What is stage five (like)?

A visual, kinesthetic, embodied experience 𐡸 A fish-eye lens and a magnifying glass 𐡸 The little clicker wheel 𐡸 Nurturing a plot of woodland 𐡸 Becoming the space, unstuck in time 𐡸 Freed up to play

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Transcript

What is the right question?

“Stage five” is a concept in adult developmental stage theory. That is—or used to be—a branch of academic psychological research. I think it may be very important. But stage five is somewhat mysterious. It’s not clear what it is.

Before asking “what is stage five?”, there’s several other questions one ought to ask. Starting with: “IS stage five?” I mean, is this even a thing? Or is it just some sort of psychobabble woo? Why should we believe in this?

And then, what sort of thing is stage five, if it’s a thing at all? What is a stage, actually? How do we know whether something is a stage or not? How many are there? Which are they?

These are skeptical questions one ought to ask if you’re interested in adult developmental stage theory. Especially if you use it, or are considering using it.

I’m not going to address them at all now! That’s because the academic literature on this sucks. The answers available are vague, and they’re not well supported by empirical research. So I’m setting all this aside for now—although I plan to come back to it.

An exciting interdisciplinary scene

Instead, I’m going to give several answers to “what is stage five?”, as if this was a clearly meaningful question. I’m going to give several because different theorists describe it in different ways.

That’s because they came to adult developmental stage theory with different intellectual frameworks, from different disciplines. In the 1970s and '80s, there was a really exciting scene, mainly at Harvard, in which researchers from different fields and departments were trading ideas about this.

Their different ideas seemed similar in important ways, but they also had major disagreements, reflecting their different lenses.

So, were they all actually talking about the same thing, like the blind men and the elephant? Or were they actually describing quite different things, all of which they called “stage five” for inadequate reasons? Unfortunately, academic research in this area ended almost completely around 1990, probably for political reasons.  And that means that at about the time that they were starting to do really good scientific tests of whose ideas were valid, if anyone’s, the whole thing just ended.

So we don’t know.

I’m mostly going describe my own understanding of stage five. It’s is generally consonant with that of many researchers in the field, but also somewhat eccentrically different. That’s because I came to the scene with different background knowledge than anyone else.

Everyone in the field starts from cognitive developmental psychology, and particularly Jean Piaget’s four-stage theory of children’s cognitive development. His fourth and final stage he called “formal operations.” He thought the essence of that was the use of propositional logic, a simple mathematical system.

Later researchers extended Piaget’s stage four to systematic rational thinking in general.

Piaget explicitly denied that there could be any stage five, because he somehow thought propositional logic was the highest form of cognition.

Starting in the early 1970s, researchers found that here are further, more powerful forms of cognition. They exceed not only propositional logic, but systematic rationality in general. Or, so the researchers thought; and I agree; and that’s what we call “stage five.”

I come to this with backgrounds also in cybernetics, ethnomethodology, existential phenomenology, and Vajrayana Buddhism. And those have shaped—maybe distorted—the way I understand stage five.

* From cybernetics, I understand developmental stages as patterns of interaction of an organism and its environment. The typical framing of cognitive psychology is in terms of representations held in an individual mind; I’m skeptical of those.

* From ethnomethodology, I am skeptical that we even have “individual minds.” Or, at least, I think this is a misleading way of understanding ourselves. Our patterns of interaction are manifestations of our culture and our local social environment. They are not primarily personal.

* From existential phenomenology, I am moved to investigate what being in a stage is like. “Being” is the existential part, and “what is it like” is the phenomenological part. I’m influenced particular by work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who emphasized the role of the body, and of active perception, in experience.

* And from Vajrayana Buddhism, I take the habit of seeing all phenomena in terms of the interplay of nebulosity and patterning. Nothing is either entirely definite or entirely arbitrary. We are nebulous and patterned; everything we interact with is nebulous and patterned; the interactions themselves are nebulous and patterned.

Unfortunately, the insights each of these four disciplines are notoriously difficult to express in plain language. Cybernetics communicates in mathematics; ethnomethodology and existential phenomenology use long made-up words and abnormal sentence structures; Vajrayana is transmitted in ritual and poetry, not prose.

I’m going to try to describe stage five as an experienced interaction, as a way of perceiving and acting, rather than theorizing about supposed mental structures, as cognitive psychologists do.  I’m going to do my best to speak plainly, but describing the texture of experience is going make me come out, I’m afraid, sounding like a stoned hippie!

