The Axiological Crisis at The Heart of All of The Crises That Afflict Our World How To Handle It

The Axiological Crisis at the Heart of All of the Crises That Afflict Our World How to handle it
8th International Meeting October 2012
The Axiological Crisis at the Heart of All of the Crises That Afflict Our World How to handle it
8th International Meeting October 2012 M. Corb coord.
The Axiological Crisis at the Heart of All of the Crises That Afflict Our World How to handle it Mari Corb (coord.) CETR editorial, 2013 Rocafort 234 bxs. 08029 Barcelona Telfono: 93 410 77 07 Fax: 93 321 04 13 www.cetr.net ISBN: 978-84-686-3798-3 Depsito Legal: Impresin: Grfiques Molero Ronda Sant Pere, 44 08010 Barcelona
Indice
Introduction9 The need for an axiological epistemology Mari Corb 15
Formality of the Axiological as Sensitive, Qualitative and Concrete Marta Grans 35
Considerations Relating to the Earth Charter in Terms of Axiological Epistemology Jaume Agust, Josep M. Basart The Will to Truth as the Will to Believe An Approach from a Nietzschean Perspective Flvio Augusto Senra Ribeiro Roberto Lcio Diniz Jnior On the structure of theological revolutions When dreaming of a theological revolution, in what way does epistemology enlighten us? Jos Mara Vigil Axiological crisis and changing values in Mexico Perspectives for the construction of an ethical social subject Juan Diego Ortiz Acosta 109 83 67 51
Postulating the absolute or selfless dimension In the light of the structural analysis of praxis carried out by Antonio Gonzlez J. Amando Robles 125
The Profound Structure of Spiritual Initiation Procedures through study of the Mahaprajnaparamitasastra Treatise on the Great Virtue of Wisdom (Nagarjuna) Montserrat Cucarull The copper coin On the motivation and cultivation of human quality: Reflections Teresa Guardans Complexity science, complex thinking and transdisciplinary knowledge Rethinking the Humana Conditio in a world of technoscience Sergio Nstor Osorio Garca The role of stories in the creation and development of axiological projects in organisations Queralt Prat-i-Pubill An urban axiology? Ral Garca In conclusion 223 217 197 171 157 143
Introduction
Our meeting and the studies that we shared during this meeting, which we present to the reader in this book, are based on a specific view of the present. We observe that technoscience is changing our living conditions at all possible levels, while the criteria and axiological systems1 used to manage the system no longer correspond to the current situation, but to the situations of the societies of the past. This has caused a breach to open up between collective axiological projects and the conditions that are now required by technological and scientific developments. Technological change has led to a serious financial crisis that has placed many sectors of the population in precarious situations, and a political crisis that has crystallised in a general lack of confidence in political figures, as well as crises involving the environment, education, international relations, epistemology, religion, equality, marginalisation, etc. It is crucial for us to face the issue of axiological dismantling, which lies at the root of all of our other problems, and which is seen in the discrediting of ideologies, religions and churches. In our view, this is the largest problem we are faced with, and very possibly the most serious our species has ever been up against. Given this transformation in our ways of life, which is caused by the constant, rapid changes resulting from our technoscience, questions inevitably arise. Under these new conditions, what sort of society do we want? How do we want to live and organise ourselves? What do we want to do with life and with the Earth, which are in our hands? In our view, our axiological projects should guide technoscience rather than the other way round. Our technoscience cannot continue to function in the absence of control, like a sorcerers apprentice, ruled only by the interests of the market.
1 We understand axiological systems to be procedures of cohesion, motivation and creation of projects on how we want to live using the know-how that we possess.
We need general know-how on all that is axiological2 in order to manage this situation of constant transformation, which seems set to continue in the future. We need to know how to create collective axiological projects suited to these new living conditions and the changes they are subject to, given that now more than ever humanity needs to prepare itself in such a way that it can change while still preserving collective and mental stability. The foundation of these projects must involve a human quality that is at once profound and light. We cannot abandon the great power of science and technology to human collectives lacking sufficient axiological systems and human quality. We need to invest all that we can in creating know-how on the handling and construction of collective axiological systems that will translate into suitable practices. To this end, we must possess full awareness of all of the aspects of the axiological crisis which is currently afflicting all countries at all levels, although its features differ geographically. We need to be aware of and study all attempts being made at solving this problem, in order to pinpoint their successes and failures. We must create a know-how on handling the axiological, an axiological epistemology that will tell us how to analyse the axiological, how to create postulates and collective projects to keep pace with the rapid changes in our technoscience, how to bring about axiological transformations and how to make use of the great legacy of our ancestors in globalised societies. To achieve these aims, reason and the logic of science are insufficient. Creation of this know-how must be approached with reference to various diverse disciplines, until we manage to provide our societies, at all levels, with the means of creating their own postulates and axiological projects. In general, the profound cause at the root of all other crises goes unnoticed. Our aim is to call attention to the axiological nature of the heart of these crises, which has led us to the serious position in which we find ourselves. Our meeting was an attempt to join forces to work toward
2 In our work we prefer to refer to the axiological rather than to values, as we feel that the latter term might have moralising and voluntarism overtones.
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this common end. We proposed the exchange of studies and experiences regarding the development and, if necessary, the creation, of this explicit know-how on the theoretical and practical handling of the axiological. It should be underscored that there was wide-scale agreement on the need to approach this problem, which has been shown to exist both in Latin America and in Europe, but reaching a joint conclusion, if such a thing is even possible, will require more extensive work carried out in conjunction. Our aim is to do so.
Participants
Jaume Agust, Doctor of Atomic and Molecular Physics, is a scientific researcher specialising in formal and computational logic at CSIC (Higher Council of Scientific Research). He has collaborated with Raimon Panikkar for over 20 years and is Vice-President of the Vivarium Foundation that manages his legacy. Josep M Basart, Doctor of Computer Science, BA Philosophy, Master of Linguistic Correction and Quality, is a lecturer in Ethics at the Department of Engineering and Communications at the Higher School of Computer Engineering and Technical School of Engineering at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Milena Carrara Pavan, an Italian author and student of the work of Raimon Panikkar, is managing the release of the Complete Works of Panikkar, whose publication is currently under way. She is President of the Vivarium Raimon Panikkar Foundation. Mari Corb, Doctor of Philosophy, BA Theology, is an epistemologist who has lectured at ESADE Business School and currently manages CETR (Centre for the Study of Traditions of Wisdom) in Barcelona. Montse Cucarull, BSc Chemical Science and Pharmacy, is a member of CETRs research team.
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Ral Garca Ferrer, BA Anthropology and Bachelor of Architecture, Master of Ethnographical Research, is currently studying towards a PhD at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and is a member of CETRs research team. Marta Grans, is a Technical Agricultural Engineer with a BA in Far East Studies and a Masters Degree in Humanities. She is currently studying toward a PhD from UCM (Complutense University of Madrid) and is a member of CETRs research team. Teresa Guardans, BA Philology and PhD Humanities, is a lecturer at CETR and collaborates on various projects relating to the educational aspects of inner development. Sergio Osorio, Doctor of Theology, Master of Neuro-linguistic Programming and Global Bioethics, BA Humanities and Philosophy, is currently an assistant lecturer at the Faculty of Education and Humanities at the Nueva Granada Military University in Bogot, Colombia, as well as director of the Global Bioethics and Complexity research at that same Faculty. Juan Diego Ortz Acosta, Doctor of Philosophy, is director of the Centre for Religious and Societal Studies associated with the Social Science and Humanities University Centre of the University of Guadalajara in Guadalajara, Mexico. Queralt Prat-i-Pubill holds an undergraduate degree in Business Administration and Management and an MBA from the ESADE Business School at Ramon Llull University (Spain), as well as a CEMS Masters degree. She also studied MBA courses in Insead (France) and holds a Masters degree in Research from ESADE. She is currently studying toward a PhD from ESADE in Human Quality and Management.
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J. Amando Robles, Doctor of Sociology, BA Philosophy and Theology, was a lecturer at the Ecumenical School at the National University of Costa Rica and is currently a founding member and researcher at CEDI (Dominican Research Centre, Heredia, Costa Rica). Flavio Augusto Senra holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Complutense University and is a lecturer on the Masters degree programme in Religious Science at the Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil. He also coordinates the post-graduate programme in Religious Science at the same University. He is president of the executive board of the National Association of Theology and Religious Science Post-Graduate Studies and Research (ANPTECRE). Jos M Vigil, Doctor of Educational Science, oversees the Koinonia website, the Latin-American Agenda and the magazine Voices. He is a member of ASETT, the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians, located in Panama.
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The need for an axiological epistemology

Mari Corb
Between the 1st of May and the 30th of September of this year, a small group of people and I shut ourselves away in a rural retreat in the Montnegre mountains, 50 km from Barcelona, to study the axiological problem facing societies of knowledge, innovation and constant change. The fruit of this labour will be several written works. My collaboration on the project has resulted in a book, which I had been developing for several years. The subject of the book is Axiological Epistemology, and we expect to publish it soon. My aim herein is to highlight some points I feel are important to understanding the books aspirations and its intent, which is to lay out the basic principals of an axiological epistemology. It seemed to me that the best way to convey the thrust of my aim was to select some passages from my book, modifying them to different degrees. The book is quite compact and any attempt to summarise it would be rather unpalatable.
The aim of an axiological epistemology
At the beginning of our retreat, we addressed the issue of creating know-how in regard to the axiological, an axiological epistemology for knowledge societies that are subject to constant change. Pre-industrial societies thought and lived secure in the belief that their collective axiological projects had been passed down to them by their sacred ancestors or the gods.
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Mari Corb
Societies in the first wave of industrialisation were convinced that they received their collective axiological projects from the very nature of things, through philosophy and science. In the new industrial societies of knowledge and constant change, we now know and live out the fact that our collective axiological projects, which must govern our lives, are not handed to us by anyone or by anything. Rather, we must build them ourselves. What we need to build is a collective life project that will tell us: How to organise our symbiotic association How to organise our procreation along physical, cultural and axiological lines How to act in the environment in a manner consistent with our survival and sustainable for ourselves and the environment How to live together in a globalised society How to cultivate our dual access to the real: the relative and the absolute. The axiological crisis we are currently experiencing is the most severe to hit humanity in all of its very long history. What is this claim based on? The fact that we must make an unprecedented transition: a shift from programming ourselves not to change and obstructing any potentially significant change and all potential alternatives, to having to program ourselves to foster, preserve and provide motivation for constant change. Pressing questions arise with respect to this transition, which is so inevitable for us. Is this sort of programming for constant change possible for living creatures? Is it possible for humans to live free from any adherence to formulas? Where would we need to find a foothold, both socially and individually, to be able to live free from submission to formulas and inviolable patterns, and to be able make necessary changes when appropriate? Is it possible, for a group of poor living beings such as us, to live perpetually devoid of fixed points of reference and in a state of constant creativity?
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Experience tells us that some individuals are perfectly able to do so without it resulting in mental imbalance. This is how true scientists and artists live, and I would even venture to suggest that those possessed of true quality also live in this fashion. Is it possible, however, for entire communities? These weighty concerns do nothing to ease the severity of our current axiological crisis, which underpins all of our other crises: moral, political, economic, social, family, individual and religious crises. The problems posed to us by the axiological in general are very serious, and we lack any know-how on how to convincingly approach the issue, which is utterly basic and fundamental for creatures as needy as us who need guidance in order to live. Our ancestors constructed their own collective projects, which formed their value systems, over thousands of years. They constructed them, rather than receiving them, although they must have believed the latter to be the case. How do we know this? Because analysis of their projects, expressed and lived through myths, symbols and rituals, shows us that all peoples that lived in the same manner essentially possessed myths, symbols and rituals that at times differed superficially but which were identical at their deepest cores. This was the case with hunter-gatherers, crop farmers, farmers organised into large states using irrigation systems and livestock breeders. We have observed that their myths, symbols and rituals were modelled on their ways of life, in order to better adapt to suit these ways of life. When the pre-industrial way of life changed, their collective projects also changed in line with it. Our ancestors therefore constructed their own projects, although they were not aware, nor could they be, of this fact. Their collective constructs needed to serve and suit static, pre-industrial societies. They thus needed to impede significant changes and other alternatives. They did this by declaring the constructs to be inviolable. To firmly entrench this inviolability, they attributed them to holy ancestors or gods. This made them sacrosanct and immutable.
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Mari Corb
Our ancestors could not have been aware that they were building their own axiological projects, because they did so over a period spanning millennia. Nor should they have been aware of it. They needed to forbid such an awareness, as it would have shattered this inviolability. One might say that the procedures used to enshrine this absolute inviolability were tactics of a system of programming for static societies. Of these collective programs, the first industrial societies modified only what was strictly necessary, but continued to hold them inviolable, both what had been changed and what had been preserved, attributing this to the very nature of things themselves or the necessary course of history. We must construct ours in full awareness that we ourselves are the builders. We need to program ourselves for motivation, to build sense for our lives, to build our collective connection. We need to build a solid base of quality in order to make suitable use of our technoscience, putting its exponential growth and enormous power to work for the good of humanity and of every living creature on the planet. Because our ancestors were builders who were unaware that they were building, they failed to leave us a legacy of know-how on how to erect collective projects. To have done so would have been inconceivable for them, as it would have voided the principle of their sanctity. We therefore find ourselves in a serious axiological crisis, without any knowledge of how to build our own projects. We need to overcome a complete and complex crisis, and to be able to change our projects at the same rate as the rapid march of our science and technology, without adequate knowledge of how to do so. We are faced with having to create new know-how in order to handle the axiological, of having to create an axiological epistemology. With this know-how, we must become capable of handling all that is axiological in nature, in order to create our own collective axiological tenets and projects at every level, including that of the individual. We must create them on our own, drawing support from ourselves and in the explicit knowledge that we do so at our own risk. Nothing and nobody is going to hand us a finished product.
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We must be able to build our own motivation to live, and this motivation must work with the same effectiveness as the stimulus/response mechanisms of other animals. Our constructs must be capable of suitable change in line with the constant shifts introduced by technoscience to our ways of life, thinking, feeling, organising ourselves, values and action. The need for continual transformation makes it impossible for us to start from a basis of beliefs, whether secular or religious, because beliefs bind and we find ourselves forced into a state of perpetual motion. The starting point of any subsequent reflection can be no other than the knowledge of our status as living creatures that speak. This is our inalienable foundation. Our collective programming must be appropriate for a living creature. It must therefore be axiological. A rational motivation would be inadequate and insufficient. Reason is abstract and operates with abstract units. Living creatures neither move nor are moved by abstract forces, but rather by concrete ones, by what enters through the senses and is capable of arousing feelings. Systems of motivation, our value systems, cannot be merely rational. Rather, they must be concrete, as are our needs. Some troubling questions arise. Wouldnt the creation of axiological know-how, i.e. an axiological epistemology, create new and serious risks? This is because creating know-how on handling the world of the axiological means creating the possibility of handling it well, but also of handling it badly. We gained extensive experience of the damage that can arise from handling the axiological during the terrible and bloody dictatorships of the 20th century, the two World Wars and numerous other wars in the same century. We also lived through it in the more distant past, in cruel religious wars. All of this violence was created and sustained through axiological manipulation and mass propaganda. This manipulation was primitive, as it was based on quantitative accumulation through mass propaganda and the use of violence and repression. Axiological epistemology, i.e. know-how on how to manage axiology, carries the potential to be more refined and effective, without the need
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Mari Corb
to be based on mass propaganda or to be coercive, violent or aimed at persecuting dissidence. Such know-how is admittedly dangerous, but what know-how isnt? Moreover, there is a strong reason for us to ignore our moral scruples, one that obliges us to take the risk while searching for ways to minimise it: we have been stripped of axiological projects and we cannot in all rationality wait for them to fall from the sky or shoot out of the ground, blossoming out of the very nature of things. Neither can we hold to the axiological projects of the past, as they relate to pre-industrial, patriarchal, authoritarian, parochial, exclusivist and exclusive societies which no longer even exist or which are in the process of disappearing. It would not be beneficial for these axiological projects of the past to continue to exist under the conditions that apply in the new, globalised industrial societies of innovation and change. We must build them ourselves, as without them we would be incapable of suitably managing the powerful progress of our technoscience, nor could we survive. No other option is possible. We must do it. Furthermore, if we consider the issue in more detail, when in history have our ancestors not taken risks as to the construction of their collective projects? They took risks, and significant ones, not only in the 20th century but also in the 19th century on the issue of nationality, and earlier during the age of terrible religious conflicts. The list is a long one. We are faced with the prospect of having to create this know-how in order to be able to survive our new circumstances, i.e. in knowledge societies subject to constant change. We must take on the responsibility and the risks posed, as we did with the creation and development of science and technology which, moreover, are things we cannot give up. One matter leads to the other. We must construct this axiological know-how relying on ourselves for support and at our own risk. Thus, this axiological science must be able to tell us how to build our own human quality and what would be a solid foundation on which to build our own axiological tenets and projects. These projects must in turn be distinguished by quality, enabling us to
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appropriately manage and orient our science and technology, our companies and our political, economic and other organisations. There would seem to be no rational solution for building this human quality other than by drawing on the wisdom of our ancestors, but without this entailing our adopting their ways of thinking, feeling, organising themselves and living. It would not be possible for us to do so in globalised societies of knowledge and constant change. We must be able to draw on the human quality of our ancestors and try to find the means of cultivating it, but in a fashion appropriate to our new cultural circumstances. Axiological epistemology should be able to tell us how to construct our human quality, both individually and collectively, as well as how to cultivate profound human quality, or what our ancestors referred to as spirituality. Without a minimum number of men and women possessed of profound human quality, there can be no communities with human quality.
The structure of language, anthropology and axiological systems
We must approach our research with our feet planted firmly on the ground. Axiological systems are a product of living creatures. Our reflections are based on our status as needy living creatures. Humans are not a spirit and a body. We are not animals that reason, nor are we animals that speak. We make ourselves into viable animals by speaking. Speech is not an add-on to our status as animals, because our very structure as living creatures is defined by our ability to speak. Our mode of existence as living creatures is structured around our status as speakers. There is nothing in our system of environmental perception, not even the environment itself or our comprehension and evaluation of it, or how we interact with it and the other members of the group or other living creatures, which is not delimited, structured and established by language. Our instinctive tendencies are also shaped by speech.
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Mari Corb
We are not animals with established or even half-established individual and collective modes of survival. No part of us is pre-programmed to guarantee our functioning and supply minimal survival patterns. Even tendencies as basic as eating and copulating have blanks to be filled in with respect to what to eat and what not to eat, how to copulate in the heart of a group and what to do with the product of copulation, i.e. children, in terms of how to support them, how to raise them to ensure the survival of the group and, by extension, of each of its individuals whose survival depends on the existence of the group. Our genetic programming does not guarantee even minimal survival functions for us, or the ability to effectively exercise them. We cannot survive without symbiosis, and we cannot be symbiotic other than by speaking to each other. Moreover, we do not have any symbiotic system that predates language. Language gives symbiosis structure and preserves it. Language determines and tweaks our structures as living creatures, filling in the gaps of our biological essence, which in itself is not sufficient to make us into viable animals. Thus, the structure that is unique to us, as living creatures, what differentiates us from other species, is the fact that we can speak. Speech constitutes us, both at the individual and the collective level. The structure of speech is therefore our anthropological structure. If language defines us as living creatures, then the structure of language is our structure, too. To discern our anthropological structure we must discern the structure of language, because its structure and our structure as humans are one and the same. Humans live in a world of linguistic assessments and representations. Our world of specific perceptions and objectifications is built on our ability to use language. The same is true for our system of social organisation and cohesion. Our objective world, the world on which we use our faculty of perception, which becomes valuable and with respect to which we act, is a world shaped by our capacity for language. We live realities, including our own reality, as representations. What we cannot represent does not enter our world of realities. Although it is
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there, in front of us, we dont see it. We dont notice it. To us, it is as if it were nothing. Humans live in a world that we build ourselves, in a world of representations or, more specifically, a represented world. The world we live in is not out there, as we represent it. It is in our minds, in our communities, as a result of our systems of collective programming. Our axiological systems, constructed by our collective speech, have the same structure as the language we use to build them. This argument is made with respect to the fundamental structure of all language, not that of individual languages. Therefore, if we know the structure of language and its formal parameters we know the profound structure of all of our axiological systems and their formal parameters. Language is what structures us as living creatures, what structures our axiological system. The structure of our language, which forms our anthropological structure, is also the structure of our systems of values, motivation and cohesion. We take this, the way in which we shape reality, to be actual reality. This shaping determines how we organise ourselves and act. All of this occurs under concrete survival conditions. The concrete formal parameters of language are the formal parameters under which we live our anthropology, and the formal parameters of our axiological systems. All of our communicative systems, which are axiological and which should not be confused with our information systems, which are abstract, have the same structure as our language as well as its formal parameters. Communication is transmission as well as axiological communion. As rich as it may be, information is only the transmission of data. It is incapable of effectively transmitting values and cannot create the axiological communion required for symbiosis between individuals. Thus, the structure and formal parameters of our natural language are the structure of our anthropology, the structure of our axiological system and the structure of all of our communicative systems. Our arts must be included in the category of communicative systems.
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Mari Corb
From this it follows that the structure of our relationship with the environment, as living creatures, is primarily and fundamentally axiological. This is because we are animals, and culture and language dont alter our status as animals. Rather, they constitute the specific way in which we exist as animals. We are speaking animals, and therefore cultural animals. Even so, language and culture define us as animals and make us viable. We must study the basic and fundamental structure of language in order to identify the basic and fundamental structure of our axiological systems, our anthropological and communicative structure in general.
The formal parameters of the axiological
Humans use two types of formal parameters: logic, which is abstract, and the concrete, which is qualitative and axiological. We have argued that language is what defines us as the animals that we are. Natural language (that which is not scientific or artistic) manipulates concrete, qualitative entities to create an effective system of communication. It uses concrete formal parameters. The sphere in which these concrete formal parameters have been used, structured and tried and tested over the longest period is in language, more than in the arts, which are also, moreover, rooted in language. Language offers another added benefit, in that its formal parameters have been studied in the field of linguistics, in terms of acoustic systems, semantics and narrative aspects. Linguistics can be used to identify these formal parameters in all their detail. We must learn to use these concrete formal parameters, taken from language, to enable us to construct axiological projects with suitable mechanisms. We have drawn on the qualitative formal parameters of language in order to study the construction of collective axiological systems. Our attention to linguistics is essentially concerned with axiology. Our approach to it is therefore not purely formal, nor do we delve deep into the concerns of linguists or guide ourselves using linguistic studies re24
lating to the creation of artificial intelligence. We think of language as an instrument that defines the structure of the specific nature of a living creature, enabling it to survive in the environment.This means that we must address three levels of language: the level of expression, the level of content or meaning and the level of designation, which is directly connected to the pragmatics of a living creature that is, ultimately, always axiological.
The tasks of axiological epistemology
Axiological epistemology, or know-how on human axiological issues, must be based on our status as animals. As needy creatures, the interactions of all living beings with the environment in which they live are concrete, sensory and axiological. We humans are no exception. Axiological epistemology must be able to give an accounting of our unique nature as living creatures that are defined as such by their ability to speak. Speech is what makes us into viable animals and, therefore, constitutes us as symbiotic living creatures. Language, which makes us into viable symbiotic living creatures, stems from and is suited to a living creature. Therefore, it is primarily and fundamentally axiological. Natural language, that which is not sophisticated owing to abstract metalinguistic procedures, must be constructed with concrete, sensory and axiological elements. In language everything is concrete and qualitative, and our shaping of reality through use of language is completely axiological. Therefore, any other use of language, such as the scientific and technological metalanguages, or axiological metalanguages, (myths, axiological projects, the arts), must be explicable via the basic features of natural language and its aims. The aim of natural language is to fill in the gaps left by the genetic programming of our species and shape our interpretation of ourselves and of the environment in line with our cerebral, sensory and behavioural structure, under specific survival conditions.
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Mari Corb
All forms of knowledge and feeling, ranging up to the highest and noblest, must be explicable from our basic status as a needy living creature that speaks and is symbiotic. Everything stems from our status as cultural living animals, and leads back, in one form or another, to this status. All human cognitive and axiological phenomena are necessarily rooted in this status, and must be explained through it. Axiological epistemology must be able to given an accounting of the development of axiological systems, of human quality, of the development of the sciences and the arts, and of spirituality or profound human quality. Bearing in mind our status as speaking living creatures, axiological epistemology must be able to give an accounting of our dual access to reality, that which is relative to our individual and collective needs and that which is unrelated to these, i.e. the absolute, selfless reality. This dual access is the basic building block of our nature as speaking living creatures. It is thus a dual, axiological access. It must be able to give an accounting not only of the biological functionality of our species, but also of this dual dimension. It must not be forgotten that this dual dimension is that of a living creature, to enable it to live. This is our inalienable structure, allowing us to survive as individuals and, above all, as a species that can adapt to change and even trigger it without a mutation in its genetic code. Axiological epistemology must make it clear that without this dual axiological dimension the existence of human life, with its frequent and occasionally radical changes, and of the sciences, the arts, philosophy and profound human quality, or what our ancestors referred to as spirituality, would be impossible. Axiological epistemology will also have to account for the two types of epistemologies seen in our species: mythical epistemology, which views our myths, tales, theories and words as formulations of the actual nature of reality, and non-mythical epistemology, which recognises that what our linguistic formulations profess through myths, symbols, scientific theories and daily language is not how reality actually is, but how we should shape our realities in order to survive, under specific cultural circumstances.
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An important task for axiological epistemology is to give an accounting of how collective axiological systems were created in the past in pre-industrial societies (myths, symbols, rituals) under different pre-industrial modes of survival, as well as why and how such systems change when modes of survival in the environment undergo significant changes. We must study how religions are generated and how religions fell into crisis when pre-industrial changes were significant. Axiological epistemology must be able to give an accounting of the shifts that occur when pre-industrial modes of life disappear, and the consequences of such drastic change for axiological systems, for religious crises and for cultivation of the absolute dimension of our access to the real, in a manner suited to the new cultural conditions. It must study how collective projects will need to be formulated in new societies of knowledge, innovation and constant change. It must make people understand the urgent need for the creation of collective axiological projects for societies that live on the basis of the continual creation of knowledge, technology, goods and services. This creation of projects shall undergo constant review and modification, to keep pace with the growth of science and technology and their effects on the lives of individuals and communities. The essential task of axiological epistemology is to provide axiological know-how capable of generating norms and procedures for the creation of collective axiological projects and for spreading them to all communities; norms to change them when advisable and in such a way that changes may be accepted easily and painlessly. It should focus on finding viable forms of widespread cultivation of the non-relative, selfless dimension of reality, without which human quality and, particularly, profound human quality, are impossible. To achieve these aims, axiological epistemology must make detailed study of the great mythologies of the past, as these constitute successful axiological projects that were tried and tested over thousands of years, in order to determine how our ancestors constructed them.
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Mari Corb
We must be able to achieve an understanding of the structure of these pre-industrial axiological projects, with the aid of linguistics, in order to determine how they were constructed, what laws they respected, what their formal parameters were, what their basic structures or axiological paradigm were, and the relationship that this axiological paradigm had with the survival systems of the group. The aim of such studies is to acquire know-how on the axiological that lies within the grasp of society, to enable it to create the axiological projects it needs at the various levels of collective organisation and action. What was the realm of spirituality for our ancestors must become the realm of axiological epistemology for us today. This epistemology must try to pinpoint, as far as possible, the two types of formal parameters: those of the logic of abstract knowledge and science, and those of the concrete, sensory and axiological, i.e. concrete or semiotic logic. It must give an accounting of why we now need an axiological epistemology that wasnt necessary in the past, and what roles it should fulfil in the new industrial societies. Axiological know-how must be free of any and all axiological adherence. It needs to be abstract know-how. It cannot be based on any belief system, or on any ideological system. Epistemologists will be able to believe whatever they wish, or pursue whichever axiological alternative they desire, but not when practising axiological epistemology. Adherence to an axiological system impedes the freedom and flexibility required for the study of axiological systems. Those who engage in axiological epistemology and those in any way involved in creating projects must have freedom of feeling. Under the new cultural conditions, axiological alternatives are possible but axiological adherence is not, as a perpetual willingness for change is essential. This axiological know-how, and the freedom that must accompany it, is imperative in the new type of society. The same attitude required of axiological epistemologists must be possessed, to some degree, by all other
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members of the new societies. Axiological freedom, creativity and flexibility are the qualities necessary in knowledge societies.
The role of axiological epistemology in the study of the absolute dimension of the real
The absolute dimension is also the concern of axiological epistemology, which studies all human axiological phenomena. In a society of knowledge, innovation and constant change, it is impossible to create in the strong, traditional and religious sense. Uncritical assumptions, however, are possible. In the knowledge society it is already known how religions were generated, on what factors relating to way of life they depended, and why they changed. In these societies it has been necessary to abandon mythical epistemology. Under these cultural conditions, study of the absolute dimension is no longer exclusively the domain of religions, of their mythical and symbolic systems, or their beliefs and theologies. It is the domain of axiological epistemology. Clearly, axiological epistemology cannot directly study the absolute dimension, as it is an entity that cannot be objectified. The only points it will study in relation to the absolute dimension of the real are: On what factors awareness of this dimension depends What characteristics it displays How it was cultivated in the past and why such diverse but constant protocols were adopted in societies that lived essentially in the same form, although separated by time and space, which often had no contact with each other What the teachings of the great masters were in regard to this dimension Their basic areas of agreement and the diversity of their proposals In what manner we would need to draw on the trove of religious and spiritual traditions of the past, without having to live as they did, believe as they did, need to belong to societies and churches as they did, and in the way that they did
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Mari Corb
How to be faithful to the spirit of their teachings without also needing to be faithful to their ways of thinking, feeling, behaving, organising themselves and living What shape to give to cultivation of this dimension in our current globalised, constantly changing cultural circumstances How to collectively live and organise the cultivation of this dimension, which is crucial to our ability to acquire individual and group human quality, and which we need in order to ensure psychological and mental stability amid constant change We urgently need to cultivate this dimension to preserve our unique human essence, i.e. our access to the dual dimension of the real, which we must use to preserve the adaptability that we now need more than we did under any of humanitys past cultural circumstances. Under the new cultural conditions, axiological epistemology acquires an unexpected level of responsibility and importance. Nevertheless, it should not be forgotten that it is a science, and thus cannot express itself in a manner adequate for the transmission of this second dimension of our access to the real, nor can it adequately transmit or provide motivation for that dimension. This task will continue to fall not to axiological epistemology but to the creation of axiological systems that propose, express and provide motivation for the cultivation of this dimension. Cultivation of the absolute, selfless dimension is the domain of systems of transmission built while explicitly taking into account the specific features of our human condition. Axiological systems must provide motivation for and induce cultivation of the second dimension of the real, and must lead individuals and groups to turn to the great teachings of the masters of past generations, found in humanitys great religious and spiritual traditions. The new axiological systems must warn of the urgent need to cultivate this dimension so that individuals and communities may possess the hu30
man quality and profound human quality needed in order for our technoscience not to work against us and against all life on the planet. Axiological epistemology is the scientific basis and guideline for the construction of axiological systems that suit the new cultural conditions. Axiological systems constructed with this know-how will be the rational motivation for drawing on all of the wisdom of our ancestors and cultivating it under the new, constantly changing cultural conditions. After this rational task of preparation is carried out, we must then explicitly cultivate this dimension, which is uniquely qualitative and axiological. The great masters of this dimension will inform us as to the right way to tread this path.
General outline for the construction of collective projects in knowledge societies
1. Study of general survival conditions in the new cultural circumstances of societies of knowledge and constant change, with particular emphasis on the specific sphere of the organisation in question. 2. Formulation of axiological postulates. Based on the choice, both freely made and inevitable, to live in and through knowledge societies. This starting point for our approach has necessary consequences, which must be formulated as a chain of hierarchically structured postulates. This chain could be as follows: Assuming a necessary choice in favour of the knowledge society, we must propound comprehensiveness. Assuming the spread and complexity of our science and technology, we will need the mutual and creative interdependence of individuals and teams. There can be no creativity without freedom and democracy. Hierarchy and subjugation hinder or obstruct creativity. We therefore need a horizontal communication model rather than a vertical flow of information.
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Mari Corb
Communication will not be able to function without mutual trust and equality. Differences in sex, race and spiritual choice are irrelevant for societies based on knowledge. Therefore, they should not exist in order to avoid endangering the creative dynamic. The rapid growth of science and technology demands that sustainability be taken explicitly into account. Comprehensiveness should also extend to the environment. 3. Construction of the collective axiological project using the actantial model, based on the hierarchical chain of axiological postulates. The actantial model cannot be constructed with narrative, as it was with myths. Rather, it must be constructed based on substantiated grounds. This will be similar to what was done by ideologies, but without recourse to mythical epistemology. 4. Clear establishment of a general strategy for delivering the axiological projects that are constructed to specific people. This general strategy shall always be a concrete form of IDS cultivation suited to the group in question, a strategy of interest if possible an unconditional interest in reality (I), of detachment from ones desires, fears, memories and expectations and from dependence on circumstances (D), and of silencing the internal monologue (S). We must also cultivate ICS: constant inquiry (I), in communication with members of the group and the environment (C), in mutual service (S). IDS-ICS are mutually dependent. 5. Careful definition of the tactics to employ in order to achieve implementation of both IDS and ICS as the relevant collective axiological project for the aims of the organisation in question. 6. For semantic investiture of the axiological systems of knowledge societies, we must determine the root semic structure that generates the mode of survival through comprehensive innovation and communication to determine which root metaphor to use to confer the diverse codes or diversity of dimensions of collective life.
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In conclusion
We have described the urgent need for an axiological epistemology, as well as the main tasks that will fall to it. We must devote our efforts to its construction. This construction should result in a relatively simple and practical proposal, so that each type of organisation can construct its own axiological project with ease. In a society based on creativity, diversity is inevitable and indispensable. We will need to construct a general axiological project that specific organisations will freely opt to join. In creative societies of innovation and change, there can be no imposition. At the core of this general project, a wide variety of specific axiological projects should be developed in line with the aims of the various types of organisations and the different cultural patterns of humanity.
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Formality of the Axiological as Sensitive, Qualitative and Concrete

