Synesis means together-being, and it means it in at least three senses:
- It means the together-being of the object of experience. This object may be a perceived thing or a conceived idea.
- It means the together-being of the first-person singular subject of experience. The I integrates each new experience with existing understanding.
- It means the together-being of the first-person plural subject of experience. The We who shares understanding also shares common objects of experience.
Being scales through synesis.
Psychic factions within a psyche unify as a person by experiencing shared objects of attention and allowing shared sense to emerge. This is the original meaning of common sense: sense of reality resulting from all our senses and sense-making.
But also, multiple persons unify as a relationship by experiencing shared objects of attention and allowing a shared perception and conception of reality — truth — to emerge. This is common sense in the vulgar sense: what everyone can be assumed to know.
But here, for me, is something relatively new: being (of whatever scale) integrates with what transcends and environs it by attuning to real holistic systems. We being real within reality by becoming good citizens of this holarchic reality to which we belong.
Reading Fritz Perls is bringing me to this understanding, and I’m learning it better with the lingering mental afterimage of Koestler, who inspired me to dig into gestaltism.
Our gestalt understandings are not just arbitrary mental constructions. Our perceptions seek systemic wholes, as do our conceptions. A perception of a gestalt recognizes a holistic functional system. And we do this seeking and recognizing as beings who are holistic systems, who contain holistic subsystems embedded within holistic supersystems. We are participants in a radically holarchic reality.
To the degree that we fail to attune ourselves to the wholes in which we are a part we become alienated. Synesis dis-alienates.
Synesis happens within, with, and without us.
Our gestalt sense of the without, apart from all speculative content, is our metaphysic. This transcendent gestalt encourages some gestalts and impedes others.
(I’m no longer sure whether the idea of enceptions is a separate issue from the conceptions and perceptions what our transcendent gestalt encourages or discourages.)