We extend a warm welcome to everyone who has joined us over the past few years, and especially if you are hearing from us directly for the first time. If you are receiving this message, you will either be on the longstanding Perspectiva mailing list, a new Substack subscriber, or you will have signed up to our Emerge project via a Perspectiva event or site in recent years. As part of a strategic review, Perspectiva recently added people who expressed interest in hearing about one of Perspectiva’s longstanding initiatives - the Emerge project, which we continue to write about and support, and are proud to describe below, but which is about to undergo some changes that we wanted to make you aware of.
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A major question for any thinking and feeling person, and a central inquiry in our network, is this: What is emerging?
In what might be one of the best short online lectures ever, Daniel Schmachtenberger describes emergence as “the closest thing to magic that is actually a scientifically admissible term.” Emergence is described there as a process of attractive forces – phenomena drawn to different aspects of itself - giving rise to relationship – non-random patterns of connection - then to ‘synergy’ – a whole that appears to be greater than the sum of its parts - and then emergence, which is about how that ‘greater’ manifests.
While emergence is a serious idea, the question - what is emerging? -has become so overfamiliar in our network that it is almost funny. This reflective query is experienced by many as a kind of jester koan, and a wry grin often accompanies it. The question has philosophical and scientific dignity and practical and political relevance, but it is also a polite way to frame a familiar inquiry expressed in plain terms: What is happening to the world? Or, in internet patois: LOL, WTF?
As part of Perspectiva’s strategic review after a decade of work, we are clarifying our relationship to a range of projects we have had full or partial responsibility for, including older ones that we are proud of, and a particularly promising one we will be launching soon. Perspectiva uses this platform to develop and communicate our work on understanding the relationship between systems, souls, and society in theory and practice, including inquiries arising from our activities and outputs. As regular readers will know, our work is a form of philosophical activism that manifests in publications, networks, institutions, practices, courses and events.
As indicated in recent weeks, in addition to our applied philosophical work, Perspectiva seeks to invite others here to amplify some of the best thinking, writing and acting in the field of inquiry and practice that Perspectiva’s role in the Emerge project has helped to create and coordinate. What follows is an overview of some of the things that now appear to be submerging as others emerge, at the point where Emerge is integrated into Perspectiva’s other existing and new initiatives, and Emerge begins to be led and managed through different activities and entities.
The Emerge project was initiated in 2018 by Perspectiva in London, the Ekskäret Foundation in Stockholm, and the Co-Creation Loft in Berlin. Together, we noticed that across Northern Europe, many people working in a diverse range of fields – in media, education, enterprise, technology, arts and politics – shared an emerging sensibility that went beyond their own fields and highlighted connections between them. That sensibility has historical, philosophical, aesthetic, cultural, political and spiritual aspects. It’s about sensing, as my colleague Ivo Mensch puts it, that
Collectively we are living a life that no longer exists.
The world of the Bretton Woods settlement, the UN Declaration of Human Rights and our framework of nation states, the rule of law and purportedly reliable market mechanisms appear to be unable to adapt – at a fundamental level of design, values, coordination and mandate – to the new internet and AI mediated information system it has created, the ecological strain it has generated, and the levels of inequality and concentrations of financial power it has permitted.
We are therefore all caught up in a gradual but quickening transition into a different kind of world that is ominous in many ways – ecological collapse, techno-servitude, and proto-fascism loom large – but it is still fundamentally up for grabs. We should expect the unexpected, and the unrecognisable, and the unfathomable, without assuming it is all bad, and doing what we can to ensure it isn’t. We decided to try to give this kind of sensibility a socio-digital home, and the main point of Emerge since its inception has been to help a nascent field of inquiry and practice to find itself, know itself and fulfil its potential.
Perspectiva has played a major role in creating, developing and supporting the Emerge project and assumed overall management responsibility for it in 2021. Emerge is now an image/brand that connects a network by loose affiliations and a (dormant) Mighty Network, it is a website (www.whatisemering.com that we support - previously edited by Tarn Rodgers Johns, and now by Layman Pascal, and it has been a series of 2-3 day gatherings (Berlin in 2018 and 2021, Kyiv in 2019, and several local, smaller ones). When Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, we also hosted online sessions with our Ukrainian network, including a day-long “Explosion of Social Trust” event for Ukraine in June 2023 (our only 8-hour online video!) and later, Emerge was involved with a Pilgrimage to Kyiv. More recently, Ivo Mensch and Leigh Biddlecome acted for Emerge, supported by Perspectiva, in the Cohere Plus project, which was funded by the EU Erasmus scheme.
I have personally written several pieces making sense of the initiative, often ahead of critical meetings, including What is Emerging? in 2019. Perspectiva also employed a Director of Emergence to run the Emerge project (Professor Anna Katharina Schaffner) from 2021 to 2022. We have given editorial and financial support to the website and to staff and associates contributing to various aspects of the work.
Emerge has other sub-projects where Perspectiva has not been involved, or where our role is auxiliary. For instance, there was a major Emerge North America event in Austin Texas in 2022 where our Chair of Trustees played a leading role, but Perspectiva staff had no role in designing the gathering, though we did support it with the series Now that you’ve found the others, what are you going to do? which was shared for participants to read and discuss before the event. To give some idea of the impact of these Emerge events, please see a fascinating and extended reflection on the event by Astrid Montuclard in Integral Leadership Review and a challenging but still broadly supportive reflection by Brendan Graham Dempsey.