Marta Grans
The aim of this discourse is to tackle the formality of the concretevaluable. Based on the hypothesis that we humans are animals defined by speech, and that it is through speech that we configure and transmit what is of value, we consider that linguistics should be able to help us in our purpose. We have made use of linguistic studies, specifically those of Greimas, which investigate the formality typical of the qualitative semantics of axiologizing narratives such as popular tales, narratives and certain myths. We are animals that define ourselves by speaking, and this communication between subjects is the semiotization of the relationship with the environment (relation S-O).1 What we are going to try and investigate here is the formality of the communication of the axiological that is accomplished in natural language, insofar as it is value-based, since neither sciences nor technologies intervene in it. When technoscience operates between the Subject and the Object, the S-O relationship ceases to be axiological, which means that in S-S communication the stimulative semiotization typical of the pre-industrial relationship with the medium expressed in natural language ceases to exist.
1 The S-O relationship undergoes a dual semiotization: on the one hand one that is typical of a living being in a determined culture, in which a world of stimuli (therefore of semiotic structure) arises and which is operative (the brain and perceptors intervene in it naturally as filters); and on the other one that is communicative, which appears when the S-O relationship wants to communicate, which forces it to transform the sensitive-stimulative into language that turns out to be an instrument of communication. It must be taken into account that the stimulative relationship has also passed through speech. The two semiotization processes occur simultaneously, and are carried out as a package, but by analysis, the steps that constitute the communicative semiotization can be discerned.
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Marta Grans
What is of interest is the formality of the presentation and transmission of the concrete-evaluative so typical of natural languages, and which has been widely studied by linguists, insofar as from this we can extract the protocol for the creation and mobilising transmission of values.
We will start with the study undertaken by Greimas of the appearance of signification, because even though his analyses focus mainly on the semantic aspect he also applies them to the phonology, which allows us to extrapolate his analysis and results to the concrete-valuable. Thus we will take his elementary structure of signification as the formality of everything concrete and axiological, and will refer to it as an elementary structure of the sensitive-qualitative-concrete. Greimas realised that for signification to occur, several factors need to be present: discontinuity, the presence of two terms and the fact that these two terms are related to each other in a relationship of conjunction and disjunction. Furthermore, signification requires semantic axes and contradictory semantic axes, both with two terms in a contrary relationship at their poles. We go on to explain succinctly each of the elements belonging to the Elementary Structure of Signification or Elementary Structure of the sensitive-qualitative-concrete (ESS).
1. The Elementary Structure of the Sensitive-Qualitative-Concrete (ESS)
Discontinuity
The apprehending of the concrete implies the existence of discontinuities in the plane of perception and of differential disparities in what is perceived.
Essential Presence of Two Terms (Binary Condition)
Thus through the perception of disparate discontinuities, we perceive differences and in that way the world takes form before us and through us. Perceiving differences implies simultaneously perceiving, at least, two object-terms and, simultaneously, perceiving a relationship between them
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that somehow links them together. Consequently it can be affirmed that a single term cannot be perceived and that the perception of something implies the existence of another reality with which it has a relationship. The relationship between object-terms will be the necessary condition for apprehending them. It should be noted then that apprehending of the concrete requires the presence of two terms and of a relationship between them. It will be necessary to study the notion of the relationship between object-terms.
Relationship between Object-Terms: Conjunction and Disjunction
A double affirmation regarding the relationship between object-terms: in order for two object-terms to be perceived together they need to have something in common, and simultaneously they must differ in some aspect, so that we can distinguish them. The relationship between two object-terms is one of conjunction and disjunction, although this may not always be immediately recognisable. E.g.: national road vs. local road: an example of semantic comparison: conjunction road, disjunction local vs. national pas vs. bas (in French): an example on a phonetic level: the conjunction is that p and b are bilabial and the disjunction is that the p is voiced or plosive while the b is voiceless
Axis of Conjunction of Object-Terms
Given that single object-terms involve no signification or boundaries and that it is on the structures level that it is necessary to seek elementary sensitive-concrete units, we must conclude that the world of concretes is an assembly of object-terms in a formal relationship.
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Marta Grans
Conjunction axis between two object-terms lays the common denominator of both; it is the background in which the articulation of discontinuity and contraposition between object-terms emerges. The configuration of the world of the concrete and language must be binary.
ESS Model
The elementary structure of the concrete is represented with this diagram: S s1

deixis
cont radi tor y ctor adic y contr
contrary
s2
deixis
s2
contrary
s1
Greimas configures a model for the relationship between two objectterms s1 and s2. They are related to each other through a common denominator that is represented as an axis S whose poles are the terms s1 and s2 which have conjunctions and disjunctions between them. Since s1 and s2 are distinguished by the differentiation between them, we can consider that viewed together they are contrary. Since everything concrete is perceived in a binary manner by contrast, against the common axis S another axis must be presented S (or not S) that will be in a relationship of contradiction, in other words, it represents the absence of everything that is S. S and S are complementary2. This S
2 Each possible signification or semantic axis S has a contradictory S. The set S & S would form the totality of the signification therefore it can be said that they are complementary.
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axis also has two poles s1 and s2, which represent what is not s1 and what is not s2.
It is important to remember again that this model refers to the semiotization of perception, i.e. to the process of communication of what is to be communicated. These are the relationships between the terms within the model: Contrary relationships: s1/s2 and s1/s2 is simultaneously conjunction and disjunction. Contradictory relationships: s1/s1 and s2/s2. Implication relationships: s1/s2 and s2/s1.
Greimas constructs the diagram in relation to signification although he also applies it to the phonological, which allows us to expand its extension to everything that is concrete and non-abstract. The terms s1 and s2 may refer to both sensitive objects and to contrary values systems. The relationship between the terms s1, s2, s1 and s2 is dynamic and follows an orientation, i.e. there is a way of abandoning one of the terms to opt for the other that must follow an established order. When s1 and s2 represent values systems, the passage from s1 to its opposite s2 represents regulated transformation operations that will constitute the fundamental syntax of axiological formations. The narrative syntax of this transformation consists of putting the model into motion and generating oriented operations, organised into series. To make a change of option, from s1 to s2, it is necessary to negate s1 by placing oneself in s1, in other words the negation of a term means the affirmation of the contradictory term. As the relationship between the terms is binary, when one negates the term s1, at the same time one is also affirming its opposite s2. Thus the series of operations generated in the transforming step from s1 to s2 is as follows: from s1 there is a displacement to s1 and from here s2 is involved. All transfers between terms are movements that are foreseeable and can be ordered.
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2. Signification Transformation Operations from ESS
Marta Grans
Greimas called these series of operations, passing from s1 to s2, performances and when constituting the operating diagram for contents transformation it becomes the most characteristic unit of the narrative syntax. The performance is the syntactic unit that, being abstract, may receive any content. In it the conflict arises between value-terms in contrariety, which means that to affirm one, the other must be negated. This means stripping a term of its value to attribute it to the other, thus a transfer of value-object occurs from one term to the other. When this transformation dynamic occurs in a narrative, the terms s1 and s2 must be invested, and this is done by turning them into two confronted subjects, which correspond to two contrary value-related bodies or actions. These contrary values are going to come from V functions, or survival functions, that are different from each other. In the conflict between two subjects with opposing value-objects, both value systems cannot be valid because they are contrary, therefore it will be necessary to affirm one and negate the other. This means stripping one term of value to attribute it to the other, thus there is a transfer of value. There are two performances or series of operations or transfers of valueobjects that take different directions. The first, according to the folk tales of Propp, exemplifying it is as follows: Society Isolation from society s1 s2 Hero s2 s1 Traitor
This represents society suffering a loss: the kings daughter has been abducted. The traitor has abducted her and has isolated her from society. The investment of the terms in this case is as follows: s1 is the society in collective order; s1 is the traitor that is the contradictory value to order; s2 is society in chaos, here the transferred value object is invested in the daughter of the king. The move is from order to chaos.
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The second direction that the transfer can take is as follows: Society s1 s2 Hero Isolation from society s2 s1 Traitor
In this part of the narrative the hero finds the kings daughter in a place isolated from society and returns her to her family. Order s1 is reestablished thanks to s2 invested as the hero which is the negation of the alteration of order s2.
Stories may occur in which the narrative takes both paths of the transfer, as in the case of fairy tales where there is a first transfer of the objectvalue from the side of society and the hero to that of the traitor and isolation from society; and then the action of the hero occurs which makes the transfer in the inverse direction. There may be narratives, like myths about origins, in which only one of the routes is taken: the absence of value-objects as original situation and acquisition by the action of a hero, god or mythical being, which resolves that absence. These formal affirmations, taking into account the constitutional model and the operations that can be generated from it, are of extreme importance for a value theory.
In a narrative there are various levels of grammar: At the deepest level there is a fundamental grammar which is of a conceptual nature and its categories are semiotic. It is this that we have just explained. An intermediate level that through the investment of the terms of the deep level allows tales to be generated with a figurative and
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3. The Grammar of the Narrative
Marta Grans
anthropomorphic form, which constitutes the superficial level of the manifestation. The fundamental invested terms represent the superficial level of the fully figurative manifestation where the human actors or personified actors, i.e. with an anthropomorphic character, fulfil aims, are subjected to tests, execute tasks, etc. The deepest level and the intermediate level are constructed using metalanguages and both articulate the level of manifestation or narration. The superficial structure has a deep structure and the laws of deep structure are the ones that determine the development of the superficial structure. This deep structure following investment determines the superficial level that should follow the laws of grammatical syntax. The grammatical syntax gives the rules for regulating operations at a story level. Deep grammar consists of operations effected on the terms that are going to be invested with content values. This grammar transforms and manipulates these contents, negating them and affirming them with operations that, because they are directed, turn out to be foreseeable and can be calculated. These operations are ordered in series. For example the relationship of contradiction represents an operation of negation of one of the terms and implicates its contrary (s1 upon negating s1 is implicating s2, the contrary of s1).
Deep grammar, along with syntactical grammar, organises the operations of the terms in the narrative once they have been invested with figurative forms of an anthropomorphic nature. The dynamics of anthropomorphic figures that appear at a narrative level are always a competition between subjects. The terms s1 and s2 are anthropomorphically invested as two subjects that represent two systems of contrary values that manifest a negation and an affirmation at a deep level. The operation of negation of s1 at a deep level translates into a domination of the contradictory s1 at a superficial level and the implication that occurs at a deep level as the next step is described in the narrative as an attribution of value to the contrary: s2. The acceptance of two contrary terms is never possible. Competition is the most characteristic aspect of the transfer of values narrative.
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The semantic units generated by syntax will be of two types, discrete or integrated, the first will have an effect of entity (substance) which through the action of the classifiers (classemes) will turn out to be a thing, person, image, symbol, etc., while the attributes contributed by the integrated units will be conferred upon them. The syntactic activity firstly provides a discrete object then immediately gives information on that object with the help of integrations. Discrete semantic units in axiologizing narratives are given the name of actants while the subclass of integrated units are called predicates. The discrete units, or actants, play only a few concrete roles that allow them to be categorized. There are six classes that are related primarily in pairs: sender/receiver, subject/object, supporter/oppositionist. Each pair constitutes an actantial category. Between them all there is a stable and constant structural relationship, which we will outline later, in which the subject/object pairing functions as the main axis, since as the axiologizing narratives that they are, their basis is to establish a value for a collectivity that has to pass through the particular subjects. The predicates, or integrated semantic units, can be static or dynamic. The static ones give information on the state or way of being of the actants, while the dynamic ones give information about the processes that the actants are engaged in or subjected to. Both equally semanticize the actants, which are empty abstract structures. The actants precede the predicates and this, via the discourse, attributes properties to them. The combination of an actant and a predicate constitute a unit that we will call a message, and as the predicates are only of two types, the messages will be either simulacra of action or alternatively of qualification. The descriptive messages of an action can make reference to an action in the thingified world or alternatively in the noological or mental world. And the qualitative messages that describe ways of being, or alternatively ways of acting, accumulatively add elements to the semanticization of the actants. There is a principle of order, an immanent system in messages with predicates of action which is: want-know-be able-do. There is also a hierarchy
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4. Actantial Structure
Marta Grans
in the qualifying predicates, where qualifications of state are more permanent than those of habit. To all of the above one must add that a succession of messages can only be considered as a sequence with meaning if the functions manifested in it are all attributed to the same actants. The same can be said for qualifications. Up to this point we have summarily studied the discourse without tackling the internal structure of the actants.
Actantial Categories
Actants are articulated in three categories: subject/object, sender/receiver, supporter/oppositionist. So let us talk about these. As we have said the subject/object category constitutes the principal axis of all relationships between actants. The subject would be a structure of desires, a force oriented towards a desired object that would constitute the guiding value. The orientation is determined by desire: the object polarises and the subject is polarised. The second category, sender/receiver, expresses the arbitrator that attributes an asset/he who receives or obtains that asset. An example is the search for the Holy Grail where: Subject = hero Sender = God Object = Holy Grail Receiver = humanity These four actants have a simple articulation, which is as follows: Sender Object Subject Receiver
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Which makes manifest that the Subject has a need that is resolved by the Sender. As this is a case of an axiologizing narrative for a subject in symbiosis, the solution is not limited to one subject but rather it is for the entire collective, which will be the Receiver. This means that the value transmitted by the Sender must be desired by each of the individuals in the collective. In some narratives syncretisms may arise, as in love stories in which a dual syncretism often occurs: the subject is simultaneously the receiver; and the object is simultaneously the sender or dispenser. There is also a third category, in which the actants that act in the direction of the desire facilitate its achievement, and the actants that act by creating obstacles, opposing the realisation of the desire or the communication of the object, helper/oppositionist. It is as if, along with those interested in the show created by the actants, with respect to an axiological transmission, benefactor and enemy forces existed. They have a subordinated character within the actantial square; they are not the main actants in the show. The helper and the opponent are a kind of projection of the will to act and of the resistances of the subject actant itself, judged with respect to the desire as beneficial or evil. The complete actantial model would end up as follows: Sender Ayudante Object Sujeto Receiver Opositor
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Marta Grans
Other examples would be: The actantial structure of Christianity: Sender Father Object Jess (salvation) Helper grace angels saints Subject the faithful Adversary world devil flesh Receiver humanity
The actantial structure of liberalism:
Sender nature Object liberty equality fraternity Helper reason Suject the citizen
Receiver humanity
Adversary Church old regime
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The actantial structure of socialism: Sender the course of history Object equality fairness Receiver humanity
the oppressed proletariat Communist party collective ownership of production resources
Helper
Subjet
Adversary Church capitalism
Every narrative that tackles values has basic units of signification or semes that constitute the pattern or axiological paradigm from which the entire system will be built. The number of constituting semes is very limited.3 From the analyses of myths and ideologies as the axiologizing narratives of pre-industrial societies, or those of early industrialisation, it can be observed that these few semes that constitute the paradigm are related with the basic structure of the action with which the group survives. Let us see the process that transcodes the action of survival in axiological paradigm. Through speech, action is transferred or metaphorized into communication, which requires its objectification and a semiotization.
3 See the analysis of myths by M. Corb in Anlisis epistemolgico de las configuraciones axiolgicas humanas. Salamanca: Ed. Universidad de Salamanca, 1983, p. 193- 426.
5. Procedure of Investment of the Axiological Skeleton (paradigms)
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Marta Grans
Through that process the action with which a collective survives becomes, due to the importance it has for their lives, a pattern for reality, for interpretation and for evaluation of everything else. The basic traits of central action in humans tend to be semiotized, i.e. converted into words charged with value because they proceed from the action upon which life depends and thus they are converted into the basic metaphor from which reality is going to be modelled. Once semiotized they establish and support the central action, model the needs of the group from that pattern and model the environment in which the group survives. They become the pattern or paradigm that configures all reality. Our natural world ends up configured from the paradigms structured by the different cultures. It must be noted that this is possible because in the case of pre-industrial societies these central actions of survival were in themselves axiological. This is the case of the hunter-gatherers, for whom killing animals and eating their meat was a source of life; or of the farmers for whom food came from burying the grain so that it would die and give fruit as a new plant. In both cases the central action can be reduced to a pair of semes in relation: from death comes life, which can be transcribed as DL. The axiological paradigms may have only a pair of semes or they may be more complex as is the case of the irrigation farming societies that combine two pairs of semes: death/life, order/obedience.4 In industrial societies, and especially in societies of knowledge, innovation and change, a problem presents itself: the actions that are the basis of life are not axiological but abstract with respect to value, therefore, the axiological patterns or paradigms cannot stem from the central actions of survival. Therefore it is necessary that we study how to generate axiological patterns for new societies.
4 Hacia una espiritualidad laica. Barcelona: Ed. Herder, 2007, p. 73-134.
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6. Levels of the Axiologizing Narrative Structure

ESS or taxonomic model:
Deep level
Common to all narrative
stable level (system)
- establishes relations between value-terms - establishes the value-term through contrariety and contradiction - is a structure of four mutually interdependent terms, each of wich can be defined through a network of relations - helps the anachronical apprehnsion of all stories - formal model that serves to articulate the invested contents
Actants:
- are defined following the ESS
Operacions or fundamental grammar:
dynamic level (process)

Specific depending
- establishes the value transfer operations that can be made with its laws - the setting up of the taxonomic model as a process generating the transformations of contents invested in the taxonomical terms that it manipulates
Intermediate level Superficial level or manifestation
Investment of value terms
on culture
Paradigm: from which semantic investment is realised Actors Grammatical syntax:

discrete units (subject) and integrated units integradas (verb, predicate)
Narrative
Modal elements: want, know, be able Do
The elementary scheme of concrete formality (ESS) and the relations that are established between its component members must be applied to everything significative and everything axiological, from the phonological to a system of axiological rules. The elementary structure is a semiotic form independent of all investment; it is a semiotic principle that constitutes and organises all forms of natural language; it is a formal model that manipulates contents without identifying with them; it is the fundamental model of all manipulation of meaning; it is the fundamental grammar of signification and therefore of everything axiological; it is the elementary morphology of everything qualitative. The ESS defines the fundamental way of being of people and societies in the axiological aspect. This way of being is a construction that has a definable logic that is present in the discourses it generates. The ESS shows and articulates the system of all the semantic universes.
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7. Conclusions
Marta Grans
In conclusion
We have been seeking the formality of the axiological, which for a living being is the formality of the sensitive, which as sensitive has to be qualitative and that is, therefore, the formality of concrete as opposed to scientific logic. Linguistics has provided us the ESS which is a structure on the qualitative and concrete. With the elementary structure of concrete formality we have found the basic structure for the treatment of the concrete. We have also been seeking the legality of axiological transformations and linguistics has provided us with the legality of the transformations in the ESS, i.e. the legality that defines passing from one term to another. We also needed to know what the structure of a narrative, of an axiologizing theoretical formulation was, and the actantial structure of linguists provides us with the constant deep grammar of tales, myths, ideological systems and axiological systems. Finally, the procedures used by linguists for the analysis of the minimum elements of signification, semes, open up to us the possibility of knowing the relationship that exists between the axiological systems of a collective group and its modes of survival. With all this we have the instruments necessary to create axiological systems suitable for the new industrial and knowledge societies, which is what we set out to establish.
Bibliography
Greimas, A. J. Smantique structurale. Paris: Ed. Librairie Larousse, 1966. ___ Du sens. Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1970. ___ Du sens II. Essais smiotiques. Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1983. Vladimir, P. Morfologa del cuento. Madrid: Ed. Fundamentos, 1971. ___ Las races histricas del cuento. Madrid: Ed. Fundamentos, 1974. Mari, C. Anlisis epistemolgico de las configuraciones axiolgicas humanas. Salamanca: Ed. Universidad de Salamanca, 1983. ___ Hacia una espiritualidad laica. Barcelona: Ed. Herder, 2007.
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Considerations Relating to the Earth Charter in Terms of Axiological Epistemology

Jaume Agust, Josep M. Basart
The Earth Charter (EC) is a declaration on global interdependence and universal responsibility. It sets forth principles aimed at building a peaceful, just and sustainable world. It was approved in Paris in March 2000.1 It is the result of ten years of intercultural dialogue at the global level on common objectives and shared values. Its origins lie in the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992 (Earth Summit), which was a failure because the summits final Declaration did not take into account the inclusive ethical vision that many people desired and expected of it. Thus, in 1994, Maurice Strong (as president of the Earth Council that resulted from the Earth Summit) and Mikhail Gorbachev (as president of the International Green Cross) headed up the implementation of the Earth Charter Initiative (ECI). At the end of 1996 a commission began to oversee the drawing up of the draft version of the Charter. The process began in January 1997 and lasted three years Thousands of people and hundreds of organisations took part via 45 committees. The process was carried out mainly through the network and regional conferences across the five continents. The more than 4,600 organisations that have ratified the Charter and given it their backing include UNESCO, the World Conservation
1 http://www.earthcharterinaction.org/content/pages/Read-the-Charter.html
1. Introduction
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Union, the World Federation of Engineering Organizations and the International Council of Local Environment Initiatives. National political institutions include the senates of Puerto Rico and Australia and the parliaments of Portugal and the Russian Federation. The ECI is currently involved in a process of expansion and decentralisation and operates with six focus areas encompassing different independent spheres: Education, Youth, the Media, Business, the UN/Global Governance and Religion/ Spirituality/Ethics. The ECI Secretariat is based in Costa Rica at the Universidad para la Paz (University for Peace) and is run under the executive direction of Mirian Vilela. The Charter is divided into three parts: a preamble, principles and conclusions. The principles comprise its core and are grouped into four sections (I. Respect and Care for the Community of Life, II. Ecological Integrity, III. Social and Economic Justice, IV. Democracy, Non-Violence and Peace) consisting of a total of sixteen articles.
2. Perspective of the Text How the EC approaches our situation
The EC refers to our current times as a moment when we must act together in response to the gravity and urgency of our situation. In this regard, we find the following expressions in the Charter: critical moment; choose its [humanitys] future; interdependent and fragile; great peril and great promise; a demanding and uncertain adventure. We urgently need a shared vision of basic values to provide an ethical foundation for the emerging world community. ...a common standard by which the conduct of all individuals, organizations, businesses, governments, and transnational institutions is to be guided and assessed.
Fundamental changes are needed in our values, institutions, and ways of living.
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...form a global partnership to care for Earth and one another or risk the destruction of ourselves and the diversity of life.
Some value-related expressions contained in the EC
The EC contains a diverse combination of appeals to values of all types (not solely ethical values), attitudes and desirable aims. In this regard, we find expressions such as: Respect, dignity, care, understanding, compassion, love; democratic societies that are just, participatory, sustainable, and peaceful; Earths beauty; environmental conservation and rehabilitation; prevent harm; prevent pollution; reduce, reuse and recycle; renewable energy, universal access to health care; responsible reproduction; quality of life; study of sustainability; respect all life; tolerance, non-violence and peace.
Some basic questions formulated in terms of Axiological Epistemology
Is the rational philosophical, or even neurological, focus that of man as a rational animal suitable for dealing with values? Are rational principles enough for establishing end goals and bringing them to fruition, i.e. to perceive the dangers but also the great opportunities of new societies? The EC generally implicitly assumes that once its principles are established, i.e. the conceptual formulation of basic values (which are thus general and in some form abstract), human responsibility will put them into practice. In short, it assumes that the conceptual formulation and understanding of ethical principles is enough to motivate, bring together and guide individuals and society. Moreover, it sees in human responsibility a guarantee that this will happen.
The conceptual ethical focus of the EC
The Charter is mainly governed by a rationalist focus, based on concepts and general principles and the consequences arising from these. Although many perspectives have contributed to the EC and even originate from different cultures, it mainly takes a conceptual view of philosophical and ethical humanism. It does not therefore adopt a rational perspective that nonetheless is firmly focused on the axiological and essentially aimed at human feeling, motivation, orientation and human cohesion in the way that the ideologies of the Industrial Revolution did. It does not outline
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any process which, based on its principles, is aimed at the concrete, at sensibility, in order to give rise to true compliance. Instead, it continually appeals to human responsibility. This corresponds with the view of man as a rational animal, motivated and guided by reason. This stance facilitates subscription to its principles and avoids creating direct opponents, but at the cost of remaining removed from concrete reality, thereby compromising its effectiveness. The view that philosophical humanism has failed in its aim of guiding society forms part of contemporary philosophical discourse; humanist reforms proposed over the course of history have not achieved their goal. The alternative proposed by some would be to seek the solution in biotechnology and attempt to use it toward a biological reconstruction of man. However, even in this case we would need to make a value-based decision on what sort of new man we wished to achieve.
The proposal of Axiological Epistemology
For Axiological Epistemology (EA), this failure of philosophical humanism reveals the deficiency and inadequacy of a mainly rational approach to value systems, the true engines and guides of culture. Thus, seen as a global ethic, the EC is ignorant of the nature and concrete functioning of value systems. As we will see further on, the EC is thus based on an inadequate analysis of the crisis of values. AE, for its part, recognises the current crisis of values and investigates its deeper anthropological and epistemological causes. It assumes a biological and linguistic origin of knowledge. Man completes himself and makes himself into a viable animal through language. Therefore, based on the results of linguistic research, AE investigates the concrete logical parameters of value systems. How they were created imperceptibly in the past over thousands of years. Why they have fallen into crisis. How they should be constructed today given the rapidly changing living conditions imposed by technoscience. For AE, technoscience is not only inevitable, necessary to ensure our survival, but also illustrates, today more than ever, the unfeasibility of the system of operation that has largely dominated society since the Industrial Revolution. Generally speaking, AE attempts to lay the groundwork for a human science that scientifically studies how
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value systems are created, implemented and change in dynamic living conditions. In light of this, AE does not concern itself with the content of value systems but rather with how they are constructed and implemented. To this end, AE bases itself on the dual human dimension, a fundamental anthropological fact. Firstly, on the need to survive; the need for complete symbiosis with the environment. It is herein, in the qualitative and the concrete, that we must seek the origin of values. Secondly, on the specifically human abilities provided by language: distancing ourselves until we silence need and the interpretations and values associated with it. This is an attitude that is mainly one of feeling, of the axiological. Ultimately, it holds the key to how humans survive: culture. Moreover, in it a subtle possibility has always flourished: the cultivation of silence in itself, in the absence of any expectations. This is the source of human quality, of freedom, and of unconditional interest in everything. This was true in the past, but today in societies of innovation and constant change we urgently need to explicitly cultivate this ability to silence, as it holds the key to our survival and to the quality of life that we seek. AE therefore proposes a general model for the Knowledge Society (KS) based on a few attitudes forming the foundation of all values. When applied to the study of our living conditions, these attitudes will give us value postulates or templates that aim to be universal and intercultural, to be formulas for dialogue between cultures. Each culture will use these and gradually develop them into specific value projects in different spheres. AE has outlined a general KS project and a project for the cultivation of Human Quality (HQ) and Profound Human Quality (PHQ). It is through these projects that companies, research teams, economic activity, etc. will be motivated and given direction. It is from this perspective of AE that we will formulate some critical comments on some aspects of the EC in the following section. We will do so using a set of questions.
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3. Considerations for Analysis Is consideration given to what processes and factors have led us to the point at which we find ourselves?
The EC mainly acknowledges two processes: the exploitation of men and resources and unsustainable population growth. Despite this, it does not give sufficient weight to the transition of societies from static to dynamic or to how to carry out a transition. It proposes preserving and transmitting values, traditions and institutions to future generations rather than inheriting and making truly effective use of our legacy in the new KS. The EC does not acknowledge the problem of the collapse of religions. Nor does it mention the failure of ideologies or the central role of technoscience and its inevitable impact on all of the cultures, including the indigenous ones, which the EC aims to preserve.
Is the global ethic proposed conceptual and formal, or does it lead to direct contact with things, to meaning and significance?
The principles of the EC, from the perspective of AE, are mainly what we term value postulates. They are conceptual formulation templates relating to values which are abstract and general enough to be adopted by diverse cultures. According to AE, postulates should arise from the study of life conditions, especially those imposed by technoscience. The EC is vague in regard to this aspect. In particular, it does not give thematic consideration to the need of the KS for quality, the need resulting from the continual innovation in which we live. This analysis and organisation of postulates must be aimed at designing quality of life in the KS and guided by a few essential attitudes necessary in the KS: enquiry, complete symbiosis with the environment, committed human communication and mutual service. These attitudes can only occur with the abovementioned cultivation of human quality. Postulates would thus be organised hierarchically based on these few basic attitudes. A small, easy to memorise set would form the base on which the rest of the postulates would be structured hierarchically. In fact, the postulates of AE can be seen as the result of these essential attitudes, and their organisation also reflects them, albeit implicitly, but their hierarchical structure is poor.
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Postulates on their own, in their conceptual formulation, are not enough to ensure their effective incorporation and that they will motivate, draw together and orient; it is not enough for them to be understood intellectually. Firstly, to truly address values we must incorporate value-based oppositions, for example the opposition between caring for and exploiting. Conversely, the EC focuses more on responsibility than it does on motivation. To be effective, postulates must be specified progressively in myriad forms and spheres, resulting in a plurality of axiological projects, until a concrete point is reached which we consider appropriately ethical. Postulates crystallised in the form of ethical projects are the field trials that will enable us to modify or change these same postulates, depending on their success.
What are the pillars on which the Charter rests?
In the language of AE, the EC is based on the two pillars of the human makeup, the dual Subject-Object-Subject relationship. Nevertheless, as we will see it does not give enough consideration to the effects of the influence of technoscience on these two relationships. Throughout its text, the EC essentially insists on two concepts: responsibility and sustainability.
In addition to duty and the call for responsibility, does it offer up any other tool for the required change?
The continual call for responsibility made by the EC falls within the scope of ethics. However, this is not enough in the face of the current crisis and dismantling of values. Rather than insisting on responsibility, understood as an obligation, as a rational imperative, we need to address feelings, to seek compliance. Toward this end we need scientific tools to formulate and implement values at the same rate as changes are occurring. Providing these tools in its two spheres, that of need and that of selflessness, or PHQ, is the mission of AE. Within this framework, responsibility does not act with respect to what is established but rather to values that we must create. It is a responsibility of research and experimentation more than of management. The EC limits itself to the first stage of postulates and a responsibility of management.
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Is the idea of sustainability enough today? Are we not perhaps dealing with survival?
Sustainability is a broad concept. It has been understood as the ability to persist, as responsible resource management, as viable development, as covering current needs without compromising the future. It is a notion that is more utilitarian than axiological. Sustainability is a rational aspect of the underlying axiological problem: the survival of the Earth. Sustainability is thus not a basic axiological attitude, in the way that quality of life or human quality are. Due to this, sustainability cannot be the end purpose of a society, as we are sometimes given to understand. For AE this survival depends on the transition from a society of information based on research and exploitation to a KS based on enquiry, communication and mutual service. The EC does not make a resolute commitment to the KS. Rather, it places the emphasis on the sustainable society.
What type of epistemology does the Charter outline? Does it use conceptual knowledge alone, or does it also introduce axiological knowledge?
The EC does not distinguish between conceptual and axiological knowledge, between concepts and values. Rather, it confuses them and uses them interchangeably. It lays out some metaphors aimed at the feelings (the large human family, the Earth as a home) which are arguable given the very broad scope of the issue addressed. This same family is in crisis, there is an estrangement of nature. Human rights sound abstract and disorientation, irresponsibility and a lack of motivation are widespread. Apart from these metaphorical allusions to the family and home, most of the text is conceptual in nature. This is a very frequent position in all fields, whether humanist or scientific. AE recognises values as essential knowledge, a knowledge that we call axiological the be-all and end-all of every activity. They are a knowledge that is qualitative, aimed at the senses, concrete, closely linked to the semantic structures of language. If axiological knowledge is that of a natural language, conceptual knowledge is that of a metalanguage in which value
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components are reduced to a minimum, with emphasis placed on the descriptive, informative, instrumental and utilitarian aspects of language. This abstraction from values enables the inventiveness and flexibility of reason and is crucial to the scientific method that aims to create the information models of reality needed to predict and control phenomena. On the other hand, the EC suffers due to its somewhat apodictic view of ethics, which is the reason for its insistence on responsibility and the ethical imperative. Despite its constructivist stance, it does display a hint of mythical epistemology. For instance, nature seems to be something outside of our constructs.
Is it a static, closed declaration?
The EC is a rather static proposal, with tinges of rational authoritarianism: it does not explicitly contemplate methodical verification of its applicability and effectiveness, of its refutability, as should be done in the realm of human science. It gauges its success more in terms of subscription to its principles than by the development of concrete axiological projects that should be triggered by such subscription. It does not contemplate revision of its formulations in order to adapt them when appropriate to the constant changes that distinguish the KS. This is a consequence of not making a topic of discussion of the relationship between living conditions and its principles. The continual, rapid changes produced by technoscience in all spheres cannot be adequately guided using static formulations such as that of the EC.
What relationships are established between nature and culture? Does any sort of transcendence appear (reason, nature...)? How can we combat the distancing of nature as a place of feeling due to the interference of technoscience?
The EC casts aside the relationship of mans dominance over nature. The Earth is seen as a living being to protect, conserve and care for. Nevertheless, it retains a certain mythical epistemology, likely inherited from scientificism. The Earth and nature are still seen as something relatively external to culture. In contrast, AE places nature at the core of
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culture. For AE nature is not something external that must be cared for, but rather a place of feeling, a privileged place in which to access the axiological dimension. There is no single nature that is identical for all cultures. Each culture has, depending on its life conditions, its own sense of nature. In the current societies of innovation and constant change it is not enough to speak of conservation, protection and reducing the impact of technoscience, as does the EC. These things are necessary, but insufficient. We need to cut to the root of the problem: we need complete symbiosis with the Earth constructed culturally, following and making use of technological innovations. Knowledge of nature is considered to be a task falling almost exclusively to technoscience. However, this science is removed from values. It has created an artificial world that tends to distance itself from direct daily contact with nature. It has become necessary to foster direct, axiological knowledge of nature in parallel to technoscientific knowledge. The warnings of ecologists and environmental studies cannot make up for the lack of an axiological science of nature.
Does the Charter make use of oppositions, sense-based evaluations or sense-based evaluations dealt with conceptually?
According to linguistics, the elementary structure of meaning is rooted in opposition. Every meaning is affirmed by negating its opposite. Although the EC poses an alternative, set up in contrast to the current unsustainable system, it does not argue the relationship of opposition between the two systems. Neither does it establish this relationship between different opposing concepts of values. And such a feat is possible, as Buddhist texts show, in order to instil respect for life and profound human quality. Such texts continually present oppositions, the rewards arising from acting in one direction as opposed to suffering in the other. Nothing of this sort occurs in the EC. Neither does it describe the opposition between a system of research to obtain information with which to exploit men and the Earth and a system of enquiry for symbiosis with the Earth, committed communication and mutual service between men. This sort of contrast is the way to avoid deceptive attempts to reform the current system without touching its foundations.
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Are there actants in the Charter? Who represents the figures of the Sender, the Receiver, the Opponent and the Helper?
Actants are the roles around which the meaning of discourse is structured; they are like an axiological grammar of natural language. Few actants appear, because the Charter is not a knowledge society project but rather a formulation of postulates. Only the preamble contains any actants (the Earth as a living creature, as a common home, technoscience as a Helper and current conditions of production and consumption as an Opponent). It is not the task of postulates but rather of projects to establish a structure oriented toward axiology like the actantial model. Despite this, postulates can reveal the existence of potential actants in the projects to be developed based on these postulates. The EC identifies some of these implicitly. It clearly points to a double Receiver actant of the KS, which would be humanity and the Earth. The EC does not, in contrast, point clearly to the Sender actant, due to its global ethical focus. Nevertheless, one might interpret from the first few sentences of the EC that our inexorable situation, with its perils and opportunities, would be the Sender, and although in the EC wisdom or PHQ do not appear as a central figure, they could be considered part of the Sender. The Subject actant would be citizens, organisations, etc., and the Object would be an emerging global civil society in complete symbiosis with the environment. The Opponent would be all of the agents of human exploitation and exploitation of natural resources, but there is no indication whatsoever that the main Opponent is anything that impedes recognising the Sender, recognising our situation and making it more difficult to cultivate HQ. The main Helper would be technoscience.
Does it adopt a social or a more individualist perspective?
The EC states: Every individual, family, organization, and community has a vital role to play. The arts, sciences, religions, educational institutions, media, businesses, non-governmental organizations, and governments are all called to offer creative leadership. The partnership of government, civil society, and business is essential for effective governance.
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This is a very general inclusive view, in which past and future are lumped together, with no mention made of the need to adapt to suit the characteristics of the KS. For example, it makes no reference to the incompatibility between hierarchical institutions and organisations and the KS.
Is consideration given to the fact that humans shape the evolution of life? Is consideration given to the fact that our biological and symbiotic needs are common, but that their realisation is cultural and therefore diverse?
Insistence on conservation is insufficient. It does not acknowledge the dynamic of human shaping and the need to guide it. The EC doesnt seem to take into account the irreducibility between cultures, despite the high degree of intercultural collaboration that went into the drafting of the Charter.
Does it place itself at the service of the knowledge society? Is adequate distinction made between information and communication? Is the imposition of technologies as ideologies criticised? In what manner?
As mentioned above, the EC fails to distinguish between conceptual and axiological knowledge. It thereby inevitably restricts itself to dealing with information. It postulates the right to receive clear and timely information on environmental matters and all development plans and activities, but it overlooks the fact that information is a means to committed human communication and that only the latter is found at the root of all values. There is no clear commitment to the KS in the EC. Instead it talks about a global civil society that is democratic and humanitarian, founded on the EC. For example, it affirms the right of indigenous peoples to their spirituality, knowledge, lands and resources and to their related practice of sustainable livelihoods. However, if the aim is to avoid cultural marginalisation then careful consideration must be given to the inevitable impact of the KS on all cultures, including indigenous ones. It would be desirable for these cultures to create their own forms of knowledge society to prevent the marginalisation that is otherwise unavoidable.
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The ethical focus of the EC means that ideological conflicts rooted in mystical epistemology are overlooked. Such conflicts of power are still as alive as, for example, the debates between scientificism and religious ideology in the United States.
By what means is compliance by people expected to be achieved?
The EC proposes that we: Enhance the role of the mass media in raising awareness of ecological and social challenges. And, furthermore: support the implementation of Earth Charter principles with an international legally binding instrument on environment and development. To this end some principles of action have been drawn up (see the final Appendix). Axiological epistemology considers the formulation of postulates insufficient. Due to this it proposes the creation of postulate-guided projects with differing levels of definition for the specific ethics in question, as it is at these levels where the desired motivation and compliance can be achieved. Furthermore, AE sees the need to use and develop strategies and tactics to implement these proposals. We must learn from religions, which are the true masters in this use of strategies and tactics.
How do the relative dimension and the absolute dimension, human quality and profound human quality appear and interact?
On this point the EC makes a series of proposals: Human development is primarily about being more, not having more... We live with reverence for the mystery of being, gratitude for the gift of life, and humility regarding the human place in nature... Recognize and preserve the traditional knowledge and spiritual wisdom in all cultures... Protect and restore outstanding places of cultural and spiritual significance... Recognize the importance of moral and spiritual education for sustainable living. With these rather conservative declarations, the EC does not nearly reflect the profound crisis of values currently under way. It takes an inclu63
sive stance, with spirituality as one of societys aspects, but it does not get to the root of the problem. The spiritual needs of the KS, or the need for PHQ, the impediments and obstacles to meeting these needs, how to inherit the wisdom of other traditions in a way that can be assimilated into the KS; all of these questions are not even hinted at in the EC. It is here that we must understand the mutation we are experiencing and the need to look to our anthropological, epistemological and axiological roots: the cultivation of Interest, Detachment and Silence (IDS), of HQ and PHQ. It is vital to realise that given the dynamic of continual change in the KS, the constant new possibilities and perils that arise, known values are often of no use to us and we can only face the new situation creatively with attitudes such as IDS and ICS (Innovation, Communication and Service). For this reason AE proposes the development of axiological projects able to motivate and guide the cultivation of these attitudes of wisdom. Human quality as an attitude empty of content appears as one more value among many others. The EC states: The protection of Earths vitality, diversity and beauty is a sacred trust. This is religious language that may end up triggering more rejection than motivation. Nevertheless, complete symbiosis with the Earth is only possible with the practice of IDS, particularly PHQ. This has been made clear by traditions of wisdom.
Principles of action in the implementation and use of the Charter Start with distribution of the Charter. Allow it to be your basic guide. Let your actions be a living day-to-day example in all areas. Empower yourself. Act with decisiveness and trust in your ability to mobilise other people. Cooperate and cooperate. Collaborate with other people to gain strength.
4. Appendix
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Empower others. Share your power and offer others opportunities to develop their own skills. Foster respect and understanding. Contribute to building relationships of respect and trust between people and groups from different cultures or communities. Resolve differences through constructive dialogue. Facilitate independent organisation. Promote the distribution of initiatives inspired by the Charter, without attempting to control them, trusting in the ability of groups to find appropriate exit routes. Focus on the root of the cause. Do not allow external pressure and unsustainable systems to separate you from your path. Commit yourself and be flexible. Always act in accordance with the principles of the Charter, but be flexible and creative in adapting specific means to the circumstances. Be ingenious. Do not let your actions be guided by a need for money. Use your imagination to achieve your goals. Use technology wisely. Remember that not everybody has access to it. If you make use of it try to ensure this use is suitable to the circumstances. Protect the integrity of the Charter. Respect the text and its spirit and make sure the Charter only becomes involved with organisations and actions that respect it and share its values.
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The Will to Truth as the Will to Believe1

