The Dialectics of Human Growth
An Interview with Dr. Otto Laske
Elizabeth Debold
Otto Laske is an independent thinker who travels in different worlds. He began as a
philosopher in the tradition of The Frankfurt School, and today he lives in Boston where he
works as a developmental psychologist, coach, social scientist, and artist. Based on his
studies, Laske has developed his own approach to developmental psychology, which he calls
the “Constructive-Developmental Framework.” In this framework he includes the
psychological, socio-emotional and cognitive dimensions of being human. Our editor
Elizabeth Debold spoke with Otto Laske about rationality, intuition, and the art of thinking
dialectically.
evolve: Let’s start with a basic question: what is rationality?
Otto Laske: The answer to that question depends on the culture you are in. In Western
culture we have gotten used to the idea that the highest gift in man is what we call thinking.
Aristotle starts his metaphysics by saying that the greatest delight for a human being is to be
aware of the cosmos and to think about it. So we are under the burden of this tradition and
therefore we have a limited view of what is not rational, what is intuitive. However, as I see it,
my emotions are an instrument of insight into myself, others, and the world. That is rational,
but it is not verbal. It cannot be conceptualized. We can be rational in different ways: by using
concepts, by using intuition, by using even feelings. Think of a psychotherapist who might
say to a client, “You are angry now” and the client may not know that. The psychotherapist
can say that because he is using his body or his self as an instrument. It’s a totally rational
procedure that he is using. Rationality is a very broad concept in my view.
evolve: How do you understand the relationship between feeling and thinking?
Otto Laske: There is no emotion that is not mediated by thought. Human emotions are deeply
saturated with thinking. How I think about a situation determines how I will feel about it.
People who set feelings against rationality or cognition are operating at a very abstract
nondialectical level where they don’t see that feeling is imbued with thinking: the richer the
feeling is, the more thinking is in it. For instance this morning, I got up at 6:30 because I
wanted to take my car to a repair shop. I felt kind of angry about it—why didn’t they see this
problem earlier when they sold the car to me? So I had a very negative view of what I was
about to do. But as I drove to the repair station I realized that this is really a wonderful
morning—seeing Gloucester, where I live, in the early sunlight by the ocean. As I conjured up
a world in my thinking based on concepts of the world that I was driving through, my anger
vanished and the feeling became one of acceptance and even more. My feeling that started out
to be anger became a different feeling in the process of being shaped conceptually. It turned
almost into its opposite. If you observe yourself, you can see that you can change your feeling
considerably by getting a bigger picture of the situation.
evolve: Why is it important to get a bigger picture?
Otto Laske: A capacity of the mind is that it can create a bigger picture. This also
relates to Jean Piaget’s research. He said that we start out as a baby being the center
of the world. There is noother, no mother, no brother yet. As “subject,” the individual who is
having a subjective experience, we start as a huge subject: there is simply our own need and
blooming buzzing confusion.
But we end up as an adult as a person who feels to be a very small element of a
huge cosmos that will continue after we pass. Robert Kegan, a Harvard developmental
psychologist who was my teacher, also observed this: we start as a huge subject and we end as
a very small one. As a huge subject we have a very small object—that which we can objecfify
or conceptualize—or we have none. We end up with a huge object—the big picture of the
world and our experience within it—and a very small subject. It is in this move from the huge
subject to the small subject and the minuscule object to the huge object that thinking and
feeling merge.
evolve: Can you say more about how thinking and feeling merge?
Otto Laske: Ok, from a research and scientific point of view, I will refer to feeling
as socio-emotional development and to thinking as cognitive development. Not to separate them
and make them oppositional to each other but rather to make visible what it means for them to
come together.
As Hegel said, you cannot unite what you haven’t separated. By this he means that you can
only see the unity of something—the big picture—to the extent that you can differentiate the
elements that make up this unity. You need the part and whole to see the unity. This is
fundamental to dialectical thinking, which I will speak about later.
The question about the relationship between feeling and thinking is a developmental one. The
amygdala, which is the primitive brain that we share with animals, and the frontal cortex,
which we consider “human,“ need a lifetime to grow together. At the beginning they are not
tightly linked by nerve fibres as they are at the end of life.
I remember interviewing an older lady when I was doing what was called “life span research.”
The discussion came to the relationship between thinking and feeling, and she said: “You
know, I don’t know pure joy anymore, because it is so mixed with what I know about sadness.
My feelings are now much more complex than they were when I was twenty or thirty.
Because of my experience, this notion that there is a pure joy, I am no longer familiar with
that.“ She was speaking about cognitive development—not just a development of her feeling.
