Sean Esbjörn-Hargens joins Nick Hedlund and Brendan Graham Dempsey for a deep dive on Complex Integral Realism, and a bigger question surfaces: what does integrative metatheory actually do in the world? The maps are enormous, and the applications so far are small and slow. Does a bigger picture hand you more leverage, or mostly a clearer view of how little leverage you have? One answer is that the payoff runs through the person doing the looking, where becoming more integratively literate changes how you read a situation long before you try to intervene in it. Another is that a big picture can be normative rather than only descriptive, as in critical realism’s emancipatory strand, which names real social pathologies and asks what a better arrangement would concretely look like along with how we would get there from here.

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Timestamps

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:02:02 – What Is Integrative Metatheory Actually For?
00:04:35 – Origins of Complex Integral Realism
00:07:11 – “I Haven’t Seen a Good Application Yet”
00:11:06 – Managing Expectations About What Big Pictures Do
00:15:37 – Integral Life Practice and Emancipatory Social Science
00:20:32 – Concrete Utopianism: Protopia and the Theory of Transition
00:22:35 – Becoming Integratively Literate
00:27:32 – The Who, the How, and the What: Why Method Gets Ignored
00:32:09 – Can Science and Philosophy Be Kept Apart?
00:38:43 – Toward a Complex Integral Realism 2.0
00:43:21 – Where Metamodernism Stands Now
00:53:02 – What CIR Leaves Out: The Anomalous
00:59:52 – What Counts as a Metatheory?
01:04:31 – From Perspective Taking to Perspective Seeking