Flvio Augusto Senra Ribeiro2 Roberto Lcio Diniz Jnior3
An Approach from a Nietzschean Perspective
This article uses the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche as a starting point to provoke reflection. Our interests lie, in principle, in the philosophers analysis of the problem of nihilism and its relationship to the conception of the world arising from religious, philosophical, scientific and artistic discourse which, according to the philosopher, is characterised by what he terms the Christian and ascetic ideal4. The study is guided by specific fragments of a philosophy that leads us to question the truth of life conceived of as a will to power. In order to give an insight into the scope of this problem, the subject matter put forward for consideration herein is restricted to the matter of the will to believe. This problem entails a dialogue between philosophy, theology and science. Beyond this delimitation, in the form of propaedeutics, on one hand it is worth noting that Nietzsche has been tackled by distinguished critics associated with various schools of interpretation, which implies that there
1 Presentation given at the 8th International Meeting of CETR in Barcelona from the 16th to the 20th of October 2012, under the title The Axiological Crisis in Terms of the Problem of Nihilism. An Approach from a Nietzschean Perspective. Work was undertaken within the scope of the Religious and Cultural Research Group. Participation in the Meeting was made possible by the support of CAPES (Coordenaao de Aperfeioamento de Pessoal de Nvel Superior/Ministerio de Educao do Brasil). The original text of this translation was published in Estudos Teolgicos in the year 2011, available at http://periodicos.est.edu.br/index.php/estudos_teologicos. 2 See description in the presentation participants 3 BA Philosophy, Master of Religious Science at the Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil. 4 On this topic, see the article entitled Entre o trgico e o asctico (Between the Tragic and the Ascetic) in Horizonte Teolgico. Belo Horizonte, 2005, n. 8.
1. Introduction
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Flavio Augusto Senra Ribeiro, Roberto LcioDiniz Jnior
are still varied perspectives on the interpretation of his philosophy. On the other hand, however, it is also essential to possess an understanding of the advances made in recent studies of Nietzsche. Finally, the aim of this study on the will to truth as the will to believe is to reflect on the value of the transitory, the fleeting and the temporary, using Nietzsches philosophy to provoke thought. However, through such provocation of thought on this trait of the world, we avoid the duality between permanent and transitory. The affirmation in Nietzsches philosophy of evolution as the correct way to designate being prevents us, by its very nature, from making these categories problematic as dualities. According to Twilight of the Idols5, the only option is to consider what exists as transition, as flow, as movement, a continual evolution of forces in confrontation. Reflection based on Nietzsche is not an easy goal to set oneself. Since the philosopher Zarathustra, the mission of philosophy has moved on to inhabit a place that lies beyond good and evil. This is a goal that must be built on surpassing a metaphysics based on the principle of identity, of permanence and the unity of being. These are the conditions for a revitalised critique of culture with a view to a new project for humanity and new goals for the Earth, i.e. taking the Earth as a goal. Dehumanising the cosmos and naturalising the human was addressed in Human, All Too Human6. This is a battlefield that holds no more room for either substantialist dogmatism of metaphysical truths or hasty recourse to relativism. The field opened up by Nietzsches philosophy of perspectivism is seen here as the appropriate place for this philosophical conflict. In this vital space, in which world and freedom converge, the truth can be experienced as the dangerous maybe, a condition under which devotees of wisdom may once again find an open sea for the adventure of knowledge.
5 NIETZSCHE, F. Gtzen-Dmmerung. In. Smtliche Werke. Kristische Studienausgabe in 15 Bnden. Vol. 6. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999. 6 NIETZSCHE, F. Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. In. Smtliche Werke. Kristische Studienausgabe in 15 Bnden. Vol. 2. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999.
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The Will to Truth as the Will to Believe. An Approach from a Nietzschean Perspective
The philosopher, like any animal-human7, is a bridge. This mid-path location, inherent to status as a transition, to being in between, is the effective situation of our mundane condition. It is the relevant way in which evolution affects and constitutes all that exists, and thus requires an understanding that the truth of the world entails reflecting on the transience of the real, of the vital, of the mundane and that which exists. The experience of overcoming is fashioned like a rope thrown over an abyss. This experience should make men able to form a humanity resolved on the most tremendous love, the most complex and lofty love ever fully experienced. Love for the ephemeral, as radical love for the world, love that takes the Earth as a goal and which has been, before reaching this point, a love denied. Love for the ephemeral is a scheme which, in terms of the will to power the term the philosopher used to conceive of life has been prohibited and deferred by the philosopher, the artist, the positivist, the idealist and ascetic believers from all schools of thought and traditions. The ephemeral is the lightest weight, but it becomes the heaviest load when the need for security and permanence is taken as the predominant will. The ephemeral attests that no reality is untouched by transience, by radical immanence and finitude. In this manner of constitution of everything, evolution is the event. The most solid thing that can be imagined is shown to be elusive. This thought is reflected in the comparable expression of the fateful verdict: Gods, too, decompose8, stated by Nietzsche in paragraph 125 of The Gay Science9.
The philosopher is an educator of his era, of his time. Today we are living through and suffering the pathos of anxiety rooted in the acceleration
7 On this topic, see Nietzsches arguments pertaining to man in the prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra. According to the philosopher, Der Mensch ist ein Seil, geknpft zwischen Tier und bermensch - ein Seil ber einem Abgrunde. NIETZSCHE, F. Also sprach Zaratustra. In. Smtliche Werke. Kristische Studienausgabe in 15 Bnden. Vol. 4. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999. p. 16. 8 - auch Gtterverwesen!NIETZSCHE, F. Die frhliche Wissenschaft. In. Smtliche Werke. Kristische Studienausgabe in 15 Bnden. Vol. 3. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999. p. 481. 9 NIETZSCHE, F. Die frhliche Wissenschaft. In. Smtliche Werke. Kristische Studienausgabe in 15 Bnden. Vol. 3. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999.
2. Regarding a Certain Appraisal of the World
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of time and experiences. At the same time as it is celebrated, finitude is also repudiated or at least concealed. For four centuries, the relativity of values has been reaching a point of critical completeness. Human, interpersonal and institutional relations are threatened by the intolerance of the islands of truth that individuals have become and by their small clubs of meaning. Tempus fugit is an expression that our era has a great deal of experience with. Anxiety that is no less significant arises from a lack of time, which passes as if the seconds that comprise it had sped up. The fruits of modern technology, fetishized in a market turned idol, played a contributing role in this experience of radical lack. This voracious devourer10 of our high hopes follows the ascetic routine of our duties and commitments. The old monster of you ought11 became a way of laying even more blame. What else can we think in this state in which we find ourselves? Awareness of the acceleration of time, the pasteurisation of experiences, reveals itself as a sign of the current version of what could still well be called decadence, i.e. a symptom of a tragic decline. In any case, there is no thought more abysmal, as an end to all that exists is unthinkable. The transience of time, previously rejected, is now maximised. How can we speak of a love for the ephemeral when we see something negative in it? In cases such as these there is no shortage of those eager for the peace of eternal rest. All of the force of life here can only negate or affirm, and therein lies the unspeakable mystery that probes impossible love, the truth of the world as an ephemeral reality; in both cases, the will to power. Since the dawn of philosophy we have considered that the senses commonly reveal the truth of the world as traffic, fruition, evolution. Everything
10 The Saturnal connection forces us to reflect and think on the meaning of this paternity and how we relate to this essential feature of our being as a world. The mark of all that lives governs our thoughts of the world in terms of how we understand it and how we understand ourselves. The logos of the world is expressed as meaning and intellect. 11 On overcoming the Kantian you ought according to Nietzsche, see the speech The Three Metamorphoses of the Spirit in his work Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Cf. NIETZSCHE, F. Also sprach Zaratustra. In. Smtliche Werke. Kristische Studienausgabe in 15 Bnden. Vol. 4. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999. p. 30.
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passes, everything transforms and eternally spins the wheel of being12 are some expressions of this understanding. Nevertheless, in these and other examples, in addition to the senses sound reason, the product of a vigorous and affirmative constitution, can also perceive this truth. Even so, as a fantastical survival instrument belonging to a fragile species, reason also postulated permanence, identity, immutability, not only under the pretext of better understanding the world but also in a desire to correct its essential mutability. Expressions of this physiological need are well known: Being is. Non-being is not, Being is one, eternal and unchanging, there is an intelligible world, the foundation is an unmoved mover, the first cause, a causa sui. In these examples, chosen for the impact they had on tradition, what remains one, eternal and unchanging is what prevents us from succumbing to constant movement. Underpinning the problem is the issue of rejection of the factual and ephemeral aspects of the world. This interpretation of the world suggests a figure and a sense for the Nietzschean interpretation of the world13. As to the issues of world and freedom, tradition developed different understandings or interpretations. For Nietzsche, the big decision and the transition to a new way of life hinge on world and freedom14. On one hand the aim is to overcome the Platonic evaluation of the intelligible world and the sensible world, and on the other to dissolve the incompatibility between nature and freedom. The transformation of the inverted world of nihilism is Nietzsches fundamental mission. Therefore, creating freedom and creating world are the source of the attitude that is of import here when the truth of the world in its precise definition is taken into account.
12 In this regard Nietzsche reminds us that the child as the third metamorphosis of the spirit is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, eternal recurrence. Cf. NIETZSCHE, F. Also sprach Zaratustra. In. Smtliche Werke. Kristische Studienausgabe in 15 Bnden. Vol. 4. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999. p. 31. In the speech The Convalescent in the same work, the philosopher affirms this doctrine of eternal recurrence. Alles geht, alles Kommt zurck; ewig rollt de las Rad des Seins. Alles stirbt, alles blht wieder auf, ewig luft de las Jahr des Seins. NIETZSCHE, F. Also sprach Zaratustra. In. Smtliche Werke. Kristische Studienausgabe in 15 Bnden. Vol. 4. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999. p. 272. 13 See NAVARRO CORDN, Juan Manuel. Nietzsche: de la libertad del mundo. Enciclopedia Iberoamericana de Filosofa, Vol. 23. Ed. Jos Luis Villacaas Berlaga, La filosofa del siglo XIX. Madrid: Editorial Trotta-CSIC, 2001. 14 Cf. NIETZSCHE, F. Nachgelassene Fragmante. Smtliche Werke. Kristische Studienausgabe in 15 Bnden. Vol. 9. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999. pp. 494 and 519.
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Nothing encouraged artistic, religious, philosophical and scientific production more than reflection on its foundations, i.e. its origins and destiny. It is still not uncommon to repeatedly hear that the fundamental questions are: What is the origin of all things?, Where are we going? and Who are we? From cave paintings to contemporary scientific and technological developments, humanity has always been preoccupied with reflecting on meaning. With regard to these sorts of questions on meaning, in 1887 German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche insisted on a way of approaching the issue. The goal is lacking; the answer to the question of why? is lacking15. The question of why? is a determining factor in understanding the phenomenon of nihilism, which had already been approached in that era by Russian literature and, in French fashion, by thinking on pessimism and decline in the face of the value crisis of the 19th century. However, as a philosophical event, the issue took root as a benchmark for understanding the essential question of the philosophy, even more so than the way in which the answer was given. Nihilism has a range of definitions in the philosophical, psychological and literary spheres as thoughts of a calamitous nature, that is, decisions of the gravest nature in regard to meaning and to questioning meaning. In general, it is worth noting at this point that nihilism is not a pure and simple crisis of values, as this could describe any time and place in the history of a human group. Nihilism was the name given to and understood as a movement based on cultural constructs. Our situation is thus even more precarious in terms of the problem of meaning and any potential social organisation. However, even while envisioning the grand destruction of conceptions of the world and a resulting anarchy of values16 or the downfall of the grand values previously accepted, let us call this moral relativism, nihilism is still a phenomenon rooted in deeper soil.
3. A Fundamental Question
15 See the Posthumous Herbst Fragment from 1887 9[35]: es fehlt das Ziel; es fehlt die Antwort auf das Warum. NIETZSCHE, F. Nachgelassene Fragmante. Smtliche Werke. Kristische Studienausgabe in 15 Bnden. Vol. 12. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999. p. 350. 16 See VALADIER, Paul. Lanarchie des valeurs. Le relativisme est-il fatal? Paris: Albin Michel, 1997. Translation to Portuguese in VALADIER, Paul. A anarquia dos valores. Ser o relativismo fatal? Lisboa: Instituto Piaget, 1997.
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This deeper soil must be tilled with the careful precision of a skilled genealogist. The philosopher should be on the lookout for signs of cultural production in the search for vestiges of originating forces, for a basis from which to understand the way the human animal has brought about and preserved a certain interpretation of the world, thereby building a suitable base for cultural constructs. The attitude of the philosopher envisioned here is that of a genealogical researcher. Tracing the genealogy of culture does not entail a mere translation of historical processes, but rather research into the mindset that manifests in the creation of any value, attitude, action or creation, whether in biological or in cultural facts. A known attitude removed from philosophers in relation to this mode of proceeding only testifies, in principle, to the existence of a mindset. Thus, we must question the type of mindset that affected the interpretation of life in the known history of humanity. This is based on the principle that mindset comprises the mode of arranging, organising, setting up a hierarchy, an ability to affirm or repudiate. What is arranged obeys a temperament, an intent, a will. The latter, for their part, ultimately determine the health of he who is willing to and willing for. Forces thus compel mindset that attest to certain abilities, certain strength. The following questions arise: What is the proper strength of love for the ephemeral? Awareness of the transitory undoubtedly requires more strength, more health, more willingness to make an affirmation that asks for no reassurance in return. The end point, tranquillity, the safe harbour of ideals and ideologies, requires a different sort of strength. Returning to where we started out, remember that mention was made of the ever present awareness that everything passes and that therefore everything is movement and transition. The nature of being of things is, from this perspective, one of constant evolution. However, the artistic, philosophical, religious and scientific movements of the recent centuries of human history (at least the last twenty-five centuries!), from Parmenides to our times, have worked to make this love non-viable. The price we pay for the truth of life drives us to commit to and preserve not truth but rather the will for what is taken as true to be effective, to be real. Nevertheless, it is only an ideal. Imposing an ideal over the truth of the world has already divided our perceptions of reality into apparent and
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intelligible, profane and sacred, good and bad, true and false, rational and irrational, conscious and unconscious, happy and sad.
The will to believe, in contrast to the shifting nature that characterises reality, longs for the end. It proposes that the world should have a supranatural, intelligible human order. This mindset, which displays hatred for the natural and passion for the beyond, is not at all unknown. On the contrary, it has shown itself to be the most commonly accepted good, the most natural, frequent and normal state, even if this mindset runs counter to life. In art, religion, philosophy and science, this situation is distinguished by idyllic idealisation as a model to replace reality. The beautiful ideal, the good, the ideal world, paradise, (on Earth or in Heaven), the intelligible world, perfect and pure knowledge, clear and distinct ideas, the myth of progress. Determining the plausibility of the content of these assertions is not germane to our purpose. What is of interest is assessing the mindset that gives rise to the type of man that attacks truth, imprisoning it in the idealisation of the world. Truth thus conceived is limited by an I want it to be that way, to be true. In actuality, what has occurred thus far entails the establishment of a true-world imposed by way of the belief that affirms what should be. After this affirmation, what was intended to be affirmed from the beginning must be envisioned. Otherwise, it must be stated that transience often meets with an attitude of suspicion. Radical prejudice against the unspeakable, unimaginable, inconceivable and changeable whole has governed our conception of the truth. A partial understanding is preferred, a radical illusion based on a faith or reason that lays the groundwork for predefinition of the nature of all things. This need is referred to as the will to believe. It is rooted in the principle that it is essential to have a secure, solid, unchanging foundation. It doesnt seem to be healthy to prefer this sort of lie. This situation is symptomatic of a lack of vitality. Physiologically speaking, we are fragile beings that love concepts and conceptions of the world, believers in lan74
4. The Will to Believe
guage, believes above all in that which fills in gaps, desirous of answers, of meaning. Thus, humanity faces the grave problem expressed by Nietzsche as the death of God.17 This issue is not restricted to expressing the simple philosophy of atheists, but rather encompasses the complex process of nihilism in Nietzsches philosophy. An attempt to comment on Nietzsches statement that God is dead equates to the task of interpreting that which Nietzsche understands as nihilism18 . According to Heidegger, God and the Christian God are both used by Nietzsche, to represent the supra-sensible world in general and its different interpretations, whether as ideals, norms, principles, rules, ends or values. In the philosophy of Socrates-Plato, these interpretations established an understanding of the world based on a dual view characterised by a real world (true) and a changeable world (apparent). Considering the end of Platonism understood in this manner thus means considering the event of nihilism in its radicalism. Nietzsches philosophy is put forward as the proposition of overcoming belief in the true world. The supra-sensible world was made into a superfluous hypothesis that should be done away with. However, the following problem persists: if we abolish the supra-sensible world, what remains in its place? Moreover, what meaning does the sensible world have after the ideal world is abolished? In other words, if God is dead, if the ideal, the end purpose, the telos that for so long has guided the values that govern Western society has lost its value, what is it that is left in its place? These questions are important problems for humanity. In the attempt to understand the whys, it is necessary to investigate the essence of the will to truth or, better said, its origins.
17 See SENRA, Flvio. Que Deus na morte de Deus. In. SOTER. (Org.) Deus e vida. Desafos, alternativas e o futuro da amrica Latina e do Caribe. So Paulo: Paulinas, 2008. p. 371-384. Also consult SENRA, Flvio. Deus nafilosofianietzschiana. Provocao a partir da noo de culpabilidade para umacompreenso moral, metafsica e religiosa da frase de Nietzsche Deus est morto. In. OLIVEIRA, Ibraim Vtor, PAIVA, Mrcio Antnio. Violncia e discurso sobre Deus. Da desconstruo abertura tica. So Paulo: Paulinas, 2010. p. 83-120. 18 HEIDEGGER, M. A palavra de Nietzsche Deus morreu. In. Caminhos da Floresta. Lisboa: Calouste Gulbenkian, 2002. p. 252.
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Important considerations are found in The Gay Science, which Nietzsche weaves around the will to truth. It is above all in this work that the philosopher expands on his unique interpretation of the existence of a relationship between science, morality and religion. For Nietzsche, all of these share the same premise: the inexorable demand for certainty. In this regard, aphorism 347 of The Gay Science entitled Believers and their need of belief is notable.
Some still have need of metaphysics; but also the impatient longing for certainty which at present discharges itself in scientific, positivist fashion among large numbers of the people, the longing by all means to get at something stable (while on account of the warmth of the longing the establishing of the certainty is more leisurely and negligently undertaken). All of this also reveals the need for support, for a base, that instinct of weakness which, in short, does not give rise to religions, metaphysics, convictions of all types but rather preserves them.19
Two aspects of this quote stand out. Firstly, the human need for something solid, something secure to support us. The second aspect is that Nietzsches approach to the truth does not restrict itself to an isolated critique of reason, metaphysics, morality and religion. This is seen in his observation that some still have need of metaphysics; but also the impatient longing for certainty which at present discharges itself in scientific, positivist fusion20. The Gay Science points out the development, as per Nietzsche, of the intrinsic relationship between science, conviction and truth. In aphorism 344 the philosopher states:
It is said with good reason that convictions have no civic rights in the domain of science: it is only when a conviction voluntarily condescends to the modesty of an hypothesis, a preliminary standpoint for experiment, or a regulative fiction, that its access to the realm of knowledge, and a certain value therein, can be conceded
19 NIETZSCHE, F. Die frhliche Wissenschaft. In. Smtliche Werke. Kristische Studienausgabe in 15 Bnden. Vol. 3. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999. p. 581-582.Translation at http:// nietzsche.holtof.com/reader/friedrich-nietzsche/the-gay-science/aphorism-347-quote_46cc00913. html 20 Idem
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always, however, with the restriction that it must remain under police supervision, under the police of our distrust. Regarded more accurately, however, does not this imply that only when a conviction ceases to be a conviction can it obtain admission into science? Does not the discipline of the scientific spirit just commence when one no longer harbours any conviction?... It is probably so: only, it remains to be asked whether, in order that this discipline may commence, it is not necessary that there should already be a conviction, and in fact one so imperative and absolute, that it makes a sacrifice of all other convictions. One sees that science also rests on a belief: there is no science at all without premises. The question whether truth is necessary, must not merely be affirmed beforehand, but must be affirmed to such an extent that the principle, belief, or conviction finds expression, that there is nothing more necessary than truth, and in comparison with it everything else has only secondary value.21
It can be seen that for Nietzsche the will to truth is a belief belief in the superiority of the truth and it is on this that science is based. There is no science without the postulate, without the metaphysical hypothesis that the true is superior to the false, that truth has more value than appearance. According to Machado22, Nietzsches argument reaches its culmination when his analysis of the intrinsic relationship between science and morality reveals the homogeneity between the two as metaphysics. Metaphysics is by nature nihilist because it judges and devalues life in the name of a supra-sensible world. Therefore, the condition of the possible existence of science is ultimately faith in a metaphysical value of the truth.
But what I have in view will now be understood, namely, that it is always a metaphysical belief on which our belief in science rests, and that even we knowing ones of today, the godless and antimetaphysical, still take our fire from the conflagration kindled by
21 NIETZSCHE, F. Die frhliche Wissenschaft. In. Smtliche Werke. Kristische Studienausgabe in 15 Bnden. Vol. 3. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999. p. -575. Translation http://nietzsche.holtof.com/reader/friedrich-nietzsche/the-gay-science/aphorism-344-quote_639d6aa76.html 22 MACHADO, Roberto. Nietzsche e a Verdade. So Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1999.
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a belief a millennium old, the Christian belief, which was also the belief of Plato, that God is truth, that the truth is divine... But what if this itself always becomes more untrustworthy, what if nothing any longer proves itself divine, except it be error, blindness, and falsehood; what if God himself turns out to be our most persistent lie? 23
Acknowledgement that science and religion share the same will to truth is still not enough to answer the question that was posed herein: What is the origin of the will to truth? To this end, two points are discussed by Nietzsche. The philosopher describes the origin of belief in terms of habit24 and need. For the German philosopher, the project of modernity, mainly distinguished by the development of science, seemed to be just the remedy to fight the will to believe. Science was developing rapidly and the best part was that this was occurring without God, the beyond, and the virtues of denial25. Does this then mean that the ascetic ideal would ultimately be destroyed by the atheism of science? This is a blunder. The scientist, according to Nietzsche, is an ascetic priest. He also gives meaning to life, offers up a truth, imposes a value. This pair, science and the ascetic ideal, both rest on the same foundation... on the same overestimation of the truth (more exactly: on the same belief that truth is inestimable and cannot be criticised)26. Both are symptoms of decadence, both insist on repudiating life; flip sides of the same coin. Both the religious edifice and that of science are built on the same foundation: conviction. When addressing the enemies of truth In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche concludes that Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies27.
23 NIETZSCHE, F. Die frhliche Wissenschaft. In. Smtliche Werke. Kristische Studienausgabe in 15 Bnden. Vol. 3. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999. p. 577. Translation http://nietzsche.holtof.com/reader/friedrich-nietzsche/the-gay-science/aphorism-344-quote_639d6aa76.html 24 See NIETZSCHE, F. Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. In. Smtliche Werke. Kristische Studienausgabe in 15 Bnden. Vol. 2. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999, p. 226. 25 NIETZSCHE, F. Zur Genealogie der Moral. In. Smtliche Werke. Kristische Studienausgabe in 15 Bnden. Vol. 5. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999. p. 396. 26 NIETZSCHE, F. Zur Genealogie der Moral. In. Smtliche Werke. Kristische Studienausgabe in 15 Bnden. Vol. 5. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999. p. 402. 27 NIETZSCHE, F. Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. In. Smtliche Werke. Kristische Studienausgabe in 15 Bnden. Vol. 2. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999, p. 317.
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According to Nietzsche, we know the fact that the world in which we live is ungodly, immoral, and inhuman - we have far too long interpreted it to ourselves falsely and mendaciously, according to the wish and will of our veneration, that is to say, according to our need.28 For this reason, he concludes in aphorism 347 of The Gay Science that this shows always and above all the need of belief, support, backbone, and buttress29. It can be understood that man, unable to handle his mortal condition and the diversity of the world, hands himself over to the unknown, to fear, and in the weighty areas of metaphysical and religious thought seeks a mechanism that can provide meaning to suffering and neutralise his finitude. It is precisely this need to create safer structures of existence capable of transcending the finitude of the human condition that reinforces a religious experience still distinguished by the mark of nihilism. Faith, while a need, is still subject to an important division in Nietzsches philosophy. In the same aphorism, number 347 of The Gay Science, he argues that belief is always most desired, most pressingly needed, where there is a lack of will. Moreover, Nietzsche continues,
...the less a person knows how to command, the more urgent is his desire for that which commands, and commands sternly a God, a prince, a caste, a physician, a confessor, a dogma, a party conscience. From whence perhaps it could be inferred that the two world-religions, Buddhism and Christianity, might well have had the cause of their rise, and especially of their rapid extension, in an extraordinary malady of the will.30
For Nietzsche, while they are possessed of a will to truth, a will to believe, believers are distinguished by a weak will. Paul Valadier31points out that a weak will is powerless in the face of the dynamic game in which truth is laid down. This affliction arises precisely from the need to find a truth at all costs, to find certainty.
28 NIETZSCHE, F. Die frhliche Wissenschaft. In. Smtliche Werke. Kristische Studienausgabe in 15 Bnden. Vol. 3. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999. p. 580. 29 NIETZSCHE, F. Die frhliche Wissenschaft. In. Smtliche Werke. Kristische Studienausgabe in 15 Bnden. Vol. 3. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999. p. 582. 30 NIETZSCHE, F. Die frhliche Wissenschaft. In. Smtliche Werke. Kristische Studienausgabe in 15 Bnden. Vol. 3. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999. p. 582. 31 VALADIER, Paul. Nietzsche et la critique du christianisme. Paris, CERF, 1974.
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The main thrust of the aim of Nietzsches analysis of the will to truth, as we have seen, is not to critique religion alone. It extends across other fields, for example to science and philosophy. For Nietzsche, both the scientist and the religious man, and even philosophers, believe they possess the truth. Nietzsche seems to want to address in his works what is concealed in the search for truth32. It is not mere coincidence that his research method is presented as genealogy. It is essential to bear in mind that for Nietzsche facts do not exist. There are only interpretations. This leads his philosophy to tear down idols, or what thus far had been called truth. It is in this context that Nietzsche contemplates belief as a human need. The human being has sought meaning, certainty, throughout the tradition of Western philosophy. It was precisely this search for truth at all costs which resulted in the (very solid) construction of convictions. Every conviction gives rise to a belief and imprisons man in the truth, or rather, in his truth. Convictions are prisons, we are reminded by Nietzsche in aphorism 54 of The Antichrist. Belief in one ideal or another (scientific or religious) reveals what Nietzsche called a malady of will. In this manner, it is evident that for the philosopher only an unsure and weak being becomes a believer. But why, then, do we need truth? Why the will to believe? According to Nietzsche, because we lack the strength to face the world as a place of dispute, of conflict, of opposing forces and evolution. As long as we seek a greater meaning, a supreme truth, as long as we need to be guided, we will always be believers. The challenge that Nietzsches philosophy presents us with is the following:
Imagine a delight and a power of self-determining, and a freedom of will, whereby a spirit could bid farewell to every belief, to every wish for certainty, accustomed as it would be to support itself on slender cords and possibilities, and to dance even on the verge of abysses. Such a spirit would be the free spirit par excellence.33
5. Final Considerations
32 NIETZSCHE, F. Der Antichrist. In. Smtliche Werke. Kristische Studienausgabe in 15 Bnden. Vol. 6. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999. p. 236. 33 NIETZSCHE, F. Die frhliche Wissenschaft. In. Smtliche Werke. Kristische Studienausgabe in 15 Bnden. Vol. 3. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999. p. 582. Own traduction.
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The profound nature of Nietzsches critique of the will to truth even extends to his own philosophy. In the chapter Why I Am a Destiny of Ecce Homo, Nietzsche states:
I know my fate. One day there will be associated with my name the recollection of something frightful of a crisis like no other before on earth, of the profoundest collision of conscience, of a decision evoked against everything that until then had been believed in, demanded, sanctified. I am not a man, I am dynamite. And with all that there is nothing in me of a founder of a religion religions are affairs of the rabble, I have need of washing my hands after contact with religious people... I do not want believers, I think I am too malicious to believe in myself, I never speak to masses... I have a terrible fear I shall one day be pronounced holy.34
The will to truth reveals itself to be a human need, one all too human, which when faced with any doubt or the diversity of the world searches above itself, or outside itself, for something akin to an ideal, an intelligible reality or thing in itself, a principle, a certainty, a truth, or even the Truth. The price we pay for our obsessive search for the truth has shown itself to be very high. For each truth attained, for each belief, for each conviction, a new idol was consolidated. Indeed, Nietzsches criticism of belief, in its very different forms, reveals that it is an essential tool for those who seek to face, with minimal intellectual honesty, all of the wealth and diversity of the world.
34 NIETZSCHE, F. Ecce Homo. In. Smtliche Werke. Kristische Studienausgabe in 15 Bnden. Vol. 6. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999. p. 365. Own traduction.
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On the structure of theological revolutions
When dreaming of a theological revolution, in what way does epistemology enlighten us?
Jos Mara Vigil
With this epistemological study, we would like to draft a roadmap of the desired epistemological revolution: where we are, what needs to change, what the main obstacles are, how such changes occur and what can be done to prepare their acceleration. We are referring to the possibility of a theological revolution with parallels to the scientific revolutions to whose structure Thomas Kuhn devoted his famous book. This presentation is set within the framework of a desire to facilitate the inevitable transition which is already underway toward a post-religious religiousness/spirituality, with particular reference to Christianity. We do this from the specific point of view of epistemology. Although this is not the only relevant perspective, it is one of the most important. Everything is epistemological, although the epistemological is not everything. We are among those who are pained to see the growing breach between the tradition of the Church, its hierarchy, structures, official doctrine, etc. and current thinking, modern culture and societal sentiment. Millions of men and women do not feel in the Church as they would in their homes, where they can feel, think and express themselves with freedom and mutual understanding. As a result, they are leaving the Church in a process of voluntary exile. They usually do so quietly, without protest, often hurt and disconcerted. We believe that this situation should be addressed. We already know that much must happen and many cogs must turn to bring about the change necessary in order for religions to align itself with modern culture and the healthy sentiments of todays society. For our part, we wish to focus on a factor of critical importance: epistemology. This area could perhaps be said to present the greatest barriers (and frequently hidden) to Christianitys ability to implement the necessary changes.
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Jos Mara Vigil
SEE A brief outline of the officially accepted epistemology of Roman Catholicism
Traditionally, it has always been believed that dialogue is the best way to solve our problems and overcome our ideological disputes and disagreements. This belief is rooted in human wisdom, and is acknowledged to be efficient in conflict resolution. Nevertheless, it has its limits. Furthermore, these are not minor. Epistemology and common sense tells us that sometimes dialogue is impossible, for example when there is no common ground from which to organise a dialogue, i.e. a shared language, the same universal paradigm, etc. When different languages are spoken, the other sides message cannot be received. When parties speak and argue from differing paradigms, each argument ends up being unintelligible. In the mind of its receiver it means something different than what was intended by the sender. When speakers have different paradigms, simple and direct dialogue is not appropriate, because it turns into a dialogue taking place between deaf people. The principles, axioms and assumptions based on which each is speaking are at odds. Differing paradigms are incommensurable; to a certain extent they cannot be expressed. As we said, we believe that one of the deepest rooted dimensions of the current crisis of religion in the West is that of epistemology. Firstly, we would like to describe the difficulties that are currently preventing the reconciliation of religions with modern society, which must be overcome.
What, then, would these difficulties be? 1. The issue of Revelation
Due to its very nature, the inclusion of revealed information creates an imbalance within human epistemology, in that a fundamentally different approach must be applied to this information, which is so different in origin.
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Revelation approaches faith as a set of truths, of knowledge, which the Church has received as a gift. It has not created or constructed this knowledge. Rather, it originates from direct communication with God, and the Church must receive it in its search for wisdom and transmit it with utmost loyalty to the faithful. The revealed doctrine that is received creates in the Church a deposit of truths, of which it is simply the custodian and to which it owes its complete loyalty. The task of giving an authentic interpretation of the Word of God, whether in its written form or in the form of Tradition, has been entrusted to the living teaching office of the Church alone. Its authority in this matter is exercised in the name of Jesus Christ. Yet this Magisterium is not superior to the Word of God, but is its servant. It teaches only what has been handed on to it. At the divine command and with the help of the Holy Spirit, it listens to this devotedly, guards it with dedication and expounds it faithfully. All that it proposes for belief as being divinely revealed is drawn from this single deposit of faith (DV 10). This is the current official position. There is a deposit of truths, which have been revealed and which can only be interpreted by the Magisterium of the Church, which must limit itself to transmitting what has been received and proposing it for belief as divinely revealed by God. The supernatural origin of this divinely revealed knowledge introduces a wholly abnormal, atypical and extraordinary element into theological epistemology in comparison to standard epistemology relating to science, philosophy and current society. This will be described below. Not even 50 years ago, the following sorts of claims by the Catholic church were possible (and in fact, even today the enabling conditions for this sort of thought remain plausible, operational, and have not been abolished): As regards the minds of the apostles we must say something similar to what we have said with respect to the divine mind (...) The apostles were much more than simple prophets or hagiographers. As the supreme teachers of the complete and definitive revelations and as keystones of the Church until the end of days, traditional theology awards the apostles the special privilege of having received, through divine inspiration, ex85
Jos Mara Vigil
plicit knowledge of divine revelations that is greater than that which all of the Churchs theologians have ever had or will ever have until the end of time... Therefore, all of the dogmas already defined by the Church and any that are defined in the future were already in the minds of the apostles, in a manner that was not mediate but rather immediate, not potential but rather formal, not implicit but rather explicit. The mode in which they became familiar with the revealed deposit was not, as is ours, through partial and human concepts, which contain much more implicit and potential meaning than they express, and require time and effort to successively and gradually unravel or explain content. Rather, this occurred through divine light or inspiration, which is a simple supernatural intelligence that updates and illuminates all implicitness or potentiality in one fell swoop. If we take, then, as a point of comparison, the meaning of the revealed deposit as it was in the mind of the apostles, and compare it with the meaning that we know, then we must say something similar to that which we said when speaking of the divine mind, which is that there has been not so much progress as lessening or a step backwards. F. MARN-SOL, La evolucin homognea del dogma catlico, Madrid-Valencia 1963, 157-1581. Little margin is left for human knowledge such as that of that of science, or for a normal sort of epistemology.
2. The realist, objectivist and metaphysical thinking of classic Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy
The Aristotelian-Thomistic concept of truth as adaequatio rei et intellectus. According to this concept, a correlation exists between our affirmations and reality. Our truths correspond directly and firmly to a reality. This is the so-called objectivism of our knowledge: an objective reality exists that categorically backs our truths.
1 (The Homogenous Evolution of Catholic Dogma, translated by Antonio T. Pin, Manila: UST Press, 1988). own translation
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Critical realism (Ian Barbour): our truths describe reality and we can think of them as reliable maps which serve to tell us, with certainty, what reality is. Ontology gives metaphysical form to this objectivism, whether it is a more Aristotelian or a more Platonic version. The reality that is most real is the being: metaphysical, ontic, beyond the mutable in reality itself, beyond changes and developments, beyond accidental transformations, the being remains and is stable and secure in its ontic objectivism, beyond our thoughts. [Niezschet: Christianity has been Platonism for the masses] Aristotelian hylomorphism, which includes categories (as venerable as they are indefensible) such as matter and form, substance and accidents, remains the only official philosophical language used to explain and expound on the mystery of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.
3. The Ecclesiastical Magisterium factor
The Magisterium factor, in turn, introduces new inherent, extraordinary elements into Catholic epistemology. Dogmas are veritas revelata ab Ecclesia proposita (BECKER, Karl Joseph, La nueva interpretacin de la fe, in VARIOS, Los movimientos teolgicos secularizantes, BAC minor 31, Madrid 1973, p. 31). These, however, are truths that are not directly biblical (otherwise they would belong to the field of revealed truths and enjoy a higher ranking), but rather derived, put together, debated and decided or voted on by the relevant ecclesiastical body, normally a council. In recent times, since the 19th century, the dogma of papal infallibility has been introduced. This provides a new source of dogmatic truth, as the pope, even if he is acting outside of any council, can declare any truth to be infallible dogma. Both revealed truths (those presented for belief as such by the Church) and dogmatic truths, (which are decided by councils or defined by the pope), must be believed with dutiful obedience (without support from reasons or evidence, offering the gift of our surrende87
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red reasoning), under threat of being cast a sinner and of excommunication from the Church in the event of persistence in this sin. These revealed truths, as well as dogmatic truths established by councils or the papal Magisterium, are immutable, infallible and irreformable. This applies not only to their letter but also to their spirit. They must remain completely faithful to themselves. Dogmatic formulas are so intimately linked to their content that any change hides or triggers an alteration in the content itself (Paul VI, Alloc. of 5th July 1967. Insegnamenti di Paolo VI, 5, 821). Moreover: The formulas themselves, in which the doctrine has been analysed and authoritatively defined, cannot be abandoned. On this point, the Magisterium of the Church shall not compromise. (Paul VI, Alloc. of 4th December 1968; Insegnamenti di Paolo VI, 6, 1045. See also Pius XII, Humani Generis, AAS 42 (1950) 565-567). This immutability of the letter and spirit of dogmatic formulas is exhaustive and total. We can best illustrate this through the words of the Papal magisterium itself. These formulas like the others that the Church used to propose the dogmas of faith express concepts that are not tied to a certain specific form of human culture, or to a certain level of scientific progress, or to one or another theological school. Instead they set forth what the human mind grasps of reality through necessary and universal experience. For this reason, these formulas are adapted to all men of all times and all places. (Paul VI, Mysterium Fidei, AAS 57 (1965) 758). More specifically: The things that have been composed through common effort by Catholic teachers over the course of the centuries to bring about some understanding of dogma...are based on principles and notions deduced from a true knowledge of created things. In the process of deducing, this knowledge, like a star, gave enlightenment to the human mind through the Church. (Pius XII, Humani Generis, AAS 42 (1950) 566). In summary: The message and the doctrine must be preserved... in suo dumtaxat genere, in eodem scilicet dogmate, eodem sensu eademque sententia Jos A. DE ALDAMA, El pluralismo religioso actual, in Los movimientos teolgicos secularizantes, BAC minor 31, Madrid 1973, p. 189).
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4. Some considerations
In the light of modern epistemology, the positive manner in which the Church views its cultural sanitisation and philosophical impartiality seems completely nave ad idealistic. In the light not only of epistemology but also of modern common sense, the lack of historical comprehension also seems absolutely naive, namely the failure to acknowledge the exceedingly simple truth that all formulations of knowledge are historical and depend on their particular contexts. Knowledge must evolve in order for its meaning to retain relevance, and it can never remain fixed in a culture and a language that are subject to continual evolution. Speaking of a divinely revealed truth implies an understanding of a world divided into two floors: that of the Earth, which is home to us humans who lack knowledge, and the upper floor, where God dwells. He occasionally drops some knowledge down to us, revealing it in order to guide our human lives toward salvation. This epistemology, which includes revealed and dogmatic truths, creates strange inferences which would be completely irregular and unacceptable in normal epistemology of normal science. For example, through revealed truths the Church can know that it is impossible for the scientific theory of polygenesis to be correct, as it would contradict the interpretation of these revealed truths that has been carried out by the Church. For the same reason the Church can maintain stances in opposition to scientific knowledge with the potential to influence morality (for example, abortion). The heteronomy of this epistemology is patently obvious: humankind and the cosmos itself are governed by an outside law, which is revealed and is of higher order, to which they must submit. They are also dependent on a higher source of knowledge. This knowledge is revealed, and simply due to this fact it comes from a higher authority which must be obeyed and which is above any normal epistemological rules. This peculiar situation allows for the existence of some epistemological features which, in the framework of normal epistemology, are clearly pathological.
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Theological and religious reason are set within an epistemological framework in which truth is not found via the epistemological methods normally used in modern society. Instead, all of these methods are placed under the control of a higher authority, with power concentrated in the hands of a single person. This amounts to absolute primacy, manifested through Gods representative on Earth, who submits to nobody and is subject to no form of control. It is an absolute monarchy (unique in the world, the final authority) that is theocratic in nature (a principle of authority that was enshrined in the general reform enacted by the Second Vatican Council in the famous preliminary note added to Chapter III of the Lumen Gentium). Even today, the Pope is still above the entire Church, even above the Council, and can take any decision unilaterally, without collegiality and without the Council, or even in opposition to them. Furthermore, what he decides not only takes precedence over any opinion or decision, but can be directly declared to be infallible dogma (with respect to this, we are not now speaking in terms of theological judgement but rather epistemological judgement; this structure has epistemological connotations that are unacceptable to the mindset of todays epistemology). This pathologically authoritarian structure has imperial origins. It is a legacy inherited from the Churchs historical institutional beginnings. It was the Roman Emperor who convened the first councils, which we normally refer to as ecumenical, precisely for the reason of defining Christian doctrine. His aim was to define and proclaim a single doctrine for the entire Empire with a view to saving it from crisis. As can be imagined, this imperial origin of the Church had a notable impact on its own epistemology, which to this day has not been redressed or amended. The methods, principles and rules of the internal epistemology of the Church, which are enshrined even in its structures and law, retain imperial features and are, in reality, purely imperial. Thus, in ecclesiastical epistemology, the use of all of the procedures and resources normally employed in mankinds search for truth such as research, reflection, argument, debate, sincere questioning and reasoned comparisons is subject to a higher
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authority, to intervention by the pope, the bishops and the hierarchy in general. It is the ecclesiastical power which ultimately declares truth. This amounts to an epistemology of power. Power creates truth by itself, and imposes it. t does not need to argue, refute the reasons of any adversary, or demonstrate its own. It is sufficient for it to simply decide. There is no need to argue, rebut the reasoning of ones opponent and prove the soundness of ones own reasoning. A decision and the announcement of it suffice. Moreover, any decisions made are decisive, final and must be obeyed: Roma locuta, causa finita. This practice was inherited from the empire. One additional aspect of epistemological power is, in this context, the prerogative of papal infallibility, capable of removing from the sphere of epistemological constraints all truths that have been determined by the pope when acting in his capacity as infallible. Under such circumstances, there is also no possibility of further debate, review or reformulation. A factor that runs absolutely contrary to modern logic and theories of knowledge is that of irreformability. Some statements of truth can be declared definitive, or irreformable, and after this the Church may undertake no further research, dialogue or debate on the truth formulated by the authority, which in its capacity as authorised exclusive interpreter of the Word of God has determined that this formulation must be accepted as definitive by the faithful, as well as by theologians, who must thereafter abstain from researching, reflecting, differentiate or debating it. Within the ecclesiastical environments most closely linked to the search for truth, such as universities and academic centres where one lives in this atmosphere that is so epistemologically unbreathable, it is logical that the objective that ends up prevailing in practice is not really the search for truth, its investigation, its differentiation..., rather one seeks to simply expound and develop the official theology and doctrine. The search is not for the truth but for the dogma. You search for the truth, but to obey the power, to recognise, comply with, repeat and expound what that power has imposed and demands.
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The power defines truth based not on a sincere and disinterested search for this truth, but rather on the interests of that same power, of the institution. This is akin to the raison dEtat, which subordinates all reason to the supreme interests of the Church, to the reason of the good of the Church, which is naturally determined by its hierarchy: its functionaries and administrators. Although it may seem incredible, and although it forms part of the imaginary social collective, even today we still live in the presence of the Inquisition. Founded in 1542 and still active, the body admits to being the oldest of the Catholic Churchs most ancient Congregations (see the profile published on its own website). It admits it has changed its name and internal organisation twice but it claims that it is the same as that founded in 1542, with the name of the Holy Inquisition. This is not simply a curious anecdote, but a detail of primary importance for the characterisation of the epistemology currently valid in the Catholic Church: these are epistemological rules that in the 21st century include the existence and effective exercising of an Inquisition. The fact that in the last thirty years over 500 theologists (the exact figure is uncertain and many people reckon that it is very much higher) have been cautioned, sent to trial, sentenced, punished or silenced some even excommunicated obviously introduces an epistemological distortion of the highest order in the epistemology of an entire Church.
The new epistemology: the new emerging epistemological paradigm
It is very important to see that this epistemological situation, which predominates within the sphere of the Catholic Church, is profoundly different to and largely incompatible with the standard epistemology that exists in most of todays society: an epistemology which, in generic and almost schematic terms, could be characterised in the following manner. Knowledge is no longer conceived of in terms of adaequatio rei et intellectus, with all of the implications that this has for the direct correlation between our knowledge and reality, but rather as a set of
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models that our human brains make based on perceived reality, in order to better cope with reality. Knowledge is no longer thought of in strict objectivist terms. There is clear recognition that the subject plays a role in its development. Knowledge is a human construct, and inside of it everything is an interpretation that we, as subjects, develop. Information is not simply neutral and objective data, but is rather loaded with theory, references and contextual meanings specific to the culture from which it originates. The correlation between knowledge and reality is not thought of in such strict objective terms: our knowledge is a map of an area. It is not the area itself, nor does it correspond directly with that area. Not only one possible map exists. Rather, there are infinite possibilities. There is not just one possible map but an infinite number; nor is it true that only one can be valid and the rest invalid. Among the many perhaps uncountable current epistemological stances, one of the central trends that we would like to highlight as one of the main and most moderate is that of critical realism, set midway between staunch objectivism and a perception of knowledge as mere pragmatic instrumentalism. Current epistemology increasingly includes the aspect of uncertainty as constituting the current reality of knowledge. The uncertainty principle in quantum physics, the identification of the double nature possessed by all subatomic reality, which simultaneously appears as a particle and a wave, with wholly different and absolutely unpredictable characteristics, has manifested itself in epistemology and all signs seem to indicate that it is here to stay. At present, uncertainty is a recognised and accepted part of our method of knowing. We are currently much more uncertain than we were in the past as regards many fields of knowledge. Even with this uncertainty, or perhaps due to it, we believe ourselves to be much closer to the truth than when we believed with certainty that we already possessed it. Today an epistemological conviction has formed, consisting of the belief that pure knowledge, independent of any interests, does not exist. The subject that creates knowledge is not a being in the
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air, without constraints or interests of any sort. Our capacity for knowledge functions in one direction or another. It asks specific questions with regard to reality depending on the interests of the subject, in all fields of knowledge, including religious knowledge. For current epistemology there is no absolute point of view, no absolute, sterile, neutral, objective meta-system that can lead to unequivocal possession of the truth, of certain and eternal, unquestionable, irreformable formulations. In todays times, it is considered that to aspire to this is to overreach, and that such an aspiration is at odds with the limits of human knowledge in its current biological state. Knowledge is increasingly being redefined with reference to biological categories. In its simplest and most basic form, knowledge is an ability held by living creatures that accumulates gradually throughout the process of evolution. Our progress is no longer due to genetic change, but rather to cultural change. Knowledge, culture, etc., are an extension of biological evolution, the phase currently being passed through. In any event, biological foundations continue to be present at all times, and are increasingly recognised by current epistemology. Our brain is not programmed to search for the truth, but rather to survive. Religious knowledge is recognised as being of a necessarily symbolic, metaphorical nature, based on basic metaphors that need to be updated, with imagery changed to keep pace with cultural change, because everything (images, concepts, references, terms, etc.) is contextual, historical and changing, and metaphors, like all symbols in general, are born, grow, reproduce and die. A significant trend in current epistemological thinking is that of complex thought, which perceives reality as a holistic whole, but one that is structured on independent levels that are not always equipped with logic or connections that we can discover or make use of. The logic of each of the different levels does not always exist without conflict. Neither can such conflict always be prevented or resolved, a fact that imbues the whole with a chaotic nature. Nevertheless, a holistic view of the whole group may support violation of the logic of one level specifically to salvage the good of the whole. Complex thought conceives of reality as multi-level, needing Aristotelian lo94
gic but also needing to violate it. It is able to tolerate these contradictions and conflicts, integrating them into a chaordic overview. In any event, current epistemology remains rooted in the emancipatory criticism of the Age of Reason and modern critical thinking. A persons maturity is expected to enable him to make public and autonomous use of his reason, without guidance or childishness. The modern person is always called on to know (spere aude!), to decide, to choose, etc. No longer is one expected to take a foreign worldview imposed by religious or political authorities.
JUDGING
We believe that, in the light of all that has been said up to this point, it is evident that it would be difficult to widen the breach between current religious epistemology in the Catholic Church and the standard epistemology that predominates in society. Dialogue between positions with such different epistemologies is not possible. The systems are not compatible. I would venture to suggest that the current crisis of Christianity in general, and that of the Catholic Church in particular, with respect to civil society, is particularly serious not only because both possess different paradigms but also because their epistemologies are completely different and even incompatible, as outlined immediately above. In periods like the one that Thomas Kuhn labels normal science, the ideological difficulties of coexistence are resolved through dialogue. These are times in which differences are not great enough to prevent this, where there is a common language, a shared framework of references. This, however, is not the case in times of paradigm shift, in which the two parties cannot understand each other or carry out dialogue because one paradigm is nearly almost unacceptable or even unintelligible to the other, even when epistemology, or the rules of knowledge, are still shared (these do not necessarily change along with a paradigm shift). In this situation, those of us who are Christians belong to both spheres and experience the conflict in our very hearts. We dream of the day that our faith will be brought into line with modern society, when the gap that has developed will be closed. This will be a multiple paradigm shift, a true
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theological revolution, to borrow the image used in Thomas Kuhns book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Bearing in mind the research that went into that book, it is worth asking ourselves: What has to happen in religions, in Christianity, in Catholicism, to overcome this difficult situation in a way that we consider to be a true theological revolution? What can we do to favour, provoke or accelerate that longed-for theological revolution? Let us remember briefly what Kuhn has to say with regard to these scientific revolutions, so that we can then try to apply it, in our own way, to a theological revolution, such as the one that we are dreaming of, and so that, from this reflection, we can deduce some guidelines for action.
What are the characteristics of a scientific revolution?
Let us remember, very briefly and schematically, because the information is very well known, what Kuhn identified as characteristic moments in the process of development of scientific revolutions. After a long period of normal science, new facts begin to emerge which do not fit inside the normal understanding of the traditional paradigm. Unable to make these facts fit the traditional framework, scientists choose to consider them epicycles, exceptions to the current rules of the existing scientific paradigm. Over time, more and more facts appear which cannot be explained by the existing scientific paradigm. These are also considered to be exceptions to the universal explanation, which is rooted in the paradigm that is shared by the scientific community. The accumulation of such exceptions begins to give rise to growing uneasiness among scientists. The existing scientific explanation no longer seems convincing in the face of so many exclusions. Some scientists begin to suspect that something is wrong with the universal explanation that is their paradigm. In some of these scientists, whether on a conscious or a subconscious level, a need to find a new overarching explanation, or paradigm, takes root. One or more of the members of the scientific community discover this new explanation, this new paradigm, which is a radical and incompatible contradiction of the existing one. When it is announced to the scientific
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community, the innovators initially encounter complete rejection. This rejection gradually lessens, as supporters of the new paradigm grow. Kuhn reflects and then asks, who usually discovers new paradigms? And his answer is that they are usually discovered by free spirits, by young scientists that are not too deeply committed in their personal and professional life to the traditional paradigm, nor to the institution. In reference to the question of who normally discovers new paradigms, Kuhn answers that usually they are discovered by young scientists who are not heavily invested, in both their personal and professional lives, in the traditional paradigm. During the process of transition the two groups of scientists, those who support the old paradigm and those who favour the new one, pass through a period in which it seems that communication between the two is impossible. Dialogue is not possible, as the two sides seem to see different things in reality, depending on the filter of the paradigm that they adopt. From within one paradigm it is practically impossible to dialogue with those that use the other. How do other scientists come to accept the new paradigm? What process takes place when this acceptance occurs? Kuhn stresses that acceptance is not always the product of reasoned arguments and scientific evidence, but can rather occur through instantaneous intuition in which, like the gestalt switch, all at once scientists take up the new view they had previously rejected. What happens to those who come to accept the new paradigm? Kuhn says that scientists who accept the new paradigm experience the sensation of being in a new world, because a new form of observation, a form of looking at the world inspired by a new paradigm, makes them notice details that they had never noticed before. These facts, which were always there but were never seen, are viewed as if they were new. With this transformation in the way that scientists view their data, the effects of adopting the new paradigm take hold in them. They spread and multiply, causing the new paradigm to move forward, conquering minds and hearts.
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Does the new paradigm end up dominating everything? Only with the passage of time a great deal of time because both acceptance and rejection of a new paradigm do not result, as mentioned above, from argument and proof. Paradigms, says Kuhn, are very resistant to falsification. Conflicting data does not normally significantly impact our adherence to basic paradigms. These paradigms express a general conceptual model that is so overarching, so devoted to explaining everything, that it does not seem possible to the subject to overturn (accept the failure or falseness) a paradigm because of one or many contradictory facts. In other fields just one fact can overturn a thesis or hypothesis. With paradigms, many contrary facts are digested by the subject simply as exceptions, or as epicycles, to use Kuhns own descriptor. Thus, the resistance of some members of the scientific community to the new paradigm seems to be permanent, lasting until death removes them from the scientific sphere. The example normally given is the case of scientist who died while continuing to refute Einsteins theory of relativity, even when the entire scientific community of the time had accepted it. Non-scientific motivations emotional, personal, conscious or subconscious play a decisive role in an area that, supposedly, should be strictly scientific.
What characteristics would a theological revolution have?
We have just outlined, very briefly and with reference to Thomas Kuhn, what he called the structure of scientific revolutions in the process of the development of shifts in the paradigms of the international scientific community. Let us attempt to do the same with respect to the possible structure of a theological revolution, with reference to the process of thought development in the community of believers, i.e. theology. Let us take a look. Theology also has periods of normal theology and others in which data, theories, schools of thought and new evaluations appear which are difficult to fit into the existing theological paradigm. This uncomfortable data is also treated as epicycles, i.e. exceptions that cannot be justified or for which justifications are argued that convince very few people, but which are in no way able to falsify the overarching paradigm underlying the relevant religious or theological view. Sometimes these are formulas of faith that originate in a cosmological or philosophical view that has died
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out, which is no longer credible or is simply insignificant, but which continues to be repeated ritually without any consideration to the gap or lack of meaning that has emerged. As we know, we live in a time in which it is not only a few isolated facts that fail to fit the existing paradigm and that must be considered epicycles or exceptions. As mentioned in the first part of this study, the difference and clash between the modes of perceiving and comprehending reality in civil society and in the community of believers were never as great as they are at present. In this situation, we increasingly see individual believers, communities, theologians, etc., who have accepted the new paradigms of society and are trying to live their religion re-expressed through these new paradigms. The type of religiousness that results is distinctly different from the official existing paradigm. These are people, groups, communities and theologians who have re-read, analysed and designed a new paradigm of religiousness. In this situation, followers of the two paradigms also find it extremely difficult to hold a dialogue. They are speaking different languages. One speaks of saving souls for heaven, the other of building the Kingdom of God. One speaks of being Christian as being baptised, while the other understands being Christian as living and fighting for the mission of Jesus. The two sides are like two players in front of the same board and game pieces, only one believes he is playing checkers and the other believes he is playing chess (Hiebert-Bosch). We are witnessing a debate and the coexistence of different types of religious paradigms. With specific reference to Christianity, there are very different takes, or readings of the religion. Some take a doctrinal view, while others take a predominantly legal view, and still others debate between the ontological cultist model and the prophetic ethics model. Very different Christianities coexist, and in reality they are incompatible. A Christianity of salvation is not the same as one in which there is no salvation beyond this world, nor is a second floor Christianity the same as a single floor one. An exclusivist Christianity is not the same as a pluralist one, or as a Christianity that considers itself one of many religions,
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nor is a theistic Christianity the same as a post-theistic one. There is no dialogue between them. rather in many instances only discrediting arises, simply expressing the difficulty of mutual communication. This has happened before, at hallmark moments. The cardinals in the time of the Inquisition had no choice but to condemn Galileo Galilei. From the perspective of their geocentric paradigm, what Galileo was proposing was clearly not only absurd but also absolute heresy. Three centuries would need to pass for the Church to digest the new proposal. Today the same thing is happening with members of the Society of St. Pius X, founded by Mons. Lefevbre, which from within its purely premodern paradigm, rooted in the Syllabus, has no choice but to label the Second Vatican Council heretical, and the popes that have allowed this heretical trend Antichrists. Who are the initiators of these new paradigms that present an alternative to the traditional one? As Kuhn said, with regard to the new scientific paradigms, these are normally young believers, without excessively strong ties to the ecclesiastical system which could impede their freedom of thought and expression. Older theologians who already have their lives behind them and whose reputations cannot be tarnished at the end of a brilliant career cannot take on new paradigms, that would result in rendering the work of an entire lifetime meaningless, even though their intuition says otherwise, even though in their heart they share it. This is due simply to a biographical argument... There are also some who cannot change due to emotional or personal reasons, or reasons of political ideology, as in some of these paradigms such as that of the liberator the socio-political and ideological have become increasingly overlapped. For their part, many of those who have seen the new paradigm cannot look back to the past. They have experienced a sort of religious conversion. It is no longer possible for them to reject the new view. It has become part of their own new vision, allowing them to see many new details and factors that they previously missed. We are, as mentioned above, bearing witness to a situation of great schism in the global community of believers, with very divergent paradigms and
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very little possibility for dialogue. All of the data being interpreted in incompatible fashions depending on the paradigm used to interpret it cannot force the falsification of any of the paradigms because, as Kuhn says, they are so resistant. The factor that most notably differentiates the dynamic of the structure of theological revolutions from that of scientific revolutions is likely the current difference in epistemologies between the two opposing sectors, and, on the other hand, the enormous, pathological weight of the ecclesiastical authority, a factor that is entirely new to the rules of the game of scientific revolution. If it is already very difficult, in principle, to hold a dialogue with differing paradigms, the difficulty increases exponentially when this difference is coupled with a huge chasm in terms of epistemology as explained in the first part of this paper. Added to this, if possible, is the difference represented by the downward-flowing authoritarian regime, self-esteemed as the sole interpreters of Revelation (DV 10), authorised in the name of God.
What needs to happen, what do we need to do... in order for a Theological Revolution to occur?
The current state of multiple and conflicting theological and ideological divisions in the Church is not a simple theoretical problem, dependent only on a store of information which, once distributed to everybody, would resolve our differences. Our theological and even spiritual differences depend on intermediate epistemological factors which are not directly available and which radically shape the way we perceive the world, feel and even reason. These are our paradigms. These epistemological factors are not simply theory that can be objectively transmitted or proven, but are rather built on experiences, attachment, legacies, senses of identity and belonging, educational sensibilities, a stockpile of encounters, explicit and subconscious feelings, etc. All of this means that peoples relationships with their paradigms are tied up with a deep sense of identity, normally on a subconscious level. Paradigms are subconscious epistemological filters through which we perceive reality, which means that our perceptions can never be completely objective.
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Rather, they are subjective and loaded with paradigm. We do not perceive in abstract terms, from an absolute place, removed from all subjectivity. We perceive through these filters, which include categories, methods and rationales that are imposed immediately. We do not simply know. Rather, we know how, inside of a framework of possibilities offered up to us by our respective paradigms of experience. For this reason, paradigms are very deeply rooted in a person and are very resistant to falsification. A person remains faithful to his paradigms even if some information or even a great deal of information contradicts the truth of these paradigms. The person can accept the coexistence of many irrefutably conflicting facts, considering them epicycles or exceptions that prove the rule. For this very reason, dialogue or discernment between paradigms does not usually work, because it is not through data and/or rationales that falsification, i.e. proving to a subject that his paradigm is false, can be achieved. The act of pulling paradigmatic stances closer together must take place on a prior or more profound level, where there is no need to appeal to divergent logic based on different or perhaps incompatible paradigms. On this level, an attempt must be made to remove difficulties, misunderstandings, suspicions, fears and mistakes, to smooth the others path toward comprehension of the other paradigm. This would involve not only removing negative obstacles but also facilitating positive perspectives: demonstrating that the other paradigm does not refute elements that are treasured in ones own position. All of this must be done with a view to attempting to eliminate obstacles in order to allow the subject to access the gestalt switch, or the intuitive moment in which, as Kuhn says, all at once and as if in a religious conversion, a view of the other paradigm becomes possible. In other words, to a certain extent epistemology can disappoint us, in that it tells us there is no direct path leading to a dialogue of discernment in regard to the other paradigm. This path of direct dialogue between incompatible paradigms, which was something we had always instinctively relied on (from a naive epistemological stance), does not exist. It is impracticable. At the same time, however, epistemology gives us some
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insight and clues although the path is longer and more complicated into overcoming the impasse in the dialogue between paradigms, as we are aware that: This lack of dialogue between paradigms is not a new problem. Rather, it has been observed many times in history, although perhaps in more moderate forms, obviously with less quantitative data and a slower historical pace. In theology, it is also normal for a period to occur which differs from that which Kuhn labelled normal science. In our case this normal period would be called normal theological science. It is normal to go through these volatile, chaotic historical periods in which dialogue between parties with differing theological opinions is difficult, and in which there is a lack of basic understanding between the different sides, even at the most basic levels of language. We must stand strong in the face of contradictions, be patient with the slow pace of the process and be understanding toward all of those who suffer as a result. We must also find intelligence and a deep understanding of the epistemological implications of the situation, in order to attempt to tackle it in the most suitable manner. Although acceptance of new paradigms can be very slow and can encounter much resistance, we know that there is historical evidence that can confirm our hope that a new paradigm will not take long to emerge dominant. We are referring to paradigms that depend on a more physical or demonstrable foundation. There are, for example, moral or philosophical paradigms that are more subtle, which social tradition may resist fiercely. However, when proof or falsification of a paradigm depends only on a good telescope, resistance is destined to fail. The Inquisition was victorious over Galileo. It humiliated and subjugated him even though it was unable to refute his reasoning, but despite stubborn resistance over the course of three centuries, the Inquisition ultimately had to cede in the face of evidence provided by the telescope. E pur si mouve. Today there are telescopes in other disciplines of science which, in their own fashion, are displacing old geocentric paradigms. The history of victims who have been steamrollered by the religious powers that be, which place themsel103
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ves above human reasoning, encourages us not to lose this vision of the future, to find hope in the constant shift toward more correct paradigms. Current epistemology enables us to understand reality through complex thought, which explains its multi-level nature: many different levels, holistically interdependent but functionally autonomous, capable of functioning without synchrony and often in conflict arising from clashes between the individual logic of each of the levels, which exist in isolation from each other. Undertaking complex thought involves understanding and accepting the logic of each level, each group, while at the same time remaining able to contradict this logic, with intelligent freedom, through decisions taken from a holistically higher level. We must respect the logic or rationale of each level, and be able to accept from a multi-level view of the whole the contradictions that can be observed between the various levels, which are isolated from each other. At the same time, we must remain able to contradict some of these rationales. The human being has an immune system that reacts to expel any foreign intrusion and which, in this sense, is tasked with rejecting the heart that has been transplanted into an organism to save it. This system correctly detects the foreign intrusion and reacts accordingly. In this sense, it has not made a mistake. However, in reference to our other meta-level, on which surgery, society and awareness exist, where this foreign heart arrives precisely to give the organism life, there is a fatal mistake, originating in the non-communication between the two levels of organisation (Edgar Morin). We are at a stage in history where we have broadened our knowledge to an unimaginable extent and reached a level of thought that is truly complex. We are aware of the multi-level nature of reality, having left behind the single-level view of classic religiocentrism that saw everything as a homogeneous reality, with a single level and logic, which never imagined there could be conflicts in the intrasystemic logic of the conception of reality, and even less so that we could come to accept that we must tolerate apparent anomalies on different levels or that we must dare to contradict some of the logic precisely for the sake of a holistically higher logic.
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This epistemological view of complex thought can give us insight into the situation in which we presently find ourselves, which we are trying to shed light on in this paper. Indeed, the broadening of knowledge experienced over the last few decades has led us to abandon the classic view that we had of reality as religious people: > homogeneous (single-level) religious view of reality, all within a single and unquestionable religious narrative, without cracks or declared contradictions > governed solely by the supreme law of our own religion > with acceptance of an auxiliary human logic, the AristotelianThomistic logic, officially adopted Now, with the broadening of our knowledge, we have come to perceive that this is only one level of the overall Reality, and that, moreover, this level is limited. We know that it is a level (religion) built by humans, that its profound values remain but are not linked monolithically, as we previously thought, to religious forms. Rather, they exist independently, on a meta-level. We are aware of other levels that we previously did not take into account: differing cultural and philosophical contexts, the limits of each religion, the eco-biological framework of every reality, including religion, the epistemological constraints of human knowledge, etc. Moreover, we recognise the logic of each of these levels. This logic differs greatly and at times clearly clashes, giving rise to chaotic, uncontrollable situations that we dont know how to deal with as a whole, nor are we able to. With this new, complex, holistically higher overview, we feel able to tolerate the apparent anomalies that arise on some levels, as well as conflicts between the logic of each of the different levels, which exist in isolation from each other. Today we feel the support of this new, holistic common sense, which enables us to tolerate these supposed errors and clashes. We are living in a time similar to many throughout history. Many clashes exist, and the contradictions between the logical rationales of the various levels are many. Many of us perhaps believe that a new heart is being transplanted, and the rejection instigated by the immune system is
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strong. We know that we have a higher reason to look to, but we dont know if the good of the whole will emerge victorious.
A more theological or spiritual reflection:
Many believers had to live through dark times in the history of the Church, such as its Iron Age, a low point for the papacy. They had to suffer through this era of the Church. They were blameless, but at the same time they were under no obligation to think that they should obsequiously acquiesce to the decisions of the ecclesiastical authority. Perhaps in those times it was not possible for them to think in this fashion. For us it is. We know that ecclesiastical staff is relentlessly dedicated to a single paradigm, that it does not lift its gaze beyond a single level and that it has not truly accepted the broadening of knowledge or complex thought, nor do they seem to comprehend the holistic, multi-level complexity of reality. For an epistemologically aware Christian, the new overview, grounded in a broader knowledge base, supports the decision to take on the task of contradicting the logic of a specific level.
What will usher in change in the Church?
Change will doubtless be ushered in by the fact that the perception of the new overview, the broadening of knowledge, will gradually spread, without much ado, to everyday Christians, making it increasingly possible for a favourable situation such as that under Pope John XXIII to arise, in which the moment is ripe for a forceful leap forward, the likes of which as things stand today we cannot imagine (but the possibility of which Torres Queiruga advises we should not rule out, as such an occurrence was also unimaginable just a short time before the Second Vatican Council). It is likely that many pastoral workers/functionaries have become aware, but dont want to see; they avert their gaze. The spread of this epistemological view of the constraints, limits, infrastructure, broadening of knowledge, multi-level framework, limitations that are self-imposed by the internal ecclesiastical policy of hierarchical
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self-selection, etc., will result in the desired theological revolution sooner rather than later. The world of thought is not a cupboard of juxtaposed propositions that exist in correlation to another cupboard holding the corresponding, physical truths that these propositions describe. Let us stop debating based on reasoning alone, in ignorance of epistemological constraints and implications. It is these pre-suppositions, axioms, unconscious assumptions and indiscriminate suppositions which we must become aware of and put a stop to. More and more people and communities must discover that we are facing a pivotal shift, and that the new epistemology shows us: > the impossibility of a consensual solution from different paradigms > the legitimacy of having different paradigms > that there is no absolute relativism between the different paradigms (they are not equal, they are not on the same plane) There must be recognition of the non-intellectual elements of affective resistance which are at play and which are impeding change: > Our interests, personal, collective and institutional alike. > Our affective subconscious... > The difficulty of abandoning myths
Is religion capable of change, or not?
Yes, but it cannot remain agrarian. It will have to abandon its methods, models and functions of control over society, its aspirations to control the truth, etc. It could, in fact, transform itself and go on to establish another type of religion, perhaps a post-religious one which could no longer be called a agrarian religion. The musings of the Dalai Lama (19 September 2012): Seeing the current crisis of religion, I am increasingly convinced that the time has come to find a way of thinking about spirituality and ethics beyond religion altogether.
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Religions can change, but, due to their inherent nature, it is very difficult for them to do so, and they have lost a great deal of time. They have fallen behind making it even more difficult for them to catch up and at this point in time we still cannot say that they are ready to change. Nor are they amenable to this change.
And Christianity can it change?
Anthropologically speaking, Christianity is clearly an agrarian religion, with all of the features inherent to such religions (programming software, beliefs, etc.). It could persist, at the expense of overcoming these agrarian characteristics, but this would require a complete metamorphosis. Problem: in the classic view, this would impinge on its identity, and as the agrarian religion that it is, it feels epistemologically prevented from and insulated against change. It will only be able to go forward if it sheds this protective shell, which is actually foreign to its true nature and its roots in Jesus, a remnant of agrarian times that we can and must free ourselves of today. Biblical/fictitious question: Would Jesus, if He lived today and knew what we now know about mythological epistemology, the human/imperial/institutional construction of Christological dogma, hyper-realist epistemology and the view that cultural anthropology takes of agrarian religions, be opposed to our reconstructing today, as a community, the Christian identity that has changed so much over the course of our short history? Many of us are optimistic, confident of Christianitys ability to survive, transforming, metamorphosing and surmounting this epochal crisis. The idea that it might also fail to do so, however, is not unsupported by historical fact. Many religions have disappeared over the course of history. What pains us is that the desired theological revolution, so essential for this much needed transformation, is not occurring, and it would seem that the upper echelon of the Church is doing all it can to impede it. The Christian religion can survive, but on its current path it is not certain that it will be able to. We are hopeful that faith will triumph, sooner rather than later, over fear. We choose the future.
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Axiological crisis and changing values in Mexico

