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My professional life started with architecture and planning, later evolving into international work and urban design. There I experienced massive contradictions in the accredited line of thoughts, which produce unnecessary conflict that is too often glibly being accepted. Think for instance of the aims in policy-making, the few positive achievements it allows, and the many negative side effects produced unintentionally. This complex of problems motivated me to go back to university for meditating on integral ways of thinking. The specific aim of my endeavor evolved gradually, setting out in seeking to grasp the nature of holism as such, and ending up in seeking a mediation between particularistic and universalistic mind frames, which seem irreconcilable in the currently ruling intellectual habits.
Gradually I discovered that the problems of integral understanding are not imposed by nature, but man-made. The habitual approaches manifest – even in pure brain work – not simple empathy, but a powerful intervention, by setting out on basic assumptions, fundamental beliefs. One talks into the situation before it has a chance of being fully understood. One of the widespread attitudes is in sticking to the mode of description, interpreting the world as a collection of objects that merely need to be described correctly.
Nevertheless, it is possible to forget all prejudices and to cultivate instead the gesture of opening oneself up to the subject matter, participatively ‘listening’ to it for its own sake – also to one’s own psychic activity. One can remain free of object predication, focusing instead on the nature (or: the intrinsic law) of querying instead of imposing. Investigating systematically into this gesture reveals a law of content logic that determines the conceptual conditions for intelligibility and is the very root of the laws of formal logic. This law states the conceptual necessities for fully understanding a query content. This law always applies, while it does not limit us in choosing the query we want to pursue. On this path no anthropocentric or anthropomorphic influence can seep in and tint the approach and method. An interesting strictly integral and universal heuristic can be developed on this basis. This is what I am have been doing in the last 15 years.
