The Meta-Modern Stage? A Blending of the Cognitive Structure — Part One
Why a question mark? Whatever the Meta-Modern is, part of it is what Freinacht calls symbolic development — I think they speak of codes — and I don`t write about codes, I simply track underlying cognitive complexity according to the assessment model of Development as Transcendental Pluralism. Especially Part Two of this text will look a bit eclectic in the choice of thinkers that serve as exemplary for that stage however, in an attempt to point towards the diversity of thought symbolic and meaningful overlays that one transcendental media, i.e., one stage-structure, can sustain and transport. In this it is, too, a questioning of some common distinctions and patterns of valuation that I see in the Meta-Modern surroundings of my life`s work that are at least disconcerting to me.
The following text is an excerpt from a book-draft that I am currently preparing in German language and translated in high speed via deep learning and a quick review.
Some aspects will be not immediately comprehensible without deep knowledge of my work, some even incomprehensible when one knows my work deeply.
Basic Orientation
The 3.2 Stage is a stage within Thirdness — the third of five developmental layers of Transcendental Pluralism. With the 3.2 Stage, as the second stage in that layer, an awareness beyond the awareness of the 3.1 Stage arises, whereby two forms of mind are simultaneously present in one person — the new spirit looks down on or faces the former one. Like a child recognizing itself in the mirror with the onset of Secondness at fourteen to eighteen months, mind recognizes itself in its counterpart and feels the desire for imaginative play, for dressing and constructing itself anew — it becomes a Dynamic Mind according to Aurobindo.
Ken Wilber speaks of the Centaur, the stage that was the equivalent of Susanne Cook-Greuter’s 5/6 Construct-Aware in his early work and up to his main work Sex, Ecology, Spirituality before he switched to his color-coded scheme of altitudes. So, in the common interpretations of Spiral Dynamics, we speak of Turquoise — at the same time in the first half of the stage we can think of Abraham Maslow’s self-actualizing and in the second half of the stage of the self-transcending personalities. Although many of the individuals — such as Soren Kierkegaard — to whom Wilber refers in the description of the Centaur stage appear developmentally later in my model, there are some overlaps that will be found in the following text, such as Jean Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness or Carl Roger’s On Becoming a Person. It is the last stage in Wilber’s work that clearly represents a developmental stage and not, like Wilber’s later stages, an amalgamation of state and stage characteristics, which is why I am excluding Wilber’s work as much as possible and prefer to refer to philosophical models that show a clear structure in their stage sequence, because their model developers generated their own and genuine, even if only partial sequence from their own stage and did not obsessively try to cover all stages found in other thinkers (such as Aurobindo) without being able to name suitable examples nor to determine clear parameters of these stages that would allow an objectively testable application to living people — as is largely the case with Wilber.
We first start again (as in my draft) with a stage overview from a philosophical perspective, then look at the four basic types of the stage, to then provide a detailed description of the four quarters of the stage, referring to other models (Part Two published next week will include the detailed description of the four quarters of the stage).
At this point, for better understanding, in my model I draw the development of human consciousness in primarily four dimensions (Fifthness would be a repetition of the first dimension as a simple identity of nondual suchness without an identity):
- Firstness as body & sensual being and the Piagetian Identical Transformation, an adaptive consciousness roughly corresponding to O’Fallon’s definition of receptive.
- Secondness as life & dreaming being and the Piagetian Negative Transformation, a differentiating consciousness roughly corresponding to O’Fallon’s definition of active.
- Thirdness as mind & meaningful ideas and the Piagetian Reciprocal Transformation, an integrating consciousness roughly corresponding to O’Fallon’s definition of reciprocal.
- Fourthness as soul & spiritual truth and the Piagetian Correlative Transformation, a self-thematizing consciousness roughly corresponding to O’Fallon’s definition of interpenetrative.
Each of the four dimensions in turn develops in four stages (.1 as identical transformation/adaptation, .2 as negative transformation/differentiation, .3 as reciprocal transformation/integration, .4 as correlative transformation/self-thematization). In addition, I see each of these stages, any one of which, especially the later stages, may extend over several years, if not decades, in an individual life, as being distinguishable once again into four sub-stages, which I call quarters. In these quarters, the pattern repeats itself equally.
