The 21st century is marked by a truly globalised and interconnected world and unprecedented complexity. It is also beset by a number of crises on many levels, including environmental, social, economic, political, moral, psychological, existential and spiritual, all of which are interrelated. Such complexity and crises cannot be adequately managed from within the framework that has underlain modernity, one which emphasises the exclusive use of analytical thinking, reductionism, decontextualisation and linear causality. What is required is a framework or paradigm or way of thinking that enables us to grasp the bigger picture, to think more holistically, to see how the different dimensions of today’s general crisis are connected, and also to provide a different vision of ourselves and the world that no longer subscribes to the disenchanted, deterministic and exclusively materialistic worldview that dominates modernity. This is where integrative philosophy and metatheory come in.
Arguably today’s three most comprehensive integrative metatheories are critical realism / metarealism, integral theory and complex thought. All three began to be constructed, and were essentially finalized, around the same time – from the mid-seventies to the early-mid 2000’s – and each has their founding father and chief architect: Roy Bhaskar, Ken Wilber and Edgar Morin, respectively. Furthermore, their main foci, and consequently strengths, are distributed between psychology, spirituality and individual emancipation (integral theory); philosophy, the social sciences and social emancipation (critical realism); and the physical and biological sciences, a generalized anthropology and human emancipation (complex thought). By combining and synthesising the strengths of each we can arrive at a complex integral realism, which is the integrative metatheoretical framework that underlies a new axial vision.
For a fuller discussion of a complex integral realism and the three integrative metatheories, see my and Sean Esbjörn-Hargens’ book chapters in Metatheory for the 21st Century, and my book Towards a New Axial Vision.