Juan Diego Ortiz Acosta
Perspectives for the construction of an ethical social subject
Introduction
The present paper puts forward the theory that the current axiological crisis, along with changing values in contemporary societies, represents the root of all the crises that are being suffered in our world. As we know, behind every economic, political, social, environmental and religious crisis we can find a diversity of human acts that threaten social coexistence, guided by the lust for power, for dominance and for profit that end up imposing the conditions of how we relate to each other in the personal, social, national and international spheres alike. These acts, which cause conflict and are motivated by valuations that are detrimental to the Other (person, community, social class, race, creed, people, culture or nation), represent the core of this axiological crisis. While there is nothing new here, insofar as relationships of domination have always existed, the present question does demand an in-depth review, for the purpose of contributing to the construction of new bodies of knowledge and practices that will change this anthropology of power for a process of humanisation, in which the profound value of life as a totality with all its intrinsic relations of coexistence, can be recognised.1 We have yet to fully understand that human existence depends on harmonious relations with others, on re-bonding with the world, with nature and with spirituality.
1 Boff, Leonardo. La dignidad de la Tierra. Ecologa, mundializacin, espiritualidad. La emergencia de un nuevo paradigma. Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 2000, p. 23.
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In this sense it should not be left to the technosciences, the globalised economic model, the influence of the media or the predominance of power to continue conditioning the fabric of our human relationships. This is no simple task, given that neoliberal ideology has been imposing new valuations and values, starting with the dismantling of the social dimension of human beings, reducing them to their status as mere individuals who must fight for their existence, at any price, including the violation of the rights of others. This ideology of individualism, selfishness, boundless ambition and domination, is positioning itself to become the new axiological framework of a fragmented society that is gradually shedding its relational nature. In view of the above, the only way forward is to accelerate our reflection on new knowledge and axiological practices, as an approach towards promoting the construction of an ethical social subject with the ability to warn of and change the self-destructive tendencies of the social fabric, and even of the environment itself. This would mean that the abovementioned social subject could adopt a new subjectivity that would help them to recognize the risks faced by contemporary society, and therefore to act in relation to common causes and contribute towards the strengthening of social cohesion. This paper addresses these issues, taking as its reference the national context of what is happening in Mexico, specifically finding its basis in three particularly acute problems that are impairing the countrys development, by which we mean violence, corruption and poverty, issues that are a manifestation of the current axiological crisis and changing values and that, today, are having a huge impact on broad sections of society. This essay is simply a sketched outline that aims to show the issue within a particular context and so it is also necessary to present a series of data that are illustrative of the problem under study. As a result the structure of this paper stems from the recognition of an axiological crisis and changing values, in response to which it highlights the importance of promoting the development of an ethical social subject, capable of counteracting these and other phenomena of a moral nature, in pursuit of the social cohesion of society. Finally, it analyses the possibility of this social subject moving towards a profound human quality or,
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where applicable, how the impetus of the profound human quality may contribute towards the development of the said social ethical subject.
Violence, Corruption and Poverty: A Moral and Ethical Background
Both Mexican society and the State are experiencing severe difficulties of a moral and ethical nature that have exacerbated a series of social problems that are plaguing a large swathe of the population. Of course, this situation is not unique to Mexico, but can be detected in nearly all contemporary societies, none of which escape from this moral breakdown, which is being analysed the world over in an attempt to explain its causes and consequences. However, it is also important to recognise that the country has drawn international attention due to the growing phenomenon of violence, which has become uncontrollable and seems to increasingly rope in hundreds of people who have made violent activity their modus vivendi and have found in it a new identity that gives them a certain kind of recognition and that forms part of the value-related change that is taking place. Mxico is part of the current globalisation process and we know that this phenomenon has spread across the entire planet, through relationships of domination, relationships that are representative of an ethical crisis because they manifest themselves through certain forms of subjugation that particularly affect countries that occupy the semi-periphery, or periphery, of the capitalist system, even though this crisis is also having an impact on certain sectors of the population of the central and hegemonic countries of the world system.2 We are talking here about a globalisation that has been imposed, that homogenises cultures and does not respect human rights; that only allows for the free circulation of goods and capital between countries, but not their people... It is a globalisation that, furthermore, accentuates inequalities, and it is precisely this globalisation that reigns in Mexico and has, long with other factors, served to intensify this axiological crisis.
2 Dos Santos, Theotonio. La teora de la dependencia. Balance y perspectivas. Barcelona: Plaza & Jans Editores, 2002, p. 55.
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The purpose of the above is not to put forward the idea that the origins of Mexicos problems lie exclusively in the global system, although we do affirm that the nature of the crisis is structural and is, therefore, related not only to internal factors but also to external ones. While many of the problems stem from policies imposed by the centres of power, others are the result of our poor educational and cultural progress, which makes it obligatory to reinforce the educational structure with an approach that not only focuses on knowledge and mastering technology, but also caters for ethical needs, insofar as it is this that will harmonise social interests with the interests of the individual, a key issue in a country where private interests have traditionally relegated collective interests to second place. Violence, corruption and poverty are three of Mexicos most pressing social problems, and in them we can find a background of an ethical and moral nature. The three cases demonstrate a breakdown in social relations, in which some people exercise the power and others suffer from it. In other words, violence, corruption and poverty entail a relationship between different agents and a connection that is based on subjugation and wrongdoing. As a result they require not only a sociological treatment that is related to the structures that make those social problems possible, but also the said conflicts have to be viewed from the perspective of ethics, in other words, through the analysis of the moral behaviour of the people living in the society, i.e. by studying the conscious and voluntary human acts that affect others.3 Violence: In this field the data are quite alarming, and in this respect we will review a recent report produced via the so-called Index of Visible and Invisible Victims (IVVI) of serious crimes. The study was carried out by the civil organisation Mxico Evala based on official Federal Government data, particularly from the National System of Public Security. According to this study, which covers the period December 2006 to March 2012,4 in other words the six years under President Felipe Caldern, a total of 88,361 voluntary, or intentional, homicides were recorded. This figure means that an average of 1,402 intentional homicides were committed a month.
3 Snchez Vzquez, Adolfo. tica. Mexico: Editorial Grijalbo, 1969, p. 23. 4 Daz, Gloria. Las vctimas visibles e invisibles del sexenio. Report published in the weekly Proceso, no. 1857. Mexico, 2012, p. 19.
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Furthermore, this violence has also been exercised through kidnappings, where the study reveals that in the same period a total of 5,478 kidnappings were reported, equivalent to 87 kidnappings a month, many of which had fatal consequences. The report also gives details on complaints of direct or telephone extortion suffered by the population, which total 26,853, equivalent to 426 complaints a month. These extortion attempts do not only affect the wealthier social classes, but are also being committed against poor and middle-class people. According to Leticia Ramrez de Alba, head of the IVVI, it must be taken into consideration that not only are the visible victims affected, but also their family members (invisible victims). She also points out that in the last six years, according to her methodology, a total of 440,000 people have suffered some kind of impact as a result of the crimes of homicide, kidnapping and extortion. The same researcher also reveals that in the last 15 years, high-impact crimes have increased, which shows that Mexicans are running ever greater risks of being affected by this type of violence. Here it is worth specifying that the majority of the crimes mentioned are related to organised crime, in other words to drugs trafficking and its range of associated forms of violence. This issue is very important in terms of analysis, given the large number of people who are, day by day, becoming involved in these kinds of activities. The cartels and criminal gangs operating throughout Mexico have witnessed an overwhelming growth in terms of the younger strata of the population, involving people aged between 20 and 35, who have been taken on by these groups or have set up new ones. Of course there is an explanation for the above situation, because in Mexico, according to official figures, there are around 7,820,000 young people who neither study nor work,5 the so-called ninis. This is essentially due to the shortage of opportunities in both the labour market and education. In percentage terms, the nearly 8 million ninis are equivalent to 21.6 per cent of all of the young people in Mexico and represent an easy prey for violence, addictions and organised crime, as well as being a threat
5 Avils, Karina. Mxico, segundo lugar de la OCDE en ninis, con 7 millones 820 mil. Newspaper report published in the daily La Jornada. Mexico, 12 March 2012.
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to social cohesion.6 It is this younger group of people that has gradually become involved in crime and is committing the offences described above on a daily basis. Corruption: Moreover, the issue of corruption is a problem that has also multiplied in Mexico, above all because it is to be found in both public and private spheres alike. Corruption is a problem that affects the State and its institutions, but also Mexican businesses and citizens. Its most obvious manifestation can be found in the actions of politicians, especially in the judiciary, at all government levels, where it is combined with another equally serious problem: impunity. In this sphere of the powers of justice, we were witnesses to the scandalous verdict related to the presidential elections of July 2012 in which, despite the left presenting a host of evidence demonstrating the electoral fraud committed by the PRI through vote-buying and exceeding their authorised election campaign budget, the electoral tribunal threw out all the evidence and validated the election in favour of the man who would be the next president. This judicial verdict was, in every possible way, illegal and once more showed the alliances and abuses of power to the detriment of respect for the law. Corruption has ultimately inundated the countrys entire political, economic and social fabric, there is no institutional or social space where no cases of abuses of power are to be found, in either the public or private spheres, for own benefit, where citizens not only end up as victims but also, in many cases, as an active part of the bribe. The Mexican economy is also marked by corrupt practices, for example, a study titled GovernmentCompanies-Corruption in Mexico (La corrupcin-gobierno-empresas en Mxico)7 established that 62 per cent of companies operating in Mexico have admitted that part of their income is set aside to pay bribes for public servants in order to obtain some kind of benefit. According to some estimates, acts of corruption cost Mexico around 30 billion dollars a year, representing from 3 to 4 per cent of Gross Domestic Product, or around 10 per cent of all taxes collected in the country.
6 Ibid. 7 Martnez, Jos. Wal-Mart y el deporte de la corrupcin. Article published by the Agencia Latinoamericana de Informacin. Mexico, 2012. Website address: http://alainet.org/ active/54481&lang=es.
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The data that defines our international position in the field of corruption show the scale of the problem: in 2011 Mexico was classified as the most corrupt country in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Furthermore it was ranked at position 100 out of the 183 countries that make up the Transparency International (TI) Corruption Perceptions Index 2011. The Corruption Perceptions Index uses data from 17 different surveys, analysing factors such as the enforcement of laws against corruption, access to information and conflicts of interest. As stated above, corruption and impunity are a mixture that has produced a culture of illegality throughout the country or, to look at it another way, these are two everyday practices that directly undermine the rule of law. Poverty: With this issue it is also necessary to document the delicate problem of social deprivation. According to the Mexican governments National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (Coneval), in Mexico 52 million people are living in poverty,8 which represents 46.2 per cent of the total population. This means that almost half of Mexicans are poor. This poverty is the main indicator of the social inequality that is prevalent in Mexican society, and which can also be documented by citing the following data from the National Institute of Statistics, Geography and Information Technology (INEGI) which were made public by the president of the UNAM, Jos Narro Robles: while the one per cent of the wealthiest Mexicans accumulated 8.1 per cent of the total income available in the country, the one per cent of the poorest only obtained 0.07 per cent, equivalent to 115 times the difference.9 These two problems, poverty and inequality, are related to two central issues of the Mexican economy: unemployment and the low wages paid to workers. With regard to the first issue, in the first quarter of 2011 some 5.6 per cent of the economically active population had no work;10 while
8 Consejo Nacional de Evaluacin de la Poltica de Desarrollo Social. Pobreza 2010. Porcentaje de la poblacin en pobreza segn entidad federativa, Estados Unidos Mexicanos. Website address: http://www. coneval.gob.mx. 9 Jurez, Vicente. Desigualdad y carencias de la poblacin, tema ineludible para el prximo gobierno: Narro. Newspaper report published in the daily La Jornada. Mexico, 27 May 2012, p. 33. 10 Poy Solano, Laura. Difciles condiciones sociales estorban la educacin superior, dicen rectores. Newspaper report published in the daily La Jornada. Mexico, 27 May 2012, p. 33.
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in relation to income the data also indicates that in 2011 annual per capita income stood at 8,890 dollars,11 i.e. 741 dollars a month, the equivalent of 563 euros a month. Furthermore, this is an average for the working population as a whole, including the low, middle and high strata of society. But if the incomes of the workers with the lowest wages are averaged out, we get an average that is equal to or lower than 4,724 dollars a year, i.e. 394 dollars a month, equivalent to 299 euros a month. Up to this point we have accounted for three fundamental conflicts. The data illustrate the magnitude of the social troubles, which leads us to understand that it is an issue related to both internal and external factors of the countrys dynamics, although the root can be related to the axiological crisis of the groups with power and the population itself, a crisis that will be analysed in the following pages, starting with the changes in values that are being perceived in contemporary society.
Axiological Crisis and Changing Values
Mexican society has become a risk society, as noted by Beck.12 The gain in power from techno-economic progress is quickly being overshadowed by the production of risks, which are not only related to the poor use of science and technology, but also to the inequalities generated by the capitalist system. The promised progress of economic globalisation has been concentrated in very few hands while, in contrast, an extensive variety of problems have emerged (violence, corruption, poverty, destruction) which have led to a whole new set of risks for society. In the case of Mexico we can affirm that several problems are now out of control and, as a result of this, attitudes of aggression, insecurity, fear and mistrust have been generated. The Mexican State is a failed State that is unable to control its conflicts, while society has been dragged along by the above-mentioned problems to the point where, today, the only thing that either the groups in power or the citizens want is to survive, at any price, without concerning themselves with the infringement of values, laws or anybody elses rights.
11 Gonzlez, Roberto. Cae Mxico 9 lugares en ingreso por habitante en este sexenio: BM. Newspaper report published in the daily La Jornada. Mexico, 21 April 2012, p. 27. 12 Beck, Ulrich. La sociedad del riesgo. Hacia una nueva modernidad. Barcelona: Paids, 1996, p. 19.
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For this reason it can be affirmed that while contemporary society is undergoing an axiological crisis it is also experiencing changing values. In the case of the axiological crisis, the groups that hold power at a global and national level, as well as important sectors of society, have determined to distance themselves from the values taught by religions, philosophies and civics, such as the idea of good, justice, equality, respect and solidarity, among others, and which entailed the search for a common good and social harmony. This, as we know, has become increasingly less important, which is why ethical and moral behaviour is distant from those principles, converting human relations into mere instrumental relations, where the other becomes an object, medium or thing, all in the interests of satisfying ones own needs, selfish desires and self-interest. And it is this that underlies violence, corruption and poverty in Mexico. And so it is that we find ourselves facing an axiological crisis, in which the values that serve to harmonise social relations and endow us with humanity, through relations of respect and affection, have been left to one side in order to prioritise other values that seek usefulness and domination of others. As a result we are losing the meaning of living in society, common sense and community spirit, which is where values related with good, justice and equality enter into play. The objectification of the other leads then to the sustaining of relations of indifference with regard to human dignity, in order to shift towards utilitarian relationships in which egocentration becomes the driving force behind ethical and moral behaviour. Mari Corb says that someone who lives egocentrically will always try to get some kind of benefit for themselves in serving others and That while the ego remains alive there is always some kind of utilisation of others, and that the love proclaimed towards them is above all selflove.13 Under this premise, private interests become favoured over the common interest, causing a crisis of those values that foster social cohesion and the humanisation of human beings in their ternary nature, i.e.
13 Corb, Mari. Theres no deep human quality without dis-egocentration, as theres no dis-egocentration without unconditional actions furthering the cause of every single creature. Essay published in La cualidad humana fuente de equidad y justicia. La herencia de las tradiciones de sabidura. Barcelona: CETR, 2009, p. 105.
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that of individual-society-species,14 the human condition of totality that we referred to at the start of this text. Up to this point we have reflected on the axiological crisis, now we will take a look at matters related to changing values. Some authors refuse to accept that an axiological crisis is underway and declare that their understanding of the current situation is as a change in values resulting from the process of globalisation. In this paper we assume that the changes in values go hand in hand with the axiological crisis, in other words, they are two interrelated phenomena that can be examined separately. As a result, in continuation we shall analyse what we understand by changing values. Globalised societies are adopting a different reference framework for values. The other values (good, justice, equality, respect, etc.), which are those that make community social life viable, are being abandoned for a different set of core values. There has been a kind of displacement or regrouping of different values that people now consider to be relevant to their lives. The balance, if ever there was one, of that ternary human condition of individual-society-species in which we assumed that we were moving in all three dimensions, has been broken. The scales have now become weighted towards the individual dimension, with the self gaining protagonism over all relations and things. Egocentration, as Corb notes, is the distinctive trait that has come to distinguish human behaviour. Individualism as a mark of contemporaneity is being fuelled by other values, such as: power, money, success, domination, consumerism, competition, accumulation, among others. These values have been systematically disseminated by neoliberal ideology and are part of the globalised culture that is fragmenting societies. This has had disastrous consequences for human relations, and even for our relation with nature, while accentuating humankinds predatory nature. And yet, in turn, this cultural change also emphasises the materialist nature of society and the idea that the maximum manifestation of human self-realisation is through having, consuming and accumulating.
14 Magalln, Mario. tica y educacin en tiempos de crisis. Essay published in the magazine Razn y palabra, no. 52. Mexico: Instituto Tecnolgico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, 2006. Website address: www.razonypalabra.org.mx.
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The neoliberal ideology has penetrated the current thinking of the individual, conditioning their spectrum of needs, desires and interests. But the most critical aspect part of this individualist culture is perhaps the loss of common sense, in other words, of the constructive human destiny that we need to have as a society, as a civilisation and as a species. Social fragmentation is causing our self-destruction, and this means that the change in values is even threatening our relational nature as human beings. As long as we continue to favour money, consumerism and power as the guiding pillars of our moral behaviour, the more we will reinforce this self-destructive process, and the fewer will be the possibilities of rebuilding a society based on fairness and caring coexistence. Some may say that this change in values is consubstantial with the change of era that human history is undergoing, and that values are not static and therefore will change. To believe this is to see this phenomenon as a natural thing. However, even though there may be some truth here, it is nevertheless important to be aware that todays predominant values are leading us towards confrontation and fragmentation, leaving little space for the recovery of the human condition of goodness. Egocentration, based on power, money and consumerism underlies corruption, violence and poverty, and therefore this change in values is making no contribution to the forging of a society in harmony, rather to the contrary, it is fuelling a culture of illegality in which everyone must fight for their own survival, without any concern for the disregarding of the laws and rules of coexistence. What is being manifested in contemporary society, based on this change in values, is the profound nature of capitalist ideology, converted into the champion of individualistic and self-destructive relations.
Social Subject: Ethical Education and Profound Human Quality
A first point to discuss here is that, despite the axiological crisis and changing values of our times, we must not resign ourselves to an irremediably fatal destiny. Quite the opposite, we must assume that it is possible to overcome the precarious condition of ethical and moral behaviour that this represents. The routes may be different but there is one that is, in
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two ways, fundamental for the configuration15 of the ethical social subject. Here we are referring to education, in both its ethical and spiritual dimension. With regard to the first of these, the start off point is the assumption of the existence of an axiological potential in humans, capable of transforming their conscience, while the spiritual side is tackled from the perspective of the cultivation of this profoundly human quality as a possible means of dis-egocentration. What we are talking about here is working from the axiological epistemology to construct knowledge and practices. However, before we make further inroads into this question we must clarify what is to be understood by an ethical social subject. We would explain this by stressing that it refers to every person who through training processes invigorates their cognitive, social and ethical aptitudes to transform them into critical capacities, capable of generating proposals that help in the development of the self, of others and of society.16 In other words, an ethical social subject is someone who, together with many other people, can look beyond the individual dimension to understand that oneself is also community and species, and that this demands that one shows responsibility in ones actions towards others and towards nature itself. And so, in line with Figueroa de Fatra, we assume that for the configuration of the ethical social subject, every person has an axiological potential that is given by their ontological conditions of reflexivity, ethics, otherness and openness,17 among others. Therefore, it is through educational processes that this potential can be fostered until values are constructed that guide human behaviour from a harmonious, just and caring perspective. This, of course, has its epistemological-theoretical demands, of which we will only indicate three: the capacity to make students reflect, favouring their open-mindedness and encouraging their critical capacity. With re15 Figueroa de Fatra, Lyle. La dimensin tico axiolgica: configuradora de sujetos sociales. Article published in the magazine Reencuentro, no. 043. Distrito Federal: Universidad Autnoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco, 2005. The essay can be consulted on the Network of Scientific Magazines of Latin America and the Caribbean, website address: www.redalyc.org. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid.
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gard to reflection, as an epistemic element, it is important to understand that the aim here is to seek clarity in a reality that is both complex and confused. It is, as Figueroa de Fatra says, returning to oneself and, at the same time, strengthening reciprocity with others and with the world. It is the objectivity-subjectivity dialectic in action. As for open-mindedness, it is possible to indicate that this involves knowing how to think, in order not to seek refuge in what is known. It involves opening oneself up to doubt, to questioning, which can strengthen alternative thinking, and the absolute rejection of reductionist knowledge. The other epistemic-theoretical demand of the educational process is the critical capacity, which is understood as thinking that is capable of confronting reality through arguments, where problematising dialogues between educator and student may generate self-critical and critical reasoning that will allow ones own reality to become intelligible in order for it to be transformed. With human beings axiological potential, which can be developed through education, and the theoretical-epistemic imperatives indicated above, this might give rise to the configuration of an ethical social subject who is capable of recomposing the axiological crisis and the change in values in order to weave another fabric of principles that will bring people back to their ternary condition. This means new attitudes that dis-egocentricise and profile the construction of relations based on respect, justice and love. Hypothetical ethical social subjects can be brought into being by means of basic primary education, but they can also be created during middle and higher education, or even by popular processes, through citizens organisations and social movements that promote common causes. The educational field is broad and within it there is also room for experiences related to work, neighbours and religion, plus a wide range of spaces for social encounter. The point here is to focus attention on axiological education with epistemic bases for the generation of that other knowledge that is related to the ethical. I believe that we must be quite clear that an education in itself is not sufficient to master the technique for instrumental purposes, but that the field of knowledge that sustains the humanisation of the person and society is also essential.
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The other sense of the kind of education that we are talking about is its relation to spirituality, or profound human quality, as the configurator of a social subject capable of acting disinterestedly and freely in favour of others in all senses. For this we will look further into the study on this human quality that has been conceptualised from the Centre for Studies on the Traditions of Wisdom. Corb points out that it is important to encourage the profound human quality, what our ancestors called mystical experience, as the best way of ensuring that the quality of our societies grow, of improving peaceful coexistence and avoiding, or at least alleviating, the destruction that may be caused by profound transformations of our collective ways of living.18 This profound human quality turns out to be complete dis-egocentration, or to put it another way, the idea is to completely silence the ego as a package of desires, fears and expectations, which in the end may permit an unconditional interest in all things and all people. Corb points out that there is only true love and true interest in the realities of this earth and of other humans when the ego has been silenced.19 As can be seen, this profound human quality is also an educational process that seeks to recover the axiological in our societies, through a continuous and profound effort of personal investigation; a quality that may come to be a configurator of an ethical social subject who is dis-egocentrated and moved by gratuitousness. This path represents an opening or interior development that cultivates a sensitivity towards existence that goes beyond our needs, desires and interests. It means starting to commit oneself to life disregarding any personal interest except that of serving others and society. This inner search may be possible because, as mentioned above, people, despite the cultural conditioning factors that make them egocentric, have an axiological potential that may allow them to enter deeply into that investigation, in order to discover the validity of life and the world, inde18 Corb, Mari. La sociedad del conocimiento globalizada y sus consecuencias epistemolgicas, antropolgicas, axiolgicas y religiosas. Essay published in Memorias del I Coloquio Internacional Dilogos: presente y futuro de las religiones y la espiritualidad. Sus contextos en Europa y Amrica Latina. Mexico: Universidad de Guadalajara, 2011. 19 Corb, op. cit., p. 105.
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pendently of their own needs. One of the challenges in this field is to develop the educational and epistemic resources that are needed to generate this knowledge, and to achieve the incorporation thereof into educational circuits, of different kinds, so as to cultivate this profound human quality.
Conclusions
Education, in its ethical dimension and also within the dimension of profound human quality, may be the configurator of a social subject with critical capacities that contribute towards self-development, the development of others and of society. Only in this way will it be possible to revert the axiological emptying or dismantling of contemporary societies, along with their changes in values, and only in this way will it be possible to recover social cohesion, with regard to the behaviour and evaluations of the subjects, in terms of recovering a sense of belonging and caring, in the acceptance of rules of coexistence and a willingness to participate in spaces for deliberation and collective projects.20 There is a guiding principle in human relations that it is important to remember: it is only through life in society that people come to acquire conscious awareness of their own existence, and for this reason ethical education along with the cultivation of human quality have an intrinsic value. We do not presume that the proposal formulated over the course of the present text is a finished idea, nor do we claim to assume as a truth that ethical education should be provided first, and then spiritual education, or vice-versa. Our only aim is to bring the validity of these statements to the debating table, along with their limitations and their possible scope, in the knowledge that there is no single path. Ultimately this means working from axiological epistemology with the aim of producing knowledge and practices that can meet the overwhelming process of power and domination exercised by culture of the individualist.
20 Ottone, Ernesto, and Sojo, Ana. Cohesin social: inclusin y sentido de pertenencia en Amrica Latina y el Caribe. Santiago de Chile: Comisin Econmica para Amrica Latina, 2007, p. 17.
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In the light of the structural analysis of praxis carried out by Antonio Gonzlez
J. Amando Robles
Postulating the absolute or selfless dimension
Given the human and scientific importance of Corbis proposal of rational postulation of the absolute dimension, it is of scientific interest to detect basic points of agreement in regard to this issue amongst other authors, even if the agreement is not total. This is particularly true when such agreement is found in scientific approaches conceived of and carried out with very different aims and focuses, such as the structural analysis of praxis undertaken by philosopher Antonio Gonzlez1. Not only is it of scientific interest but, as is usually the case in such instances, it is also a much desired scientific opportunity to compare and contrast, learn, integrate and make progress in the approach thereby confirmed. In reference to the structural analysis of praxis carried out by Gonzlez, for the purposes of our aim of demonstrating concurrence on important points we shall limit ourselves herein to three of the moments in said praxis: occurrence of the act and the radically different nature of this act from the things that appear in it, the necessary justification of human actions or the universality of the scheme of law and its limitations in terms of justification, and the real alterity of things, or the reality that lies beyond them, to which this alterity refers. In the three moments, rational
1This analysis, which he returns to in his works Teologa de la praxis evanglica. Ensayo de una teologa fundamental, Sal Terrae: Santander 1999 and La transformacin posible. Socialismo en el siglo XXI?, Bubok: Madrid 2010, he chiefly develops in his work Estructuras de la praxis. Ensayo de una filosofa primera, Trotta: Madrid 1997.
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postulation of a reality beyond all reality, and therefore beyond reason pointing to the absolute dimension, is a fact. Before proceeding to give an accounting of this, however, it is necessary to provide an initial description of the author and of the nature of his analysis, wherein we find the first point of agreement with the approach taken by Mari Corb.
Motivation and analysis
Antonio Gonzlez is habitually noted, and rightly so, for his philosophical, intellectual and even institutional ties to the thinking of Xavier Zubiri and Ignacio Ellacura. From Zubiris work he absorbed a passion for reality, for what it is founded on and how to access it with philosophical rigour. From Ellacura he took his passion for social and political reality, and for an informed understanding of this reality, to further its transformation through a liberating praxis. Zubirian inspiration, in its broadest sense and gleaned from Ellacura, runs through his entire work2. In light of the above, it is clear that Antonio Gonzlez is a philosopher. He is also, however, a theologian, and as several of his theological works show, his theological knowledge is extensive. Furthermore, he possesses a sound knowledge of the history of religion, culture and the current economy. What makes him relevant for theology in Latin America is the fact that he is critical of it but still identifies with its vocation of liberation, as well as the contribution he makes to the issue with his structural analysis of praxis. He finds the practical, ethical and political dimension of this category, so essential to liberation theology, overvalued in said theology, as it is in post-Marx Marxist theory, at the expense of the theoretical dimension and a comprehensive overview of it, leading it to be reductionist and therefore insufficiently liberating, or non-liberating. As to his motivation in regard to liberation theology in Latin America, this is explicitly stated in the Introduction to his work Teora de la praxis evanglica, wherein he comments that although the book is not written
2 This does not mean he is in complete agreement with Zubiri. The discrepancy starts with the very concept of reality. Cf. Estructuras de la praxis, pp. 36-43.
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on the subject of liberation theology it is a book written after liberation theology, seeking an exit to the crisis that theology has suffered, and in which it has left us.3 This is his immediate aim. Another of his aims, one more mediately, scientifically and philosophically ambitious, is to show in what sense it can rationally be claimed that Christ constitutes the definitive revelation of God4 or, expressed in broader terms, how the absolute, selfless dimension can be rationally postulated as the only dimension in which human beings are fully realised. However, the structural nature of his praxis analysis causes his philosophical contribution to transcend any potentially specific Latin American interest, making it a general contribution to philosophy, first philosophy, as he likes to call it, or foundational philosophy, as well as to religion as a subsystem of meaning, to rational substantiation of the absolute dimension of reality or selflessness this substantiation is that which is of interest to us here and to substantiation of a liberating praxis. His analysis, a structural analysis of praxis, is of a scientific, phenomenological nature rather than a philosophical one, despite the fact that it is a first philosophy, i.e. a philosophy upon which all other truths are
3 Teologa de la praxis evanglica, p. 14. On the previous, and first, page (p. 13) he had written: Since discovering the Christian faith in my childhood, the different intellectual and political movements revolving around liberation theology represented, for me and for many of those around me, the most suitable way of giving an accounting of that faith in the world we must live in. Not many of the basic features of this global context have changed. Poverty and the oppression of millions of people continue to pose a challenge for Christians. And, nevertheless, history has shown us the limits of this theology. Liberation theology, in its classic formulations, did not focus enough on the ultimate structures of sin, and for this very reason neither could it fully address the social and historical forms of sin. 4 Teologa de la praxis evanglica, p. 18. This same rational stance is what enables him to account for the originality of the religion of Israel and of early or original Christianity in comparison to other religions, and to reclaim virtually all Christian doctrine, even that formulated more dogmatically. It is a stance that can and does give rise to conflict, as it initially sounds quite belief-oriented, particularly when, in our view, it does not insist enough on the symbolic nature of the religious language in which Christian truths are expressed, but its consistency and openness cannot be denied, precisely because it proceeds rationally, in principle without assumptions, rather than on the basis of beliefs. This is the case when he states that it is necessary to point out the enormous inequality of religions with respect to the only salvation, which comes from Christ. And this, let us repeat, does not mean placing the Christian religion at the very summit of all religions (Ibidem, p. 438). In this regard, the disparity between his reading of New Testament texts and Christian truths and that of Mari Corb is enormous, and the two are difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile.
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founded. In other words, in his praxis analysis Antonio Gonzlez must universally hold to an approach to praxis that is immediate, direct and empirical, aiming to note solely that which is, what appears in the various moments of praxis and the structure it displays, without any philosophical or even scientific presuppositions such as those usually represented by suppositions or explanations of an anthropological, natural and linguistic nature which, due to their nature as explanations, follow rather than precede the different moments of praxis. His approach to all praxis, therefore, including his approach to religion5, is exclusively scientific, or even pre-scientific, if you will, in that it is not even based on a foundation of postulates, but rather on the given. The analysis we are referring to is a structural analysis of the four moments which, in the following structural order, comprise praxis in its entirety: acts, actions, deeds and activities. The analysis is thus one of praxis, inasmuch as praxis is composed of these moments. The act is the simplest unit to a certain extent an abstract representation of all acts and activity is the most complex structure. Due to space constrictions, we will attempt to limit ourselves herein to sketching a minimal outline of this analysis, the bare bones needed to establish an initial correlation between his approach and that of Corb and to enable better understanding of the importance and implications of the three sections of description and commentary that will follow. Acts, as mentioned above, are the abstract expression employed by Gonzlez to refer to the simplest analytical unit of praxis. Some of their characteristics will be outlined and commented on in the following section. At this time we will simply underscore their most important characteristic, which in turn characterises the subsequent structures of praxis (actions, deeds and activities): radical alterity. One thing common to all acts, whatever their nature, is that they are always updates to things, but in such a way that the updates differ radically from the acts, and the acts from the updates. As Gonzlez states, Acts are updates to things that stand in radical alterity to the acts themselves6.
5 Religions do not consist, as we have seen, of simple views of the world. They form systems of religious deeds featuring, of course, an intellective moment. (Teologa de la praxis evanglica, p. 134). 6 Teologa de la praxis evanglica, p. 82
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There is yet another alterity, however. This is real alterity, which always occurs and is perceived between the things updated in acts and the things to which these hark back, an alterity which translates into a distension between updates and things. Nor are they identical or equivalent. Between them there is always a profound and real difference. This means that acts, actions, deeds and activities are always distended with respect to the things in themselves, and open, i.e. never completed and closed monads in themselves. Due to the very structure of acts, actions, deeds and activities, there is always a reality that lies beyond their update. We thus see the foundation of reality in itself, the reality which, beyond any reality updated in deeds and activities, can ultimately be postulated as the absolute dimension, in the most selfless and absolute sense of this term. When subjected to structural analysis, actions, the basic units that comprise our acts, are no more than a set of three types of acts, feelings, affections and volitions, independent from one another although linked and linkable. They are already human and even personal, but still lack any meaning. Deeds, on the other hand, are actions with meaning, which in contrast to actions as such, comprise another type of act, acts of intellection of meaning, which Gonzlez also calls intentional acts. Deeds are thus structures with a great degree of practical precision. They are systems of perceptive, emotional, desiderative and intentional acts, oriented around a single scheme. It is precisely here, in deeds and as schemes of meaning and of orientation, that religions or religion, as the subsystem of meaning that it is, finds its potential and its reality. Thus the alterity of reality, or the awareness of a reality in and due to the update that refers back to itself as a reality of the other, beyond its update, is for this very reason paradoxical and possesses power, i.e. the power of attraction entailed by alterity as a challenge, or tension between the updated reality and the reality when considered in itself. For Gonzlez, religion is rooted in the paradox of the alterity of reality 7, in the need to
7 The paradox of alterity lies in the fact that while the updated reality seems to be reality, it is not. For Gonzlez, however, it is also paradoxical because it is in it and, we would suggest, due to it that our most intimate, personal and profound being emerges, according to repeated statements made by Gonzlez himself: Always when we are brought back to what is most other, at the same time it is that which is most own (Teologa de la praxis evanglica, p. 128), or, expressed in a more synthetic and almost categorical manner, the most other is precisely the most own and specific. (Ibid. p. 252)
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justify and the challenge of justifying this difference and tension. In this regard, if every human action is linked to the paradoxical power of alterity, it is not surprising, says Gonzlez, that certain deeds appear wherein the intent is to imbue this alterity with a specific meaning. This is the function of religions, to give meaning to this paradox by moulding it8. How? Religion does this by assuming the role of an ultimate scheme of explanation of alterity, and thus of orientation, and setting itself up for this purpose as a universal scheme of law and as the materialisation of the principle of retribution. Thus, what defines religion for Gonzlez is not that the meaning it bears is religious, sacred or something equivalent, but rather that it is the materialisation, in deeds with meaning, of the radical alterity that characterises praxis9. This materialisation or materialisations need not necessarily be religious. They may well be secular or lay, as has been the case since the Enlightenment10. The important factor is that they are ultimate or aspire to be so. This is because, given the open nature of our deeds, human beings are not contented with partial explanations and require final explanations. In any case, returning to the subject of deeds, even as actions with meaning deeds are always characterised by multiple possibilities, and in order to act one must choose from amongst these. It is to this seizing of a possibility that activity structurally corresponds. Two more acts are required for activity, in addition to all of the acts comprising the deed. These are acts of reason. This is due to the fact that only by reasoning can we rationally opt for one of various possibilities for actions with meaning. Finally, it must be borne in mind that there is no single mode of truth. For the four moments comprising praxis, there are an equal number of corresponding modes of truth. The truth corresponding to acts would be a simple truth, in the sense that it is primary, direct and immediate; a non-linguistic truth. To actions, there would be a corresponding current
8 Teologa de la praxis evanglica, p. 129. Gonzlez made comments along similar lines in regard to religion as a religious quest: The religious quest consists of an attempt to transcend the intentional schemes that give meaning to the paradox of alterity, questioning the foundation of this paradox irrespective of our praxis. (Ibid., p. 134). 9 Idem 10 Ibidem, pp. 126 and 130
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truth, to deeds, truth as an adaptation and to activities, truth as an unveiling and realisation.11 Gonzlez is thus able to cover the structural analysis of all praxis with a view to the different moments that comprise it, giving an accounting of it in a manner that is always phenomenological, empirical and free from philosophical suppositions, even scientific ones, i.e. without appealing to theoretical suppositions that arise afterwards and which, being the theories that they are, must be - at least initially - explained themselves rather than offering an explanation. This factual approach, without any anthropological, philosophical or scientific presuppositions, constitutes the first basic point of convergence, of great epistemic consequence, with Corbis anthropological approach based on human beings as a living animal capable of speech. This occurs despite the fact that the approaches are thematically disparate. This has been captured by Juan Manuel Fajardo in his doctoral thesis on understandings of religion12, wherein he encompasses both approaches, alongside others of the same nature, under the category of epistemic understanding as opposed to those he places under that of modern understanding, illustrating the great epistemological divide between both understandings and their consequences. According to Fajardos characterisation, approaches in the category of modern understanding, as modern as this understanding may be, will always be philosophical or theological, always based on beliefs, whether these are philosophical, scientific or theological, while approaches in the category of epistemic understanding will always be empirical, factual and lacking in suppositions, more suited to giving an accounting of the nature of that which is religious and its functions, as well as the developments it undergoes, its changes and its transformations13.
11 Ibid., pp. 101-110 12 Juan Manuel Fajardo Andrade, Nuevas comprensiones de la religin y su incidencia en la epistemologa y metodologa del pensamiento teolgico latinoamericano, Doctoral Thesis, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Department of History and Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy), Madrid 2011. 13 Although Fajardo does not use them with Corbis intent, there is a high degree of correlation between his categories of modern understanding and epistemic understanding and Corbis categories of mystical epistemology and non-mythical epistemology. The former could be subsumed within the latter, as the latter span a much broader historical reality.
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Corb bases her approach to the axiological and to the religious on human beings as living animals capable of speech, thereby possessed of a knowledge providing us with two simultaneous approaches to the object or the reality that we know: one that is relative, depending on our lives, needs and interests, and another that is absolute, or reality in and of itself. Gonzlez, interested in structural examination of praxis, bases his approach on the human act as an update of things or realities, in which by virtue of this same update the act and the update differ radically, i.e. radical alterity, as do the updated things from the things that they refer back to, i.e. real alterity There are clearly thematic and even discipline-related differences between the two approaches, but they share a factual basis as their starting point and all of the implications that this entails. In light of this, they are far from opposing each other. Rather, they are complementary. With this minimal sketch of the structural analysis of praxis undertaken by Gonzlez, we hope to make it easier to understand the line taken in the three sections that follow. Without this sketch these would have been more difficult to comprehend.
The act is not only the most basic and primary structure of praxis, the first praxic truth of all and, therefore, the first transcendental of philosophy14 (the second transcendental would be the alterity with which things display themselves in our acts). It is also, in itself, of such a nature that it participates in the absolute dimension and, even taken in its relative function as a place where realities are updated, it enables postulation of the pure act or the absolute dimension, which for Gonzlez is God15. Seen as updates to things, acts exist in a continual state of evolution. They have a constitutively dynamic, temporary and open nature, in the sense that due to the existence of a radical alterity between acts and updates
14 Teologa de la praxis evanglica, p. 83 15 La transformacin posible. Socialismo en el siglo XXI?. Madrid: Bubok 210, p. 132. 20th century French spiritual layman Marcel Lgaut expressed himself in similar terms: the Act within act in which God is and spreads in the World. Marcel Lgaut, Llegar a ser uno mismo, Buscar el sentido de la propia vida, Asociacin Iglesia Viva: Valencia 1993, p. 101
The act as an occurrence and its nature
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of things in acts, in principle no update will ever be the same as the act. Every update will be dynamic, temporary and open, as will acts, being the updates that they are. However, due to this same radical alterity, we may dwell on acts in themselves, just as we may dwell on things in themselves. Acts, then, appear differently, not thing-related or subjective, because they are not things, nor do they entail a subject behind the acts. Acts appear as they are, a subtler reality. They do not occur without things, but they are not things. They are an act, the emergence of things. Acts are not visible, audible or touchable. Acts do not appear, they cannot be updated and they do not emerge. What does emerge, according to Gonzlez16, are the things that constitute the conclusion of these acts. In this sense, acts are not real but they do occur, as is stressed by Gonzlez. They occur and they are true. They are bearers of a truth which is that of themselves, that of their being, that of the update itself, rather than that of the updated thing; a simple, absolute, immediate truth, an invisible patency of their being: immediate, diaphanous and transparent. This leads Gonzlez to conclude with the following paradoxical expression: Acts are not visible, but everything is visible in acts17. It is in this patency, if not in the act itself the transparency not of glass but of the human nature of the act in which Gonzlez identifies a materialisation of the personal corresponding to said act, and therefore proof of the difference between person and subject. Indeed, if one understands the act in this way, subject and person cannot be considered to be the same, nor can person be thought of as a subject located behind the act. Person is neither primarily a subject nor a self-possessed reality. The root of person, stresses Gonzlez, lies in the physical occurrence of acts, in the patency of this occurrence. All of the above enables Gonzlez to claim that the ontology of acts is truly metaphysical, as it brings us to something that differs from all physical things, and which consists precisely of the emergence of them18. Moreover, it allows us to see acts in themselves as a human structure that enables us to postulate the reality of the absolute dimension as the
16 Cf. La transformacin posible. Socialismo en el siglo XXI?, p. 26 17 Ibidem, p. 28 18 Ibid., p. 30
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act par excellence, where things, update and act are a single reality, the one reality, absolute and total, the pure act. Thus, any attempt to understand the act, or acts, without postulating the absolute dimension to which these themselves refer, becomes just another of many attempts at objectification and nominalisation of praxis, which unfailingly values human acts by their results, along with the reductionist effect or effects that this entails. Therefore, in this line of approach to the absolute dimension, as is often the case with theistic spiritual masters, Gonzlez quite rightly refers to God as the pure act19. This is an appropriate manner of naming what cannot be named, the absolute dimension of reality, and of underscoring that without this non-dualist starting point a truly liberating praxis is impossible. In this non-dualist conception based on the subtle being of the act we find, then, another important point of agreement, as well as in the concept of the person achieving realisation as an act fully here and now, and being identified with that act, liberated from time and from results or, rather, acting beyond them, from a position of unity and total surrender, without divisions either of the mind or the heart.
When we covered deeds as actions with meaning and the need to justify them, we observed the emergence in praxis, according to the structural analysis by Gonzlez, of religion as an exercise of meaning, aiming to give an ultimate or complete meaning to real alterity and to justify it, and we even saw the form that it has adopted, which Gonzlez calls a scheme of law20. This has not been the only form. Religion, re-linking the human being to alterity and to its power via the scheme of the law, has also at
19 20th century French spiritual layman Marcel Lgaut expressed this concept in nearly identical terms: the Act within act in which God is and spreads in the World. Marcel Lgaut, Llegar a ser uno mismo, Buscar el sentido de la propia vida, Asociacin Iglesia Viva: Valencia 1993, p. 101. Also see, by the same author, Interioridad y compromiso, Asociacin Marcel Lgaut: Madrid 2000, p. 66. 20 Teologa de la praxis evanglica, p. 139 et passim. Cf. chap. 3, El esquema de la ley, pp. 112-173. This concept, also expressed as the Adamic scheme of self-justification and Adamic logic, along with its opposite, the scheme or principle of selflessness features heavily, to the point where it is a key concept, in his work Reinado de Dios e imperio. Ensayo de teologa social, Sal Terrae: Santander 2003.
The universal scheme of law as a justification in praxis and its limitations
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times appeared rather to be de-linking. This, however, has not been the predominant form, which has been that of religion as a scheme of law. This has manifested in all religions, even despite the limitations displayed by the scheme, as universal as it may be. Given the real alterity, the insurmountable distance between updated realities and the realities in themselves to which these hark back, there will always be a distance, also insurmountable, between praxis (acts, actions, deeds and activities) and its achievements and results, necessitating its justification. In the words of Antonio Gonzlez, our intentional schemes can never aim to exhaust the radical alterity of the things updated in our acts21. Viewed and considered thus, the justification will always be one of praxis by its acts, achievements or results, with a need to resort to schemes of meaning or of orientation, which are, in this sense, intentional. These schemes are nothing more than abstract schemes, constructed based on past praxis experience, with a somewhat determining role, which in religion take the shape of a scheme of the law and operate as a principle of retribution or, what amounts to the same thing, achievements as the result of praxis and, therefore, as its retribution. In the ambit of the cultural, the social and the political, the scheme of law and principle of retribution would translate into the universal and therefore well-known ideology of the human being as having ultimate responsibility for and being deserving of his fate. It is praxis, understood as the praxis of a subject, as the production of intentional acts rather than praxis as formed by constitutive dimensions, which explains the outcome or the cultural, economic, social and political status achieved by the human being. Such is the scheme, a scheme of law laid out in a universal fashion, which has been embodied by religions, prisoners of an alterity that they want to justify and from which there is no exit within the scheme. There can be no exit, because religions hinge on this alterity. What is more, they set themselves up as guardians of alterity as such22 and, in short, of the systems of meaning that hinge on it. On this profoundly dualist path which is based on, we would suggest, non-dualist approaches, surmounting and
21 Ibid., p. 104 22 Cf. La transformacin posible, p. 114
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exiting alterity is impossible, as is full and total realisation of the human being and, therefore, our liberation. Gonzlez therefore, with a view to the religion of Israel, classes the universal scheme of law as humanitys fundamental sin23, a category he did not arrive at lightly. Rather, he chose it with conviction and reasserts it frequently. The category is not only theological, but also sounds profoundly Manichaean and even, in our judgement, rather unjust, despite the fact that for Gonzlez it is profoundly biblical24. We must admit, however, that it is of an uncommon coherence and radicalism to express the determining and oppressive role of the scheme of the law as such, and to suggest that another view of praxis is not only possible but desirable. This is what has occurred at times in some religions25, noted particularly by Gonzlez in the religion of Israel, although the scheme of law was still heavily and recurrently present, and especially in Jesus of Nazareth and early or original Christianity. In these moments and situations, the scheme of law and principle of retribution were shattered as a justification, and another principle emerged which was no longer based on the correlation between results and actions, but on selflessness, on the free and selfless intervention of a God that was completely other. For this reason, and in these terms, for Gonzlez Christianity is not merely another religion, but rather something which transcends all religion26. The opening that characterises our praxis in all of its structural moments but particularly from the moment of deed performance necessarily entails a need to justify it. Moreover, this occurs in such a way that if we adhere to praxis in its immanence no other justification is possible outside of the scheme of law or principle of retribution, i.e. outside of the mechanism of praxis justified and justifying itself by its acts and results. This explains the anthropological universality of the scheme of law, the
23 Teologa de la praxis evanglica, p. 189 et passim. Or, additionally and with a view to the Jewish and Christian faiths, Adams sin (Ibid., p. 247 and 258). 24 See his interpretation of Gen. 2: 16-17, i.e. the ban on eating fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, in Teologa de la praxis evanglica (pp. 185-194). What God would have forbidden would be the aim of justifying ourselves to ourselves through the fruits of our good deeds (p. 189) or, in other words, having introduced the scheme of law. 25 Gonzlez asserts this, although with utmost caution, when he states that there are attempts to liberate us from that scheme (Teologa de la praxis evanglica, p. 155). 26 Ibid., p. 438
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way it has been adopted by religion or religions, raising the principle to its highest expression, but also to its radical limit. Because, from an immanent point of our praxis, the observation by Gonzlez that nothing can be found in it that enables a justification of it beyond the scheme of law27 is very important. Within and under the scheme of law, there is no possibility of a full justification of our praxis other than in a correlation between our actions and their results. If another justification is possible, there is no way that it can arise out of immanent analysis of our praxis. We must transcend this. We must surmount the concept of praxis as justified by its results. This new praxis is that which we see crystallised in certain interpersonal relations, a praxis characterised by selflessness, which these same types of relationships show to be possible. It is the praxis which, as mentioned above, we observe occasionally in religions and particularly, according to Gonzlez, in the religion of Israel, and even more fully in Jesus of Nazareth and early Christianity: true human liberation, a liberation that is pure selflessness, a gift and grace, if we can call it that, insomuch as it is something that occurs without a rational explanation. At this point it can be understood that full liberation is something that can and must be postulated, but not something which can be assumed to be the product or result of application of the scheme of the law. If it were, Gonzlez points out, we would remain under the scheme of the law, and there would be no such liberation, as we would remain subject to the necessary justification of praxis by its results, the alterity which gives universality to the scheme of the law. This scheme may be of a religious, metaphysical or scientific nature; it is of little import. Provided that it entails alterity and a correlation between results and actions, it will be a scheme of law, never liberating in nature, with an unlimited immanent ability to reproduce itself. Postulation of this selfless praxis in Gonzlez is another point of agreement with the postulation of the absolute dimension seen in Corb, a postulation that is rational, but beyond which we cannot arrive ratio27 Ibid., p. 171
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nally. It is, nevertheless, a postulation that is necessary for possession of a comprehensive, total, liberated and liberating conception of human praxis.
The reality beyond all alterity
It is alterity, radical or real, which enables us to dwell on the act in itself, irrespective of the things that are updated in it, on the justification required by each update that acts consist of, and on things or realities in themselves, irrespective of the acts and updates in them. When we dwell on these, we can question what acts are, what the justification beyond justification is, and the reality of things beyond their updates (obviously, as these are not reality), but also even beyond the things to which their updates hark back. The fact that realities are still conceived of in terms of alterity is enough to tell us that they are not true reality; beyond them there is another reality, one beyond all alterity. We have now looked at the first two moments and raised some questions. Let us now take a look at the third, at things, and raise further questions as to what they are in themselves, independent of acts. Radical and real alterity does not allow us to see things in any other manner, beyond even their update or the things in themselves, than in terms of alterity. Thus, reality itself would seem to be nothing more than alterity. This leads Gonzlez to frequently express himself in terms similar or equivalent to these: Reality is nothing more than the alterity of things irrespective of our acts. Reality is real alterity28. However, reality conceived and thought of in terms of alterity is still not the true reality. Rather, as the alterity it is, it is thus not the ultimate reality. We must therefore ask ourselves questions as to its foundation. What is the foundation of this alterity? What is the reality beyond this, its alterity? This alterity means we must ask these sorts of questions, and that we cannot answer them with another reality constructed in terms of alterity or entailing alterity. This is because, as Gonzlez soundly reasons, the foundation of all alterity cannot be one more thing among the real things in the world29. He adds that this is because the power
28 Teologa de la praxis evanglica, p. 82. Also see p. 98. 29 Ibid., p. 136
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of the foundation of alterity is also other with respect to the things in the world30. We are thus once again faced with the rational need to postulate the absolute dimension; absolute in terms of selflessness, or free-from all justification and all presuppositions31, having to move between the need for reason and its radical limitations in order to reach this dimension. Indeed, we must question alterity and its paradox, but upon questioning the foundation of these we are questioning the foundation of all alterity. This is because to question the foundation of this paradox is to question the foundation of all alterity32. However, any attempt to think of the foundation of the paradox of alterity as one real thing amongst the real things of the world would not itself be rational33. The foundation sought, should it exist, cannot be one real thing amongst the other real things in the world.34 To think thus as regards the foundation of the paradox of reality would not be rational. This is because human reason, in the exercise of seeking the foundation of the paradox of alterity and if it retains internal consistency, if it seeks to give a total explanation, is thrust in this exercise beyond all alterity, beyond any reality. Thus, human reason is rational when it recognises that the foundation of the paradox of alterity is not a reality that can be reached by human reason. When we question the foundation of the paradox of alterity, what we are faced with is totally other. This is true to such a degree, says Gonzlez, that rather than a real alterity it would be more accurate to speak of a total alterity. It is totally other35, stresses the author. Herein we encounter the rational limitations of human reason in this regard. Human reason can take us from the radical alterity of things in our praxis to the real alterity of things independent of this praxis. However, reason cannot take us beyond this alterity of the real. This is because reason, a function generated for alterity and dependent on it, cannot
30 Id. 31 Estructuras de la praxis, pp. 71-72 32 Teologa de la praxis evanglica, p. 137 33 Id. 34 Id. 35 Id.
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starting from the basis of its constitutive alterity illuminate what is totally other. Reason thus recognises this, it recognises its limits. Reason is rational.36 In other words, being rational, reason cannot take human beings to the absolute dimension, or reveal this dimension. It can only postulate it. This is because the absolute dimension is reality in all its selflessness. Our ability to know this dimension results from the condition that Mari Corb identifies in human beings as animals capable of speech. Here we see another example of the potentially complementary natures of the two different empirical approaches and proposals of Corb and Gonzlez. When the living animal capable of speech that is the human being knows something, it knows it in two dimensions. One of these is relative, a reality of things dependent on human life, and the other is absolute, or dependent on the thing in itself. In each of the two approaches, in that of Gonzlez, which is of a rather philosophical nature, and in that of Corb, of an anthropological, linguistic and social nature, although both are epistemological, the objective is to restore to human beings their total dimension, in its full and completely liberated and liberating praxis. Gonzlez weighs things in terms of liberation and liberating praxis, and Corb in terms of creation and cultivation of profound human quality, but both approaches converge in their ultimate aim and the way in which they achieve it. We shall close with a reiteration of the main conclusion reached by Fajardo in the aforementioned doctoral thesis on new academic understandings of religion and their bearing on the epistemology and methodology of Latin American theological thinking, as we consider it an appropriate epistemological framework in which to encompass both approaches to the religious, that of Mari Corb and that of Antonio Gonzlez. Since modernity first ushered in academic approaches to the religious, two fundamental academic understandings have emerged, one modern and another epistemic. The first is based on intellectual suppositions such as subject, nature, analogy and truth, proceeding as a theology, albeit of a secular nature. As such, it was not only the predominant stance but virtually the only one until just a few decades ago. The second is not
36 Ibid., pp. 137-138
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based on intellectual suppositions, but rather on findings: findings with respect to human beings, to knowledge and to reality as processes and constructions, proceeding in an epistemic and scientific fashion, with no pretensions other than to reach this it does aim for as far as findings and postulates will allow, as comprehensively as possible. And this is, for Fajardo, and we agree with his opinion, the understanding that best suits the new nature of the religious in our times of knowledge and of reality as human beings are discovering it to be. The proposals of both Mari Corb and Antonio Gonzlez fall within the framework of this understanding. Moreover, it is because they fall within this framework that postulation of the absolute or selfless dimension is rational in both of them.
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The Profound Structure of Spiritual Initiation Procedures through Study of the Mahaprajnaparamitasastra Treatise on the Great Virtue of Wisdom (Nagarjuna)
Montserrat Cucarull
The historical context of the treatise
The Prajnaparamita is one of the central texts of Mahayana Buddhism (also known as the Great Vehicle). Its title literally translates as Verses on the Perfection of Wisdom, Which is the Storehouse of Precious Virtues (or, additionally, the Mother of All Buddhas). Like all of the great spiritual texts from traditions of human wisdom, the work is so profound that even today it can steer us toward what it terms liberation or enlightenment, despite the 2000 years that separate us from the original authors, as well as enormous disparities, both intellectual and cultural. The original text of the Prajnaparamita has been lost. It is believed to have been written in Sanskrit. What has been passed down to us are four Chinese translations (dating roughly from 400 A.D.), one Tibetan translation, one Sanskrit recession and one Tibetan translation of this recession. One of the features of the Mahayana sutras is that the texts consist of one version in verse (generally first and less studied) and another in prose. The reason for this seems to be that the verses are written in dialect and thus more difficult to understand in comparison to the prose, which uses standard Sanskrit. We also know that the sutras were originally intended to be memorised. The translation, in contrast, is meant to be read. Thus, the literal translations of the verse forms become somewhat unintelligible and difficult to comprehend.
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Although some of the poems potential charm has likely been lost in translation, we can attest that what has been transmitted are the principles of Mahayana doctrine, communicated in a format that is vibrant, simple, direct and concise. The Prajnaparamita is a work of great precision, where every word and formula is meticulously selected and placed in a defined order with a specific aim. It represents the culmination of long centuries of scholastic philosophy. In order to interpret it correctly, consultation of a comprehensive commentary and compilation are necessary and even fundamental. The Maha Prajnaparamita Sastra (Mpps), on which we have focused our study, constitutes such a commentary. The Mpps is attributed to Nagarjuna, one of the most enigmatic but significant figures in Buddhism. He was a Bodhisattva (teacher, sage) and founded the so-called Middle Way school of thought, which accepts Buddhism and the mysticism of the Great Vehicle (Mahayana), scrutinises ancient Buddhist texts (Hinayana) and leads, like all forms of Buddhism, to the Great Void. With respect to this Void, we would like to clarify that the term, commonly used in Buddhism, is employed as an antidote to all attachment to false views and conceptions. It could perhaps be stated that this is another term used to denote non-duality, the non-differentiability of yes and no. The Middle Way school of thought is thus not a nihilist school. Rather, in this school appearances are rejected only in order to affirm the Self. The aim of our study, however, is not to interpret the treatise from a spiritual perspective, although we do try to comprehend its message, but rather to focus on it from an axiological, epistemological perspective.
Study of the Mpps from the perspective of axiological epistemology
We work on the assumption that the text employs terminology that is not mythical but rather conceptual and logical, with reasoned arguments that are dealt with on an axiological level. In other words, the treatise
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axiologises, as do all of the central texts of the various traditions. We therefore aim to observe how it uses logical arguments as a foundation for the axiological. With a view to this axiological end, we will observe how the basic structure of language is used and how transformation processes are presented rationally. Let us briefly review the basic structure: We know that the logic of the specific formality of language, which is actually the basis of human structure, rests on opposing elements that share a common axis. If we pursue this basic model of meaning, then we must find the axis that joins two clearly presented opposing elements, and be able to make a choice between the two. To transition from one to the other, one must be rejected. Since the system is binary in nature, rejection of one implies acceptance of the other. In the Mpps, neither myths nor beliefs are employed in order to make this transition, i.e. to cover the entire structure. Rather, exclusive use is made of arguments, in order to convince through reason. Dialogues between teacher and student are employed to dispel doubts and make arguments at the same time as they address questions and objections. The model is simple and it is repeated constantly from all angles, acting as a framework for the Buddhas teachings, which we summarise in the following manner: the world of desire is a world of suffering, fear, anxiety and death. To live in this world is to live with ones thoughts, feelings and actions rooted in self-indulgence (S1). There is, however, an alternative: a true life, one of non-suffering, of peace and happiness (S2). In other words, an existence lived with ones thoughts, feelings and actions rooted in silencing self-indulgence. As can be seen, the argument is semiotic. There are no beliefs but rather two possible alternatives, presented in opposition to one another. The model is one of two terms, S1 and S2, in opposition to each other but joined by a common axis.
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Buddha uses conceptual logic to illustrate the consequences of desire and the formality of the semiotics of the axiological as a lead-in to the alternative. It should be borne in mind that we are presenting a formal, abstract model in which the entire structure is covered rationally, but which is also axiological. In other words, a qualitative leap must be taken from the formal implication. Feeling must come into play, as we know that everything relating to the senses and to feeling, and thus to quality, is concrete. Feeling knows nothing of logic or formality. Arguments do not convey quality. Therefore, once the two options have been clearly presented, the task at hand is to make a choice. In this area, reasoning is no longer possible. Reasoning helps drive the entire process, to clear up doubts and answer questions. It thus prepares us for the leap, getting the launch pad ready, but this leap is not automatic. It is qualitative and axiological, with no relationship of cause and effect. No reasoning or argument can make it automatic. For this reason, taking the leap could be said to be akin to a gift. More specifically, in the Mpps we see that the common axis that connects the two formalities is a way of life, in which the following elements are at cross-purposes: A A system of life in which thinking, feeling and acting are governed by self-indulgence, S1.
We have thus described a basic axis that joins two opposing elements. These opposing elements must be clearly presented in order that we can undertake a transformation from one to the other. There are two options, and we must choose the way of life considered to be best for survival. In accordance with the basic structure of meaning, in order to transition from one option to the other the self-indulgent way of life must be rejected. Since the system is binary in nature, this rejection necessarily
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B A system of life in which these three faculties are rooted in the total silencing of self-indulgence, S2.
implies acceptance of the way of life based on the total silencing of selfindulgence. This formal transition is made by reasoning that desire, which arises as a result of living self-indulgently, gives rise to suffering. If desire exists, duality exists, and the consequences of living in this manner are argued. In other words, to live in S1 is to live with ones thoughts and feelings in a world of subjects, objects, individualities, perspectives, fears, etc. It can be reasoned that what truly exists in reality is not this world (S1) of realities that this self accepts as such and which self-indulgence creates. This is how the semiotic structure of transformation enters the picture, that is, that in order to end suffering one must deny self-indulgence S1(non-S1), arguing that reality is not truly as we believe we see it. If there is no desire there is non-duality, and thus the alternative emerges: the true life is living with a silenced ego, silenced desire, in non-duality. Herein, in addition to all of the formal structure described above, there lies another step: the realisation of what in Buddhist terminology is called non-duality, or emptiness, which involves living with a silenced ego. This would be the qualitative leap. Until now the structure has followed a rational path, but after reasoning that the issue at hand is living, thinking and acting based on the silencing of self-indulgence, the question of how to carry this out or of what exactly this entails can no longer be approached through reason or argument. This next step, the qualitative leap, is the ultimate aim of the Mpps. To achieve it is to acquire what we call profound human quality, the fruit of personal effort and choice which, as we have mentioned above, constitutes a gift that cannot be formulated. We can affirm that it has a double nature, in that we are aware, beyond a shadow of a doubt, of its unquestionable presence, but at the same time it cannot be formulated. It is what Buddhists refer to as the Void, which is void of any formulation. It is thus not surprising that Buddhas arguments are always presented in terms of S1 and S1, with clarification and reasoning applied to these terms but without any formulations with respect to S2.
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S2 cannot be described. It is a term without cathexes. S2 can only be spoken of in the context of rejection of S1. When this option is rejected, S2 is chosen. The next step is to verify it (the qualitative leap). The words of Buddha point to the fact that S2 can be grasped intuitively, without the need to become bogged down by descriptions. It is therefore not surprising that when S2 is spoken of, references are continually of the sort: but it is not that, it is not that, it is not that... nor that, nor the other This transformation is only carried out if we make the choice. In other words, there must be a personal decision to voluntarily take the step. The leap is qualitative and, as mentioned above, in this, in achieving the leap, there is no relationship of cause and effect. We could say that Buddhism breaks out the heavy artillery in the field of argument, logic and reason, but that the knowledge that Buddhism seeks is not exclusively logical. Rather, it seeks something that cannot be formulated: quality. It must be understood absolutely that desire generates suffering and fear, and this must be verified. This will aid us on the path to rejection of self-indulgence, as a cause of suffering, and to adoption of the alternative. Buddhism speaks of the constructed world, that which we build and experience. Through its arguments and reasoning, if we follow the rough paths it leads us down, it makes it possible for us to abandon the world of concepts and representations, to move beyond what would be the basic model of meaning, to an area where there are no more concepts or representations. In summary: two clearly opposing options are presented, and in order to achieve the transformation, one of these must be rejected. Since the system is binary, when one is rejected the other is implicitly accepted. Once this is understood, the last step is no longer procedural but rather qualitative. We will look at several examples of how opposing terms are presented, and how an entreaty is made for quality and recognition. We would like to make it clear that the text is very brief. It consists of strong affirma148
tions and is laid out in the form of questions, answers and tales in which arguments are given and doubts and the meaning of these strong affirmations are clarified.
No wisdom can we get hold of, no highest perfection, No Bodhisattva, no thought of enlightenment either. When told of this, if not bewildered and in no way anxious, A Bodhisattva courses in the Well-Gones wisdom 1
This passage is clearly describing two opposing options. Bearing in mind the common axis on which way of life hinges, it presents two poles: a way of life rooted in the ego, and thus a world of entities featuring subjects, objects, wisdom to achieve, perfection and illumination, contrasted against a way of life with the ego silenced. Where there is no ego, there are no subjects, objects, wisdom or Bodhisattvas2. We see clearly that S2 can only be achieved by rejecting S1, and that absolute rejection of S1 leads to acceptance of S2.
If a Bodhisattva comprehends that all dharmas are devoid of self, the Tathgata calls him a true Bodhisattva. 3
To realise absence of the self S1, without entities, subjects or objects, is to live with a silenced ego (S2). Whoever achieves this will be called a true Bodhisattva: a sage, a teacher.
Form does not differ from voidness
This equates to saying that form has no existence independent from emptiness, as the latter negates any form, any entity (S1). It is non-form S1 and, as such, implies emptiness (S2). It is impossible to conceive of or characterise emptiness (S2). Quality is looked to in order to permit an
1 The Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines & Its Verse Summary, translated by E. Conze http:// huntingtonarchive.osu.edu/resources/downloads/sutras/02Prajanparamita/Astasahasrica.pdf 2 Another name for Buddha 3 The Diamond Sutra
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intuitive grasp of what is being discussed, as we are told that between emptiness and form, there are no boundaries whatsoever.
and voidness does not differ from form4
This equates to the saying also Buddhist that that is this and this is that, or emptiness is form and form emptiness. The Buddhist void is not something metaphysical that lies behind or beneath form. There is no emptiness other than in form. If we distance ourselves from form we distance ourselves from emptiness. There is no access whatsoever to emptiness if not in form, because there is no duality whatsoever, no boundary, no entity. Our language and our expressive capabilities are not up to the task of allowing us to delimit this immense subtlety, but we are clearly made aware of it. In these affirmations, even the S1-S2 opposition is surpassed, as both the ego and emptiness are not entities but are rather void; this is non-duality. This is a clear example that the ultimate goal of the Mpps is to act as a guide enabling the final qualitative leap to be taken. Another example in which the same thing is alluded to:
What exists not, that non-existent the foolish imagine; non-existence as well as existence. Existence and non-existence are both not real. A Bodhisattva goes forth when wisely he knows this.5
What we suppose is real (S1) is not S1. Once this is understood absolutely, one reaches enlightenment or goes forth (S2).
All Dharmas are ever without substance 6
All phenomena, such as things, objects, subjects and individualities that exist, are non-existing (what we consider to be S1 is void (it is S1), phenomena are merely perceptions of our mind and senses. They are imperma4 The Diamond Sutra 5 The Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines & Its Verse Summary, translated by E. Conze http://huntingtonarchive.osu.edu/resources/downloads/sutras/02Prajanparamita/Astasahasrica.pdf 6 The Diamond Sutra
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nent. As we perceive them, they only exist in our minds. They are limits imposed on a background that is void of any boundaries. They possess no entities of their own. They do not delimit any independent entity. Above, however, we have stated that everything we delimit (beings and experiences) is emptiness, and that emptiness is not a black nothing but rather an inconceivable background. As regards emptiness (S2), it cannot be stated to exist or not to exist, because these categories correspond to our ability to make assessments and objectifications.
And, at that very moment, the Bodhisattvain total meditation, reached profound transcendental wisdom and saw with perfection that the five aggregates, in themselves, were empty7.
To reach profound transcendent wisdom is to position oneself in nonduality (S2). It is not termed transcendent due to one entity transcending another, as would a god. Our being is comprised of an aggregate of five diverse elements, subject to chance, which come together without forming an entity, i.e. something material. The aggregates are the material form of our bodies, our individual mode of feeling and understanding, our individual representations and perceptions and what one could call the aggregate of our awareness, which houses our senses and mind. The Sutra claims that what we take for real, as real as our own being (S1), is only an aggregate. It is not what we believe it to be. It argues that only by rejecting S1, or comprehending absolutely that our own being is void of any entity, can we intuitively grasp that which is perfect and profound transcendent wisdom (S2). This is like an earthquake that shakes the foundations of our conceptions, a lethal blow to our interpretation and assessment of reality. This comprehension equates to the death of the self that is described in theistic traditions. We observe some examples of how an attempt is made to characterise S2, at times only through suggestion and at others using some form of imagery, but only with a view to enabling an intuitive grasp.
7 Ibid
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According to legend, on his deathbed the Buddha acquiesced to requests from his disciples and uttered his last teachings, on the subject of where the disciples would find comfort and refuge after his death:
Henceforth, after my departure, you yourself will be your own refuge, the Dharma will be your refuge, and you will have no other refuge8.
An appeal is made to quality rather than to authorities or rules. Truth (S2) is recognised internally. It is qualitative and does not conform to any rules. Quality recognises quality, and by recognising it, it is realised. This is an example of an attempt to characterise S2 (as a refuge) in order to incite an intuitive process that no characterisation or imagery can possibly depict. In other passages, where the Bodhisattva is referred to as a wise man free of ignorance, the text says:
Mounted upon it [the vessel], one guides to Nirvana all beings. Great is that vessel, immense, vast like the vastness of space. Those who travel upon it are carried to safety, delight and ease.9
S2 is akin to a boat that carries certainty, happiness, etc., and other times it is akin to:
a light brighter than the sunor...in the quiet and darkness of the night, everything appears as if it were dayoronce you forego attachment and let things be, you will be at peace, wherever you are. If you doubt it, you will never be able to perceive it.10
Only after absolute rejection of S1 is acceptance of S2 implied. The aim is to go beyond that which is suggested by the language, to that which this language cannot describe. Buddhist texts make it clear that S2 cannot possibly be characterised, for example:
8 Mpps. Chap. III, Page 85, Vol. I 9 The Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines & Its Verse Summary 10 Enseanzas zen, pp. 51 and 59, own translation
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To quarrel over Truth, Perfect Wisdom, Emptiness, is to ignore that the Absolute is subtle, profound, difficult to know and full of a unique flavour.11
Truth, or Wisdom (S2), is imposed by internal recognition. It is recognised by the quality of the option. It is not linked to any formulation. It can therefore be stated that what we are dealing with is quality, or the axiological. It has no concrete form in which to frame itself. S2 cannot be expressed by language. It is subtle and difficult to perceive, as when one drinks water. One knows how hot or cold it is, but one cannot explain this to others. Buddhist masters claim that the writings the entire cannon are nothing more than prose, and that all of the sutras seek only a clear and discerning mind, with understanding appearing between the lines. If this is the case, what is the point of discussion? Although Buddhism, like all traditions, contains different disciplines and employs methods, these serve only toward the recognition of quality. In other words, procedures must be used only for the attempt. In fact, they serve for nothing else (following Dharmic law, sitting down to meditate, performing exercises, discipline, etc., all of these procedures help the practitioner know how to recognise the quality that we are speaking of ). The various arguments given in Buddhist texts provide criteria for the recognition of Wisdom, or Truth. These criteria are of qualitative refinement, meant for enquiring, searching and discovering within, not without, oneself. The aim is to incite, in the absence of mythology or beliefs, investigation into what ones self actually is and thereby acquire profound human quality. The model is simple and is repeated continually, with brief and powerful arguments. Realities (what we consider real) are not so. This is argued from many different viewpoints. They are fleeting. Everything that is constrained is fleeting; it has no entity of its own. Everything is impermanent. Desire is the enemy; silence it.
11 Mpps. Chap.I. Page 52. Vol. I own translation
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If we live, think and feel with our egos as entities, this makes us conceive of what we perceive with our senses and mind as real. An entreaty is made for the rejection of this option, and arguments are given to this end. Recognition will lead to the dispelling of what is considered to be reality. The arguments used are not intended to build another reality, but rather to dismantle the first. After this, the next step cannot be approached through argument. If one achieves absolute rejection of the reality that he or she is seeing and perceiving, the illusion is understood, as is the fact that there is a way to live, think and feel with a silenced ego.
Conclusion:
Buddhist tradition developed and was practised outside of the political system and social organisation of the times, but this does not mean that it was completely removed, as the Buddhist maxim this is that preaches unconditional love and compassion for every living thing. Buddhism passed its wisdom down through generations, free of power and of their influence. In todays societies, we need profound human quality more than ever before, as well as a certain critical number of people possessing this profound human quality, simply so that it can bear fruit. In days gone by, this was the aim of religion. On a separate note, modern technology and science-oriented societies live on the creation of knowledge and continual innovation. They are dynamic, undergoing constant transformation in terms of way of life and organisation. It is therefore impossible to aim to prevent or control new ways of life and of organisation, or the way in which reality is evaluated and interpreted. In the new cultural dynamic, everything must be free to move and create, and this freedom must extend to all areas: knowledge, values, morality, way of life and mode of organisation. The aim of this study was to understand the profound structure of procedures for spiritual initiation, and we have tried to do so specifically in the area of Buddhist tradition.
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We believe that understanding the model of the structures used in construction of the axiological is a valid way to broach the topic of profound human quality with the men and women of modern societies, as this can be done through reasoning, by clearly presenting two opposing options and providing the tools needed for transformation to be freely and voluntarily chosen, thus avoiding the barriers that arise when one comes up against mythical epistemology, as there is no need to use beliefs. We must therefore proceed through use of two types of formality: 1- Use of argument-based logic to present two contrary modes as two clearly opposed options, and: 2- In order to make the transition, use of semiotic formality, of the concrete, to enable choices to be made voluntarily. We will thus need to build collective projects aimed at cultivating human quality. This human quality is indispensable, and we urgently need it if the knowledge society is to function and survive. We also need a certain critical amount of this quality. These would be specific projects that would need to be adapted to suit different cultures and the different circumstances of each individual society. On a related note, we need to construct procedures to allow us to recognise and cultivate profound human quality, which is necessary in order to make the qualitative leap. This cannot be a project but only a procedure (a non-project) through which any project that is designed can be lived. These procedures can be inherited from all of humanitys great traditions of wisdom, after being freed from the beliefs in which they were framed and without any need for us to be Buddhists, or believers. Buddhism has been used due to its clear, concise and conceptual nature. We were pleased to find that we were able to apply the knowledge gleaned from our studies on the structures of meaning, but we know that this is actually precisely what all traditions of wisdom have done. Each of these was a concrete expression of its specific culture and period, of equal validity in terms of cultivating profound human quality. Today we can recognise this profound human quality in each of them, and learn from all of them without needing to belong to any of them.
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Montserrat Cucarull
Only in this way is total freedom possible. Only in this way can we achieve the flexibility needed to adapt to continual change. In light of this, it is clear that we also have an instrument that can be used to study and comprehend all of humanitys traditions of human wisdom.
Bibliography
-Nagarjuna. Le Trait de la Grande Vertu de Sagesse (Mahaparajnaparamitasastra), E. Lamotte. Louvain, Ed. Universit de Louvain. Institut Orientaliste Louvain-la-Neuve, 1970, 1981. 5 Vol. -The Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines & Its Verse Summary. Translated by E.Conze. http://huntingtonarchive.osu.edu/resources/downloads/sutras/ 02Prajanparamita/Astasahasrica.pdf -The Diamond Sutra in: Iluminacin silenciosa. Antologa de textos Soto Zen. Madrid, Miraguano 2010, pp. 51-92. - The Heart Sutra in: Iluminacin silenciosa. Antologa de textos Soto Zen. Madrid, Miraguano 2010, pp. 33-50. - Bodhidharma. Enseanzas zen. Ed. Kairs. Barcelona 1994.
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On the motivation and cultivation of human quality: Reflections