However, here at 3.2 we are already in terrain that has been explored in less detail than the previous stages. So far, there is no subdivision here that shows more than two sublevels — in this respect, we are entering completely new territory in terms of detail with four quarters. At the same time, with the exception of Terri O’Fallon’s STAGES and my model, it is the last empirically studied stage so far.
A Philosophical Orientation
As any of the previous stages, the 3.2 Stage has an Outside- and an Inside-View, both of which can appear collectively (either directed to cultures or exterior systems) or individually (either directed to the mind or single organisms or structures). Sri Aurobindo and Soren Kierkegaard are examples of an Inside-View that reflect on this stage from beyond, wheras G.W.F. Hegel is an Outside-View describing the stage as part of the larger structure of humanity. Jean Paul Sartre serves as an example of the Outside-View to clarify some of Hegel`s expressions directly at the 3.2 Stage.
The Outside-View: At the 3.2 Stage, the Outside-View produces double-loop awareness, as a trinitarian awareness interacting with a unity of Thirdness and Secondness, which is the expression of a new mode of differentiation causing adaptation.
The Inside-View: At the 3.2 Stage, the Inside-View produces implicit dialectics, as one trinitarian mental ideology is interacting with a second trinitarian mental ideology, which is the expression of a new negative transformation interacting with its inverse, namely an identity.
Aurobindo`s Dynamic Mind
For Sri Aurobindo, the age of the Veda, i.e., the Upanishads, and the discovery of one’s own consciousness in the Externalizing Mind, the physical mind, which brought the sense channels, for instance, in the form of thoughts inside, was followed by the age of Buddhi. Buddhi as intelligence, “a transpersonal mental faculty of the mind”, he subdivides into two further phases: first there occurred a great outburst of intellectual philosophy, which, however, took as its basis the spiritual truth of the Veda and attempted to reach it anew, not by a direct intuitive or occult process, as did the mystics of the Upanishad, but by the power of the reflective, speculative, logical thinking of the mind; processes of yoga were developed that used the thinking mind as a tool to reach spiritual realization, and spiritualized this mind itself at the same time, generating paths of salvation, such religions as Christianity, Buddhism, the Platonic and Aristotelian schools of which Metamodernism in large part is another iteration — the phase of the 3.2 Stage, or Dynamic Mind, as Aurobindo calls it in his Letters on Yoga, or the Ethical Stage, in The Synthesis of Yoga. Then followed, according to Aurobindo, an era of development of philosophies and yoga processes that used increasingly the emotional and aesthetic being as a means of spiritual realization, spiritualizing the emotional level in man through the heart and feeling. This was accompanied by tantric and other processes that took up the mental will, the will to live, the life of sensations, making them at once the instrument and the field of the effort to enlightenment — the onset of the 3.3 Stage, or the Thinking Mind as it is called in Aurobindo’s letters, or the Aesthetic Mind (not to be confused with Kierkegaard’s Aesthetic Stage), to which we turn next time.
The ethical mind according to Aurobindo becomes perfect to the extent that it detaches itself from desire, sense impressions, impulses and habitually dictated actions and discovers a self of right, love, strength and purity in which it can live fully and make it the basis of all its actions. Inherent in this ethical mind, as being, is the religious impulse, as a phenomenon distinct from our other subjective tendencies, though it influences them all; hence we find this stage realized especially in religions, such as Christianity, where, for example, Augustine of Hippo tells of the knowledge that there is a lower and a higher reason, where the lower (at the 3.1 Stage) is still imbued with our animal and physical needs — though it prevents us, as it were, from being like animals in the satisfaction of these needs — but the higher one is directed toward inner and spiritual knowledge. As Augustine writes, both parts work intimately together despite their separateness — for when “that earthly or carnal sense, therefore, seduces the attention of the spirit, which dwells on temporal and corporeal things with lively deliberation for the sake of its practical tasks (the 3.1 Stage), to enjoy these things, that is, to value them as a kind of special and proper good, and not as general and common — such is precisely the immutable good, that it is due to all — then, as it were, the serpent addresses the woman.” Augustine thus equates the 3.1 Stage in its weakness to the seduction in paradise — and the higher reason, the 3.2 Stage, can stop this seduction. At the same time, however, the lower reason allows us to turn towards the world and to understand it practically — without it, without the 3.1 Stage, according to St Augustine, man would no longer be able to live.
