Life as Ladder

Biohermeneutics is a particular kind of theory, namely a stage theory. 

A stage theory asserts that life consists of certain stages of development.  Each stage structures the details of an individual's experience into a certain overarching pattern.  That pattern determines the horizons of possibility for the individual's apprehension of the world: all experience will be interpreted within the defined contours of the stage.  The parameters of each stage are self-consistent.  A stage provides a coherent structure – a paradigm – for organizing the data of the world.  In short, the individual does not relate to the world in a purely objective fashion, but only from within a particular stage.  Even objectivity itself – that is, the notion of the world as separate from the self and following its own set of laws – belongs to a particular stage.  Scientific objectivity, which feels beset on every side by narcissistic ideologies, is prone to resist any notion that its own being, too, might be based on a merely contingent construction of reality, since an artificial pluralism is one of ideology's favorite rhetorical tactics.  Yet the pluralism of stage theory is by no means egalitarian, but notably hierarchical.  Science can take comfort in knowing that narcissism – the infant who may one day grow up – is a mere way-station on the path to objectivity. 

As such remarks imply, the levels of a stage theory are progressive.  The stages comprise a series ranging from simple to complex.  Each stage is more sophisticated than its predecessor.  A higher stage has a complex relation to a lower stages preceding it, including elements of both refutation and incorporation.  In the first place, the higher stage does falsify the tenets of the lesser level.  The methodology and conclusions of the lesser stage are no longer a sufficient approach reality.  By the same token, however, the lesser stage is simultaneously posited as valid to a limited extent, within its own subordinated sphere.  The higher stage, in its greater comprehensiveness, expands upon but does not entirely displace the lesser.  Accordingly, a higher stage both rebuts and subsumes its predecessor.  The entire series thus comprises a set of concentric modules progressing outward towards greater truth.

The stages are universal.  All individuals everywhere are construed as passing through the same stages, in the same sequence.  Whatever the variations in individual experience, each individual necessarily organizes her or his experience into the same basic overarching structures.  Cultural difference, too, is irrelevant.  The stages are held to be part of the structure of reality, that is, a substrate prior to culture.  The stages, not culture, go "all the way down."  The postmodernist conception that cultural construction determines all things is a heresy from the vantage of stage theory, which makes room for the self's relation not only to culture but also to an external world and to an internal selfhood.  For postmodernism, of course, stage theory's claim to comprehensiveness is merely a figment of a particularist, and likely oppressive cultural paradigm. As often in philosophy, a back-and-forth debate of "I-encompass-you," "no-I-encompass-you" ensues.  Ultimately, stage theory agrees with postmodernism that "all is paradigm," but contests the implicit postmodernist premise that we ever could or ought to escape paradigms altogether; rather, the goal is to transcend limited paradigms with more comprehensive ones.