Completing Piaget's Project

Subtitled 'Transpersonal Philosophy and the Future of Psychology', this is a dense, demanding and rewarding read, reframing as it does the seminal work of Jean Piaget beyond its generally perceived atheism. Piaget's early genius is evidenced by the fact that he had published over 30 academic papers by the age of 18 and while still at school was offered the post of director of the prestigious Geneva Museum of Natural History. It was around that time that he encountered the work of Bergson, which was profoundly influential, especially on his early novel La Recherche, containing the seeds of his important concepts of immanence and equilibrium or 'structure-of-the-whole' involving the transcendence of ego and the unifying action of love. This is the Piaget unknown to psychology who was also making important contributions to biology, many of which have since been validated by more recent systemic models. The author reviews a number of relevant sciences and the importance of nonlinearity in his thought. Progress in both science and religion can lead to convergence not only in these fields separately, but also between them.

This makes Piaget a pioneer of a sophisticated post-modern scientific understanding and he describes the interesting process of transpersonal heterochrony - the variable emergence point of transpersonal experience in the life cycle. One interesting theme is that we may be in danger of losing this capacity if we immerse ourselves too deeply in a materialistic understanding of life that denies the spirit. The author argues that systems theory reintroduces a direction to evolution in terms of self-organisation and 'emergent teleonomy' towards a more spiritualised society. We already have within us spiritual 'chreods' awaiting activation and drawing on collective human experience. We can each contribute to maintaining the openness of these channels. Science, philosophy, psychology and religion are all bound together in human experience and our quest for a deeper understanding of reality and demanding post-formal thinking. In the final analysis, the spiritual must incorporate the findings of modernity, which the author find plausible largely because of adaptive complex systems theory restoring a sense of directionality to our view of life.