Integral Human Development

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to expound on the concept of integrality or wholeness. It provides a discussion of how integrality could be possessed and preserved and why it is important in an ever changing and demanding business and social environment. It examines the phenomena of fragmentation, compartmentalization, and disintegration – the flipsides of integrality – and their consequences in business.
This paper also explains the need to re-visit the purpose of business and the distinction between its means and ends. Through an extensive review of literature, it presents the increasing need to promote the value of the human person and to put him at the center of organizational growth.
It also provides insights on how the call for greater humanism in business could be addressed. By looking at the case of the Institute for Integrality, Inc., it hopes to encourage more initiatives along the line of integral human development.

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to expound on the concept of integrality or wholeness.  It will provide a discussion of how integrality could be possessed and preserved and why it is important in an ever changing and demanding business and social environment.  It will examine the phenomena of fragmentation, compartmentalization, and disintegration – the flipsides of integrality – and their consequences in business. 

This paper will also explain the need to re-visit the purpose of business and the distinction between its means and ends.  Through an extensive review of literature, it will present the increasing need to promote the value of the human person and to put him at the center of organizational growth. 

It will also provide insights on how the call for greater humanism in business could be addressed.  By looking at the case of the Institute for Integrality, Inc., it hopes to encourage more initiatives along the line of integral human development.  By examining data that feature the responses and feedbacks of its clients, it aims to make an exposition of the prevailing degree of openness and receptivity of businesses and individuals to understand and practice integral human development.

Competitive environments have led many businesses to make purely bottom-line decisions despite management theories presenting evidence that humans are at the core of business success. The strong profit motivation has led to corporate behavior that demands more from workers than simply their creative output. This results in situations whereby workers may distance themselves from their humanity to survive. Yet, humankind was created to give life to life. It is imperative therefore, that humans retain their whole selves within and outside their workplace. Organizational leaders help this process by providing value-based leadership that works toward meeting the common good.

Keywords: Common good, human development, whole person, integrality, humanistic management,compartmentalization

This study is an insider action research on the Institute for Integrality, Inc., a recently formed organization dedicated to promoting integral human development. As indicated in its corporate name, integrality or completeness is at the core of the mission of the Institute.

While the Institute is still at its foundational stage, the action researcher, who is also the founder of the institution, was faced with the challenge of aligning its various stakeholders – board, management, faculty, partners, and clients – through a collaborative approach to building an authentic organizational identity. This core action research started with defining and developing the concept of integrality, followed by a fine-tuning of identity and the design of an identity-based organizational culture.

Meanwhile, the thesis action research focused on the process of organizational identity building through which an integrative theory, alongside other relevant contributions to knowledge, was derived and developed. Through meta-learning, transformative learning was found to be the best route to building organizational identity and culture, given its two powerful mechanisms of critical self-reflection and discourse.

This article, in order to better understand Pope Francis’s newly coined
term, “integral ecology,” and its implications for a virtue-based moral theology, has relied upon its insertion in the social encyclical tradition, and
specifically within the context of integral human development, which
originates in Populorum Progressio, so as to better understand its implications.
Seeing integral ecology in the light of the natural law tradition
that highlights its theological origin in Genesis, such as is done in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, allows us to realize that Creation is a gift from God and that man, made in his image and likeness, is called to be provident in his use of Creation for others, especially the poor, the weak, and future generations.
The specific virtue in which Pope Francis sees the natural moral law flourish is sobriety, a social expression of temperance, which is informed by
the virtue of solidarity. In line with Caritas in Veritate, this virtue is best
learned within civil society, from which it is meant to permeate and
transform the society as a whole. It is in this way that integral human
development, as social, economic, cultural, and spiritual, embraces the
Creation given to man and finds its evolution in integral ecology, and
in the full flourishing of the virtue of sobriety.

Defining what a business is can be a daunting task. Its telos today as before is not very well understood, much less is there a consensus. Philosophers have added to the conversation proposing the main tenets of a business such as focusing mostly on being entirely answerable to its investors1, focusing only on its profitability and success, minimalizing business activity to a short list of do not’s, simply maximizing long-term value, or focusing on the integral good of all of those involved. A lot of the conversation is even based simply on the material and instrumental or on the means and methods rather than on the ends and purposes. Each, subsequently, is necessary for the life of the business, but in order to understand why each of these parts are encompassed in the telos of a business, such a task requires a deeper understanding of human action and interaction. It also requires a deeper understanding why man works in the first place, especially as part of a community called a business.

Laudato Si’, Pope Francis’ 2015 social encyclical, introduces a new term into Catholic social teaching, integral ecology, and with it, gives an impetus to the further development of theologically-based virtue ethics, or virtuous morality, as found in the virtue of sobriety. In order to understand the term integral ecology and its implications in sobriety properly, it is necessary to situate it within the context of earlier social encyclicals. Thus, I will first review the social encyclicals to show how integral human development forms the background for integral ecology. Then I will further investigate the meaning of integral ecology by following the pontiff’s Scriptural exposition of the natural moral law. Finally, I will conclude by demonstrating how the praxis of integral ecology, rooted within the natural moral law, comes to maturity in the virtue of sobriety. Through careful examination of the text, Pope Francis’ call for integral ecology can then be understand as the summons to a full flourishing of the natural moral law in the virtue of sobriety, needed by society especially to realize this broadened idea of integral human development within the context of all of creation.