Teresa Guardans
The copper coin
(Some thoughts shared in the spirit of communication; these are not a presentation...) For the third year in a row Queralt Prat and I are teaching a course at Esade Business School on the development of human quality. This experience has taught us valuable lessons, both stemming from the reactions of students and the evolution of activities as well as the results obtained. These are something we would like to share as they may contribute some information to the reflections being carried out at this Meeting on the construction and transmission of the axiological. We are currently involved in the fourth edition of the course Creativity and Innovation: Leadership Skills, which is taught in thirty hours over ten weeks (one weekly 3-hour class). On average, roughly 20 students have enrolled in each group. It is an elective subject offered on different programmes. I have sketched out this background information as our reflections are based on the reactions of these students. I dont know if it is common for students to send messages of thanks to the faculty when a course ends for having given them the opportunity to learn, thanks for the process, the discoveries, for what has been acquired, etc. In our case it happened not just with one student, i.e. an isolated incident, but with a very significant number. It happened not just with one group with whom a special rapport had developed, but with all three groups, in the three editions of the course, with differing schedules, different formats, different languages (Catalan/Spanish, English, students from Spain and also exchange students from the Americas, Asia, Europe, etc.). We will see what happens over the two editions planned for this year, but at the
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moment the response received in previous sessions can be summed up as an explicit thank you. A thank you that runs counter to my doubts on the wisdom, or lack thereof, of offering a course such as this. And it is from the discrepancy between my questions and doubts on one hand and the involvement and reactions of the students on the other that these reflections arise. What sort of doubts? What questions? In the run-up to the module and during its first edition, I was concerned that I was playing fast and loose with the legacy of those who had ventured into the Absolute. I didnt feel comfortable exploiting this legacy by taking and adapting the findings and ascertainments of these men and women, these free seekers, these lovers of Truth, and putting them to work toward professional success and productivity. This discomfort was akin to what I would feel in turning yoga into mere fitness. In an attempt at coherence I made myself promise to forget the students, the business apprentices, etc., and to address the person. The human beings in front of me. Even so, I suspected I was fooling myself... It was then, after the end of the first edition, that the first messages of thanks began to reach me. These have continued to roll in. They are the root of these reflections. Are thanks not the result of an awareness that something valuable has been received? Do they not imply the conscious experiencing of an acquisition, a change, something learned? When a student writes that the most important thing is that I have learned I have a long path in front of me and sees how to tread this path and that to do so is possible if he truly wishes, are we really moving away from the aim of the Truth seekers? Have we sold a pig in a poke to the student that expresses thanks for the chance to stop (I so needed to be able to think about what it is I truly value and desire!)? And if there are students who say they have discovered that simple attention exercises help them understand themselves and understand from a new perspective, have we squandered these ancient resources of wisdom?
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The copper coin. On the motivation and cultivation of human quality
First wake-up call. Based on our experience, the following truth became clear to us: finding ways to motivate is not the same as cheapening or squandering. Motivation is essential, and the initial motivation can only appeal to the self ; there is nobody else at the starting line. It is our self that spurs us into action. What needs to be fine-tuned is whether the aim of the proposal is to strengthen the self-centred vision of reality or if it helps to put it in its place and to open up other perspectives. This unprompted flow of students revealing the quality of their experience has helped us dispel any doubts over the wisdom of such a course. It offers us evidence that the degree of success of any specific activities that are proposed is not the main cause of students satisfaction. What really matters is that they have been provided with an opportunity: the opportunity to dig deeper, to explore the possibilities that lie beyond the automatic behaviours of self-centredness. Moreover, as soon as the attempt is made an internal recognition blooms, the recognition that over there lies something worth the effort, the discovery of possibilities that had not been guessed at, like delicate stalks of grass that need only a few drops of water to flourish. From all of this we can glean some ideas on content and method, on conditions that might foster the cultivation of human quality via the educational sphere. As a starting point, we will go on to provide an overview of the aims of the course.
Overview of the Course
We stand before a group of students who aspire to be leaders. The first step is to underscore that creativity (creativity in a team) is the basis of leadership in the 21st century. Leadership no longer means standing before an army. Leadership is excellence, at any and all levels, irrespective of our position in the social or business organisational structure. Today, leadership is creativity, innovation, collaboration with (and/or management of ) creative teams and communication.
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Building on this base, the idea is to show where creativity is rooted, i.e. in what skills and attitudes, and what can create obstacles to impede it. Furthermore, it is not difficult to discover that the main barriers are essentially those that we ourselves erect; a self that filters and imposes an interpretation, which looks but doesnt see, applying instead its own mental models. A self that acts without questioning, on an auto-pilot of long-standing habits and personality traits, and all of this from a perspective of short-sighted repetitive interests centred around ourselves, with which it is very difficult for us to be able to motivate an innovative team. In light of this it can be understood that promoting creativity has to do with increasing the capacity for full, silenced attention (a full cup can hold no more tea, explains a Japanese proverb), with detached observation enabling a deeper understanding of situations (of the environment, of others and of ourselves) and a greater flexibility (freedom) in terms of reaction. Moreover, and especially, it has to do with delving into a recognition of what drives and motivates us, an exploration of our own interests that makes it possible to give them a broader meaning, in such a way that they reach beyond the personal boundaries of each individual. Otherwise, it will not be possible to enlist others in the creative adventure (i.e. I could relate my desires and my project, thank you for leading me finding it. It was a great day for me!). All of this is presented as a learning process that asks students to get personally involved, as the aim is not the acquisition of certain conceptual knowledge but rather a broadening of self-knowledge and personal exploration into ones own resources of attention, detachment, silenced lucidity and management at the level of interests. Exploration at the personal level and practical application in a team, during the sessions and with a view to the future. An initial demonstration on the first day of class of the meagre limits of students attention is enough to suggest that they work on a different attention exercise each week, first testing it out in class and then practising it over the course of the week. All it takes is to start the first class while projecting some objects onto a screen, with some others spread across a table (tins, files, CDs, fruit, etc.). Mid-class, the projector is turned off, the table is covered and students are asked what was previously on dis160
play. From the person who didnt notice a single thing to the one who imagined some non-existent glasses, the whole experience is interesting and fun. Small in-class experiments can enable students to understand and become aware, through experience, of the low functioning, auto-pilot way in which they operate, as well as of how their possibilities (and freedom) will increase if they can successfully take control of themselves. A powerful image is that of the freedom of Nelson Mandela during his long imprisonment making the poem by William Ernest Henley, Invictus, his own... I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul, and how he keeps his natural reactions at bay, working toward a broader interest than that which would be served by a more than justified attitude of personal revenge. The course features in-class experiments (or hands-on practice), some of them individual and others in groups, as well as a great deal of dialogue and exercises to be carried out in some form or other throughout the week, not to mention reflection. Each week students are assigned texts to read relating to the topic to be addressed in the next session, on which they must send written reports answering a specific question that can help them delve deeper into the topic. Right from the beginning they know, and can see for themselves, that only by involving themselves in the course as a personal process will they be able to discover which resources may prove the most valid, for themselves as well as for when they need to foster creativity in a team. For this reason, to aid in strengthening the process the final task is an evaluation of the methods used on the course, an analysis of the material covered in each session and of the resources put into practice in class and on a personal level. This evaluation is twofold: firstly in terms of anything that might have been discovered on a personal level (resources acquired, work-related ideas opened up for the future, etc.) and second, in terms of potential applications with a view to driving creativity in a team. Students are requested, based on their experiences, to do what they can to improve the course, both for future students and in order that they themselves will have a valuable work tool on which to draw. One student, Joo Lee, wrote to us some months ago: Every lecturer and every book says Be Creative!, but I mean, how can we just Be creative? Is it
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even possible to become creative? Isnt creativity an inborn ability? If we look up history and find someone creative, we call them geniuses. However, this course starts from the basic assumption that it actually can be nurtured. Joos words really summarise the aim pursued by these ten sessions: to promote discovery and practice which, beyond the limits set by the self , open up a world of possibilities, and that there are resources that enable this exploration and treading this path is probably worth the effort. Motivated to improve their creativity, students learn about the self and its functions and practise some methods of taking control of this self. They practise forms of detached observation and resources of attention and silencing. They also begin to learn to recognise their desires and expectations, the direction in which they are heading, if there are differing levels of desires and interests, if these mesh or are opposed to each other, if there are aspects they wish to prioritise. In addition, they are shown and they analyse specific examples of people that stress the importance of turning the powerful force of interest toward something greater than personal benefit, and reveal what they have been able to achieve by doing so. It is a journey that is made at a personal level and in dialogue and group exercises, through sharing, teamwork, etc. Moving on from this overview, we would like to return to the initial question of the concerns that troubled us: Exploitation of resources? Debasing propositions?
The Philosophers Stone
This short story from the Yoga Vasistha (India, 11th-13th century, work attributed to Valmiki) sums up what we have learned from this experience. It goes as follows:
There was a wealthy villager in the Vindhya hills. Once when he was walking through the forest he lost a copper coin. He was a miser, so he began to search for it in the thick bush. All the time he was calculating, With that one cent I shall do some business, it will become four cents and then eight cents and so on. For three days he searched, unmindful of the taunts of spectators. At the end of those three days he suddenly
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found a precious stone! Taking it with him, he returned home and lived happily. What was the cause of this misers finding the philosophers stone? Surely, his miserliness and his searching the bush for the lost cent! In the case of the preceptors instructions, the disciple looks for something but obtains something else! The miser would not have found the precious stone if he had not searched the bush for his one cent! (The Concise Yoga Vasistha. Albany, State University of New York Press, 1984, p. 346)
The miser needed a motive to start looking, i.e. his copper coin. Everybody has their own copper coin. For Carlos Castaneda it was learning to hunt, and Juan Matus built on this base. For others it may be realisation, success in a given field, knowing oneself to be useful, or eternal life. It is the self that starts treading the path as described early on in this text and it could not be otherwise. Over the different editions of the course we have learned that misuse of the teachings of the masters of silencing does not rest on where we start out (hunters apprentice, business apprentice, apprentice to a saint...) but rather in what direction the path leads: if it helps to open or to close the loop around oneself. And the key is whether or not the dual dimension of our humanity is taken into account: the self-centred aspect and the selfless or silent aspect. If the answer is no, then each step will very likely reinforce the selfcentred structure, even though the individual may gain in terms of health, balance, serenity or efficiency. This is because greater self-knowledge and various concentration techniques will help them to better organise and manage their lives, occupations and emotions. However, upon occasion, only in exceptional cases, a glimpse will be caught of the field that opens up beyond the self (the precious stone). In contrast, if we start based on the view of human beings as possessing a dual nature, we will able to direct efforts toward recognising this nature, that is, toward becoming aware, through experience, of the functions of the self and its limits and toward developing cognitive skills in the silent dimension. All of this, in addition to the abovementioned benefits, enables self-recognition from a new perspective, of oneself and of others or the environment. This is because in addition to the self-knowledge that may
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promote better management of the self, there is also the self-knowledge capable of discovering that the self is a (necessary) function that works to further our existence, but that it is not everything. There is more. And this recognition, small though it may be, is a window that opens, a level of personal experience that may then turn into an argument (an internal guide) that pushes for exploration. It is that know yourself that sets us into motion: right here, in me, I possess all the elements with which to begin a philosophical adventure of knowledge and freedom, my share of mystery in relation to myself (Eugenio Tras1). The hidden treasure, the precious stone, the gem: in oneself, in everything. Where else if not here? On a related note, a second lesson or ascertainment: living with and in the awareness of that beyond the self is a part of human nature. Students messages have shown us this. That cheerful and unprompted thank you is the joy of being, they are communicating their joy at truly being, at a taste of freedom, a boundary being knocked down, at feeling something that was always there but never before encountered. As soon as they try silencing, i.e. not using their auto-pilot habits and expectations, or when they practise the watchful gaze, the experience brings them joy. And they are thankful for it. I insist on stressing this aspect of their thanks, as I believe it is what gives us insight into which direction we are heading in. This internal gesture of gratitude is the antithesis of an inflated self: Thank you for the course, thank you for what I have learned, thank you for everything... Each of the students expresses this in his or her own way, whether at length or more concisely. Each highlights different aspects but all have the same common denominator of having tasted profoundness, having had a valuable experience. It is only a thirty hour course, and as of yet there are no plans for the work that we start to be continued in any way. Furthermore, it is more than likely that the students myriad jobs will once again take centre stage. But who knows? At least they made an effort for a few hours. They have sought their coin and know something of the gem, whether it is small or large. They have also heard of, and practised a little, the tools that will allow them to continue to delve deeper.
1 La razn fronteriza. Destino, 1999. p.391 and 379
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Reflections on Methodological Aspects
Modifications have been incorporated into each new edition of the course to make the most of what gave good results, to correct, to fill in the gaps... standard fare in education, really. However, there are aspects of the process that perhaps are worth singling out in case they may be extrapolated to other areas of reflection on the cultivation of human quality. We have mentioned the importance of practical experience during the course. In fact, while preparing for the first edition of the course we assigned more importance to aspects relating to textual readings, individual work based on mandatory reading and conceptual knowledge. Bit by bit the proportions changed. Readings, while still necessary, have taken on the role of starters: an introduction to pave the way for our work on the topic. However, when we were able to propose some sort of practical experience relating to this work (games, exercises, real experiences in a team, although on a small scale, etc.) we realised from comments and evaluations that these small experiments (as we call them) are worth more than a thousand words. They sometimes bear fruit in unexpected ways, leading to conclusions or personal discoveries we had not previously considered. It seems fitting to stress, therefore, something extensively recorded in pedagogical literature: when what is being explored and cultivated lies in the qualitative sphere, understanding is gained through the senses. Moreover, to foster this understanding we need not rely on thousands of complex resources. To give one example: a few turns around the room or the corridor with the eyes covered (first in a chain holding hands and then each person alone) will lead to reflection/understanding on the development of societies, the contributions of the mythical structure and its limitations, the contrast with societies of innovation and their modes of securing some sort of guidance, etc., that is much more real (rooted in experience) than that resulting from reading a lot of pages. Regardless, reading has proved useful to help students make the most of games. Another ascertainment: we are made for games, for playful experiences, for learning in a group. We suggested the first experiments hesitantly. The students were not little children. They were grown men and women. We observed, not without some surprise, that at no time were there (nor
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are there now) any reactions of reluctance. After reading their work, we realised that it was these activities that students had most enjoyed and in which they had learned the most. Having fun and learning: a happy couple, at least in this field. At any age. We have thus made an increasing effort to find, for each point or topic to be developed, this sort of small practical experience as a resource to facilitate learning. This goes to show something already well known: the power of the image. How content filters through fluidly and directly from short videos or simple images. Narrative through the image. It also works the other way round: when students are invited to build and communicate their own message, their use of images shows a great deal of synthesis and expressiveness. Different methodological resources have been used to further the three steps in the learning process: surprise, arouse expectations with a view to motivating personal involvement in learning. hands-on learning: practise, check, discuss, judge, evaluate and test, at the individual level and in groups (this process is linked to the development of social, symbiotic beings at all levels, including that of the development of human quality). develop awareness of what has been learned; awareness of the shift in perspective, of personal discoveries, of the development of skills. In the early days we were not aware enough of the importance of this third step. We placed all of the emphasis on material that we thought we should supply ourselves, without taking into account the characteristics of a qualitative learning process. It was essentially by chance that we realised the utility of this personal approach to what had been learned. As part of their final projects students were asked to consider what they had accomplished. We saw how this step contributed to allowing the whole process to take shape, making it more aware and therefore more operational. Facilitating this awareness in relation to the material covered on the course has thus become a key strategic element. Students are made to see the importance of carrying out constant evaluations, both of each session
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as a whole and of individual activities, as well as of their own personal exercises. They are given time to do this. A constant stream of evaluation culminates in the final project: a report on the process suggested for furthering the development of creativity, both individual and in groups. Students must also be allowed to make their own counter-suggestions, both as people and as future team leaders. Using what has been learned as a starting point, students are invited to improve, broaden, take advantage of and add... with a view to beginning to hammer out a proposal to foster creative development and to motivate it (how they will convince others, with what words, with what examples, etc.). In this manner the scope of the activities multiplies, as each set of exercises and resources is carried out simultaneously on two levels: that of the learning pursued and facilitated by performance of the activity itself and that acquired through observation (questioning, analysing) of the functioning of the group and of individuals during the learning process. This is something we have come to understand and incorporate along the way. These are the lessons we have learned while preparing and teaching this subject, and perhaps they may be of some use in other situations relating to the cultivation of human quality.
In Conclusion
Directly and indirectly, over the years we have been able to gain diverse experience relating to the development of human quality in groups ranging in age from three to twenty-something years. From very small humans to others no longer so small but very restless, to fully grown young adults. Undoubtedly as time passes we will be able to draw many more conclusions. However, one aspect in particular seems to leap out at me based on this review of our experiences with these groups of university students, bearing in mind that I also devote my time, in collaboration with other educators, to preparing material for groups of very different ages. What stands out, in short, is something that is perhaps very obvious: the development of the most profound levels of quality, the sphere of de167
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centring the self, is part of the process of human growth and maturing. Participation and cooperation by the relevant individual (motivation) is indispensable, and requires that the specific conditions and interests of each age be taken into account. Development in this sphere cannot be imposed externally. Learning can never be imposed from outside. It requires personal involvement. For this reason, motivation is essential. The unique thing about motivation in maturing human quality concerns fostering development of the personality and the relationship with reality, which is not a closed circuit but which goes beyond itself, leading to the discovery of reality (internal and external) beyond the world that the self places at its own disposal. It concerns fostering an experience of the dual dimension of existence, based on the characteristics of each life moment. It concerns developing awareness of this possibility, or of this open door. This uniqueness does not occur outside the normal process of personal development. It does not occur by skipping states, or in opposition to the natural stages of development, or by ignoring them. Rather, it occurs by considering the work in each stage in the context of an awareness of the dual nature of the human being, so that the changes that characterise each age are put to work to further the development of a self capable of performing the tasks it must perform to survive as well to further awareness of the sphere of selflessness. Each age has its own resources, those suitable to the specific phase of development in terms of motivation and hands-on exercises, but with a universal awareness that the world is not bounded by the self. At the tender age, for example, when all of the senses are groping in the dark and exploring the world, this curiosity should be fostered and its flames fanned even more if possible. This must be done without forgetting the need to bring the enjoyment and pleasure resulting from investigations to a conscious level of awareness. And in the early stages of that magical phase of conscious discovery of language, the same applies: fostering it as much as possible without setting aside exploration and literacy in qualitative languages, in symbolic languages, which act as the vehicles to silent or selfless experiences. And consciously sharing in this tasting of what all of these provide us.
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And in the years of self-discovery, when we become aware of ourselves and our own growth, the different facets of inner growth should be explored in the awareness of what growing means and how it is a limitless adventure. And at the time when personal autonomy is established, and when bonds form between peers and groups become important, and at the age when ideals emerge, when life plans take shape, and at the age at which we take up the reigns of our own lives... In each of these phases we must motivate, invite and foster the conditions necessary for the maturation process to occur as fully as possible. This means promoting trust in the possibility of maturation, with development of an explicit awareness of the self, reflecting on it in a way suitable for each age, evaluating the steps that have been carried out, getting a taste of what has been gained through learning. Getting in touch, step by step, in a way appropriate to each moment, with our own nature, with the value beyond the self. Experiencing it, recognising it, becoming aware of it through experience. This getting in touch is, I believe, the most efficient copper coin. It is what incites further progress or, to phrase it better and to continue on with the image theme, this getting in touch actually amounts to glimpses of the philosophers stone; a new, more powerful motive able to sustain us even when the self begins to resist. These successive editions of the course have helped us understand (or accept) that motivation for the cultivation of human quality begins with the self, with its desires and expectations. And, to the extent that this self glimpses that it can surpass its self-imposed limits, it is the very taste of having gained something that becomes a motive to move into the beyond. This means that an approach that gives consideration to the cultivation of human quality in education or in any sphere should be careful to leave space for raising awareness of anything that might have been glimpsed, enjoyed, understood Because its flavour is subtle, different in nature from that of the satisfactions of the self, and it may go unnoticed if this moment of recognition is not facilitated.
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Perhaps herein lies the key factor that may tip the scales between feeding the self and putting it in its place. These wake-up calls showing the recognition of gains in the sphere of de-centring can offer a foundation on which to establish a foothold and find motivation to keep moving forward. Otherwise, the path will very likely be rooted in the expectations of the self and will continue to feed them without moving beyond them.
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Complexity science, complex thinking and transdisciplinary knowledge