In unison, Aurobindo writes that the higher activity of the Dynamic Mind is to surpass and dominate the Externalizing Mind, not to get rid of it, but to raise all actions of which it is the first stimulus to the nobler level of intelligence. The impressions of the sense mind are used by a thought that transcends them and arrives at truths that sense truths do not give — ideal truths of thought, truths of philosophy and science, which in earlier times, for example in Plato but also in Augustine, find their origin in the “One” that was often called the Good or God; a thinking, discovering, philosophical, and mythically poetic mind overcomes, rectifies, and dominates the first mind, which is still attached to some sort of sense impressions.
We also find this dichotomy in Aristotle, who divides the soul into two property realms, one passive and one active — think of Terri O’Fallon, in whose model every first stage is a passive and every second stage is an active one. So, he, Aristotle, writes that passive reason is now joined by a second, active reason, in the soul. Passive reason is still identical with the body and acts according to a simple adaptive logic, perceiving the laws of wisdom “which say that what is good is to be done and what is bad is to be left alone” — think back again to the equilibrations now consciously experienced, e.g., the institutionalized, consciously held Golden Rule at Kohlberg`s Moral Stage 4 — while active reason works dialectically, “that is, with the help of distinctions,” with the Negative Transformation or an inversion, and related goals, hypotheses, and experiments. When I negate something, something else comes into being, the rejection of one plan or goal is thereby always the simultaneous decision to accept another — the famous dictum of Spinoza “Omnis determinatio est negatio” (Every determination is negation) allows man at this stage, through their active reason, to make an either/or choice, to make decisions regarding one’s own mind and this on the basis of an integrative activity, the comparison of alternative plans, goals and explanations of the world; this criterion of decisiveness in respect to one`s mental sphere was still lacking at the 3.1 Stage, if we think back to Kierkegaard’s definition of the Aesthetic Stage, which had no real decision-making capacity regarding its spiritual dimension, but only regarding the dimension anchored in life.
At the 3.2 Stage, in negation, in dynamic, pragmatic intellectuality, according to Aurobindo, creation, action and volition are the real motive, and thought and knowledge are used to generate thought constructs and propositions that serve primarily the realization of one’s ethical being — suppression and disciplining of emotional and sensual pleasure in order to achieve self-mastery and thus freedom. One thinks of the seven deadly sins (pride, greed, lust, anger, gluttony, envy and sloth) or the three mind poisons in Buddhism (ignorance in the sense of indifference, greed, and aggression), which are to be avoided by conscious control of the 3.1 Stage. In Meta-Modernism we find this reiterated when, for example, Hanzi Freinacht in Nordic Ideology provides a “to-do list to save the world” where, among other things, we must first become free — free ourselves from “the emotional regime of slave morality”; for only “when a person is no longer constrained by such negative emotions, but still remains socially and ethically functional, would I argue that he or she is approaching a deeper existential freedom that Nietzsche personified in the concept of the superman.” Only when a person can be definitively determined as a subject who “demonstrates sufficient inner personality development: self-discipline, intrinsic motivation, a strong compass, self-knowledge” one has so to say reached the ethical being, realized the normative truth.
For this reason — as we can read in The Synthesis of Yoga — the truth is only a formation of the intellect, which is effective for the action of the inner and outer life. The Dynamic Mind is “therefore in itself a mind of the will to live and act, much more a mind of the will than a mind of knowledge: the man at this stage lives not in an assured and constant and eternal truth, but in progressive and changing aspects of truth which serve the changing forms of our living and becoming, or, in the highest case, help life to grow and progress.”
This is reminiscent of Susanne Cook-Greuter, who writes about the Construct-Aware person:
- That here, on the one hand, a 5th person perspective allows us to analyze both our own becoming and the evolving theories of our own becoming, as well as the fundamental need to recognize and create orienting frameworks or stories that are at the heart of all human meaning-making around the world, regardless of culture…
- …but, on the other hand, there can be a realization that it is pointless to describe reality through ever more complex maps and approximations, which can lead individuals to suffer greatly from experiencing the limitations of constructs while having no way of overcoming them through the same rational means that led them to comprehend this condition.
