This piece addresses Lines of development, the last in this series on integral theory.
In brief, lines refers to the variety of capacities both within individuals and across groups. In some ways, it bears some similarity to the proposal of multiple intelligences, though such efforts have been criticized from the scientific community for lacking predictive validity or insufficient operational definition. Despite this, there has been widespread adoption and persistence of such theories in education circles.
Jordan Peterson’s lecture series on personality, IQ and creativity covers this in some depth, including a clip taken from this lecture.
Having said that, how can we reconcile this with the obvious facticity that there are clearly individuals and groups with widely varying capacities and abilities?
Here are some examples of lines of development, from one source, though I do not imagine this is exhaustive by any stretch
Cognitive – the ability to take on different perspectives. Some overlap with quadrants.
Emotional intrapersonal – awareness of internal emotional states.
Emotional interpersonal – awareness of another’s emotional states and the interaction with own.
Somatic – bodily and kinesthetic awareness and ability.
Moral – ability to discern the right thing to do in a situation.
Spiritual – the capacity to explore what matters to the individual.
Willpower – the ability to set and execute goal-directed behaviors while overcoming obstacles and challenges.
In some ways, while reminiscent of skill or procedural knowledge as suggested by a concept like techne from Greek philosophy, or “how to”, it seems an order of abstraction removed encompassing something more general than a specific skill. For example, perhaps someone with a demonstrably sophisticated somatic line of development could be expressed in such varied forms as an athlete, a dancer, or a musician.
As a musician myself, I’d like to explore a hopefully fruitful digression in the context of this discussion of capacities.
What if lines of development could be construed as extensions of more basic sensory capacities? For example, it would be interesting to note the correlation among the following – low or no-vision, absolute pitch, and musical ability. One article “found that 12 of 21 blind musicians could recognise a musical note without any reference,” while another reports “blind children are 4000 times more likely than sighted children to exhibit the ability than sighted ones.”
Absolute pitch has been described as “color hearing” which makes sense in the way that what is color but the ability to discriminate among different categories of light – seeing red as red, blue as blue, and so forth. When put like that, it’s actually amazing that musicians without absolute pitch function at all without it – by analogy, it would be akin to telling a visual artist to create without color. Though there are many art forms that do not rely on color, it seems a significant part of the visual experience. I do happen to know at least one artist who worked at the highest levels of the industry despite colorblindness. Similarly in music, the remarkable case of Evelyn Glennie, a deaf musician exhibiting absolute pitch, is a testament to the sheer ingenuity and diversity of human expression. I also recall a family trip as a teenager to France at the Fragonard parfumerie, where there exists an occupation called “Le Nez” (French for “the nose”) who must be able to identify 2000 different scents. I imagine it would be exceedingly difficult to excel at this job or something related in the culinary professions with a limited sense of smell or taste.
To close this tangent, this piece, and this series, how do lines of development relate to the broader “grammar for empathy” I’ve proposed as a shorthand way to understand integral theory? One way of putting it is to recognize our own strengths and weaknesses in the context of our own development while seeing and valuing the differences in others to aid fruitful cooperation through compassion, patience and generosity for those less developed than our strengths. This framework of lines also cultivates awareness and humility where we can grow, and appreciation for those around us who demonstrate higher degrees of competence in lines we may not be so developed in ourselves.