Rethinking the Humana Conditio in a world of technoscience
Sergio Nstor Osorio Garca
We are currently in the throes of a shift in our understanding of what it means to know. This change can be appreciated if we consider knowledge with a view to Webers Ideal Type. Using this model we can single out two major paradigms in scientific knowledge. On one hand we have the scientific knowledge of classic science, in place since the 16th century up to the beginning of the 20th century, and on the other hand the nascent paradigm of contemporary science that is emerging out of the crisis of the former paradigm. In terms of philosophers, the old scientific paradigm could well be referred to as Cartesian, Newtonian and Baconian, as its main tenets were formulated by Descartes, Newton and Bacon. The new paradigm can be called holistic, ecological, systemic or complex, but none of these adjectives completely embodies it. Thinking under the new paradigm in science includes at least the five following criteria. The first two pertain to our conception of nature and the other three to the epistemology through which we interpret it: 1. A shift from a part to the whole Under the former paradigm, in any complex system the dynamic of the whole could be understood through the properties of its parts. Under the
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I. A holistic understanding of the new rationality
new paradigm the relationship between parts and the whole is reversed. The properties of the parts can only be understood by considering the dynamic of the whole. In short, in no way are there parts. What we call a part is simply a model in an indivisible network of relationships. 2. A change from structure to process Under the old paradigm it was believed that fundamental structures existed, and that there were forces and mechanisms through which they interacted, giving rise to processes; a belief that in nature there was a universal, objective and immutable order, and that the task of the researcher was simply to discover the universal laws that objectively govern the universe. Under the new paradigm each structure is considered a manifestation of an underlying process. The entire network of relationships is intrinsically dynamic. 3. A shift from objective science to epistemological science Under the old paradigm it was believed that scientific descriptions were objective, that is, independent of the human observer and the knowledge process. Objective knowledge was provided through the instruments used for observation and methodology, and above all by objective laws that were discovered through observation. This knowledge was diametrically opposed to value-based knowledge. Science was value-neutral. Under the new paradigm it is believed that we must explicitly include epistemology understanding of the knowledge process and of the cognitive subject himself in the knowledge that we craft with respect to reality. Furthermore, a distinction is made between the real, on one hand, which is always determined by our human brain, and reality, which is a human interpretation and shaping of the real. Current science does not objectively know the real. Rather, it simply and quite plainly moulds it. No consensus yet exists as to a suitable epistemology, but there is a growing trend toward the consensus that such an epistemology would need to be an essential part of human knowledge, and of scientific knowledge of reality.
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4. A shift from construction to the network as a metaphor for knowledge Abandoning the principles, axioms and universal laws based on which reality behaves and is established is leading to the emergence of other rationales to explain the phenomena that support the principle of indeterminacy and self-organisation. The metaphor of knowledge as a construction fundamental laws and principles, basic building blocks, etc. has been employed for thousands of years in science and Western philosophy. For the traditional paradigm, a shift in these aspects spells a total collapse of the foundations of knowledge. Under the new paradigm, the metaphor of construction based on solid principles and axioms is being replaced by the metaphor of the network. When we perceive reality as a network of relationships, our descriptions also form an interconnected network that represents the phenomena observed. There can be no strict separation between any known object and the subject that knows it. Moreover, in this network there are no hierarchies; no absolute foundations that guide our knowledge linearly. This shift, from something constructed to a network, also implies abandoning physics, above all that in the tradition of Newton, as an ideal against which to mould and judge other sciences and as the main source of metaphors for scientific descriptions. 5. A shift from the truth to rough descriptions The Cartesian paradigm was based on the belief that scientific knowledge could achieve an objective and absolute knowledge of reality independent of the knower, through a linear and cumulative understanding of knowledge. Under the new paradigm it is recognised that all concepts, theories and discoveries are limited and inexact. Science can never provide a complete and definitive understanding of reality. Knowledge is not true or false, but certain or uncertain. Scientists do not operate with the truth as a correlation, without any fissures, between concept and thing, but rather with the isomorphism that can be established between the different levels of reality and the different levels of reality perceived by the cognitive subject. Knowledge is not objective, but paradigmatic (Nicolescu: 1996).
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Another way of understanding this shift is that suggested to us by complexity science, particularly by the complex thinking of Edgar Morin. According to said author, we can now point to a paradigm of simplification that operates through reduction of the whole to its parts and disjunction between the subject and object, as well as a paradigm of complexity that operates by joining back together and at the same time drawing distinctions, without the need to separate (Morin: 1984, pp. 318-369 and 1994). These forms of paradigmatic knowledge are made clearer when contrasted with a view to the criterion of complexity. Under the paradigm of simplification, complexity is what must be abandoned in order to move closer to the truth, while for the paradigm of complexity, complexity is a challenge for knowledge.
II Complexity, complexity science and complex thinking

