Alternation of worldview between inside-outside and outside-inside

World Introversion through Paracycling (Part #7)

There is clearly a challenge to the shift from "inside-outside" to "outside-inside" -- effectively a process of "world introversion". It could be argued that neither worldview is inherently stable or sustainable over time. This suggests that any degree of sustainability and coherence may derive from the dynamics of the shift between the two worldviews -- namely that it is necessary to keep moving between them, shifting the cognitive "centre of gravity" from one to the other (Living as an Imaginal Bridge between Worlds: global implications of "betwixt and between" and liminality, 2011). This is consistent with recognition that people fluctuate in their behaviour all the time along a continuum between introversion and extroversion. Again as noted by Antonia Macaro and Julian Baggini (What's the problem with introversion? FT.com, 12 May 2012):

Inwardness should not be seen as an alternative to outwardness, but its necessary accompaniment. Philosophy is an excellent example of this. Apart from Bertrand Russell and A.N. Whitehead's treatise on mathematical logic, no major work on the subject has ever been co-authored. Yet every major philosopher engaged in endless dialogue with colleagues and critics. Even Descartes' Meditations was published with a series of objections and replies. Introversion is to engagement as digestion is to ingestion.

The metaphors of walking and use of a bicycle are valuable in this respect. It is indeed possible to walk on one leg through "hopping", just as it is possible to ride a monocycle. Both are somewhat ungainly and a challenge emphasizing the need for a heightened sense of balance and its development. Arguably "hopping" or "monocycling" is however precisely what so many are encouraged to do -- in the extreme case through advocacy of either left-wing politics or right-wing politics as the "only correct" solution -- and as with the unquestionable promotion of "growth" at all costs. Whilst it may take time for a child to learn to walk (or ride a bicycle), there are clearly considerable advantages to such forms of locomotion.

Other metaphors of alternation can be usefully considered (Metaphors of Alternation: an exploration of their significance for development policy-making, 1984). Development itself may well call for a form of alternation, if only as suggested by the traditional value of crop rotation (Policy Alternation for Development, 1984). An argument can be made that "transdisciplinarity" calls for a form of "walking" (Transdisplinarity-3 as the Emergence of Patterned Experience: transcending duality as the conceptual equivalent of learning to walk, 1994).

Of particular interest is the possibility that the many "problems" which are such a dramatic focus of attention in "external" reality can benefit from being recognized as cyclic features of "internal" reality -- external "worries" thereby reframed through world introversion. Rather than experience a sense of impotence at their overwhelming nature in external reality -- problems about which one can effectively do nothing -- incorporating them into internal reality may offer quite different ways of engaging with them. Some implications are discussed separately (Psychology of Sustainability: embodying cyclic environmental processes, 2002)

There is of course the sense in which those problems, otherwise assumed to be characteristic of "external" reality, effectively invade "internal" reality in the absence of any more disciplined way of framing this process. The consequence typically manifests as stress of some form -- or even depression. The external/internal boundary becomes dysfunctionally porous with external problems effectively framed as unwelcome "immigrants" with all the challenges that imagery then implies (Implication of Personal Despair in Planetary Despair: avoiding entrapment in hopeful anticipation, 2010; Cognitive Implications of Lifestyle Diseases of Rich and Poor: transforming personal entanglement with the natural environment, 2010).

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