After I babble a bit, I’ll summarize briefly some descriptions of stage five from academic cognitive scientists. They may be talking nonsense, but at least they sound sober.

What stage five is like

So what I’m going talk about is a visual, kinesthetic, embodied experience, and that’s especially difficult to talk about. It’s easy to talk about thinking, because that’s already largely in words. And I think a distinctive feature of stage five is that it is not so much about thinking in words.

What I’m going to describe is not a mystical experience, not hallucinating, not a special state of consciousness. It’s really difficult to express what kind of thing it is. What I’m hoping is that you may recognize some of it, remember having been that way.  I think these are experiences that anyone can have, “at” any stage, if that’s even a meaningful thing to say.  What may be distinctive about stage five is that they become more common, and that you gain more skill in being in these ways.

So the first aspect of what I want to talk about is what I call “the open field of activity.” Imagine that you are in front of, looking out on, a plane; a landscape. And there’s all this stuff happening on this landscape. Like, things are emerging out of the plane, they’re popping out of the ground, and they dance around. They maybe change color, they bump into each other, and then they subside back into the field. These are the “happening things.”

In this quasi-metaphorical description I’m giving, these are not generally physical objects. They are matters that call for care, or that impinge as relevant to your concerns.

Sometimes these seem to be coming at you from all directions, tasks, interruptions, people emoting, public events, and you may feel embattled, and this can be overwhelming.  I think this is an experience that everyone has had, this feeling of stuff coming at you, metaphorically. And that can give a sense of what sort of description I’m trying to give.

In a more characteristically stage five experience, you have panoramic vision over the whole field of activity. Your view is from outside, and above. At the same time you can see accurately extremely fine details of these emerging phenomena. It’s like you’re looking through a fish-eye lens and a magnifying glass at the same time. So you see the forest and you see the trees. And you see the leaves on the trees, and the caterpillars walking on the leaves on the trees! So you don’t get lost in the details, and you don’t get lost in space.

Another aspect of this is that you are not detached, you’re engaged. The experience of stage four can be like looking at the world through a heads-up display. So there’s a transparent piece of glass that has projected on it engineering diagrams, or an org chart, that is telling you what you are seeing, and categorizing it and representing it. This is the experience of stage four.

At stage five, you can still do that when it’s useful; but more typically, you’re actually looking directly at the world, you’re perceiving without an interposed representation. You can still, when it’s useful, turn the heads-up display on, and use some kind of rational system, some systematic ontology, for perceiving, conceptualizing the world. That can often be very useful; and stage five can do everything that stage four can do.

But you also have, like, a little clicker wheel, so you can choose different heads up displays, different representations of the world in different conceptual schemas. You can use different frameworks for perception, and you can actually look with multiple ones simultaneously. This is a very characteristic aspect of stage five.

In stage five, caring about lessens; caring for increases. You are intimately involved in the details of the field of activity, because you care for them. It’s more like tending a garden than like building and operating a machine, which is the experience of stage four.   It’s more nurturing, less controlling. At stage four, you relate to everything in terms of “What does this mean to me? What do you mean to me? What can I do with this thing?”

Although, a garden is still pretty top down; like, you decide where to put which rose bush, and you put some tulips over here. Maybe a better metaphor would be taking responsibility for a plot of woodland that you nurture. So you make sure that there’s adequate water in a drought. You clear out diseased trees. You build brush piles to provide habitat for small mammals. Foresters do this. They pile up dead branches, and rabbits or weasels, or I don’t know what, live in there.

This metaphor of “nurturing” might sound nice. And that’s not really the point. Part of caring for a plot of woodland is uprooting invasive plant species. It’s setting traps for pest animal species. It’s building a fence around the plot to keep out wild dogs. If 30 to 50 feral hogs break through the fence, a semi-automatic rifle might be called for.

The next aspect of stage five I’d like to talk about is what I call “becoming the space.”  And this is a sense that your self, your awareness, becomes fused with the field of activity, the space within which everything happens. So in some sense, you feel like you are doing everything that occurs in the field of activity, because you are the space. And at the same time, you’re not doing anything, because you are just the space. You are not any longer an isolated individual in your head who is doing the thing: one thing, and then the next thing. It’s a continuous flow of activity, that is interaction across all of the participating entities, human, and material, and information technology, or whatever.

This sense of extending through space—you also feel decentered in time, and like you extend through time. So you become aware of your place in history, and that you are in the middle of a lineage of people doing things, thinking and feeling and being, in ways that are shaping you now. This can extend centuries into the past, centuries into the future; but also just years, or any period of time.