We are here in the state which constitutes Kierkegaard’s second form of despair, that one recognizes one’s own permanent transformation, but at the same time either “not being who one wants to be” — the failure of one’s own self-construction –, or “not wanting to be who one is” — as a permanent experience of weakness. In doing so, Kierkegaard affirms the burden that the ability to self-align through the active mind entails, and the difficulties therein — for example, weakness arises as a desperate person who wants to be who he is not, “whose only desire is this craziest of transformations, and thinks that this change would be as easy to accomplish as changing a coat,” (arguably, watching a child learn to change their coat shows the complexity of that process as well) or the question of loss of self and alienation, when he humorously recites the following story:
“The story is told of a peasant who came to the capital clean-shaven and had earned enough money to buy a pair of shoes and stockings and still had enough left over to get drunk — it is said that when he tried to find his way home in his drunken state, he lay down in the middle of the country road and fell asleep. Then a car passed by and the driver shouted at him to move or he would run over his legs. Then the drunken peasant woke up, looked at his legs, and not recognizing them because of the shoes and stockings, he said to the coachman, ‘Drive on, these are not my legs.’” Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death
Jean Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness goes so far as to say that man is not at this stage, though at the same time “nothingness, is the only thing we will never find” — for when we design ourselves, he thinks, we are what we are not yet — because we live in the fantasy of the future, and when we think we will reach this future in the present, it has already passed by, and it is then what we are, but as past: and therefore in the mode of no-more. Although we live constantly in an inner fullness of the beingnesses dreamed by us, and therefore the nothingness is not to be found in any way, we are still nothing of it and the fullness itself a nothingness, an illusion.
Hegel`s Formal Power of Judgment
In Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel`s work, the Theoretical Mind, the intelligence, accompanies the Practical Mind, the will, in the constitution of Thirdness. Altogether, the theoretical reason can thereby be subdivided into three parts (notion, formal power of judgment and formal reason), where the first part belongs most closely to the 3.1 Stage, the other two rather to either the 3.2 or 3.3 Stage, since they are the aspect of the mental levels that do not rest in the heart and so perhaps, as Swedenborg suggested, in the lungs — even though Hegel does not mention a physiological component here. Essential also for Hegel that the two aspects, the will and the intelligence, cannot be separated, as the quotation below shows.
“The distinction of intelligence from will often has the incorrect sense that both are taken as a fixed existence separate from each other, so that the will can be without intelligence, or the activity of intelligence can be without will. The possibility that, as it is called, the intellect can be formed without the heart and the heart without the intellect, that there are also unilaterally comprehensionless hearts and heartless minds, indicates in any case only this, that bad, in themselves untrue existences take place; but it is not philosophy which is to take such untruths of existence and imagination for truth, the bad for the nature of the thing.” G.W.F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences
The theoretical mind at the 3.1 Stage is to be described with Hegel rather as a passive thinking, a receptive experience of thoughts in one’s own absolute substance and the higher faculty of desire, which is an involutionary movement that ends in a purely abstract determinate, the ideology of the 3.1 Stage, to which, as a generalization, everything we experience is subordinated. At the 3.2 Stage, the active process of judgment is added again — as in Secondness in general: everything is about having a conviction and representing it and letting it show up in others. The judgment itself consists in the fact that only through it a predicate — a property — is connected with the subject — an object of the world or in the self (predicative judgment), “so that if this connection did not take place, subject and predicate each for itself would nevertheless remain what it is, the one an existing object, the latter an idea in the head.” Thus, in the joining of the two elements of predicate and subject, there arises at the 3.2 Stage — especially with the Outside-View — a sense of what Jean Paul Sartre calls the circle of selfhood; basically, nothing more than the definition of a non-dual state in which one’s awareness (predicate), through an awareness of that awareness, is consciously reconciled with the prior world of secondness and firstness (subject). Or as Sartre writes in Being and Nothingness: “Selfhood represents a degree of negation that goes beyond the pure presence of pre-reflective thought for oneself — in the sense that the possible that I am is not pure presence for the for-itself (the cognition of it in one’s own consciousness), as reflection is for reflecting, but that it is absent presence.” This means that one’s own possibilities, of which one is conscious and which one consciously generates, are directed to generate a coincidence between self and world — possibility is first absent in the world, “an absent presence,” and in actualization we cause, say, a glass that stands before us to become an object into which our consciousness transcends, as the possibility to quench thirst. Without the world there would not be the possibility of quenching the thirst, but without the awareness of the thirst there would be no world, it would only be a background from which no forms emerge; the world here acquires a quality of “being mine,” a structure that we live: “The world is mine because it is haunted by possibilities that are mine, and the awareness of each of these possibilities is a possible self-consciousness that I am; it is these possibilities as such that give the world its unity and its meaning as the world.” Thus, Hegel also writes that the Theoretical Mind in looking at the world gives it meaning. When this active side of striving for a unity with the world is integrated with the Practical Mind, according to Hegel, it comes to the realization of free will.