Thinking and feeling are separate at the beginning of life and more united at the end of life. In
the stages in between, they reach different levels of equilibrium. In most cases they are ‚out of
sync’ so that people who have not fully developed their thinking are in a disequilibrium
between their social-emotional and cognitive development.
evolve: What is the difference is between socio-emotional and cognitive development?
Otto Laske: I am calling Robert Kegan’s work on meaning-making “socio-emotional development.“
It’s my term, not his. Meaning making is feeling with cognition. Meaning making is
socioemotional development, while making sense of the world conceptually is cognitive
development. Both, in fact, are aspects of rationality. The big unresolved issue is how they
relate.
But let’s look at a model of development. After twenty-five years of having absorbed
developmental theories, I look at them simply as the basic social theory of the twenty-first
century. They talk about the kind of human beings we are in the present state of the world,
which is why they speak about potential in a very helpful way. Kegan sepaks of five stages,
from Stage 1, which is the young child, to Stage 5. I’m going to start with Stage 2, which he
calls “instrumental.“ We have all been there since we have all been adolescent: my world is
one in which I actually know very little about other people and their feelings and thoughts. If I
think of my first love, I thought I was madly in love with this other person, but I was mainly
in love with myself. I really wanted only to know that she loved me. By calling this stage
“instrumental,“ Kegan says that you are using others as an instrument for satisfying your own
desires, needs, and illusions.
evolve: What is the relationship between one’s capacity for rationality and one’s feelings at this stage?
Otto Laske: That’s an interesting question. On one hand, feeling and thinking are the same, and
in another way they are worlds apart. Feelings come out of my own impulses, and are unrefined
and not imbued by thought. In that sense, they’re abstract and impoverished even though
powerful feelings seem to be the end of the world! At Stage 3, which Kegan calls “other
dependent,“ I feel that I am like everybody else and that what defines me is the expectations
that others have of me. I am fully other dependent.
My task now is to move out of this other dependence at Stage 3 into Stage 4 where I leave
behind me all of these internalized others or voices that pretend to be authentic but are not
really me. On this journey from other dependent to self-authoring, I am going to learn that I
have an authentic voice and have inauthentic voices in me. I always use the example of
Martin Luther in Worms in the 16th century to explain what self-authoring is. When he was
asked to recant his views he said: “Here I stand, I can do no other. You can kill me, you can
imprison me, I will not recant my beliefs.” That is self-authoring. They are not dependent on
others any longer. This involves the courage to be oneself, to walk to one’s own drummer and
to be ostracized for it and to be killed or kicked out. According to the empirical research, the
majority of humans seems to stay at Stage 3 or between 3 and 4 and only a fifth of adults in
this culture makes it to Stage 4, the self-authoring stage.
Now, once you are there in this glorious position of integrity, what’s your next task? Your
next life task is to get out of it, to leave the self-constructed cage of integrity and begin to see
that you cannot develop any further yourself without making a few other selected people
midwives of your own further development. So here you enter into the sphere of intimacy, not
only in the sexual sense of love, but of being open to be shown by others where your limits
are. Stage 5 is not easy to verbalize. According to Kegan, this is the stage of self-awareness,
where I no longer am interested in formation but transformation. I am no longer defining
myself by where I was born, how I was educated, what my profession was. In the face of
mortality, I am now a tiny piece in a huge cosmos that will go on after me. I now have a big
picture of my life and the feelings I have about my life and the lives of others are mediated by
my cognitive development that now enables me to objectify experience in a much bigger way.
evolve: So, how we feel changes over time as we develop the capacity to make sense of the context
we are in.
Otto Laske: Yea, and this depends on the extent of our cognitive development. To hold a view of a
self-authoring person, it takes a particular cognitive profile. In the end I would say that cognitive
development and socio-emotional development coincide and merge, as do feeling and thinking.
We all know people who are emotionally more mature than cognitively, so the equilibrium that
Piaget was concerned about is often not there and cannot be there because the person is not fully mature.
Full maturity and equilibrium are the same, at least in an ideal world. While that may never entirely
happen, I think as a theoretical standard, it’s a useful notion.
evolve: How do you assess cognitive development?
Otto Laske: There are people who speak of cognitive development in terms of stages, but I do not. I follow Michael Basseches, who was my teacher at Harvard, and I speak of phases. I do so
because when you go beyond logical thinking development, I do not see clear delimitations
between one period and another. Between 1978 and 1984 and beyond, Basseches took this
pioneering step to ask: why don’t we look into what dialectical thinking is empirically? This
had never been done.
evolve: What is dialectical thinking?