And just as with the spatial metaphor—where you’re seeing all the details, you’re getting this really close-in look, and you’re seeing the whole picture— With time, you’re both… You’re much more present, in the now. In stage four, your time is structured. It is scheduled. You have deadlines, you’re doing this, and then you’re doing this and you know what’s going to happen next. The stage five experience of time is of being here now without the structure. It’s also the experience of being across centuries, because you’re not separate from those who have gone before. They are being you, and you are being the future; all of the people who come after you.

There’s a quote from Abraham Maslow that I find really moving. He said:

I had a vision once, at Brandeis University. It was at commencement. I had ducked commencement for years, but this one I couldn’t duck; I was corralled. And I felt there was something kind of stupid about these processions and idiotic medieval caps and gowns. This time, as the faculty stood waiting for the procession to begin, for some reason there was suddenly this vision. It wasn’t a hallucination. It was as if I could imagine very vividly a long academic procession.

(This makes me cry, actually.)

It went way the hell into the future, into some kind of misty, cloudy thing. The procession contained all my past colleagues, all the people I like, you know, Erasmus, Socrates. And then the procession extended into a dim cloud in which were all sorts of people not yet born. And these were also my colleagues. I felt very brotherly toward them, these future ones. It’s the transcending of time and space, which becomes quite normal.

Robert Kegan, who’s one of the foremost theorists in this area, says that in his data set, he finds that nobody really gets to stage five until age forty. You have to have had decades of experience in order to begin to get this sense of one’s extension in time, of being the past and being the future at the same time. And maybe it’s not until you get to forty that that really sinks in and shapes you.

This sense of the diffusion of oneself, of being extended, being the space, leads you to experience “me” as being one of the things that happens within the space of activity. So “me” is just one object among all these other happening things. It’s not that you stop having a self, it’s that the selfing is an activity that happens within the space that you are. And lots of different kinds of selfing activity may arise from the field, and dance around, and then submerge again.

And this is very funny! It leads to a sense of humor about oneself. You can’t take yourself seriously if you’re just this little dancing puppet. So you’re much less bothered by people’s negative opinions about you, because the “me” is not an especially significant thing in there.

So you’re freed up to play. It’s serious play, because you do care for the whole field, but you’re not identified with outcomes. You are aware of risks; you take sensible actions. You may be unhappy when things go badly, but it’s not saying something about you so much anymore.

Within the field of activity, because you are seeing through multiple lenses, there’s a lot of scope for paradox, for contradiction, that you’re seeing in different ways simultaneously. And this is really funny, and enjoyable, because contradiction is no longer a problem. You can integrate both sides of a contradiction, without needing to resolve it in favor of one side or the other; because these are both valid ways of looking at things.

So that was me sounding like I’m on drugs.

Academic accounts

I’m going to now briefly talk about a series of academic characterizations of stage five. It may actually be helpful to see how each of these descriptions is incomplete or inaccurate; so one can understand what stage five is in terms of what it isn’t, quite. Similarly, a lot of the standard explanations of stage five are in terms of what it isn’t; namely, stage four.

As you’ve heard, it’s really difficult to describe stage five in its own terms. And as you move toward a new stage, or are not yet firmly embedded in it, it’s actually a lot easier to look back at the previous stage, and say “not that,” than to look forward, or down or around, and say, okay, this is where I am now, and this is how it is. This is on top of the problem that stage five, unlike stage four, is mostly not about explicit representations, which are easy to verbalize.

The term “stage five” itself is really a “what it isn’t” description: namely, it isn’t stage four; it’s something else. It’s good as a term, and I use it a lot, because it’s basically meaningless. It doesn’t try to tell you what stage five is, and so that leaves it as an open space of possibility; where a bunch of these other academic terms are trying to nail it down, in a way that doesn’t seem to be all that helpful.

Calling it “stage five” does drag in Piaget’s stage theory, which is definitely questionable. “Is there actually such a thing as a stage?” This is a question! And using the term “stage five” prejudges that; so I actually also like to use other terms, which don’t prejudge that.

I use the term “fluid.” This is good primarily by contrast with stage four, which is really marked by its rigidity, its dualism. Stage four is about “this, not that”: sharp distinctions, logic. There’s a couple of problems with the term “fluid.” One is that it could describe stage three, which is also non-rigid. Another is that a fluid is homogeneous and undifferentiated, and stage five isn’t that. So the term “fluid” might point toward what I call “monism,” the “All Is One” idea; that is definitely not what stage five is about! Stage five, we saw, is intensely attuned to details and differences, as well as the big picture.