Here Hegel names similar thinkers and traditions as Aurobindo does with regard to his ethical stage — for example the acquisition of freedom of will through character formation, as Plato, Aristotle and the Roman philosophers had in mind — but especially still Christianity as a turning point, since here freedom no longer has to be acquired, but becomes the essence of man: “The individual as such has there an infinite value, in that he is the object and purpose of God’s love and destined to have his absolute relation to God as spirit, to have this spirit dwelling in him. “ Exemplarily read one of the Church Fathers, namely Gregory of Nyssa:
“The One, in fact, who created man for the purpose of participation in his own goods and planted in him the germs of all advantages in nature, so that through each of them our desire for the corresponding related perfection in God might be kindled, certainly did not want to deprive us of the noblest and most precious good, — I mean the gift of grace of self-determination and the freedom of our will. For if the compulsion of necessity were to prevail over human life, the image would be unsuccessful on this side, insofar as it would stand out too much from the archetype because of this dissimilarity. For how could nature, subjected to certain necessities and subjugated by them, be a faithful image of that which reigns and rules royally? Therefore man, because in all things he is called to resemble God, had to become a partaker of the right of self-determination and freedom; consequently, however, the attainment of all goods is also linked to virtue as a combat prize.” Gregory of Nyssa, Great Catechesis
Here, too, the focus is on the formation of character: the linking of free will to virtue, through which the latter gains its proper value, for, Gregory continues, “the origin of even the least evil did not take its beginning in the will of God-no fault could befall evil if God could be regarded as its author and father-but evil somehow sprouts from within us, arising through the free choice of our will as soon as there is a departure of our soul from the good.”
Whether in Plato, where the “wise man is free even in chains,” in the Fathers of the Church, “where sin also comes from freedom,” or in Sarte, writing from a prisoner-of-war camp, — “to show that the coefficient of the adversity of the thing and its character as an obstacle (combined with its character as an instrument) is indispensable for the existence of a freedom, means to use an argument that goes in two directions; for while it enables us to establish that freedom is not invalidated by the given, on the other hand it indicates something like an ontological (being/natural) conditioning of freedom. Would it not be reasonable to say, along with some contemporary philosophers, ‘If no obstacle, then no freedom?’” — freedom plays a central role here and is no longer a concept referring to freedom from chains as it still was in the Homeric Illiad.
However, as Hegel states, problems arise in the recognition of the free spirit: “The spirit in the immediacy of its freedom being for itself is individual, but which knows its individuality as absolutely free will; it is person, the self-knowing of this freedom, which as abstract and empty in itself has its particularity and fulfillment not yet in itself, but in an external thing. This is against the subjectivity of intelligence and volition as a volitionless thing without right, and is made by it its accidens, the external sphere of its freedom, — possession.”
This means that here we still do not possess a reciprocal transformation of Thirdness but one of Secondness: that of the 2.3 Rule-Oriented Stage and therefore social comparison and social integration are still determined by the visible, measurable, concrete-operational possession — whether monetary or through physical labor power — and social value coupled to it, i.e., the ability to collect and accumulate or repeat conceptual phrases. Aurobindo, too, emphasizes that the first stage of buddhi is still directed toward nature, though no longer as a means of gratification, but to “help and arm” the intelligence, that is, to “understand it, possess it, and master it.”