Otto Laske: For me, dialectical thinking is the height of adult thinking, and at the same time, it
is a way of living. In dialectics, what is separate is at the same time inseparable. Let’s say an
apple is different from a pear. Logically an apple is different from a pear, they have different
names, they taste different, and so they are different. But to say that pear and apple are
different makes sense only if we see that they are the same in that they are both fruits. As
fruits they are the same but in their individuality they are different. The dialectical notion is
that unity and difference are the same. The difficulty in learning or practicing dialectical
thinking is to think unity and difference together. Logial thinking looks only for differences,
and sees everything that is ‘non-A’ as “wrong.” This is a way to reduce complexity radically
without being aware that in the ever-changing world that we are living in, ‘A’ and ‘non-A’ are
always connected to each other. Dialectical thinking, on the other hand, knows that
connectedness, and because of that, it is more realistic. But it is not being taught in schools
and university, so it is a kind of lost art.
So, what sets apart logical thinking from dialectical thinking is the meaning of negation. In
logical thinking, if I negate something, I say that it is false. Because ‘A’ is always forced to be
‘A’, ‘non-A’ is declared to be wrong and not important. (“You are either my friend or my
foe.”) In dialectical thinking we are dealing with preservative negation. Preservative negation
means that when I negate something, when going from ‘A’ to ‘non-A,’ I’m not killing it, or
doing away with it or calling it false. Insread of that, we keep ‘non-A’ in our memory to use it
again with ‘A.’ We transcend ‘A’ through ‘non-A’ and include both in a higher synthesis.
Our notion of what ‘A’ is becomes richer, because I have included what is ‘not A’. For the
dialectical thinker, that which is absent is as real as what is present. This has an ontological
purpose. If absence didn’t have the same ontological status as presence, development and
change would not be thinkable. Here we speak about emergence as what is real. So emergence
means that the absences become presences. There is this constant back and forth between
what is present and what is absent. That’s the transformational process.
This helps us realize, for example, what dialogue is and how it can be transformative.
Dialogue can’t be understood by the pre-Hegelian logical mind; nor is it possible to
understand using the Wilberian AQAL map. To understand dialogue, you need dialectical
thinking. Dialogue is only possible when I see myself (‘A’) and the others (‘non-A’) in the
unity of a dialectical process.
evolve: What is the relationship between dialectical thinking and intuition?
Otto Laske: In the beginning, dialectical thinking is a learning process but later on it becomes an
intuitive process of discovery in the sense that as a dialectical thinker, I develop many
intuitions about what is missing in what people say and in the world. It is the intuition
of what is absent, what is not already here, what could be, what needs to be. This is also
happening in art where you try to manifest expectations of what material requires from the
creative person. Intuition is always based upon information and knowledge, and because
knowledge always includes levels of understanding, we have to speak about levels of intuition.
So there is not “the” intuition.
I develop my intuition about a person through assessing him or her based on empirical
observations or, as psychologist, through measurements. In my art I gather knowledge about
the material with which I work. So depending on the thinking I do about my material—
whether it is a human developmental profile or an image—I build up intuitions that are higher
or more complex than the intuitions I started out with. That’s why I think that intuitions
develop.
If I had a second life I would want to study intuition, because there is no research about the
development of intuition over a life span. That is a reason why intuition is always considered
an opposite of thinking, which is nonsense.
evolve: Does it mean that we integrate thinking and feeling in our intuition?
Otto Laske: The dialectical perspective on thinking would be to say‚ as long as you
put feeling and thinking in opposition to each other, or one above the other, you are thinking
in formal,logical terms, but not in dialectical terms, because that’s not a holistic view of the
human. You need both elements to think holistically about the human. But our destiny as human
beings is that you can only realize that unity between the two step by step during the course of
your development. (Some never realize this.)
Today there is a lot of thinking about spiritual development, even though no one has
measured it yet. One thing that is clear to me is that one can be “spiritual” at every level of
development but it will depend on your level of socio-emotional and cognitive development.
The cognitive level of development will determine the kind of spirituality that one is satisfied
with. I am cautiously optimistic about the future of humanity, provided we understand, more
and more, the importance of dialectical thinking. We want a holistic view of the human; we
want to evolve. Through a dialectical position, transformation is possible. But transformation
is never easy. You cannot evolve if you don’t go through an arduous journey of development,
which has been talked about by many, many people, inluding Hermann Hesse. It is never
simply handed to us on a platter.