The first term for stage five was “post-formal.” That is defining it in terms of what Piaget had said stage four was, namely formal. There’s a quote here, from a review article:

Various theories arose, which were based on the assumption. The distinctive characteristic was the acceptance and integration of various, at times incompatible, truths; which were highly dependent upon context, and upon the way in which the subject perceives them; without the subject needing, as in stage four, to look for and find a single truth. Such theories provoked great enthusiasm in the scientific community.

I think that is a relatively accurate description of an important aspect of stage five. “Post-formal” points to a rejection of propositional logic, which goes all the way back to Aristotle. It’s the logic of the Law of the Excluded Middle; that every statement is either absolutely true or absolutely false; and that’s something that stage five critically rejects.

This is not a new idea. So, one of the first terms applied to stage five, in the 1970s, was “dialectical”; and this is going back to Hegel, who is not my favorite person. But we do have to admit that Hegel had a bunch of ideas that were wrong in detail, but in general trend turned out to be really important and correct in some ways; and one was his rejection of Aristotelian true/false logic. And that’s what “dialectic” is supposed to be about. It’s taking multiple frameworks and aiming for a synthesis, or at least working with the contradiction, without trying to resolve it.

Another early term besides “dialectical” that was applied to stage five was “reflective.” This is good because it describes the way that stage five stands apart from systems and can take this view from above and around; not being locked into a system, but looking outside on top of it; and being able to intervene in systems from outside.

This isn’t, however, really unique to stage five. Kegan says that each stage is in some sense a theory of the previous stage. So stage four is a theory of stage three. Relationships are the substance, or a critical part of the substance, of stage three, and they’re not thematized. You are in relationships. Stage four is a theory of relationships. It structures relationships, and you have to reflect on relationships. So reflectiveness is not actually a distinctive feature of stage five.  One develops into stage four by conceptualizing the limitations and failure modes of stage three.

There’s another problem with the term “reflection,” which is it is typically taken to be a cognitive operation. It’s thinking about, and this is actually deemphasized in stage five. I mean, certainly, in stage five, you do all kinds of difficult thinking; but that’s not the distinctive substance of it.

Other terms that are applied to stage five in the literature are “relativistic” and “contextual.” This could also describe stage three, which is similar to stage five in some ways. There’s a stage three attitude of “everybody’s opinion is equally valid, because everybody has their own experience”; and that could be understood as relative and contextual. Stage five is relativistic and contextual, again, relative to stage four.

“Meta-systematic” is a term that I use, and that other theorists in the field use. It is, again, a way of talking about this ability to see things in multiple ways simultaneously. But as a term it’s problematic, because it suggests that’s all you’re doing, and it centers systems. Stage five is not primarily about systems, in the way that stage four is. Stage five uses systems, sometimes, when they’re useful. But that’s not, again, its substance.

There’s another problem here, which is that " meta-systematic" suggests a system of systems. This is a very common misunderstanding. Stage five is not itself a system; is not a system of systems. Understanding how a superordinate system can subsume and incorporate another system within itself: that just gives you another system. This is a stage four recursive operation. It’s not stage five. What one subsumes systems within, at stage five, is the space, the field of activity. Systems appear as entities that pop out of the ground, they spin around, and they go “flomp!”, back into the ground.

The term “inter-individual” is used in Kegan’s book The Evolving Self as the term for stage five. It points towards this decentering of one’s self. But it again leaves intact the idea that there are distinct selves; that stage five is again about how selves relate to each other. And in stage five they interpenetrate in a way that they don’t at stage four; and they are structured in a way that they aren’t at stage three. But, at stage five, selves are not the thing; and this is I think, a limitation in Kegan’s understanding.

In his later book, In Over Our Heads, he used the term “self-transforming.” Again, this centers “self” as the key thing. It also has the problem that each stage represents a fundamental transformation of selfing, a very different mode of “self” occurring, than the previous one. So transformation is an aspect of every stage; or every transition, at least. I think he’s pointing to the fact that at stage five, transformation continues, and it’s a deliberate act; and that is actually true and important. But again, the self is not the key thing, I think.

At stage five, because the self is no longer an entity, there isn’t a coherent thing that could act to transform itself. Rather the delocalized patterns of activity, which we think of as selfing, continue to transform, not through the action of the self on itself, but through interaction with everything in the context, the situation, the field, the space of activity. That’s what accomplishes the transformation.

I’m sounding like a stoned hippie again.

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