Integral [+] Facticity

About

Welcome to Integral [+] Facticity — my personal and professional website documenting my ongoing research, writing, and the development of the Metapattern Institute.

The title carries over from the Integral Facticity Podcast, which I launched in 2022 in memory of Michael Brooks, although the ideas behind it reach much further back. My father first introduced me to Ken Wilber in the late 1990s, and integral theory had already become an important framework for me by the time I began my studies at Concordia University in Montreal. It was there, through my encounter with Jürgen Habermas, that questions of religion, modernity, rationality, and post-metaphysical thought began to complicate and deepen that earlier formation.

Richard J. Bernstein later became especially important to how I worked through those questions. An American pragmatist philosopher whose work moved across pragmatism, hermeneutics, critical theory, and social and political philosophy, Bernstein was unusually good at building bridges between traditions that were often treated as separate. His Beyond Objectivism and Relativism was particularly important for me because it refused the choice between a detached, context-free objectivity and a relativism in which every standpoint becomes equally valid. Instead, Bernstein developed a fallibilist account of judgment grounded in practical reason, dialogue, and our situated participation in the world. His work gave me a way of bringing questions I had been carrying from Wilber and Habermas into closer relation, and the concepts of integral facticity and, eventually, enactive fallibilism crystallized through that process. By the time I needed a name for the podcast, integral facticity had become the name I was giving to many of the questions I had been working through, and I later carried it over to my Substack.

By then, Brooks’s work, together with Matt McManus’s writing on postmodern conservatism, had drawn me much more seriously into political theory. I became increasingly interested in how the left might recover substantive philosophical, political, and religious commitments without abandoning critical reason, pluralism, or epistemic accountability — and in what an integral approach might contribute to that reconstruction. Part of what made Brooks’s work stand out to me was that he seemed to embody much of this already. He could move between left politics, religion, philosophy, and internationalism without treating any one of them as sufficient on its own, bringing them together with a rare combination of intellectual rigour and humour. His death in 2020 was a real loss, and the podcast was my attempt to keep some part of that work alive.

Over 21 episodes, I spoke with scholars and public intellectuals about questions that rarely fit comfortably within a single discipline or political tradition. Those political concerns did not replace my earlier philosophical and religious interests so much as widen them. My Substack became the place where these strands could continue to develop together through reflections on my reading and research, longer-form written work, journal-like essays, and increasingly more personal and autoethnographic material. The site also serves as a working space for experimenting with AI-assisted research and writing, part of a broader interest in how emerging technologies are changing knowledge work, scholarly practice, and institutional learning.

A large part of this trajectory has developed outside conventional academic settings. I hold a degree from Concordia University in Applied Human Sciences and Religious Studies, but after completing my undergraduate studies I decided not to pursue graduate school and continued much of my reading and research independently alongside my professional work. My experience across the nonprofit and community sector, information technology, knowledge management, and financial services has shaped that work, as have longstanding interests in organizational development, behavioral health, and interdisciplinary professional education. Together, these experiences have kept me interested in how knowledge moves — or fails to move — between researchers, practitioners, organizations, and the communities they serve.

The Metapattern Institute grew out of that broader trajectory but has developed a distinct institutional purpose. It is an independent research and knowledge mobilization organization focused on health, technology, and public life. Its work brings together research, digital curation, public scholarship, and knowledge brokering, with particular attention to the spaces between research, professional practice, institutional decision-making, and the wider public. As Founder and Director, I lead the Institute’s organizational development, research infrastructure, knowledge mobilization, and collaborative work.

Alongside that institutional role, I continue my own research through the Institute while maintaining Integral [+] Facticity as the more personal record of that research, my professional development, and the experiences and relationships that shape it. The Institute provides a durable institutional setting in which my research can develop alongside broader work in knowledge mobilization, collaboration, and public scholarship without reducing the Institute itself to my individual research program.

The name Metapattern has an older personal history of its own. My father first introduced me to Gregory Bateson and his idea of the “pattern which connects” — the metapattern, or pattern of patterns — and the term became part of the language we used to talk about Ken Wilber and integral theory. When I eventually began building the Institute, it gave a name to something I had already been trying to do across much of my work: look for relationships among different forms of knowledge, experience, and practice without assuming that their differences could simply be dissolved. The Institute’s name is therefore also part of an intellectual inheritance from my father, one I am developing in my own way.

That history helps explain why part of the project is explicitly autoethnographic. I document aspects of my experience, professional development, relationships, and institutional life when they bear directly on the questions I am working through. The aim is not simply to make the research more personal, but to keep visible some of the circumstances in which ideas are formed, tested, and revised. This gives the work a longitudinal dimension while keeping attention on the biological, psychological, historical, social, and institutional conditions within which human development actually occurs.

The philosophical side of this work has gradually taken on a more definite shape. Much of my research and thinking today revolves around integral facticity and enactive fallibilism. Integral facticity asks how human development unfolds through embodied, relational, historical, and institutional life, while enactive fallibilism asks how knowledge can remain situated and open to revision without giving up the possibility of warranted judgment. Together, these concepts provide a framework for understanding human beings as situated yet capable agents, whose knowledge and judgment remain partial and open to revision, and whose action is embodied and relational. The work develops through a broad interdisciplinary dialogue spanning philosophy, critical theory, contextual behavioral science, and post-secular public theology.

The Integral Awareness & Commitment Training (IACT) program is the applied dimension of this research. Currently in development, it examines psychological flexibility, adaptation, and values-committed action as they unfold over time in the context of people’s relationships, commitments, institutions, and everyday lives. Here, integral facticity and enactive fallibilism can also be tested and developed in practice rather than remaining only at the level of philosophical argument. I am also exploring possible organizational applications, including stress management, professional development, collaboration, and collective learning.

The personal history behind this work begins in Montreal. I was born and raised here, and the city sits at the root of much of what appears on this site. The subtitle — “Listen to the hummingbird, don’t listen to me” — is a line from Leonard Cohen’s “Listen to the Hummingbird,” on his album Thanks for the Dance. Cohen occupies a distinctive place in Canadian culture and in Montreal in particular, but his significance for me is personal as well. My father first introduced me to Cohen, and his work later became an important point of connection with my first Zen teacher, Albert Low, linking the three of us across different periods of my life. That convergence of place, family, culture, and religion also points toward something I mean by integral facticity: the way a life takes shape through histories we inherit, relationships that form us, encounters that change us, and the particular social and cultural worlds we inhabit. I’ve written about some of that history in “Albert Low & Zen at War: On Suffering, Kensho, & Catholicism in Quebec.”

If any part of this resonates with you, I hope you’ll follow along, take part, and help me continue building the research and institutional work around it.

Warm regards,

Erik