In other cases, our role is more associative. The Emerge podcast by Daniel Thorson, for instance, was an invaluable part of the Emerge ecosystem, and it shared the Emerge brand, but it was initiated and led independently - and very well - by Daniel.
More recently, Emerge Lakefront is a major new conscious co-living initiative on the outskirts of Stockholm, a wonderful place and a boon to the network, but again, where Perspectiva has no direct responsibility.
There is also a European Worldmaking Forum scheduled in Berlin for October 23-25, 2026, which will invite the Emerge network. I plan to be there, and the organisation still supports the event in a range of ways, not least due to our own commitment to worldmaking and desire to contribute to joint European efforts, but it is not a Perspectiva event.
So, as you can see, Perspectiva has played a defining role in Emerge, but the project appears to be evolving in ways that make it easier for us to let it go to a large extent, which is important as we release capacity to focus on other things.
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I have been reflecting on the part Emerge has played in Perspectiva’s work so far. On our website, which, like most websites, needs updating, if you click on what we ‘Do’ you see the options on the right:
The whole theory of change is for another time, but these terms each reflect a different idea of what we believe needs to happen and how we hope to contribute. Insight is mostly about our intellectual output in books, essays, and events; Praxis is mostly about innovations in socio-spiritual inquiry and new forms of embodied and relational learning, including our antidebate methodology. Realisation is mostly about our commitment to 21st-century Bildung, which initially manifested as an annual festival. And Emergence is fundamentally about social diffusion across networks, and it manifested in the Emerge project. At a time when the world is profoundly stuck in its capacity to respond to incipient collapse, Perspectva felt we needed new ideas, but also that since ideas compete with each other, we need ideas enacted in new practices to shift inertia; we hope the learnings from both theory and practice might manifest in new cultural and educational forms. That requires receptive and generative social networks to help create what is sometimes called a norm cascade, moving the future from the margins into the centre of world-creating activity.
More recently, in terms of our premises, the activities of the Emerge project speak from and to all of them in some ways, but principally to premises one, four, five, eight and, at least potentially, ten.
On Perspectiva’s website, we describe Emerge as follows:
Philosophically, Emerge is inspired by the way the meaning of emergence highlights the possibility of a different intentional stance towards the world; one that is grounded in receptivity, intuition and subtlety rather than ideology, reason and force. We (and yes, it might be an impossible we) are informed by the scale of the meta-crisis and we are not politically naïve. Some call it a spiritual perspective in the sense that it’s less about imposing our wills than listening deeply to what we appear to be called upon to be and do. The challenge for each of us is to accept the reality of our contingency and interdependence, because “I am part of all that” – while also taking responsibility for our uniqueness and autonomy – because “I am part of all that”. And that tension between our actions not really mattering, and the fact that all that matters arises in a world awash with greed, hatred and delusion, when it is not even clear if we are on the right side of history. Are we the good guys? It is a different kind of game. All over the world, networks and organisations are rising up to explore unchartered intellectual, spiritual or cultural terrain that invites ways of being, thinking, and doing and building new forms of institutional praxis and political capital around them. Such initiatives are at the heart of our Emerge network.
So far, so nostalgic. Now what?
As with a few other projects, Perspectiva has acted as an incubator for something that has expanded and consolidated and is ready for new oversight and direction. We will always be co-initiators and early shapers of the project and its network, and will continue to support Emerge as far as we can. However, it is time for Perspectiva to pass along managerial responsibility to a recently created entity called The Emerge Institute, which is registered as a non-profit initiative in Sweden, and is currently acting as the educational/practice arm of Emerge Lakefront.
Perspectiva will still be closely connected to the Emerge project in its new instantiations. The whatisemerging.com website is old and lacks interactive capacity, so there will not be new postings there for very long. Instead, the current intention is to create a new Emerge Substack, which will be the responsibility of The Emerge Institute. That substack will begin by including highlights from the Emerge website over the last few years until the Emerge Institute is ready to share its new offerings, most likely from the Autumn onwards.
As a reminder, if you don’t wish to receive these messages, there is an unsubscribe button at the bottom of the message. That’s all for now on admin.
On more exciting matters, I can warmly recommend recent Katie Teague videos, particularly on Cynthia Bourgeault, and Zak Stein - both are truly excellent and well worth your time.
In our next post, we’ll be announcing a new book by Perspectiva Press. There are many ways to frame what it’s about, but it can be seen as a radical way to attempt to transform the relationship between systems, souls and society in theory and practice.
It’s about anarchism, no less. The state we’re in is not unrelated to the nature and purpose of the states we have. Rather than look to the state for answers, what if the answer lies in freeing ourselves from reliance on the state?
See you again soon.
Jonathan Rowson, CEO of Perspectiva and Co-Initiator of Emerge.
I appreciate the effort to share your process with others so thoroughly and thoughtfully. Perspectiva is truly a beacon of light...
After reading this I feel like I can exhale and reconnect with hope. Looking forward to connecting with this dynamic emergence. Thank you.