“Life is an autonomous event which takes place between the organism and the environment. Life processes do not merely tend to preserve life, but transcend the momentary status quo of the organism, expanding itself continually and imposing its autonomous determination upon an ever-increasing realm of events.”

The conceptions of post-formal thought bear remarkable similarity to each other and are consistent with the notion of development—emergence from embeddedness, the whole becoming part of a new whole, the oscillating tension between inclusion and distinctness—presented here.

Gilligan and Murphy find in their studies of post-college age adults that some persons begin to question the limits of their abstracted forms or principles for intellectual solution of moral problems.

Among the central features of this new way of thinking seems to be a new orientation to contradiction and paradox.

All transitions involve leaving a consolidated self behind before any new self can take its place. At the 4-5 shift this means abandoning—or somehow operating without reliance upon—the form, the group, standard, or convention. For some this leads to feelings of being “beyond good and evil,” which phenomenologically amounts to looking at that beyondness from the view of the old self, and thus involves strong feelings of evil.

in the shift to stage 5 there is often a sense of having left the moral world entirely (“ ‘ought’ is no longer in my vocabulary”); there is no way of orienting to right and wrong worthy of my respect. This is the killing off of all standards, the attempt to be not-me (who is his standard)—the cynic, or existentially despairing.

People may live along a wide continuum of health or malaise at any evolutionary moment, but how they experience their experience is first of all a function not of where they are on that continuum but where they are in their evolution.

At the moment (this disequilibrial moment when the old structure is being negated or rejected without yet being fully appropriated as content for the new structure), the “instinctual” is seen as antagonistic to the “judgmental.” In order to give that instinctual life some play, one must “suspend” judgment and “go with the wind.” But what is actually being suspended is a form of judgment, a form of authority bent on internal control.

While the world of work is ideally suited to the culturing of the institutional balance, work settings which can encourage, recognize, or support development beyond the institutional are quite rare.

Workaholism is the hypermasculine analogue of the institutional balance to the hyperfeminine self-abnegation of the interpersonal balance (though neither predicament is the exclusive province of men or women, respectively). The picture of the workaholic—with his or her all-consuming investment in the exercises of achievement, self-esteem, independent accomplishment, self-discipline, and control—looks like that of the evolutionary truce of institutionality in peril, working overtime lest it fall apart.

Rather than expressing itself in terms of a loyalty or fidelity to an abstracted system-preserving form (of the self or the actual public institution), responsibility would seem to be more saliently a matter of taking responsibility for one’s construction and transformation of the form.

If the notion that most workplaces are not well suited to the development of genuine intimacy is unperturbing to those who shape them, perhaps the notion that the workplace works against a person’s growth in general might be more so.

Work organizations that will not recognize the employee’s growth often force the employee to choose between the job and his or her own life-project. Most workplaces are appallingly unconcerned about this choice, judging that its costs are almost entirely borne by the employee.

The image of an adult relationship that is genuinely intimate—sexually, but in every other respect as well—brings to light again the theme of reciprocity first seen in the interpersonal balance.

“Life is an autonomous event which takes place between the organism and the environment. Life processes do not merely tend to preserve life, but transcend the momentary status quo of the organism, expanding itself continually and imposing its autonomous determination upon an ever-increasing realm of events.”

The conceptions of post-formal thought bear remarkable similarity to each other and are consistent with the notion of development—emergence from embeddedness, the whole becoming part of a new whole, the oscillating tension between inclusion and distinctness—presented here.

Gilligan and Murphy find in their studies of post-college age adults that some persons begin to question the limits of their abstracted forms or principles for intellectual solution of moral problems.

Among the central features of this new way of thinking seems to be a new orientation to contradiction and paradox.

All transitions involve leaving a consolidated self behind before any new self can take its place. At the 4-5 shift this means abandoning—or somehow operating without reliance upon—the form, the group, standard, or convention. For some this leads to feelings of being “beyond good and evil,” which phenomenologically amounts to looking at that beyondness from the view of the old self, and thus involves strong feelings of evil.

in the shift to stage 5 there is often a sense of having left the moral world entirely (“ ‘ought’ is no longer in my vocabulary”); there is no way of orienting to right and wrong worthy of my respect. This is the killing off of all standards, the attempt to be not-me (who is his standard)—the cynic, or existentially despairing.

People may live along a wide continuum of health or malaise at any evolutionary moment, but how they experience their experience is first of all a function not of where they are on that continuum but where they are in their evolution.

At the moment (this disequilibrial moment when the old structure is being negated or rejected without yet being fully appropriated as content for the new structure), the “instinctual” is seen as antagonistic to the “judgmental.” In order to give that instinctual life some play, one must “suspend” judgment and “go with the wind.” But what is actually being suspended is a form of judgment, a form of authority bent on internal control.

While the world of work is ideally suited to the culturing of the institutional balance, work settings which can encourage, recognize, or support development beyond the institutional are quite rare.

Workaholism is the hypermasculine analogue of the institutional balance to the hyperfeminine self-abnegation of the interpersonal balance (though neither predicament is the exclusive province of men or women, respectively). The picture of the workaholic—with his or her all-consuming investment in the exercises of achievement, self-esteem, independent accomplishment, self-discipline, and control—looks like that of the evolutionary truce of institutionality in peril, working overtime lest it fall apart.

Rather than expressing itself in terms of a loyalty or fidelity to an abstracted system-preserving form (of the self or the actual public institution), responsibility would seem to be more saliently a matter of taking responsibility for one’s construction and transformation of the form.

If the notion that most workplaces are not well suited to the development of genuine intimacy is unperturbing to those who shape them, perhaps the notion that the workplace works against a person’s growth in general might be more so.

Work organizations that will not recognize the employee’s growth often force the employee to choose between the job and his or her own life-project. Most workplaces are appallingly unconcerned about this choice, judging that its costs are almost entirely borne by the employee.

The image of an adult relationship that is genuinely intimate—sexually, but in every other respect as well—brings to light again the theme of reciprocity first seen in the interpersonal balance.