Reality Within, Between, and Beyond
Escaping the Enclosure of Reality to Discovery the World Beyond.
Going Beyond
My interest in the Order of Reality has more to do with the relationships between entities than the order within them. Even more, I am curious about the reality that is beyond our reach and control. In this sense, I see reality in the same way we look at outer space. Time and space take on a different existence out there. When we get out of our heads and beyond the things that we do, we can discover what has been hidden by how the modern world has developed.
The conventional approach to order creates rules that confine and bind people to a structure. Institutionally, it is about power and control. Particularly, in the hyper-ordered world that we live in, the freedom to think (Abstract) and to act (Concrete) requires us to disrupt the rules that bind us. We become change agents by default when we chose to go beyond the boundaries of the prescribed order of society. Of course, this is not as simple as it might appear. The reason is that disruption can have many purposes, some of which are destructive and controlling.
Enclosure
My friends Richard Martin and Richard Merrick recently wrote about the practice of Enclosure in England. Their use of the term has particular resonance for the history of their world. The term Enclosure also has an application for people who seek to go beyond what is expected of them, whether in service to others or as artisans.
“Enclosure excludes and it contains. This is a device that foments and perpetuates inequality, taking from the many to profit the few, while fraying the ties and restricting the spaces that bring communities together. It is inextricably linked to the rise of capitalism, building on foundations laid by the manor system of feudal society. …
Encroachment on the commons, imperial conquest, colonisation, enslavement and privatisation of public assets were all manifestations of the impulse to enclose, prompted by a desire for the accumulation and economic growth that drive capitalism. …
With enclosure came a form of control – of people, of resources, of access, of knowledge – that remains the dominant system of governance and management today. A population had their freedom of movement curtailed.”
“Walls look like order; but more often than not a wall stands at the precise fulcrum of an imbalance in society. Most walls are only necessary as a means of defending the resources of those that have them from those that lack them. In this way, though they present themselves as mechanisms of security, they are in fact tools of oppression.
The Book of Trespass. Nick Hayes. p98.
Why is it that when we take vibrant, interesting, purposeful people and put them into organisations, the energy disappears to be replaced by a form of safe compliance? What is it about the enclosures of an organisation structure?
Thinking - good, innovative, exciting, critical thinking - of the sort that spurs generative change - relies on friction. It’s not until someone points out that the emperor is rather scantily clad that people notice familiar surroundings in a new light.
…
The trouble with being enclosed and “looked after” is that we end up with the same relationship as the farmer and her turkeys.
Artisans, though, have an outlaw inside of them prepared to cross boundaries set by others in their own interest. That outlaw, that trickster in us who will question, explore and take risks, is increasingly valuable and necessary. We need to nurture it if we are to do our best work.”
This enclosure is not just economic and geographic. It is also moral and social. The enclosure by wealthy, powerful elites is really a boundary to protect them from the reality that is beyond their wealth and power. The effect of these boundaries goes beyond what they may believe that they are doing. I have thought for a long time that in spite their grandiose plans to save the world, they are actually rather small-minded people. When totalitarian control, eugenics, and depopulation are your best ideas, it does not offer much hope for a better world.
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn described the effect of this type of enclosure in his Harvard University speech in 1978. In his speech, he states.
“A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. There remain many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life. Political and intellectual functionaries exhibit this depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in their self-serving rationales as to how realistic, reasonable, and intellectually and even morally justified it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice.”
This is a description of the breakdown of The Order of Reality. It doesn’t just break down and remain at that state. It either will collapse altogether or a reversal will begin to take place.
Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago,
“Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself.”
It explains the passivity and lack of courage to act morally. He also writes,
“You only have power over people as long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything, he’s no longer in your power–he’s free again.”
The creators of the modern world believed that they were in control of reality. And so they are in a limited sense. But absolute control is not possible because reality is an ordered relationship between all things. When we accept this truth, and respect it in how we function in our lives, we can begin to see new sources of opportunity.
Order Within
Luiz von Paumgartten, The Abstractionist, responded on LinkedIn to one of my posts on the order of reality. He pointed toward his essay called Principles of Natural Reality. It is a very interesting essay. This is a prime example of the order of conceptual reality. It makes me to want to learn more and to develop the mathematical skills that I should have learned fifty years ago. Natural Reality exists principally within the Abstract or Intellectual Order of Reality. As a result, it becomes a teaching device for learning how reality functions through cause and effect.
Where Luiz von Paumgartten is operating within the Abstract order as I describe, Alan Rayner, as a recent guest on The Eddy Network Podcast, offered his insight of Natural Inclusion. Alan’s description below shows me that he is operating between different orders.
“Natural inclusion is a fundamental principle of Nature, which I first explicitly recognised and began to try to bring to public attention in the year 2000. This principle enables us to understand all natural bodies, including our own human bodies, as dynamic inclusions and expressions of Nature, not exceptions from Nature. It can be understood in simple physical terms as the receptive-responsive evolutionary relationship between intangible space and energy in all material form. To understand this principle requires a shift from abstract perceptions of space, time and material boundaries as sources of definitive separation between independent objects, to recognising them instead as mutually inclusive sources of natural continuity and dynamic distinction. In effect this represents a move from a static to a dynamic framing of reality: from abstract rigidity to natural fluidity.”
When each order has a demonstrated integrity, the subsequent interaction between the orders expands what is possible to understand. In effect, we break the bonds of enclosure.
However, if you live immersed in The Spectacle of the Real, your sense of the cause and effect of reality is twisted. The experience of cause and effect in a hyperreal world of simulated surreality surrounds us like a cloud or shadow. Jean Baudrillard describes it this way.
