Scholarship of Integration

In its inadvertent creation of multiple ecological crises including climate change, humanity as a whole appears caught in a lemmings loop, racing toward a probable future identified as The Long Emergency. One might think that even the possibility of this future scenario should be sufficient to effect a revolution in education. Yet overall there appears to be insufficient depth of respons-ability in this regard, of taking heed of ecological educational discourse. The paper advocates a deeply ecological education through identifying the significance of ecoliteracy as involving a critical contrast between two worldviews (modernism and a prospective ecological worldview). The paper advances futures of ecological thinking through a deep interpretation of ecology and related terms including ecosystem and ecologics. The complex integrative character of conceptual ecology is foregrounded and extended through associating it with transdisciplinarity, integralism and critical realism under the overarching orientation of Boyer’s scholarship of integration.

Today’s society looks to universities for solutions to broad-based issues that require cross-disciplinary expertise. Yet, the organizational structure of our institutions remains locked in academic and administrative silos that have little genuine ability to communicate or to recognize the interdependence of knowledge. Why does the capacity to communicate between disciplines and units remain limited? How do formalizations of our experience create barriers? What kind of reflection would it take to subject our mental models of knowledge and learning to critical inquiry? This discussion highlights one of the most entrenched ‘group identity myths’ that underlie the structure of modern academic institutions, the ‘triviality of integration’ thesis.

This study empowers a dialogue between the East Asian Taijitu—related to yin-yang theory—and Western dialectics; in so doing, it also enriches the notion of dialogue itself. Applications or resonances, such as found in quantum physics, are additionally identified; a particular focus is given to exploring brain hemispheric function (notably through the scholarship of McGilchrist)—an inquiry which has far-reaching consequences for social theory and for global academia in general. The Taijitu can be interpreted in a reductive fashion (inferring cyclical stasis) or in a rich way (involving complex evolution); the study adopts the latter interpretation, indicating its aptness. The topic sits in service to the betterment of humanity and planet through identifying the critical underuse of such semiotic patterns as the Taijitu in academia and—at least in a formal way—in Western society at large. A general import for social theory comprises the empowerment of adequately complex articulations of understanding in contrast to more reductive theorisations involving flat ontologies in conjunction with strong bias toward one half of apparent dichotomies such as that of “agency versus structure.” The study indicates the usefulness of both Bhaksar’s philosophy of dialectical critical realism in “underlabouring” such apt social science, and that of the notion of “the scholarship of complex integration” (after Boyer). An additional contextualising triangulation via postformal reasoning further enhances the significance of the work. Finally, the study offers a key conceptual formulation in helping understand the underlying logic of the Taijitu and postformal dialectics as comprising that of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem(s).