Thus, on the one hand, property rights are found here as a central element — on the one hand, therefore, Karl Marx’s last chapters in Das Kapital are devoted to the subject of how “self-produced private property, based, as it were, on the adhesion of the individual, independent laborer to his working conditions, is displaced by capitalist private property, which is based on the exploitation of foreign but formally free labor” and how a social property can arise, while Friedrich von Hayek, the icon of neoliberalism, sums up in the Constitution of Freedom that “if we are all only subjects of the same law that applies to all citizens, if we are immune to arbitrary restrictions and free to choose our own labor, and able to accumulate property, no other man and no other flu of men can force us to be subservient to their will” — both thinkers, however, pursue the same intention of liberating us, albeit from different directions.
At the same time, in collective expressions of the stage, one often finds the fear for control through resource domination; as, for example, in Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, the idea that the Jews threaten freedom through their domination of the nature of money, when he writes that “just as one had once understood how to occupy public opinion for years with the struggle between federalism and unitarianism and to wear it out in it, while the Jew bartered away the freedom of the nation and betrayed our fatherland to international high finance, so now he succeeds again in making the two German denominations storm against each other, while both foundations are eaten away and undermined by the poison of the international world Jew.” In turn, the cry for freedom, namely that “we, as Aryans, are thus able to imagine under a state only the living organism of a people, which not only secures the preservation of this people, but also leads it to the highest freedom by further training of its spiritual and ideal abilities,” which does not even stop at military escalation, as “the possibility of regaining freedom.” Here everyone can ask the question to what extent and to what extent these themes are just acting and working in our collective consciousness, because these dynamics continue to make the 3.2 stage susceptible to warlike escalations. At the same time, as Fyodor Dostoevsky writes in Crime and Punishemt, people here allow themselves the right to dispossess others and do violence to them when they experience themselves as superior — to do evil in order to create good.
The story that Dostoevsky tells here is as follows: Rodion Raskolnikov, a young student living impoverished in St. Petersburg, kills an unscrupulous pawnbroker for her money. Before the murder, Raskolnikov believes that he could use the money to lift himself out of poverty and do great deeds. Once he does, however, he is plagued by confusion, paranoia, and disgust at his actions. His justifications vanish into thin air as he struggles with guilt and horror and is confronted with the real consequences of his actions. The following passage shows an interrogation by the police officers, who begin to consider Raskolnikov as the murderer of the aforementioned pawnbroker. In it, the desperate young man lays out his past basis for justification — note the quasi-Augustinian stage differentiation toward the end.
“Further, as far as I remember, I develop the thought that all the leading spirits of mankind, for example, the lawgivers, then Lycurgus, Solon, Mohammed, Napoleon, and so on, that all of them, without exception, were criminals, by the very fact that they gave a new law, and thus violated the old, held sacred by society and inherited from the fathers, and certainly did not shrink from blood, if only the blood — sometimes quite innocent and heroically shed for the law — could help them to their goal. It is remarkable that the greater part of these benefactors of mankind and leading spirits were particularly terrible butchers. In a word, I come to the conclusion that all of them, not only the very great ones, but also those, if only a little deviating from the ordinary paths, capable of bringing something new, must necessarily be criminals by their very nature — more or less, of course. Otherwise, it is difficult for them to rise above the average, and to remain with the average — they cannot engage in that, again according to their nature, and I am of the opinion that they are even obliged not to engage in it. In a word, it is, as you see, not an entirely new thought. It has been printed and read a thousand times. Now, as for the division of people into ordinary and extraordinary, I admit that it is somewhat arbitrary, but I do not insist on exact figures either. I only attach importance to my main idea. It consists precisely in the fact that, according to a law of nature, people generally separate into two categories: into a lower, ordinary one, the material, so to speak, which serves only for reproduction, and into people in the true sense of the word, that is, into those who have the gift or the talent to say something new to their environment. […] Those of the second category all transgress the law, are destroyers or tend to destroy, depending on their abilities. The crimes of these people are of course graduated and very different: mostly they demand in manifold expressions the destruction of the existing in the name of a better. But if such a man, for the realization of his idea, let us say, must also step over a corpse, over blood, he can, in my opinion, answer for it to his conscience to step over the corpse, that is, depending on how serious the idea is — pay attention!” Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Simultaneous, and as an aspect of personal extremes projected into societies, at the 3.2 Stage, as it were, what Hegel calls law and also a contract structure emerges from looking downwards onto the 3.1 Stage. Lawrence Kohlberg’s studies of moral judgment show, that it is only at this stage that people are consistently able to honor contracts and not lose themselves in their own interests — or as Kierkegaard writes about the person at the 3.1 Stage, “the more the personal being is absorbed in mood fluctuations, the more the individual is in the moment, and this in turn is the most adequate expression of aesthetic existence: it is in the moment.” These great fluctuations to which the aesthetically living person is exposed at the 3.1 Stage do not necessarily move away but “though an ethically living person also knows mood fluctuations, they are not the most important thing for him; he sees the mood beneath him,” for he who lives ethically does not “abolish the mood, but he diminishes it for a moment, and this moment saves him from living in the moment, this moment gives him mastery over desire, for the art of mastering desire consists not so much in abolishing it or giving it up altogether, but in determining the moment” — that is, in distinguishing in the moment between right and wrong and give a normative structure precedence.
