Nick Hedlund describes Visionary Realism as an attempt to sketch a worldview adequate to the complexity and sacredness of reality, one built on reverence, humility, and listening. In this episode of the Integration podcast, he talks with Brendan Graham Dempsey about what stands in the way: the split Kant first named between what’s knowable and what’s real, a divide Hedlund traces forward into postmodernism and treats as the hidden engine of the metacrisis.

Visionary Realism grew out of Ken Wilber’s integral theory and Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism, though Hedlund is clear that neither survives the encounter unchanged. His answer to the Kantian split runs through Bhaskar’s distinction between the world as it is and the world as we know it, arriving at a reframing he calls “constellational containment,” where mind sits nested within the world rather than sealed off from it. Along the way he makes a case for reading Piaget as a realist, and turns to what “visionary” is doing in the name, drawing on the Promethean myth and Bhaskar’s reminder that the world doesn’t depend on us the way we depend on it.

Hedlund is also candid about what’s still missing, including a fuller theory of value and Bhaskar’s later, more spiritual work, an area he’s only begun opening up. The episode closes on philosophy as a way of life, and on Hedlund’s own question of what his essence actually is. Visionary Realism, he says, is “a philosophy I can live by.”

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Timestamps

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:02:22 – What Visionary Realism Is
00:07:33 – Promethean Fire and the Limits of What We Make
00:11:41 – The Split Kant Left Behind
00:18:32 – Where Does a Dog Exist?
00:30:44 – Mind Nested Within World
00:46:09 – Participatory, Process, Pluralistic
00:52:19 – What’s Still Missing
01:00:19 – Spirituality Without Losing the Secular Mind
01:09:04 – A Philosophy to Live By