Single Vision

“Now I a fourfold vision see, 
And a fourfold vision is given to me:
‘Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And threefold in soft Beulah’s night 
And twofold always, may God us keep
From single vision and Newton’s sleep!” 

William Blake, Letter to Thomas Butts

The curse of “Single Vision” and the consequences of Single Vision is what we are suffering through today, so it was in many respects entirely self-inflicted. In The Ever-Present Origin, Single Vision is described as the “one-sided attitude”. This one-sidedness ignores and neglects our full reality, and is expressed today in reductionism, fundamentalism, the hyper-partisanship of contemporary politics and even narcissism and totalitarianism. Moreover, there is a pathological tendency in some quarters to reduce, misappropriate, and coopt integral consciousness to and by this Single Vision, which would, in effect, result in totalitarianism and the make integralism abortive. This is also the danger of any “synthesis”. Against this tendency we must be on our guard.

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Projection and Enantiodromia

Many of our current troubles would be resolved if we simply understood two dynamics — two processes. One is projection, and the other is enantdiodromia.

If the very many didn’t know about the psychological mechanism of projection before, they certainly do now — or at least they should. Although we’ve briefly described projection before in relation to the post on “Shadow Psychology”, we should expend a little more time on this, since resolving it is so critical to getting through the present crisis.

Narcissistic Mind

“For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern” — William Blake

The first occurrence of the term “paradigm” was the familiar Alexandrian list of the grammatical persons. Para-digma means, generally, to sketch beside — the two column list of the grammatical persons in singular and plural form. Rosenstock-Huessy felt very strongly that this grammatical paradigm was a great error that set the wrong tone and laid the wrong foundations or our self-understanding and for our thinking about reality.

This first paradigm makes the “I” form the “first person” of the grammatical relations, an error that persists and recurs in Descartes’ “cogito” (the “I think”) as the sole truly existent thing, where the assurance of my being is contingent upon my thinking and established the pursuit of the “rational self-interest” as the foundational political principle for the re-organisation of society that we call “modern”. It also clearly encouraged the problem of narcissism and self-importance with its suggestion of the supremacy and primacy of the ego-consciousness.