Kohlberg accordingly speaks of this fifth stage of moral judgment as that of the social contract, which dominates the second half of the 3.2 Stage in particular, after the overestimation of one’s ethical height leads to failure in the first half. Social norms are questioned and not merely followed in order to belong to a group. Instead, only those rules are regarded as right which, from a utilitarian perspective — i.e., a consideration of benefits — bring an advantage to all those who belong to the same abstract class of living beings; whereas today — prepared by the involution of the 3.3 and 3.4 Stage — is extended to all human beings, classical nations of this stage, such as ancient Athens, still distinguished between free men and slaves, or between men and women; also the Roman civil law, about which Marcus Tullius Cicero writes in The State is an early example of this stage: “Since, then, the law is the bond of civil society, and equal rights form that of the law, by what power can a community of citizens be maintained, if their condition is not equal? If, then, it is not expedient to equalize fortunes, if the powers of the mind cannot be equal in all, surely there must be equality of rights among those who are citizens of an equal republic, for what is a state but a community of rights?” The state now has an active mental identity in the form of a statehood based on laws that keep the faculty of desire under control — which was already illustrated in Marx and Hayek above.
While Jürgen Habermas paraphrases these legal structures as collective perspectives of salvation, as normative discourse in which the “finding of common goal-oriented truths in the sense of quasi-metaphysical-religious systems” is paramount, Michel Foucault sees them as aspects of collective power structures, as expressions of a governmentality, a form of rule molded by the institutions, the procedures, analyses, and reflections, the calculations, and the tactics that a government uses to control the population — which is pointing towards the main difference between the Outside and the Inside View at this stage, namely, that earlier see itself as performative, finite, driven sense of selfness that is knowing the road to redemption the later views things more from an essentialist or communitarian viewpoint where the infinity of the self is thrown into finitude by whatever is deemed to be the source of the good.
Differentiation of the Outside- and the Inside-View
For Soren Kierkegaard, in addition to despair from either a lack of necessity or a lack of possibility (which we saw at the 3.1 Stage), there is also despair that arises from the tension between finitude, the finite structure of the self, and infinity, the infinite imaginative capacity of the self. Although Kierkegaard seemingly projects this finite structure onto identities of earlier stages, it is also the case that the Outside-View tends to experience itself as a finite, circumscribed mind, which is roughly an authentic or free self — albeit with states of boundlessness — and the Inside-View tends to see itself as infinite imagination or mental movement, as a reasoning quality of consciousness. Conversely, the Outside-View projects infinity as its absolute freedom into the world, experiences itself as a cause, and imagines new things without limits, while the Inside-View finds its limitation in the world, its non-being, and thus may come to feel that it is merely an effect and not a cause.
The Inside-View may thereby penetrate so much from its infinity into a finitude and feel effected that, as Kierkegaard writes, “even if God in heaven and all his angels would offer to help him out of it — no, now he does not want it, now it is too late, he would once have given everything to be freed from this torment, but he was made to wait, now it’s all over, now he would rather rage against everything, he, the one person in all existence who is treated most unjustly, to whom it is especially important to have his agony in hand, important that no one takes it away from him — because that way he can convince himself that he is in the right.” In this way a moral rage develops, an initial grief becomes a “demonic madness”, as Kierkegaard then explains. The Outside View, on the other hand, tries to ignore one’s own limitedness, but “with the help of the infinite form, the negative self (the negative transformation), man first wants to transform the whole, in order to get in this way a self as he wants to have it, generated by the help of the infinite form of the negative self, and so he wants to be HIMSELF. That is, he does not want to begin with the beginning, but ‘in the beginning,’ as the ‘beginning being’. He is not willing to clothe himself in himself, nor to see his task in the self-given to him; with the help of the being of the infinite form he wants to construct it himself.” This creates a permanent process of self-alienation in the desperate attempt to become oneself or in that of no longer being oneself. In the end, however, according to Kierkegaard, “the self is a synthesis in which the finite is the limiting factor and the infinite, the expanding fact” and so it needs both the imagination and the restriction.