1. Complexity in its daily definition: the impossibility of a knowledge of reality The first meaning assigned to the term complexity comes from the terms colloquial use. The complex is that which is complicated, and which therefore illustrates the inability of people to know what they want to know. The complex is thus what is not immediately comprehended. Therefore, when we speak of the daily use of the term complexity we mean that which we cannot understand logically and rationally. It is a reference to something that is complicated. This definition of the term complexity, which is the one we all most often use with complete assurance, not only connects us with the common meaning but also, surprisingly, with the definition established for the term under the simplification paradigm. 2. Complexity in the classic scientific definition: the apparent disorder of reality I shall use the term classic knowledge to refer to that knowledge which made its appearance in the 16th and 17th centuries, which was consoli174
dated through disciplinary work in the 18th and 19th centuries and then entered into crisis in the mid 20th century. I shall use the term non-classic or complex knowledge to refer to the scientific knowledge that emerged from the crisis of classic scientific knowledge, which arose in the context of two world wars, beginning with the physics of relativity, quantum physics and thermodynamics and continuing with the revolutions of the 40s: with the theory of information, general systems theory and general cybernetic theory. It then intensified with the failure of the Viennese circle and the emergence of the secondorder epistemological revolutions and gained a further foothold with the appearance of new logics, new algebras, new geometries and the creation of theories of organisation in physics, theories of self-organisation in biology and the inclination toward complex thinking and transdisciplinary knowledge which shared a common emphasis on a new mode of knowing knowledge. For the simplification paradigm, what is complex is what is complicated and disorderly in the reality that greets our senses, which should be ordered under the rule of reason. The complex is that which is opposed to order, the opposite of what is clear and distinct for reason. For the knowledge of classic science (the simplification paradigm) the complex is revealed as an empirical reality, the whole of which meets our senses as that which is complicated, indeterminate, risky, disorderly or chaotic, or simply as something lacking a logical explanation. For classic science, reality is presented to us as something very disorderly, but this is only an apparent disorder, as behind it and as a result of human knowledge, of reason an order can be found which can be explained via a number of specific invariabilities and universal laws that govern the universe underneath the apparent empirical complexity. In this regard, for classic science knowing is legislating: finding the lawlike formula of the real. Thus, classic science is able to find the logical order that lies behind the empirical disorder that we perceive with our senses. For classic science, only the science of the general exists. There is no science of the specific.
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The knowledge of classic science thus reveals a logical and objective order behind the empirical or subjective order. Classic science is the science of objective knowledge of reality. It is the science which minimises and extirpates the disorderly and apparent nature of empirical reality to reach the logical truth which is certain, orderly, ordering in nature and clear and distinct. The subject of the knowledge, operating in a methodical fashion, is able to objectively and mentally re-present reality when it is presented to him without entering into the known (first order epistemologies). This way of thinking is certainly simplifying in that it reduces the complex, the common fabric, to the essential, to what can be deduced or induced from apparent, superficial chaos. Furthermore, as we know, for this exercise in thinking classic science unearthed two extremely efficient strategies: disjunction or division between the objective order of reality and the subjective or sensory disorder of the knower disjunction between scientific, objective knowledge and reflexive or philosophical knowledge and, at the same time, reduction of the whole of the real to the logical and legal elementary formulas of its parts or of one of its parts. Therefore, to avoid the complexity of the real, i.e. the chaotic multiplicity that meets our senses which, moreover, play tricks on us we must conform to the Cartesian maxim that invites us to know reality by starting from said reality in its minimum or most simple and certain expression and gradually and carefully advancing until reaching the whole of the known. Reality can be known if, advancing step-by-step and breaking down the whole into its parts, we are also simultaneously able to understand the whole as the sum of its parts. The truth, from this perspective, is thus the logical-linguistic adaptation between re-presentation of the thing or concept and the empirical thing of which it is a reflection. Complexity is thus perceived as something that obscures, interferes with, distracts and disorients thinking. Complexity ultimately appears in classic science and was also already seen in the common meaning inherited from it as the unwelcome presence of the complication, the disorder, the tangle that must be ended as soon as possible if we want to possess an objective knowledge (true knowledge of reality). For classic science, to know is to uncover the profound order that is revealed under the faade of the real. The complex is only a superficial and
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apparent manifestation of a profound order of the real which can be understood through universal laws. Nevertheless, and as we will see further on, the contemporary interpretation of knowing invites us to operate within another sphere of understanding: it is not a matter of getting to the simple by leaving behind the complex, but rather of understanding the complex through its most profound elements; the backdrop for which perhaps we lack both categories and the required logic. For contemporary science, knowledge is not therefore a mental re-presentation of an external and objective reality that can be accessed methodically, but a translation and a neuro-linguistic, socio-cultural and historical reconstruction of that ultimate dimension of the real in which we ourselves are involved. 3. Complexity in the contemporary definition of knowledge: a challenge to thinking While the ideal of the classic paradigm, or simplifying thinking, guided and continues to guide the bulk of modern scientific formulations, in contemporary formulations of knowledge advances are made via other routes. Certainly, contemporary knowledge does not eliminate simplification of the real from human knowledge, as it is one of the strategies of human knowledge, but it knows that as a simplification it is therefore a knowledge operation and not the end purpose of scientific knowledge.
On this subject, French philosopher Edgar Morin tells us that complex thinking that goes in search of a paradigm of complexity does not wish to arrive at a thinking in regard to the completeness of the whole. Rather, it seeks a thinking able to stitch back together, unite and organise, without ever being able to reach completeness of knowledge (Morin: 1992, pg. 10).
In short, the issues tackled by thinking today are themselves complex, that is, they are related by an infinite number of variables and components whose understanding requires a poly-ocular vision, a transdisciplinary approach, an organisational paradigm that in turn involves a
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reform of thinking as a reform to the education that reforms thinking. In this regard, complex complexus is that which is interwoven, overlapping, relational and contextual. Neither can reality that is not independent from the subject be reduced to an analytic or synthetic understanding of its parts. Rather, it must be understood along with the aid and differentiation arising from the intercession of the cognitive subject. As we stated at the outset, complexity at the superficial level is what is interwoven, the whole, but at the deeper level it is an organisational understanding of events, interactions, feedback, determinations and vagaries that constitute the phenomenal world. This is true not only in the empirical sphere, but also in the logical sphere. Expressed phenomenologically, the empirical or phenomenal world does not occur without us, but neither is it purely a construct of ours. Complexity is mutual feedback between the observer-conceiver who perceives the world and the phenomenal world that appears for us in and through this mutual feedback. There is no world without the observerconceiver, but neither is there an observer-conceiver without the world. There is no objective science of reality beyond the observer-conceiver (subject). Rather, there is paradigmatic science. Or, as we are reminded by David Bohm, the level of reality revealed or explained in scientific terms is the surfacing of an unrevealed or implied level (Bohm: 1998). In reality, independent and separate objects do not exist as such. The deeper reality or Implicate Order is a vibrational manifestation out of which an explained reality emerges for us. Reality, we are also told by Fritjof Capra, is like a canvas woven of a network of interactions between which human life in its knowledge is presented to us as one of the networks threads (Capra: 1983). What we call an object at the superficial level does not have substance or essence in itself. Rather, it is a simple temporary configuration a process in a vast and inseparable network of fluid and changing interconnected relationships and feedback. In this manner, as Morin says, the entire Universe influences all events that occur inside of it. The whole therefore determines the behaviour of the parts (Morin: 1983).
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From this perspective, reality, i.e. the entities, objects, events, occurrences or happenings are permament flows of energy which appear and disappear, which organise themselves (self-organise), which change, alter and transform, and not necessarily through the intervention of the person that knows this reality. The cognitive subject, that is, the observer-conceiver, is the person that abstracts and constructs shapes, draws boundaries, separates and contemplates the continua as objects for his knowledge. In other words, reality is a jumble of relationships, interactions, mutual feedback and phenomenological vagaries that are, moreover, subject to the bioanthropological, sociocultural and noological limitations of human knowledge (Morin: 19882). Humans cannot perceive the immensity of the real directly. Rather, our perceptions of it are gleaned through the mould shaped by our needs, fears, concerns and desires. Man does not know reality exactly as it is. Rather, he shapes it to suit his needs and interests (Corb: 1992, pp. 60-83). In this manner, the observer-conceiver filters, simplifies, constrains and also distorts the complex whole in order to be able to perceive it suitably. Under this new paradigm the human brain is what perceives the Implicate reality and translates and reconstructs it linguistically into an explained order. For this reason, our explained or moulded reality is only perceived in accordance with the structure of the observer-conceiver. It is man who shapes and gives meaning to the object perceived, in line with his own intrinsic characteristics. In short, it is us human beings, through our brain-spirit and use of language, who divide and separate; who break apart and reduce in order to be able to deal with a reality that cannot be other than phenomenal. For contemporary science, the objective world found outside of the subject simply does not exist. External reality, or better yet, the world, is not something that exists objectively out there that man later represents mentally. Rather, it is something that emerges in the knowledge process. Today, human cognition denotes the causation of the emergence of the perception and subsequent conception of the meaning that the real has for us, through our continual interactions of the brain-spirit and the phy179
sical and cultural environment in which we perform the act of knowing. Knowledge depends, then, on our experiences, which in turn modify our perceptions and beliefs (Bateson: 1998; Varela: 1997). The environment, i.e. the environment in which the observer-conceiver operates, does not exist in a fixed and complete manner encountered by the subject. Rather, it is the bio-socio-cultural background shaped by the cognitive acts of the observer-conceiver in accordance with his own needs, interests, desires and fears (Corb: 2008). In other words, man does not adapt to the external and independent world. He builds and inhabits it based on his interactions and mutual feedback. As a result, as cultural beings we find ourselves in a state of fluid motion in which the environment and our interactions are continually modified with respect to each other, giving rise to the specific way in which humans inhabit the world. Complexity is therefore the network of mutual phenomenal feedback based on which the observer-conceiver builds a world in which he can live and in which he develops cognitive activity as an effective survival strategy. Complexity or the so-called complexity science seeks to understand that which normal and dogmatic sciences, according to Kuhn, cannot understand: dissipative, non-linear emergent dynamics of reality. Complexity is not an answer, but rather a challenge to thinking. 4. Complexity science Contemporary literature approaches the term complexity in a blanket manner; it can refer to complexity theories, chaos theories, complex thinking and more. Nevertheless, when authors refer to complexity theory (or at times, use it interchangeably with or equate it to chaos science or theory), they are generally referring to specific findings in physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, geometry and cybernetics which emphasise phenomena that had not been contemplated in earlier relevant theories (Espina: 2004, page 10).
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All of the above has been outlined in very general terms. In more specific terms, complexity science originates from developments in systems theory, cybernetics and information theory, which merged together naturally. It is distinguished from these developments, however, in that complexity appeared as a concept only once they had enabled an understanding of the constructive, negentropic role of disorder, of uncertainty, of chance and the event. In other words, complexity is particularly related to second-order cybernetics and systems theory, not to first-order theories. Complexity emerged with the appearance of concepts such as self-organisation, complexification, dialogic emergence and recursive causality, among others. Only at that point did the conditions permit thinking with meaning and assigning an explanatory role to the aspects mentioned. Some of the conceptions that are most evocative of complexity science are based on theories of organisation and self-organisation building on the contributions of second-order cybernetics and the theory of selforganising systems. However, many of these conceptions continue to ground themselves in first-order cybernetics and systems theory. The difference between these can be seen in the two types of forms of feedback that have been discovered: negative feedback and positive feedback. The former preserves the state of the system and the latter enables change toward new system states or new systems. Complexity is particularly related to the latter, as only through explanation of the metamorphosis of the system, order and disorder is evolution transformed into constructive and explanatory variables. Complexity is particularly related not to the paradigm of order, but to the appearance of change, of evolution, toward the establishment of new orders through disorder where evolution itself becomes a constituent and explanatory principle. Something common to these modes of understanding reality is that this moving closer to the real cannot be achieved mechanistically, i.e. breaking reality down into a limited number of specific variables which, in relation to each other, wholly satisfy the explanation or render it sufficient. In general, the nature of complexity theories is more that of understanding, supported and justified by some explanations by natural science but not in such a way as to exhaust the relations181
hip between a few specific variables. Rather, this understanding is always of something more. It is an understanding that is not arrived at, but rather toward which we are guided. Knowledge of complexity is an intentional knowledge, in the sense of being constantly oriented toward an end goal, that of complexifying the simplifying and reductionist understandings of classic science. In this manner, it is inappropriate to speak of complexity theory or complex thinking as if it was a new discipline, unless one continually bears in mind its necessary incompleteness.
For its part, complex thinking is a direct reference to the intellectual work of French philosopher Edgar Morin, who seeks not only recognition of the challenge of complexity but also and this is where he adds something new consideration of the principles of intelligibility that serve the interests of the human hyper-complexity that we are and that constitutes us. Morin proposes a reform to thinking aimed at overcoming simplifying thought, overcoming a disjunction and reduction-based logic of the rational explanation of the world that is established in classic scientific thinking and invites development and construction of a complex thinking that can understand he who conceives of complexity: man as homocomplexus (Osorio: 2012a; 2012b). Pursuant to this, Morins complexity does not allude to complexity as it is understood by what is known today as complexity science, but rather to something that does not fit inside this science. I am referring here to understanding from a rational point of view logical and mythological (complex) of the current state of the human condition (Humana Conditio) that Morin metaphorically calls the hyper-complexity that we are and which constitutes us, which in the historic moment of human self-constitution is described by Morin with the two major metaphors the planetary iron age and the prehistoric age of the human spirit.
5. Complex thinking
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In simpler terms, Morins complexity does not refer to any of the current problems based on which complexity science operates, but rather to a metaphor that leads us to complexify complexity thinking in order to understand the hyper-complexity that constitutes us as humans who live on a planet located in a suburb of a galaxy amidst myriad galaxies in a specific era in which we are establishing ourselves as a species. According to Morin, for the first time in the history of our establishment as a species humanity holds in its hands the fate of its own realisation or destruction. And this, moreover, applies on a planet-wide level. Returning once again to a more general discussion, without singling out authors, trends or schools of thought, the complex as explained using the term complexity is synonymous with wealth of thought in the sense of simultaneously taking on contrary, concurrent and complementary elements or situations, as well as taking on the concepts of self-organisation, emergence, complexification, bifurcation, etc. as heuristic tools used to understand reality. No simple reality exists. Reality is always complex: what does exist is simplifying thinking and complex thinking. In view of this, the comprehensive nature of complexity is better perceived in complexity approaches that push the complex toward the human and the social. Thus, not all complexity traditions touch on the human phenomenon. Those which do not may be considered to be complexity sciences. In them we can find a trend toward a new reductionism which entails seeing complexity solely and exclusively through an extremely complex set of variables that are barely comprehensible, with computational systems that are in turn extremely complex in that they tend to proceed via a purely functional or model-based analysis of reality. Although he is aware of their great contribution to scientific knowledge, Morin calls these forms of understanding the real restricted complexity (Morin: 2010). In turn, the complexification of these forms of complexity, in order to understand complexity thinking and he who understands it, enables the emergence of complex thinking capable of understanding our specifically human complexity or hyper-complexity. Professor Morins complex thinking is not a goal that can be reached after surpassing simple knowledge or complex understanding of reality. Rather, it is a metaphor used to understand that which has not made
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complexity science an integral element: man as a constituent component of that reality and, at the same time, as a compressor of that reality. For his part, Morin develops his advocacy of complex thinking by integrating the intuitions of some traditions, focuses and schools of complex understanding of reality, not via a functional or model-based use of computational tools but through the use of thinking principles or operators (Morin: 1996) which enable what he metaphorically calls knowledge of knowledge (Morin: 19882). To illustrate this, remember that the operators of complex thinking are: the principle of the recursive loop, the principle of self-eco-organisation, the principle of emergence, the hologrammatic principle, the dialogic or dialogisation principle, the principle of the reintroduction of the cognitive subject into all knowledge and the principle of blurring (Osorio: 2008: 100-114: 2012). According to Morin, intelligence, thinking, awareness and language are interdependent, with each involving and entailing the rest. Nevertheless, they may each be understood separately. Thus, intelligence is the art (strategy) that is able to solve problems, thinking is the dialogic art (strategy) able to produce the conception of reality, awareness is the reflexive art (strategy) able to notice the activities of the human spirit (mind), bearing in mind that full use of any strategy requires full use of the others, and all of them need the intercession of language (Morin: 1988: 216). In short, Morins complexity is a metaphor that integrates human hypercomplexity into the very understanding of complexity, more so than it is a logical, epistemological or linguistic notion. A mathematical understanding of reality is not rejected, but it is approached via different epistemological presuppositions. Thus, complex thinking capable of understanding complexity thinking by introducing the cognitive subject to all knowledge must be considered a discourse that envisions different paths. It is a mistake to seek, in complex thinking, a thinking that is consolidated, finished and complete. For this reason it is an error to attempt to understand it as a completed discourse of the whole of the real, or as the great synthesis of our times (Morin: 2009)1.
1 Osorio Garca, Sergio Nstor, Biotica global y pensamiento complejo. Hacia una emergente manera de ser, in Revista Latinoamericana de Biotica, Bogot, UMNG, Vol. 8, No. 2, Ed. 16, julio-diciembre 2008, pp.106-113.
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Edgar Morin, in this argument for complex thinking, seeks not only the recognition of the challenge entailed by knowledge of complexity, but also and this is where he adds something new consideration of the principles of intelligibility that enable us to understand ourselves through this same constituted and constituent complexity. Morin proposes a reform to thinking aimed at overcoming simplifying thought, the disjunction and reduction-based logic of the rational explanation of the world that is established in classic scientific thinking, and advocates development and construction of a new form of thinking that merges the intuitions of traditions, approaches and schools of thought that seek complex understanding of the real in order to arrive at the human-hypercomplexity that rationally formalises said complexity. As regards an axiological epistemology, it must be specified that in this new spectrum of knowledge of reality, according to Morin rational knowledge of reality cannot surpass what he and many others term the mid-band of reality (Morin: 19882, pp. 220-249). Rational knowledge cannot surpass the level of microphysics. Neither can it surpass the level of macrophysics. Moreover, in both cases the demarcation criterion is mathematical. However, human knowledge has the ability to dialogue with that which cannot be rationalised, that which cannot be measured and which results in those who attempt to do so falling into two of the temptations that threaten human rationality: rationalisation, i.e. thinking that everything rational is real, and mythologisation, i.e. thinking that reality is a simple construct of the brain-spirit. Complex thinking recognises the inability of reality to be rationalised: the mystery that inhabits us and constitutes us. Morin, however, gives no evidence of having accessed it, at least not from the point of view of the principle of reason. Thus, to take a Corbian view of Morin, it could be stated that Morin assesses the spectrum of knowledge of the absolute dimension of reality but does not explicitly access it. Nicolescus path was different, as we will see further on.
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6. Complex thinking as encyclopaedic organisation of knowledge Edgar Morin, who for over thirty years has insisted on the construction of a complexity paradigm, believes that specific disciplinary knowledge tends by its very nature to close in on itself and become cut off from other sorts of disciplinary knowledge. In this regard, knowledge is increasingly fragmented and its unity and relationships cannot be conceived of. Morin believes that interdisciplinarity is a solid attempt to exit the prison-like knowledge of disciplines, but one which does not achieve its objective as it integrates knowledge in a purely external fashion, in the way that the UN seeks the integration of different nations but instead of uniting them only results in each defending their position before the others. We must therefore go further, and in this distance we will find the transdisciplinary approach. For Morin transdisciplinarity, like interdisciplinarity, seeks the unity of knowledge that is fragmented into disciplines, but not via the pragmatic or programmatic route. His route is paradigmatic. In this regard, Morins working hypothesis is that the development of science since the 18th century has been at once disciplinary and transdisciplinary. That which was achieved by disciplinary development was what enabled non-disciplinary knowledge, but it was eventually imposed as a means of integrating knowledge, an abstract nature of rationality. For Morin, the principles that have caused disciplinary knowledge to emerge are the same principles that have enabled transdisciplinary knowledge. Therefore, the true problem should not be sought in the construction of knowledge but rather in the criterion through which knowledge may be related. It is essential to investigate inside the epistemological dimension of human knowledge. Thus, the relevant question in these historic times must be how we can rethink knowledge. The topic of transdisciplinarity itself must be present in the principles that organise, determine and control knowledge, that is, in our paradigms (Morin: 1992). The classic scientific paradigm is at once simplifying, disjunctive and reducing. It simplifies reality, which in itself is complex, to lawlike principles of invariability. It separates reality, which is always an interconnected system of systems, into multiple parts, without allowing for consideration of the link between these parts.
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Moreover, when it attempts to consider the unity of knowledge it reduces the whole to a part (simplifies) or understands the whole via a part (reduces). In this manner, according to Morin the three major organisations of knowledge physics, biology and anthropo-sociology exist in complete disjunction or are unified by reducing the biological to the physical and the anthropological to the biological. There is no way to consider man as a whole whilst also reflecting on his differences. In this view, in order to develop a complex or transdisciplinary knowledge it is necessary to transform the simplifying paradigm using a complexity paradigm; with a paradigm that distinguishes, separates and opposes but at the same time integrates, joins and enables the communication of knowledge without reduction or simplification (Morin: 1983, pp. 314). According to Morin, under this new epistemological paradigm it will be possible to achieve an encyclopaedic integration between the three major domains of knowledge of reality: the physical, the biological and the anthropo-social. Morin thus proposes creation of an encyclopaedic circle of the knowledge that has been broken into three mega-disciplines through a triple recursive and encyclopaedic movement, as follows:
The first integration movement occurs when the anthropo-social dimension is integrated into the biological dimension of existence, as we humans remain living creatures, sexual animals, vertebrates, mammals. Simultaneously, the biological dimension must be integrated into the physical dimension (physis). Living organisation
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arises out of physicochemical organisation. Anthropological organisation arises out of biological organisation, which for its part arises out of physicochemical organisation, but as new materialisations these cannot be understood through the earlier organisations. In this manner, the dimensions are integrated and at the same time explained, without having to resort to an abstract level of explanation. The second movement is the reverse of the first, since the physical science that serves as the foundation of knowledge is not only physics. In this regard knowledge is not, as mechanical physics thought, a pure reflection of the physical world, but rather a cultural, intellectual and noological construct whose developments depend on a sort of social organisation and on techniques of observation/experimentation that occur within a specific historical period. We must root the physical and chemical in the biological, and the biological in the anthropo-social, as the knowledge that we have of these levels of reality depends in turn on the conditions, possibilities and limits of our knowledge, which itself depends on the conditions of our spirit/brain, which in turn depend on form of social, cultural and historical life. The third movement must give an accounting of the encyclopaedic nature of the previous movements. It entails thinking on the subject of how an external dynamic in turn involves an internal dynamic that involves the external dynamic. This encyclopaedic nature requires new principles of knowledge organisation such as a theory that enables thinking simultaneously as to the continuity and discontinuity (emergence) of the levels of physical, biological and anthroposocial knowledge. For Morin it is these three movements in a single encyclopaedic circle that can give rise to a paradigm of complexity, to complex thinking aimed at enabling the emergence of a new rationality. This topic was dealt with by Morin in his monumental work Method. Method in this sense does not seek a single theory for all knowledge, which is something that Morin has not given consideration to, but rather an enciclopaedic integration of all knowledge on the basis of complex thinking (Morin: 1983, pg. 316).
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The mission of this Method is not to provide pragmatic outlines or programmatic formulas, but to enable a paradigmatic reform of the organisation of knowledge. It seeks to warn us as to the degenerative illness of rationality in its two major expressions: rationalisation as reduction of reality to what is thought of as reality (error of knowledge) and mythologisation, which believes it can find the quintessence of reality in the human spirit (the illusion of knowledge) (Morin: 2001, pp. 21-36). And yet, his proposal does not end there. Morin believes that the most important part of this new organisation of knowledge is not pluridisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity, but rather what he calls the ecologisation of thinking2, i.e. bearing in mind the wherefore of human knowledge. This implies that human scientific and non-scientific knowledge must be located in cultural spaces and historic periods in which cognitive processes occur. The ecologisation of thinking considers knowledge a strategy for the social transformation of reality and for the formation of the human condition. In this context, rationality is a thinking interaction between man and the reality in which he finds himself and participates. In this interaction with reality, rationality which is much more than scientific knowledge seeks an improvement in the living conditions on the planet and at the same time a determination of the profound condition of the human condition.
At the same time as it joins what has been disconnected back together, complex thinking also makes distinctions, without separating. Advocacy of complex thinking thus becomes a very effective tool for considering the human challenges in the planetary era, and it meshes with the aim of achieving an axiological epistemology in the sense that it is with a new, broader rationality that humanity may get a second chance to inhabit the earth whilst also changing the traits that have characterised it throughout history.
2 Morin, E. (1991) El pensamiento ecologizado In: Gazeta de Antropologa, No. 12. Available at: http://www.ugr.es/~pwlac/G12_01Edgar_Morin.html
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The role of stories in the creation and development of axiological projects in organisations
Queralt Prat-i-Pubill
The study of the role of stories in the construction and development of the axiological project of an organisation is a recent phenomenon which began in the late 1990s. This paper offers an initial analysis of the various models of storytelling, narratives and rhetoric and how these stories are used within organisations. The context in which a growing interest in the use of stories has come about has its roots in the questions that business owners, managers and entrepreneurs ask themselves: How do you persuade employees to change? How do you get them to work together? How do you share knowledge? How do you control and mitigate the circulation of rumours? How do you communicate who you are and what is important to you? How do you transmit values? How do you direct people toward the future that you envision? (Denning, 2004). The concern is clear. These questions are essential to the task of orienting a group of individuals toward a common goal but we dont know how to achieve them. We do know that organising, bringing together and motivating human beings cannot be done mechanically or by following rules or specific techniques. Subsequently, if a companys organisation depends on the coordination of individual wills but we dont know an explicit way of doing this via a type of knowledge that can be communicated and taught to those interested in bringing together and coordinating teams,
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1. Preamble
we are left asking the following questions. What should business administration schools teach? What is management? Can stories point us toward new possibilities for understanding and management? Mintzberg (2004), Drucker (1999) and Bennis (2009) describe a new understanding of what it means to manage organisations. For them it is the ability to develop skills in the areas of flexibility, understanding and action within a given setting that goes beyond learned parameters. The ability to manage change and ambiguity without the need to close the system but in an atmosphere of continual learning, i.e. an open system of creation of strategies, processes, goods and services. These are skills that could not be defined as technical-theoretical knowledge of reality, of how things function, but which entail a practical knowledge of how our parameters of understanding, theorising and action operate in the world. This knowledge would therefore be completely contextualised, characterised by constant change or, in other words, knowing how to practically apply conceptual theoretical knowledge that allows one to act freely. Therefore, managers make decisions drawing on their human quality, that is, on their powers of discrimination, in order to determine how to act outside the confines of any theoretical modelling learned. Specifically, in the current competitive situation requiring development of full teambased communication, neither human quality nor theoretical-technical knowledge are enough. Rather, managers must develop theoretical-practical knowledge of how to influence axiologically, understanding that this undertaking is not a precise recipe but it requires hard work and constant attention, in the same manner that the technical-business plan does. This paper aims to make an initial investigation of the use of stories as a key element in this axiological project. To this end we will analyse a range of diverse contributions to the world of management, particularly from America and Europe. Our intent is to highlight the axiological, value-based element in stories, although it should be pointed out here at the outset that many authors pass over this relationship for different reasons.
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2. The
conception of the organisation
situation:
The
knowledge society demands a new
The concerns that we will go on to highlight are not uniform in nature. There are many types of different organisations and differing contexts. We will see, however, that the organisational model required in the 21st century has changed. Values of control and domination in organisations no longer work, because these are an obstacle in current times of change. Even so, these values paradoxically remain predominant. The operations of many organisations are bureaucratically structured, and a high volume of business is therefore needed to sustain the organisation. This renders them inefficient. Furthermore, the growing complexity of technology and the difficulty of integrating activities and people, as well as a shift in the view of the individual in democratic and participative societies, implies that prerogative-based management by managers using an I order and command model legitimised by their special knowledge of how things function is no longer appropriate for economies of continual change. In other words, while the bureaucratic structure allowed competitive advantages to be gained in the industrial economy, this no longer occurs in the knowledge-based society. The values of exploitation, control, domination and oppression that predominate in bureaucratic structures thus become outdated. The relationship between the individual and the organisation also changes. The most important skill of the manager is not solely his possession of the know-how needed to take technical action, or the I order / I command dynamic. Rather, he must be able to bring together and motivate the team toward the attainment of common goals. Thus, the manager, the business owner and the entrepreneur are asked to be leaders, since they cant command. But what does it mean to be a leader? For Bennis (2009) it is being able to create meaning, to connect individuals to a joint effort to create a communion of wills. But how is this done? How is meaning created? How are individuals connected to a collective project through the communion of their wills?
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3. Stories in organisations
3.1 The use of stories as a research method Interest in the role of stories in organisations initially arose because organizational researchers questioned the epistemological and practical basis of how organizational research was conducted. Enquiry, mainly quantitative in nature with a philosophical positivist focus, showed organisational operations that were removed from reality, ignoring many facets and therefore hampering action for new organizational proposals (Czarniawska, 2004). Interpretive methods of analysis thus began to be promoted, one of which was the qualitative analysis of narratives. Narratives analysed were those that organisations made public in various written media. This proposed qualitative analysis using narratives encountered a range of problems from the outset, the most significant of which was justifying and defending an interpretive approach in organisational science. An argument was made that anthropological philosophical sources facilitated a more comprehensive overview of human operations in organisations. It was also argued that although it could not be argued that narratives are true in contrast to science, which was still understood as truth, this did not preclude exhaustive and scientific analysis of these narratives. However, these justifications met with criticism from those that believed that interpretation of stories was still open to political and social influence and was therefore unscientific. Nevertheless, Thomas Kuhn (1970) contributions, which gradually reached a wider audience, showed that not even natural science was free of political and social influences. Therefore, it was appropriate to understand scientific contributions not as truth but rather as a modelling of the reality that scientist defended in the academic community, a modelling that was then temporarily accepted, if rigorous and appropriate, until falsified (Popper, 1963). Although both contributions have been developed from different epistemological positions, Kuhns contribution does promote an understanding of science that is open to the possibility of using narratives as a research method.
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In narratives, the opposition between narratives meaning and truth is obvious. Given this conflict, an objective viewpoint is demanded (Essers, Bohm, & Contu, 2009). Therefore, a positivist focus still predominates; a widespread dichotomy exists between facts and value, even when using narratives as a qualitative research method for organizational analysis. Therefore, there is a crisis of representation to which many qualitative scientists still have not given rigorous consideration. Thought this crisis explicitly reveals itself in the use of qualitative analysis methods, this does not mean that scientist using qualitative methods have a non-positivistic epistemological position. One possible way out of this crisis of representation is to understand interpretive meanings as a modelling of reality subject to rigorous examination. This crisis of representation, between the model and truth exists in science despite the research method used. It is a crisis of representation in our epistemological understanding of our scienunderstand and predict reality, and therefore are not the truth or reality. Some authors (Hawkins & Saleem, 2012), even while using qualitative analysis claim the way to reflect the truth of a narrative is for the researcher to focus on its context, understand the implications and role presented by the personal narrative and the importance of time to how the story is narrated. In this case, though using interpretive methods the epistemological bases are positivist, i.e. authors understand that there is a reality, a truth that science can unravel either with quantitative or qualitative methods. Therefore, use of either type of method can become a purely practical choice with no epistemological questioning, therefore maintaining outdated anthropological foundations. In contributions that stray from the dominant positivist understanding, it has been shown that even in economic theory, a discipline which predominantly utilizes quantitative methods and positivist epistemology, not only data and logic are used, but it also employs abundant rhetorical arguments and stories to defend scientific discourse (McCloskey, 1998). We have thus seen how the proposal for analysis of narratives in organisations developed from a critical foundation, in the aim of correcting a biased view of the organisation and shedding light on organisatio201
nal functions that are not explicit (and thus difficult to measure and quantify), but which nevertheless have a direct impact on the development and actions of the organisation. There is also awareness, however, that narratives can be used ideologically (Basten, 2011). Awareness of this, of the fact that narratives are reflections and interpretations and of their subjectivity, still negatively impacts the perception of them as a research method subject to rigorous standards of validation in the scientific sphere. This critical study of organisations, which rejects a positivist epistemology is the starting point for the use of narratives as a research method. The progress started by studying only organizational narratives, and later developing towards a more comprehensive analysis of narratives in organisations. Thus, encompassing not only narratives in different media written by organisations but all of the existing narratives in organisations, explained by various different participants. Researchers devote themselves to giving voice to those narratives which are not the predominant ones supported by the organisation but are in some way subversive, those that are passed over, thrown away, silenced and marginalised. This type of more comprehensive study entails increased considerations relating to analytical subjectivity, but at the same time it enables the creation of new proposals and approaches to unresolved problems. Nowadays research additional covers narratives that may not be written but which some researchers believe are the most important, because these narratives influence companies actions (Adorisio, 2008; Vickers, 2008). Many of these narratives, which are called emergent narratives, are incomplete and may not possess, among other features, a complete plot or fully defined actors (Boje, 2001). One of the most dominant narratives in the organisational world is managersws portrayal as able to know, control and give the right answers to competitive situations, following parameters of efficiency, profit maximisation, planning and selection (Turriago Hoyos & Braun, 2010; Vickers, 2008). The dominant story of the manager is that of executor, an operator of environment, processes and people. It is seen that on one hand we have the predominant narrative, which could be defined as the opinion held on a given topic, in our case on what a manager is, and on the other we have something very different: what the managers role should actually be.
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However, as the use of narratives in organizational research progresses, it is understood that narratives not only supply a framework of reflection for retrospective sense making or an opinion on a phenomenon. Moreover, this narrative understanding is also carried out in a present moment that is recounted, and therefore always with a possible narrative, named antenarrative, defining the future (Boje & Baskin, 2011). As this present moment is defined with meaning, it is argued that language cannot be a neutral instrument but rather imposes a view of the world. Our contact with the world is not direct (Bruner, 1986). This is due not only to our biological and linguistic conditioning with respect to the world, but also because our culture, i.e. our social and community life, is a permanent creation and recreation, a continual renegotiation of meanings (Berger & Luckmann, 1991). This creation of meanings is not dependent on an external reality. In keeping with the theories of Maturana and Varela, Gooseff (2010) argues that the construction of meaning is intrinsic to the system of the structural pair formed by the biological being and reality. According to this theory, reality is not external but is already defined by the system formed between the entity and reality. In our case, language enables us to evolve through culture. Without culture we are monstrosities...incomplete, unfinished animals (Geertz, 2000). Thus, one of the problems of psychology lies in its study of a sterilised man stripped free from his culture, when in actual fact man is first and foremost culture, i.e. a construct of meaning that defines him and makes him viable (Bruner, 1990; Corb, 2007). It is seen that research into narratives in organisations has evolved. Not only does it go beyond explicit written narratives while also taking an interest in those that are marginalised, silenced, or not strictly complete narratives (antenarratives), but it also claims that reality already presents us with meaning in the present moment, and therefore individual reflection (retrospective sensemaking) is no longer the only key to the study of stories. Psychology and anthropology thus enter into play in the field of studying narratives. This new vision of the importance of language not only as a means of information exchange but as a means of constructing social and organisational reality has not been studied in detail in organisations. It would be
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interesting to determine which discourse structures of stories facilitate, inhibit and configure processes of change (Heracleous & Barrett, 2001). We will address the topic of the axiological use of stories in organisations in the next section. We have seen how the study of stories has contributed to facilitating the understanding of science, based on either quantitative or qualitative methods, as a modelling of reality. It can therefore be understood that narratives do not aim to transmit a truth. They only aim to create a meaning (Fineman & Gabriel, 1996) that is useful for understanding the phenomenon in question, thereby evincing a clear pragmatic epistemological constructivist base. Thus, the process of creating meaning is as fundamental in man as the notion of action (Flyvbjerg, 2001); a creation of meaning that encompasses the past and the specific context, an understanding of the social reality in which organisations operate (Corvellec & Hultman, 2012). Thus far we have described how stories began to be used as a research method in management. Over the next few pages we will describe how they are used to promote development of an axiological project. 3.2 The axiological use of stories in the organisation 3.2.1. The contributions of the field of narratives and storytelling Our interests lie in studying how a group of individuals is motivated and drawn together to achieve an organisational goal. We want to know how stories can aid in the creation of an organisations axiological project, an axiological project that creates meaning and therefore orientation. The use of stories in organisations is diverse. Thus, in addition to the use of narratives to construct either individual or collective meaning to enchant the world (Boje & Baskin, 2011), they are also used to promote a specific emotion or feeling in an audience (Carriger, 2010; Dawson, Farmer, & Thomson, 2011), to transmit complex ideas (Carriger, 2010). As transmitters of knowledge (McDrury & Alterio, 2004) they are therefore related to learning.
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Some authors claim that narratives are effective tools for transmitting values (Carriger, 2010; Parada & Vilads, 2010). It is this claim that we aim to investigate. Narratives are also used to create excellent teams, to neutralise harmful rumours and to describe how the future of an organisation should be (Carriger, 2010). To this end, one practical example (Steuer & Wood, 2008) explains how executives in organisations in the midst of a takeover (being bought) use stories: to illustrate the vision of the organisation and the attainment of objectives, to reply to contradictions and ambiguity between official discourse and implementation, to mitigate suffering due to loss and to express the assimilation of values imposed by the takeover process. It is not clear how and in what manner stories impact the attainment of the desired effects, and which types of stories are used. In many management articles leaders are described as needing to know how to sell their vision, and to be able to do that they must know themselves (Yoeli & Berkovich, 2010). This self-knowledge, however, undoubtedly goes beyond knowing how to create a coherent explanation of themselves in order to create a narrative, i.e. a coherent explanation that enables communication with an audience (Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001). It is claimed that the leader must know how to explain coherently, through a story, what the organisation does, and obviously this must be related to what the organisation actually does (Iglesias & Bonet, 2012; OConnor, 2002). How this is done has not been described. Moreover, assuming that one knows oneself, how is a narrative created that can persuade the audience? Does the preoccupation of some academics with the narrative only relate to selling goods or services using an argument, through a story? Is it only a good exercise in reflecting on and presenting an organisations ideas? We wish to investigate the contribution of stories to the construction of collective guidance. The construction of meaning not only lies at the core of what it means to be human, but it also enables us to build an identity (McDrury & Alterio, 2004). In psychology, narratives are used as a tool to build identity (Heinen & Sommer, 2009; Kraus, 2005). These narratives are dependent on the social world in which an individual is located, and they constitute social relationship bonds. This socially influenced self-construction of the personal narrative is never considered to
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be complete, and in most people it is never explicit (Kraus, 2005). In the organisational world this contribution by psychology is mainly used in the development of management and leadership, not in the development of the companys axiological project. We would point to the critical view of Lapp and Carr (2008) in regard to overselling the ability of stories to transform an organisation. According to Lapp and Carr, many coaches and consultants use storytelling as storyselling, or as a way of introjecting values into an audience when there is no real alternative to the one presented in the narrative and to the values that play a role in the storys plot. Thus, it is claimed that the expected organisational change does not occur and if it does it is for the wrong reason, or the expected change becomes negative (Lapp & Carr, 2008). Nevertheless, although many researchers are reluctant to accept that the use of narratives can in itself bring about axiological transformations (Schein, 2000; Simpson, 2012), a large number of academics do support this view. So far we have not found conclusive studies of how values are changed. However, for example, for Parada and Vilads (2010), values can be transmitted through stories. In this case narratives are studied as creators of identity and meaning in the family business. For them, business is not simply a business but the expression of the individual and collective identities of the business owner and the organisation, passed down in accordance with them from generation to generation. Stories are the basis of the transmission of values. Although authors defend the existence of a relationship between the narrative and the values transmitted, it has not been shown or made clear theoretically. Schein (2009) doubts that employees values can be changed through stories. According to him the only way narratives seem to work is through educational interventions. These interventions consist of dialogue, thinking collectively and imagining possible futures and values. However these educational interventions do not work without an understanding of the basic hypotheses behind the organisations operations (Schein 2000). For Schein it is paramount to understand the presuppositions used by the organisation in its operations and uncover the specific filters of understanding through analysis. Therefore, He proposes to study organisa206
tions artifacts, for example their dress codes, level of formality, working hours, meetings, how decisions are made, how communication is carried out, social events, jargon, uniforms, rites and rituals, as well how conflicts are managed and the balance between work and family, among other things. It is not clear, nor does the author rationally justify how to move from uncovering the specific organisational filters to ascribing to and living with new collective/individual values. He therefore does not put forward any theory relating to axiological functioning. We would underscore here the incongruence of certain theoretical approaches. In regard to management, for instance, reference is made to managing change as if the manager were able to control and direct this change. This hypothesis, however, is based on the presupposition that the manager can use his knowledge to determine and create the collective orientation (Simpson, 2012). If we give careful consideration to the word change, though, we realise it implies an uncertainty, a not knowing. How, then, is this change executed? Simpson intuits the impossibility of management by knowing what, but he does not consider that perhaps a change of direction may be defined by investigating and acting on the whys, this means on the values. Simpsons (2012) answer to this problem is that the use of problem sharing and conversation in a group of participants united in not knowing, through stories relating to change, will itself facilitate the desired change. We could not be more skeptical as to the conclusions of this theory. Even so, we to some extent share his suspicion that it is not via the managers control that change can be dominated, as is claimed in a somewhat veiled manner in the systems thinking approach, but rather through conversation to enable the creation of new meanings and new learnings. In this case, narratives acquire a central role in any organisational transformation. Therefore, narratives and not individuals create the self-emergent organisation. Nevertheless, it is also clear that simply speaking and conversing can easily lead to coffee conversation. Thus, without operational implications. It would be necessary to develop an axiological theory that could be refuted.
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Therefore, our research shows that storytelling can work as a tool for axiological development, albeit with more modest levels or effectiveness, as it promotes communication and dialogue. It is in the communication that arises from storytelling that the creation of new meanings is fostered. Therefore, the story becomes a facilitator of individual and collective, as well as intra and inter-organisational, learning processes. Scharmer (2001) points out the diverse ways in which a group dialogue or conversation may be established. The first of these is talking nice, in which speakers address each other without making an impact on the mental models held. Conversation is superficial and well-mannered. The second is talking tough, where speakers challenge each other using tough speech. Each defends his own point of view, his own mode of understanding and approaching reality. The third is using reflexive dialogue, where an attempt is made to understand the epistemological hypotheses of the understandings and actions of each of the participants in the conversation. The fourth and final is using generative dialogue, which consists of jointly imagining possible future actions. Evidently, it would be difficult for a conversation held at the talking nice level to give rise to change. It is not enough to argue that it is essential to converse and hold dialogue based on storytelling. Rather, a specific type of dialogue and conversation must be proposed. It is only through generative dialogue that the values discussed have enough force to act at the organisational level. At the same time, however, in the absence of an axiological theory to support this process, how can we ensure that this conversation can reach an established goal? If no axiological theory exists, should we trust that the process will be spontaneous? Boje and Baskin (2011) offer a practical contribution with respect to the organisational world. In their view, human beings need to build meanings to give sense to and enchant the world. If, for example, an organisation were to mechanise work in such a way as to deprive it of all meaning, the organisation would be disenchanting the world. The I order / I command structure is thus understood as one that disenchants the world. In light of this, it is quite complicated if not impossible to impose a narrative designed by management or to make such a narrative the dominant one. The only way out of this difficulty may be to copy the 3M experience, namely imposing a dominant narrative in the orga208
nisation to promote the creation of individual and group meaning, therefore fostering emergent narratives and antenarratives. This represents an adjustment to the meaning of what it is to be a leader and manager. Leaders objective is to control and make sure that there is no control and domination in the organization. 3.2.2 Rhetoric contribution Thus far we have described the contributions of storytelling and narratives to organisational research or organizational management of change. Another tradition that promotes the use of stories is rhetoric. According to Conley (1990), rhetoric can be classified in four models that were born in Greece and have had different influence in European history. Management mainly uses the theoretical contribution originating from Aristotle and Roman rhetoric, rooted in the Greek model of Isocrates and Protagoras. Thus, the key characteristic of Roman rhetoric is a search for social consensus through debate and eloquence, while Aristotles rhetoric is based on opinion and the contextualised probability of persuasive arguments being created in the situation in question. Aristotle considers three key elements to creating persuasive arguments: logos, pathos, ethos. It is stressed that for rhetoric to be effective the orator must have humanist training because he must be able to connect with the audience in the ethical sphere, and it is argued that he must have a notable possession of the virtues of humility, courage, wisdom and abstinence (Iglesias & Bonet, 2012). Narratives in this sphere are seen as able to transmit values and ethics, i.e. those that are expressed in the narrative (Williams, 2006). Another of the proposals of rhetoric consists of using the classic model of creation and defence of a thesis (Czarniawska, 2004): exordium (capturing the audiences attention), narrative (explaining facts), proposition or division (presenting the points defended and those disputed), proof (presenting the arguments that defend the case), refutation (repudiating the arguments of adversaries) and conclusion (summarising the arguments to move the audience).
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Thus, rhetoric using narrative structures like those described in the world of management expresses itself as the art of argumentation. It focuses on knowing and using, in the most effective manner possible, the argumentative function of language. Consideration is not given to which values are to be transmitted, but rather to how this should be done. The system of values is already determined. Thus, it does not take the form of an ethical discussion. Rather, basic value presuppositions are already determined. Rhetoric is that which can use metaphors and structures suitable for attaining its objective of convincing the audience inside a specific system of values. This is so because the individual is conceived of as a rational being, and therefore values and ethics are assumed to exist and to be rational. There is thus no room for an axiological interpretation of rhetoric. Axiological theory therefore does not exist in rhetoric, although reference is made to values inside the structure of logos, ethos, pathos, and they are argued to exist in the different areas of narrative structure. It is assumed that individuals are rational beings that use rhetoric to give meaning to what exists, based on predefined, pre-existing values. If no axiological approach exists in rhetorical proposals and these boil down to using values without any axiological argument but with one that is simply ideological because it is ethical, then use of rhetorical theory runs counter to the organisational change of the 21st century. In management, rhetoric becomes a defender of values chosen uncritically, with no possibility to shape them through an axiological theory. Study could be made of how to contextualise the important theoretical contributions of rhetoric, which has over 2000 years of history, within the framework of axiological development as a tool for examining the communicative axiological process.
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4. Conclusions
We believe that the study of stories in the form of narratives, storytelling and rhetoric is a very interesting area of research with organisational. Because, societies characterised by constant change in which creativity and innovation is prized, bureaucratic organisational structures cannot work. It is difficult to foster creativity and innovation with structures whose main characteristics are control and submission. If organisations and teams cannot be drawn together using the I order / I command model, then how can we create united teams working toward common goals? One possible way is with the creation of shared meanings and orientations through the use of stories. After this initial study of the use of stories in management we conclude that there is a general overselling of the use of narratives, storytelling and rhetoric in regard to their ability to institute transformations in individuals values. In the case of narratives and storytelling, the relationship between construction and development of the story and successful implementation of the new desired values has not been made clear. In rhetoric theory the anthropological conception of the individual neutralises the possibility of an axiological treatment right from the outset. We have seen that psychology views narratives at the personal level as builders of meaning and personal identity. At the organisational level this relationship has not been established. For the manager, business owner or advisor, scientific contributions emerging in this sphere are therefore not suitable for practical use. We thus know that a simple explanation of a story in an organisation does not entail adherence to the axiological proposals presented. In light of this, we would stress that axiological theory in the use of stories in the organisation is non-existent. Therefore, although the contribution of stories to the creation of an organisations axiological project is meagre, we believe that the contribution to the epistemological sphere of management science is interesting. The understanding of what the narrative means has been gradually fine-tuned. It began with the view, originating in literature, of it as a text transmitting an argument regarding a phenomenon. It progressed
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to include all stories, regardless of whether they were in written form and even those that are not complete narratives. This facilitated a more complete understanding of the organisational phenomenon that had not been detected by quantitative research methods. In parallel to this broadening process of narratives concept, a transformation in the epistemological conception of the narratological event has also occurred. First, narratives were considered the work of a subject, (read individual, group of individuals or organisation) removed from context, interpreting reality. Now, narratives in themselves are being considered central in the creation of meaning, defining and constructing participants reality. Finally, we would stress the importance of stories role in the construction of the axiological organisational project and underscore that scientific contributions in this sphere may also be appropriate for use at the political and social level. We expect to see a growing interest in the study of stories in management. Because, the new playing rules of the knowledge economy, favouring creativity and comprehensive human development as basis for competitiveness, are gradually becoming assimilated by organisations. Bibliography
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Bruner, J. 1990. Acts of meaning. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Carriger, M. 2010. Narrative vs PowerPoint: for leaders, it may not be a matter of fact. Strategy & Leadership, 38(2): 52-56. Conley, T. M. 1990. Rhetoric in the European Tradition. London: The University of Chicago Press. Corb, M. 2007. Hacia una espiritualidad laica, sin creencias, sin religiones, sin dioses. Barcelona: Herder. Corvellec, H. & Hultman, J. 2012. From less landfilling to wasting less. Journal of organisational Change Management, 25(2): 297-314. Czarniawska, B. 2004. Narratives in social science research. London: SAGE Publications Ltd. Dawson, P., Farmer, J., & Thomson, E. 2011. The power of stories to persuade: The storying of midwives and the financial narratives of central policy makers. Journal of Management & organisation, 17(2): 146-164. Denning, S. 2004. Squirrel Inc. A fable of leadership through storytelling. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Drucker, P. F. 1999. Management challenges for the 21st century. New York: HarperCollins. Essers, J., Bohm, S., & Contu, A. 2009. Corporate Robespierres, ideologies of management and change. Journal of organisational Change Management, 22(2): 129-129-140. Fineman, S. & Gabriel, Y. 1996. Experiencing organisations. London: Sage publications. Flyvbjerg, B. 2001. Making social science matter. New York: Cambridge University Press. Geertz, C. 2000. Available Light. Anthropological reflections on philosophical topics. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Goosseff, K. A. 2010. Autopoeisis and meaning: a biological approach to Bakhtins superaddressee. Journal of organisational Change Management, 23(2): 145-151. Hawkins, M. A. & Saleem, F. Z. 2012. The omnipresent personal narrative: story formulation and the interplay among narratives. Journal of organisational Change Management, 25(2): 204-219. Heinen, S. & Sommer, R. 2009. Introduction: Narratology and interdisciplinarity. In S. Heinen & R. Sommer (Eds.), Narratology in the age of crossdisciplinary narrative research. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
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Simpson, P. 2012. Complexity and change management: analyzing church leaders narratives. Journal of organisational Change Management, 25(2): 283296. Turriago Hoyos, . & Braun, B. M. 2010. Managing innovation: a values based approach. The Journal of International Management Studies, 5(1). Vickers, D. 2008. Beyond the hegemonic narrative - a study of managers. Journal of organisational Change Management, 21(5): 560-573. Williams, R. 2006. Narratives of knowledge and intelligence ... beyond the tacit and explicit. Journal of Knowledge Management, 10(4): 81-99. Yoeli, R. & Berkovich, I. 2010. From personal ethos to organisational vision: narratives of visionary educational leaders. Journal of Educational Administration, 48(4): 451-467.
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An urban axiology?
Ral Garca
This text is based on the research I am currently carrying out toward my Ph.D. in Social and Cultural Anthropology on the subject of the relationship that arises between the social phenomena of the city and urbanism, understood as the designed and built environment. As my work is still in progress and my hypotheses still in their infancy, I have chosen a communiqu as the best way to outline my research. Urban planning was described as a scientific discipline for the first time in the writings of Ildefons Cerd in the mid 19th century, since which time its role in the development of the modern metropolis has progressively increased. After evaluation of its history over the course of a century and a half it can be stated that there is no option but to view it as a science that has failed in its objectives of social improvement, which were the a priori reason for its existence. The failure I am referring to is that which is universally perceptible in both our daily lives and in the media, and which stretches back to the onset of industrialisation in cities (nearly all of them) managed according to the modern concepts of land use, planning, projects and design. Evidence of this failure is seen in the inequality and injustice as well as the absence of a decent existence and enjoyment of rights that characterise contemporary urban life, even more so in the current phase of unbridled late capitalism which has led to yet another economic crisis among the Western powers. I believe it unnecessary to cite excessive proof of something we live with every day and which is now (or perhaps never so much as now) evident as a negative peak on the graph, although the anomie, solitude and emotional stress, not to mention the violence, injustice and even revolts that we are all aware of are more than sufficient evidence that urban life is very problematic.
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In broad terms, the succession of ideas, trends, theories and schools of thought of urbanism as practical know-how over this entire period, which coincides with that referred to as Contemporary History, has not achieved any of the utopian objectives it set out, i.e. improvement in the living conditions of city residents and, by extension, of society in general. From city renovations such as that of Paris by Baron Haussmann or that of Barcelona by Cerd to Arturo Sorias linear city theories, Howards garden city, the Modern Movement proposals in the Athens Charter (Benevolo, 2007) and, for example, the current self-proclaimed Barcelona Model (Capel, 2005), the raison dtre of urbanism has always been to design hygienic cities characterised by human justice and peace. What actually occurs is something different: increased segregation, marginalisation and poverty, dehumanisation, speculation, pollution, etc.
If we consider the absence of results which has characterised the discipline of urbanism as compared to the social utopia that it advocated, perhaps we can see that in its current form as an instrument it cannot be the key to solving the issues addressed by urban planners. Expressed in the terms being used in this gathering, one could say that the intention was to axiologise city society via a mainly urban form, through its architecture, morphology, etc. In other words, by transforming space.
Today, with half of the global population living in cities and the number expected to rise constantly over the next few decades, city planning inevitably becomes challenging. As with the ideologies of the industrial era (capitalism and communism), which have acted as pseudo-religions to shape modern societies, urban theories that have sought to bring order to the supposed city chaos also reveal themselves to be given their results in need of complete overhaul. It might be argued that urbanism in the 19th and 20th centuries was not even minimally successful in avoiding the injustices and conflicts that the West has found itself embroiled in. Perhaps the reason for this is that, as with other contemporary ideologies, it has not managed to achieve the right axiological direction.
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Religions, in the historic period in which societies were managed under a mythical epistemology, also determined urban production. A text by Joseph Rykwert serves to illustrate this:
Modern authors always consider the choice of a site for a town in terms of economy, hygiene, traffic problems and facilities. Whenever the founder of an ancient town thought in those terms he could only do so after having translated them into mythical terms. (Rykwert, 1985: 16)
After the long mythical period, cities have moved into the era of industrialisation, where urbanism has become scientific and its predominant paradigm what is referred to as functionalist, giving priority to demands associated with hygienism and communication and coming to be dominated by real estate speculation and the capitalist system of production that underpins all changes in the modern era. At present, with the ideologies of the 20th century falling into decline, we can look back and make our own judgement of the city that represents the legacy of the last two centuries, whose result has not been exactly positive. Urbanism in the era of knowledge and continual change must be able to play a role and contribute to a sustainable quality of social life. Where to start? My hypothesis is the view that, as Gerard Horta (2010) argues, urban design deals with symptoms rather than causes. Due to this, urban planning never achieves its palliative objectives with respect to society. The truth is that ethnographic observation, for example at the level of public space, will reveal that the dynamics of the users of streets and squares often dont obey the programmes proposed in planning by politico-economic institutions. Rather, we find ourselves in a society that appropriates public space in a spontaneous manner, as if it were fluid and difficult to grasp, resulting in a contradiction of the pre-established public order. As Massimo Cacciari argues (2010), the city is the perennial experiment giving shape to contradiction and conflict, and to want to overcome such contradictions is a bad utopia. The authoritarianism of the modern urban form that conceives, plans and orders space has been delegitimized and corresponds with the current axiological crisis, which is cultural and paradigmatic in nature.
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This situation of incoherence between the city as it is conceived and as it is lived along the lines of Henri Lefebvres notions of space (1974) has led to what Anthony Giddens (1990) calls disembedding, or the lifting out of people from their local contexts of interaction. This phenomenon surfaces in the abstract idea of the city which characterises the thinking of the urbanists and politicians who are the actors that establish the expert systems of modern urban planning. My methodological proposal aims to describe and understand the distance that arises between the abstract city of modern urbanism and the concrete city (Signorelli, 1999) experienced daily by people, drawing on ethnographic observation of the so-called public space of the street to do so. Diverse anthropological studies, such as my fledgling work, show that social subjects make use of streets and common spaces in the city in a way unexpected by the official order, a use that is at once complex and precarious, in which interaction negotiations featuring agreements and conflicts occur continually. These uses occur outside of the conditions imposed by urban morphology, overlapping it in a random fashion. This phenomenon is impossible to control with programming imposed from the top, and the question arises of whether greater freedom would be more advisable than ordinary spatial use planning by centres of power. If we add to the mix the hyperconnectivity and socialisation of information that new technologies have entailed for the past few years, it becomes necessary to envision a public space (a quintessential element of the Western city) that is more open, a space that allows people the creativity entailed by the challenge of self-management and participation. If public space use does not necessarily adjust to suit the mono-functional purposes assigned by the urban planning of technical exports, but rather broadens and surpasses these purposes, then we can understand the observation proposed to urban planning philosophy by Franco La Cecla: minimal spatial definition, maximum social utilisation (2010: 127). Along these same lines Amos Rapoport, one of the few anthropologists specialising in constructive human culture (2003), closes one of his texts, advocating that designers of contemporary spaces pursue open-ended design characterised by freedom, flexibility and adaptability to the chan220
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ging circumstances of our society. Lastly, I would cite a conversation between the architect Hans Kollhoff and the film director Wim Wenders:
I dont believe that anybody can make a city hall understand urbanistically that what is most beautiful in a city are precisely the areas where nobody has done anything... These areas have escaped the urbanists... For me a citys quality of life is directly related to the potential existence of this lack of planning.
These words of an artist Wim Wenders clearly show the problematic aspects of the discipline of urban planning as scientific know-how. Jrgen Habermas (1984) warns of these aspects when he addresses how science and technology act as an ideology of modernity, eliminating practical interest. As Chombart de Lauwe (1963) argues, it is not a question of man adapting to the modern city, but of making cities that adapt to the new man. The old mystical union of city dweller and city must in todays times be conscious and secular. It thus cannot be based on an urbanism of industrialisation which ultimately obeys capital dynamics. The social project in the city must make use of the science of urban planning but it cannot expect it to provide a sense of utility an axiology because it is abstract knowledge. The values that generate the axiological postulates in societies characterised by change may benefit to a degree by city design, but urban morphology will not in itself generate the culture needed for a society to be viable in the long-term. I would now refer to the closing words of Joseph Rykwerts classic work The Idea of a Town (1985: 257), which in my opinion give a simple summary of the transformation of the meaning of the city over the course of human history:
... The Roman who walked along the cardo knew that his walk was the axis around which the sun turned, and that if he followed the decumanus, he was following the suns course. The whole universe and its meaning could be spelt out of his civic institutions so he was at home in it. We have lost all the beautiful certainty about the way the world works we are not even sure if it is expanding or contracting, whether it was produced by a catastrophe or is continuously renewing itself. This does not absolve us from looking for some ground of certainty in our attempts to give form to the human
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environment. It is no longer likely that we shall find this ground in the world cosmologists are continuously reshaping round us, and so we must look for it inside ourselves, in the constitution and structure of the human person. (The underlining is my own)
Bibliography:
BENEVOLO, Leonardo (2007): Historia de la arquitectura moderna. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili. CACCIARI, Massimo (2010): La ciudad. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili. CAPEL, Horacio (2005): El Modelo Barcelona: un examen crtico. Barcelona: Ediciones del Serbal. CHOMBART DE LAUWE, Paul-Henry (1963): Des hommes et des villes. Paris: Payot. GIDDENS, Anthony (1990): Consecuencias de la modernidad. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. HABERMAS, Jurgen (1984): Ciencia y tcnica como ideologa. Madrid: Tecnos. HORTA, Gerard (2010): Rambla del Raval de Barcelona. De apropiaciones viandantes y procesos sociales. Ediciones de Intervencin Cultural/El Viejo Topo. LEFEBVRE, Henri (1974): La production de lespace. Paris: Anthropos. LA CECLA, Franco (2010): Contre larchitecture. Paris: Arla. RAPOPORT, Amos (2003): Cultura, arquitectura y diseo. Barcelona: Edicions UPC. RYKWERT, Joseph (1976): The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology of Urban Form in Rome, Italy and the Ancient World. Princeton: Princeton University Press. SIGNORELLI, Amalia (1999): Antropologa urbana. Barcelona: Anthropos y Divisin de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades. Universidad Autnoma Metropolitana, Iztapalapa, Mxico.
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In conclusion
The meeting was very dynamic and enriching due to the diversity of the proposals made on how to approach the issue that was the focus of this edition of the meeting: The axiological crisis at the heart of all of the crises that afflict our world: how to handle it. It is utterly impossible for the team to reach definitive conclusions in this initial attempt at tackling the axiological dismantling that we are experiencing on a global level. In light of this we will give a brief summary of each presentation in order that the reader can form a general idea of the diverse contributions presented and discussed.
The Need for an Axiological Epistemology

