’s own self-consciousness, more exactly on the consciousness as activity, which means not on any special content but on the consciousness of inner activity purely as such. Activity-consciousness is also the mirror of all contents or objects. It is however, as we will see, the mirror of itself and of its own activity.

When I speak of →sense-experience (Sinnerfahrung), I intend the dual aspect of activity and content. The elementary definition of →sense is togetherness of activity and content; there is content in each word and also the activity of pronouncing or thinking it. But the very first content of self-conscious activity is the activity itself, reflecting itself or being its own mirror.

Self-conscious activity is the same that I-consciousness is in the basic philosophical understanding, which means the activity that is never object, in difference to any psychological Ego-image (Me). We will come back later to this difference. The philosophical I am is the expression of self-consciousness as the unity of activity and content. I is nothing else but the self-reflexive activity.

The basic philosophical I am has nothing to do with any artificially generated Ego-solitude (Edmund Husserl), because the I is from the very beginning in relation to things and, more basically, in relation to the You, that is, to other self-reflexive beings. I is a relational entity as well, in terms of self-relation, as in the sense of relation to others, as we shall analyze further.

A methodological remark is in order: All these statements belong to a fundamental phenomenology of the self-conscious activity-experience. Their only possible proof is precise and careful observation, which is the first step in any methodical philosophy. As Aristotle knew, the first step cannot be proof in the sense of deduction, but in the sense of reference to first evidence, a point that has been forgotten and refuted in contemporary philosophy (the pretended, erroneous “Muenchhausen-trilemma”3 of contemporary rationalists).

The only “text” that we assume in philosophizing is not on paper but in our very consciousness—in mine and yours—if we share it with each other. While the philological textual sciences operate upon the interpretation (hermeneutics) of texts, philosophy operates upon my/our own consciousness: Our own sense of performance with its contents is the primary and specific object of interpretation. She can be called not only “science of sense”4 but also in regard to the necessary work of interpretation of the conscience data: →sense hermeneutics and universal sense hermeneutics. Its object is not the meaning of a given text but the sense (meaning) of the given dual understanding—primarily the meaning of consciousness itself. We are only at the very beginning of that work.

The universality that philosophy claims is a strange one, in dialectical contrast to the character of philosophy, which I am now getting...

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction to the English/Indian Edition
• Chapter 1 Epistemological Entry Lived self-reflection and methodical reflection
• Chapter 2 Philosophical Anthropology The multidimensional human being in logical reconstruction of Indian wisdom
• Chapter 3 Social Philosophy: Outlines of a Value Levels Democracy Reflection levels as fundamental law of the social system
• Chapter 4 Semiotic Theory of Action An unknown period system
• Chapter 5 Semiotic Language Theory New deal of linguistics and philosophy
• Chapter 6 Semiotic Theory of Arts The language beyond the languages
• Chapter 7 Religious Philosophy Beyond orthodoxies and academic agnosticism
• Chapter 8 Ontology Orientation in the fields of “Being”
• Chapter 9 Meta-Ethics Making the value spectrum conscious
• Appendix to the “Integral Theory” of Ken Wilber
• Copyright