There are several ways to get to one pole or the other. Sartre in Being and Nothingness describes this dynamic, for example, when it takes place between two people, as a “sadomasochism” in the human mind, in which we allow ourselves to be mutually objectified again and again, thereby desiring to circumscribe ourselves in order to experience ourselves and not always just a self-imagination that leads to infinity, an infinite regress, and in the next moment, in the confinement, fearing the loss of our freedom, wanting to objectify the other. In doing so, this is also subject to a futile nature when we seek to know ourselves through the eyes of the other — one uses the other as a limiting factor “to cause me to be fascinated by myself as an object,” but according to Sartre for this “I would necessarily have to be able to realize the intuitive apprehension of this object, which is I, as it is for the other, which is impossible in principle.” Conversely, David Bohm, in On Dialogue, at the same subphase of the stage, in the third quarter, looks for the infinite in participatory thought, and says that he thinks “if you are strong enough, so to speak, that you can exist in a distracting environment, then you are strong enough to contemplate the infinite-but the infinite might be so powerful that its effects would distract you if you contemplated it too quickly.” So, he assumes “there is the possibility of transformation of consciousness, both individually and collectively” if we learn to live in the distracting multiplicity of community — but this can also easily result in a despair of the infinite in the concrete because orientation is lost.
If we look at the Outside- and the Inside-View, we find accordingly also a different emotional note — if we remember the basic emotions of Firstness we remember that first came seeking and fear followed by the pair of grief (panic) and dominance. The first two emotional states are decisive in Firstness and thus also for the 3.1 Stage — the Outside-View is afraid of losing the ideal state of mind and thus its own possibilities and thus permanently seeks for this state without ever finding it; the Inside-View is seeking for the necessities that allow to grow into the aesthetic ideal and is afraid of not living up to the ideal. With the 3.2 Stage, the Outside-View uses the feeling of dominance, as a responsibility, to use its free will to bring a being into the world and grieves — or rather panics — about its own failure, its abandonment of possibilities, as Sartre beautifully illustrates when he writes “thus we are fully aware of the choice we make. And if anyone objects that, according to these observations, it would be necessary to be conscious not of our being chosen but of our choosing ourselves, we will reply that this consciousness is expressed by the twin ‘feelings’ of fear and responsibility. Fear, abandonment, responsibility, whether subdued or in full force, constitute the quality of our consciousness insofar as it is pure and simple freedom.” Conversely, the Inside-View begins with a mourning for what is not in the world in order to take responsibility for what has been lost or is not yet. Kierkegaard in Either/Or writes about how grief gives rise to one’s own freedom and, in this slightly modified text, that he “often discovered in his daily life how profitable it is to give grief an ethical expression, not to extinguish the aesthetic factor of grief, but to cope with it ethically — that is, in the realization of one’s own freedom. As long as grief is calm and humble, he is not afraid of it; when it becomes violent and passionate, sophistical so that it drives him into despondency, he rises up, he does not tolerate rebellion, he does not want to be cheated by anything in the world of what he has from God’s hand as a gift of grace. He does not chase away sorrow, does not try to forget it, he repents, because this sorrow is beautiful, is itself an expression of the universally human, a beating of my heart within me, and will reconcile me to everything.”
This differentiation echoes in developmental models from this stage — Jane Loevinger’s Ego Development, as a model of 3.2 Outside-View is driven by freedom, when our conscience indicates that our selective apperception is too narrow, we consciously expand it and thereby reach a new stage, while Robert Kegan’s dynamics between subject and object, which represent an Inside-View come through ever new variations of melancholy and depression over an absence, a nothingness of fulfillment at the previous stage.