Nick Hedlund calls the metacrisis a forcing function for humanity’s self-understanding, asking us to rethink what reality is, what a human being is, what nature and the sacred are. Visionary Realism is his answer: a philosophical framework built as a root level response to the metacrisis in service of radical planetary flourishing, forged by putting two serious traditions, Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism and Ken Wilber’s integral theory, into sustained dialogue, letting each transfigure the other into something genuinely new.

In this IAM Research Forum session, Hedlund walks through what each tradition gets right on its own (critical realism’s depth ontology, integral theory’s map of human development) and where each runs out of road, building toward the four core ideas of Visionary Realism: pandimensional realism, a new science of interiority, transcendental evolutionary realism, and alethic resonance, the idea that our worldviews and institutions need to stay in tune with reality itself.

Timestamps

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:01:40 – Origins: The Ecological Crisis and the Birth of the Metacrisis
00:13:40 – A Metatheory of Metatheories: Alpha, Beta, Gamma
00:19:50 – What Critical Realism Brings
00:30:10 – What Integral Theory Brings, and Where It Falls Short
00:38:20 – Forging the Synthesis: Visionary Realism
01:00:20 – Alethic Resonance: Staying in Tune with Reality
01:05:03 – Q&A: Open Questions
01:30:19 – Closing Reflections