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Contacts Relevant Writings Back to Streams Brief Introduction Of the classical philosophers, Inclusionality is perhaps most closely related to the ideas of Heraclitus, the original ‘Philosopher of Flow’, who asked people to ‘listen not to me but to the Logos’, by which he meant the fluid dynamic, timeless language of Nature as ‘All’. Heraclitus appreciated that his words could only evoke, they could not define, fix or reproduce the Logos in All its ever-transforming vitality. He famously claimed that no one can step in the same river twice and that knowledge of many things is not wisdom - wisdom is one thing, the understanding of how All is steered through All. He also recognised the inability of many to hear or remember hearing the Logos because they could seemingly satiate their desire for certainty and control by defining Nature objectively, in precise, fixed and concrete terms. Indeed the human struggle to impose definition upon an intrinsically dynamic world could be described as the ‘obsessive compulsive disorder’ of orthodox western philosophy to this day, as epitomized by Plato’s lament, ‘Oh, to find a solid without flux!’ Whereas Plato at least recognized, albeit mournfully rather than joyfully, that a ‘world without flux’ is unnatural, the obsessive compulsive determination of his followers has been to make Nature solid by means of the mental abstraction of ‘material’ from ‘immaterial’ and vice versa. Systems of definitive, ‘to be or not to be’, logic, language, and mathematics have been contrived to reinforce this abstraction, serving to box Nature and human nature up into artificial independent categories, based ultimately on the assumption that an absolute demarcation can be drawn between an object’s inside and outside. Although this assumption is unsupported either by our everyday human experience or by contemporary scientific evidence implicit in quantum mechanics, relativity and non-linear theory, our self-perpetuating belief in it continues to place our constructed ‘human reality’ at odds with the reality of our natural neighbourhood. It is a source of great psychological, social and environmental distress and damage, embedded deep in the foundations of scientific, mathematical, theological and socio-political theories that we let govern us because they appear to serve our material interests. In effect, we come to sacrifice truth for the sake of convenience - the conscious or unwitting practice of a great many who call themselves ‘pragmatists’ - and suffer the implications. Inclusionality can release us from the constraints and paradoxes of objective rationality through seeking to represent and reason about Nature and ourselves honestly, in correspondence with evidence and experience, not on the basis of a seemingly convenient or economical initial premise. Truth, not pragmatism, is the paramount value. And in a natural world of Flow, Truth cannot be Objective - An Absolute, Fixed, ‘Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth’. Truth, in so far as all our senses and sense-making facilities, both explicit (sight, sound, taste, smell, touch; locally apprehending) and implicit (proprioceptive; non-locally imaginative), can inform us given our inescapable bodily situation within Nature, is dynamic relational. Hence the philosophy and logic arising from inclusionality is based on mutually inclusive fluidizing space and dynamic informational boundaries, not the concrete fixture of material information abstracted out of spatial context. An Inclusional Principle and Logic thereby emerges. This can be expressed ecologically as follows. Content is contextual: the inhabitant is a dynamic inclusion of the habitat, not an exception from it, as objective rationality would have us make believe. Content simultaneously forms from and gives expression to the receptive spatial pool that it fluid dynamically includes and is included in; the inhabitant transforms the habitat and vice versa as inseparable but distinguishable (discernible) aspects of one including the other, nested over all scales from microcosm to cosmos. Inclusional flow entails the local-non-local logic of ‘somewhere as a dynamic inclusion of everywhere’, not solely the local logic of discrete, opposing objects. This resolves the 2,500 year-old battle between propositional and dialectical thinkers, which is characterised by each rejecting the rationality of the other’s position. It includes and values insights from both propositional (one or other) and dialectical (one and other in mutual contradiction) traditions, without entirely rejecting their rationality but subsuming and transforming this into a less limited, dynamic relational (one including other) form. Hence inclusionality adds in, for the observer, the empathic, situational feeling of what it means to be included in what is observed, where, for example, gravitational and thermal fields can be experienced but not seen. It makes the difference between the insightful, compassionate understanding that comes from discerningly seeing with feeling as an included observer, and the diminished, dispassionate understanding that comes from divisively seeing without feeling, as a detached observer making objective, context-free comparisons and judgements. Contacts
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