- M. Corb For the first time ever, humanity finds itself without a heteronomically accredited collective axiological project, and without sufficient knowledge of how to create one. This work proposes approaching the solution to this grave problem by attempting to formulate basic principles of a know-how on handling and creating the axiological, i.e. constructing the foundations of an axiological epistemology.
The Formal Parameters of the Axiological as Sensory, Qualitative and Concrete

- Marta GransThe aim of this work is to consider the formal parameters of the valuable/ concrete (and therefore axiological) with a view to determining whether it is possible to formulate a structure that can be used as a tool for tackling the axiological crisis that is afflicting us. To this end we will delve into the realm of linguistics, as our hypothesis is that human beings are animals constituted by speech, and that it is through speech that we configure and transmit the valuable.
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-Jaume Agust, Josep M. BasartAn initial analysis of the Earth Charter is presented from the perspective of axiological epistemology. This perspective is used to highlight some of the areas of deficiency or the incongruence of the proposals made by said Charter. At the same time, possible alternatives are suggested for development in future works, with the aim of rectifying or eliminating these areas.
The Will to Truth as the Will to Believe:

An Approach from a Nietzschian Perspective -Flavio Augusto Senra Ribeiro and Roberto Lcio Diniz JniorThe text presents the relationship between the will to truth and the will to believe. The philosophy of Nietzsche is used to expound on the evaluation of the ephemeral, the metaphysics of repudiating life and the meaning of the will to believe as the will to truth. The text concerns itself with inquiring into the reasons that man remains confined to the structure of belief.
On the Structure of Theological Revolutions

-Jos Mara Vigil-
Dreaming of a Theological Revolution: What Does Epistemology Shed Light on For Us? In the first part, devoted to SEEING, the author describes the manifest breach that has opened up between the epistemology of official Christianity both in its theology and its spirituality and the epistemology of society and modern science. In the second part, JUDGING, he touches on what we now know about the structure of scientific revolutions (Thomas Kuhn), questioning the conditions that would facilitate a possible theological revolution. The third part is devoted to ACTING, or what we could do to bring this revolution about in order to overcome this severe epistemological breach at the soonest possible future date.
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Axiological Crisis and Changing Values in Mexico:

Perspectives for the Construction of an Ethical Social Subject -Juan Diego Ortiz AcostaThis work analyses the contemporary axiological crisis in terms of three social problems in Mexican society (violence, corruption and poverty) which illustrate the pressing need for educational practices that lay the groundwork for the development of an ethical social subject who will reverse the self-destructive trends that are dismantling the social framework.
Postulating the Absolute or Selfless Dimension in the Light of the Structural Analysis of Praxis Carried out by Antonio Gonzlez
-J. Amando RoblesBased on Mari Corbs postulate of the basic scientific construction of man, i.e. the human being as a living creature possessed of the ability of speech and a dual access to reality, Amando Robles presentation summarises the structural analysis of praxis undertaken by philosopher Antonio Gonzlez and illustrates the convergence with Corbs postulate seen in three moments of this analysis.
The Profound Structure of Spiritual Initiation Procedures through Study of the Maha Prajnaparamita Sastra
Treatise on the Great Virtue of Wisdom -Montse CucarullThis work deals with the Maha Prajnaparamitra Sastra, a text from the Buddhist Mahayana tradition, considering axiological epistemology as a mode of spirituality that is compatible with modern societies. This text does not operate using mythical terminology. Its terminology is rather conceptual and logical, in the manner of the Buddhist Mahayana tradition. This illustrates how it is possible to show another dimension of reality within the religious crisis without recourse to myths or beliefs. It is enough to make use of the formal parameters of the semiotics of the axiological, that is, it is only necessary to present two opposing concepts: life centred on desire as opposed to life based on silencing desire. In this scenario, negation of the first term implies acceptance of the second.
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The Copper Coin

-Teresa Guardans-
On the Motivation and Cultivation of Human Quality: Reflections As with any learning process, the development of human quality requires personal involvement. For this, motivation is essential. How then, is one motivated to surpass the self, moving beyond self-interest? Experiences gleaned from some courses taught at Esade Business School provide a starting point for reflection on some particular aspects of learning and the development of human quality.
Complexity Science, Complex Thinking and Transdisciplinary Knowledge: Rethinking the Human Condition in a World of Technoscience
-Sergio Nstor Osorio GarcaThe contributions of complex knowledge and the science that deals with it are considered as a response to the crisis of classic scientific knowledge, which involves a simplification of reality. An attempt is made to understand complexity in terms of its most profound elements, in the recognition that perhaps we have neither the labels nor the logic necessary to do so. Knowledge is understood as a neuro-linguistic, socio-cultural and historic translation and reconstruction of the ultimate dimension of the real in which we ourselves are involved.
The Role of Stories in the Creation and Development of the Axiological Project in Organisations
-Queralt Prat-i-PubillThe use of narratives to institute organisational change is a necessity in the knowledge society. Persuasion as opposed to controlling and ordering is a keystone of management. Research into narratives for the purpose of organisational change is still in its infancy and is limited due to a tendency not to question research hypotheses.
226
An Urban Axiology?
-Ral Garca FerrerThe problems afflicting our cities show that the self-imposed social aims of the science of urban planning have failed due to the fact that up to the present day its experts have tried to produce an axiology based on material (architectural) transformation of space. The failure of this strategy shares a common feature with the current axiological crisis in that it has not adapted to suit a way of life based on knowledge and constant change. An anthropological view of public space may help us better approach the situation we find ourselves in, enabling us to rethink the city, adapting it to suit the new society.
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The Axiological Crisis at The Heart of All of The Crises That Afflict Our World How To Handle It

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The Axiological Crisis at the Heart of All of the Crises That Afflict Our World How to handle it

8th International Meeting October 2012

8th International Meeting October 2012 M. Corb coord.

Formality of the Axiological as Sensitive, Qualitative and Concrete Marta Grans 35

The need for an axiological epistemology

The aim of an axiological epistemology

The need for an axiological epistemology

The need for an axiological epistemology

The need for an axiological epistemology

The structure of language, anthropology and axiological systems

The need for an axiological epistemology

The formal parameters of the axiological

The need for an axiological epistemology

The tasks of axiological epistemology

The need for an axiological epistemology

The need for an axiological epistemology

The need for an axiological epistemology

General outline for the construction of collective projects in knowledge societies

The need for an axiological epistemology

Formality of the Axiological as Sensitive, Qualitative and Concrete

1. The Elementary Structure of the Sensitive-Qualitative-Concrete (ESS)

Essential Presence of Two Terms (Binary Condition)

Formality of the Axiological as Sensitive, Qualitative and Concrete

Relationship between Object-Terms: Conjunction and Disjunction

Axis of Conjunction of Object-Terms

The elementary structure of the concrete is represented with this diagram: S s1

Formality of the Axiological as Sensitive, Qualitative and Concrete

2. Signification Transformation Operations from ESS

Formality of the Axiological as Sensitive, Qualitative and Concrete

3. The Grammar of the Narrative

Formality of the Axiological as Sensitive, Qualitative and Concrete

Formality of the Axiological as Sensitive, Qualitative and Concrete

The actantial structure of liberalism:

Adversary Church old regime

Formality of the Axiological as Sensitive, Qualitative and Concrete

the oppressed proletariat Communist party collective ownership of production resources

Adversary Church capitalism

5. Procedure of Investment of the Axiological Skeleton (paradigms)

4 Hacia una espiritualidad laica. Barcelona: Ed. Herder, 2007, p. 73-134.

Formality of the Axiological as Sensitive, Qualitative and Concrete

6. Levels of the Axiologizing Narrative Structure

Common to all narrative

stable level (system)

- are defined following the ESS

Operacions or fundamental grammar:

dynamic level (process)

Intermediate level Superficial level or manifestation

Investment of value terms

Paradigm: from which semantic investment is realised Actors Grammatical syntax:

Modal elements: want, know, be able Do

Considerations Relating to the Earth Charter in Terms of Axiological Epistemology

Jaume Agust, Josep M. Basart

2. Perspective of the Text How the EC approaches our situation

Considerations Relating to the Earth Charter in Terms of Axiological Epistemology

Some value-related expressions contained in the EC

Some basic questions formulated in terms of Axiological Epistemology

The conceptual ethical focus of the EC

Jaume Agust, Josep M. Basart

The proposal of Axiological Epistemology

Considerations Relating to the Earth Charter in Terms of Axiological Epistemology

Jaume Agust, Josep M. Basart

Considerations Relating to the Earth Charter in Terms of Axiological Epistemology

What are the pillars on which the Charter rests?

Formality of the Axiological as Sensitive, Qualitative and Concrete Marta Grans 35