Aims & Scope
Human Architecture maintains that all human failures at self and broader social change in favor of the good life are rooted in the problem of habituation, i.e., the human propensity to become subconsciously attached to sensations, ideas, feelings, things, relations, and processes. Decisive among these habituations are the dualisms of theory/practice, self/society, and matter/mind—by-products of dualistic oppositions of materialist and idealist world outlooks lasting for millennia. These dualisms are responsible for the world-historical fragmentation of the essentially creative human search for the good life into mutually alienated and thereby failing paradigms of philosophy, religion, and science—giving rise to equally fragmented and mutually alienated western utopian, eastern mystical, and global academic movements.
The splitting of the inherently artistic and creative human spirit into its ideological components more or less corresponds to the world-historical transitions of ancient civilizations to classical political, medieval cultural, and modern economic empires—for which the dialectics of nomadic vs. settled modes of life paved the way in the course of an increasingly synchronous global development. The postmodern condition today is the general crisis of all fragmented paradigmatic structures, modern and/or traditional. It follows, then, that the good life will not be the gift of a wise few, of supernatural forces beyond, or of an objectively preordained natural or historical progress. Human de-alienation can only be an artistic endeavor by each and all—only within a creative humanist framework can the habituated dualisms and fragmentations of philosophy, religion, and science be overcome while preserving their true meanings and contributions.
It will be demonstrated that all dualisms can be effectively transcended through their conscious and intentional re-articulation as diverse manifestations of part-whole dialectics. The habituated common sense definition of society as multiple ethno-national and civilizational systems of relations among “individuals”—based on ahistorical presumptions of human “individuality”—will be rejected in favor of its definition as a singular world-historical ensemble of intra-, inter-, and extrapersonal self relations. It will be argued that human life can be harmonious only when it is a world-system of self-determining individualities. Contributions of western utopianism, eastern mysticism, and Science to an otherwise singular movement in humanist utopystics will be critically explored within an integrative framework. Human architecture will be introduced as the spatiotemporal art of design and construction of part-whole dialecticities in everyday life—of building alternative world-historical realities in the midst of the personal here and now.
Human Architecture provides a forum for the exploration of personal self-knowledges within a re-imagined sociological framework. It seeks to creatively institutionalize new conceptual and curricular structures of knowledge whereby critical study of one’s selves within an increasingly world-historical framework is given educational and pedagogical legitimacy. The journal is a public forum for those who seek to radically understand and, if need be, change their world-historically constructed selves. It is a utopystic research and educational landscape for fostering de-alienated and self-determining human realities.
Human Architecture will transcend the habituated dualisms of young and old, undergraduate and graduate, student and teacher, in and outside classroom, on- and off-campus, academic and non-academic, knowledge and feeling, mind and body, private and public, society and nature, reality and imagination, and philosophy, religion, science, and the arts—east and west. It will disempower the social stratifications of class, status, and power arising from economy, culture, and politics in favor of recognizing the all-encompassing stretch of human alienation—fostering new sociological imaginations more conducive to a shared human liberation project.
A Peer-Reviewing Journal
Contributions to Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge pass through a rigorous selective process with respect to their fit, relevance, coherence of argument, and innovativeness in consideration of the scope, nature, and intended purpose of the journal. The journal adheres to the peer-reviewing principle for advancing scholarship, but aims to design and build new scholarly avenues to meet this requirement—seeking mechanisms that foster openness of inquiry and evaluation; mechanisms that invite constructive judgments subject to free, open, and mutually interactive, not blinded and one-sided, peer reviewing practices; mechanisms that can be employed as widely and dynamically as possible among specialist and interested scholars in the field who value the need for the proliferation of new, critical, and innovative personal and global insights and transformations.
To meet the highest standards of scholarship, liberatory editorial practices need to transition from static peer reviewed to dynamic peer reviewing models that de-couple publication from defective pre-publication peer review requirements, and engage in alternative peer review practices that remain open to all those wishing to review a manuscript at any time in the post-publication phase—encouraging expanded and deepening exchanges among scholars, authors and readers alike. They need to invite critical thinking about prevailing and dominant paradigms and inflame creative spirits to forge new scholarly horizons and intellectual landscapes. And they need to embrace the subaltern voices in the academia and beyond, voices of those who have been deprived of cultivating their sociological imaginations through formal scholarly publishing avenues.
Human Architecture warmly invites contributors and readers to peer review the articles herein and to openly share their critical and constructive insights with one another in the future chronicles of this journal.