“To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn't have. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But it is more complicated than that because simulating is not pretending. "Whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill. Whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms" (Littre'). Therefore, pretending or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the "true" and the "false," the "real" and the "imaginary." Is the simulator sick or not, given that he produces "true" symptoms?” (emphasis mine)
Abstractions are a component of reality, but not the whole of reality. The built culture of human creativity and industriousness is a component of reality, but not the whole of reality. We need clear thought processes, while at the same time accepting that every Abstraction, like every Cultural expression, is part of a greater whole.
What is that greater whole is the question that we should be asking. We ask within the order of the Intellect as we seek to go beyond what we know to imagine new horizons of reality.
The Enclosure of Systems
We experience reality, in part, through systems of ideas, organizations, and networks of relationships. These systems operate between the Abstract and the Concrete.
Ideas are conceived. Plans drawn. Action taken. All of this functions within the comprehensive whole of reality.
The conceptual design of a plan is an image of the interplay of the systems. Systems design is one of the great innovations of the past century.
Like any idea or tool, a system understanding can be manipulated to create an enclosure as the two Richards describe above. This is now taking place in our world.
I wrote about this in my short book, All Crises are Local, which appeared during the first six months of the COVID pandemic. It was apparent to me then that …
“The pandemic response by nations and global health organizations is a case study in a global systems breakdown. …
COVID-19 is not simply a global health crisis. Public health is one function among many. As a systems crisis, the coronavirus pandemic impacts every person, organization, and community on a global scale. The crisis is impacting the economies of the world, the political cultures of nations, and the social progress that has advanced world-wide over the past century.
The question that I am asking is how to address one aspect of the system–public health–while maintaining a healthy alignment with all aspects of the system.”
This approach raises questions concerning the relationship of Abstract systems of design and their Concrete application in the real world. How could these tools of perception and application not reveal the corruption and damage being afflicted upon the world? Did these leaders not see what was plainly obvious to anyone with a basic background in systems theory that there was something seriously wrong in the approach to solving the crisis? The effect casts a shadow on the use of systems tools. For it is now clear, they can be used by bad actors for destructive ends. This is how enclosure transitions into the realm of the moral.
Reality Beyond Perception
As I read Luis’ work, it reminded me of reading about Kurt Godel and his Incompleteness theorems.
“Gödel's completeness theorem is a fundamental theorem in mathematical logic that establishes a correspondence between semantic truth and syntactic provability in first-order logic.”
In other words, there are things that we know to be true that we cannot prove to be true. If reality is a sentence, then not only do the words used matter (Semantics = Abstraction) but the sentence construction matters (Syntax = Concrete). Whether in the realm of the Abstract or the Concrete, there is no final certainty within or between those two orders that something can be known and fully realized.
Let’s look at three aspects of the idea of an incomplete understanding of reality.
1. Human limitations of both thought and action.
My experience in working with individuals and organizations is that we are all limited in our perception, in our capacity for analytical thought, in our intuitive insight into the functioning of the world, and in our capacity to solve the great problems of our time. Our limitations are not just of thought and action, but in the ability to perceive reality as more than a concept and a result. It is the context of relationship that exists as the context of our thought and action.
2. Knowledge of reality beyond proof.
As Michael Polanyi said, “We know more than we can tell.” We know things to be true that we cannot offer tangible evidence or rational proof as to why it is true. Yet, we trust our intuitive sense of right and wrong, or of the real or unreal, to help us live in a real world beyond our complete knowing. We know love and beauty even when there is no objective standard to determine its truthfulness. We are living in a utilitarian enclosure where all reality is reduced to that of a machine and a transaction. Yet, there is always something missing from the experience.
Walker Percy described this existential crisis by asking.
“Why does man feel so sad in the twentieth century?
Why does man feel so bad in the very age when, more than in any other age, he has succeeded in satisfying his needs and making the world over for his own use?
Could it be that the acknowledgment of our human limitations of perception, analysis, and action is the key to breaking out of the enclosure of society?
3. Faith in the comprehensible nature of reality
Look again at Luiz von Paumgartten's Principles of Natural Reality affirmation of the nature of cause and effect. To understand this principle is to gain a view of the comprehensive whole of reality. Grasping how cause and effect represent a way to perceive reality, we can then trust our perceptions, and ultimately have ultimately faith that reality is always available to us.
I find attempts to describe reality in this way very compelling. In Godel’s case, his conclusion really had more to do with the limitations of human thought to capture the comprehensive whole of reality. I believe we should pursue conceptually an understanding of reality that has an application through the talent and initiative of each of us. We should reach beyond our knowledge of the real world to gain perspective on the simulated world that dominates our culture today.
Imagining Reality
The beauty of the Three Orders of Reality is that it gives us gives a pathway to expand our perception of reality. We not only can identify reality. We can work with reality to expand our expression of the classic virtues of truth, beauty, and unity.
Imagination is a function of the Spiritual in coordination with the Abstract and Concrete.
We grasp an insight that requires a clear or compelling thought. We identify how it can be applied in a situation within an organization or as a work of art.
When we imagine reality in this way, we begin to see that a formalized system characterized by consistency, coherence, and completeness is not to our advantage. As a form of limitation, it becomes an enclosure restricting our thoughts and actions.
If we imagine Reality in the context of the three orders, we will discover that which we could not have when all we could conceive was the Abstract and the Concrete. When we add the Spiritual as the realm of reality, existence, and relationships, we can move beyond into the world that only hinted itself to us as that knowledge that we know but cannot tell.
You've brought these notions together beautifully. I read this just a few I did my “third space” post that was triggered by explanation with a client. They all seem to be pointing in a similar direction of enquiry.....