ABSTRAKT [PL]
Wyzwania współczesnej antropologii chrześcijańskiej wobec idei transhumanistycznych
Człowiek na różnych etapach swojego życia konfrontuje się ze słabościami fizycznymi lub duchowymi, które mają wpływ na codzienne funkcjonowanie jednostki: od samookaleczeń, depresji, stanów lękowych, przez zwykłe codzienne niepowodzenia lub niegroźne choroby aż po nowotwory i nieuleczalne choroby. Jednocześnie w dojrzałym ludzkim funkcjonowaniu charakterystyczne jest unikanie takich sytuacji, poszukiwanie środków zaradczych, leczenie czy wręcz zapobieganie. Na tym gruncie, przy udziale rozwijającej się technologii, medycyny i dziedzin pokrewnych, kształtują się idee związane z transhumanizmem rozumianym nie tylko jako biotechnologiczne udoskonalanie człowieka jako jednostki i samego człowieczeństwa w ogóle, ale również jako działania ukierunkowane na redefinicję człowieczeństwa – natury ludzkiej, duszy, umysłu. Za przykład mogą posłużyć badawcze odniesienia do idei postczłowieka, funkcjonujące już organizacje podobne do „Humanity+” oraz pojawiające się sformułowania definiujące podmiot stanowienia prawa jako osobowość, świadomość i zdolność do moralnie istotnych zainteresowań w zamian za słowa jednostka, człowiek, zbiorowość.
Współczesne próby sformułowania nowych definicji człowieczeństwa, natury ludzkiej lub jej negacji, zmuszają do poszukiwań filozoficznych i teologicznych w odniesieniu do pojawiających się opisów antropologicznego pojmowania ludzkiego bytu. Dotykając sedna ludzkiej egzystencji koniecznym jest poszukać chrześcijańskiej (re)interpetacji powyższych idei.

Słowa kluczowe: transhumanizm, antropologia chrześcijańska, chrześcijański transhumanizm, integralny rozwój człowieka, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Nowy Adam, Omegalny Chrystus.

ABSTRACT [ENG]
Challenges of contemporary Christian anthropology in confrontation with transhumanist ideas
The mankind at various stages of his life confronts physical or spiritual weaknesses that affect the daily functioning of the individual: from self-harm, depression, anxiety, through ordinary daily failures or minor illnesses to cancer and terminal diseases. At the same time, in mature human functioning, it is characteristic to avoid that situations, seek remedies, heal or even prevent them. On this ground, with the participation of evolving technology, medicine and related disciplines, transhumanist ideas are understood not only as biotechnological improvement of man as an individual and humanity itself, but also as actions aimed at redefining humanity – human nature, soul, mind. Examples include research references to the idea of post-human, already existing organizations similar to “Humanity+” and evolving of defining and specifying the wording proposed by the transhumanists that should be used to write about personality, awareness and the ability to morally relevant interests in exchange for the traditional words such as individual, human, collective.
Contemporary culture formulates new definitions of humanity, human nature or its negation, and force to seek philosophical and theological research in confrontation with emerging descriptions of the anthropological understanding of human being. Touching the heart of human existence, it is necessary to seek Christian (re)interpretation of the above ideas.

Słowa kluczowe: transhumanism, Christian anthropology, Christian transhumanism, integral human development, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Ultimate Adam, The Omega Point.

The social and spiritual message of Pope Francis calls for all actors, individual and corporate, to engage into a form of radicalness in both thought and deeds. Francis has progressively elaborated a «mission statement» that articulates objectives to be prioritized, not only by Christian organizations but also by social, economic and political structures. These objectives should not be separated from methodological insights that aim at enabling their implementation. This article develops a hermeneutical reading of Francis’ encyclicals, apostolic exhortations and other documents so as to facilitate their appropriation and reinterpretation by an array of actors and traditions. Such reading insists on the fact that the objectives and methodology being proposed by Pope Francis are, at the same time, radical, systemic and open-ended, and, by way of consequence, organized into a « vision » that is to be shared, enriched and furthered.

The importance of the spiritual dimension in the lives of people living in conditions of poverty and social exclusion and the often-critical role of faith-based organisations has gained increasing relevance in development research and practice. A growing line of research focuses
on how to integrate the faith dimension into the evaluation of social programmes and on quantifying the effects of faith. The objective of this article is to propose a framework for integrating a spiritual dimension into the design and practice of impact evaluation by using
the concept of integral human development (IHD). Integral human development emerged within the Catholic social tradition, but is not specific to it. It is a perspective on human development that integrates the material and spiritual, recognises the interdependence between humans and their environment or territory and demands change at both the
individual and collective levels. This framework is then applied to the design of an impact
evaluation of a faith-based programme that accompanies people with drug and alcohol
addictions in Argentina. The article highlights the following characteristics of an integral
impact evaluation: the interaction between multiple well-being dimensions; the use
of knowledge and methods of analysis from multiple disciplines; the importance of
understanding the diverse pathways to improvements in well-being; the assessment of the
spiritual dimension through changes in one’s relationships with oneself, others and the
environment; and the importance of assessing personal change within the context of social
and community transformation.