Jean Gebser
Encyclopedia
Jean Gebser was a philosopher who described the structures of human consciousness
, a linguist
, and a poet
.
in Imperial Germany
(now Poland
), he left Germany
in 1929, living for a time in Italy and then in France. He then moved to Spain
, mastered the Spanish language
in a few months and entered the Spanish Civil Service where he rose to become a senior official in the Spanish Ministry of Education. He was also a published poet. When the Spanish Civil War
began, he moved to Paris. He lived in Paris
for a while but saw the unavoidability of German invasion. He fled to Switzerland
in 1939, escaping only hours before the frontier was closed. He spent the rest of his life near Bern, where he did most of his writing.
Late in life, Gebser travelled widely in India
, the Far East
, and the Americas
, and wrote half a dozen more books. Gebser was as much a man of science and the arts as he was a mystic
. In fact it would be a serious mistake to believe that he favored mystifying dogma over transparent explanations. He was no proponent of fascist or other ideologies using various cultic symbols and myths for self-justification.
He died on May 14, 1973 "with a soft and knowing smile." Gebser had written in Die Schlafenden Jahre, "When we are born we cry and weep, when we die we should smile." Algis Mickunas, professor emeritus of philosophy at Ohio University
was given a tape of Gebser's last death-bed utterances by Gebser's widow and this tape has been digitally enhanced by the media laboratory at the University of Oklahoma
(his weakened state and his asthma made him difficult to understand). This and other personal letters and publications are held at the Gebser Archives at the University of Oklahoma History of Science
Collections, Norman, Oklahoma
, Bizzel Libraries.
from 1914 to 1945 were the symptoms of a structure of consciousness that was at the end of its effectiveness, and which heralded the birth of a new form of consciousness. The first evidence he witnessed was in the novel use of language
and literature
. He modified this position in 1943 so as to include the changes which were occurring in the arts and sciences at that time.
His thesis of the failure of one structure of consciousness alongside the emergence of a new one led him to inquire as to whether such had not occurred before. His work, Ursprung und Gegenwart is the result of that inquiry. It was published in various editions from 1949 to 1953, and translated into English as The Ever-Present Origin. Working from the historical evidence of almost every major field, (e.g., poetry
, music
, visual arts, architecture
, philosophy
, religion
, physics
and the other natural science
s, etc.) Gebser saw traces of the emergence (which he called "efficiency") and collapse ("deficiency") of various structures of consciousness throughout history
.
Gebser's theory is that human consciousness is in transition, and that these transitions are "mutations" and not continuous. These jumps or transformations involve structural changes in both mind
and body
. There are a number of these levels:
and time
. For example, the myth
ical structure embodies time as cyclical/rhythmic and space as enclosed. The mental structure lives time as linear
, directed or "progressive" and space becomes the box-like, vacuum-like homogeneous space of geometry
.
The deficient form of the mental structure Gebser called the 'rational' structure. The rational structure of awareness seeks to deny the other structures with its claim that humans are exclusively rational.
As each consciousness structure erupts, it also eventually becomes deficient. Gebser held that previous consciousness structures continue to operate parallel to the emergent structure.
claims that "everything is nothing but matter
— atoms". Philosophy, the love of wisdom, is replaced with instrumental reason, the ability "to make". Contemplation
—looking inward—is devalued in relation to what one "can do". "Wise men" fall out of favor and are replaced by the "man of action." Successes in technologically
re-shaping matter offer solutions to some problems but also give rise to problems of their own making. Mechanized slaughter of two world war
s and the new atomic weapons exemplified and symbolized the expression of the ontology
of the rational/mental structure. Living becomes hard to bear in such a consciousness structure.
Some saw the cause of this despair as a lack of value
s or ethics
. Gebser saw that it is the very consciousness structure itself which has played out to its inherent end. He saw that its metaphysical
presumptions necessarily led to this ethical dead end. A "value-free" ontology like materialism leads of necessity to living "without value". Any attempt to remedy the situation by a return to "values" would ultimately fail. But it was through this very quagmire
of "the decline of the West
" that Gebser saw the emergence of a new structure of consciousness which he termed the integral.
opposed and "static" categories of Being
gave way to transparency.
Transparency points to how it is that the one is "given-through" and always "along-with" the other. For centuries, time was viewed as having distinct categories of past, present and future. These categories were said to be wholly distinct one from the other. Of course, this created all kinds of difficulties regarding how beings moved from one category to the other — from present to past, for example. What integral awareness notices is that though we may utilize categorical thinking for various purposes, we also have the realization that time is an indivisible whole
. That various beings in the present are crystallized from the past, and which also extend into the future. In fact, without already having an integral awareness, one could have no notion of time as "past" or "present", etc. Without the awareness of the whole, one would be stuck in a kind of "not-knowing" of an always only "now" not connected to any sense of past or future. Even the mental awareness which divides this whole into distinct categories could not have become aware of those categories without an awareness which was already integral. Thus, awareness is already integral.
Gebser introduced the notion of presentiation which means to make something present through transparency. An aspect of integral awareness is the presentiation, or "making present", of the various structures of awareness. Rather than allowing only one (rational) structure to be valid, all structures are recognized, presented, one through the other. This awareness of and acceptance of the various structures enables one to live through the various structures rather than to be subjected to them ("lived by" them in German).
To realize the various structures within one's language and habits, and even within one's own life and self is a difficult task. But Gebser says that it is a task that we cannot choose to ignore without losing ourselves. This means that our so-called "objective thinking" is not without consequences, is not innocent. That to live "objectively" means to give life to the horrors of nihilism
combined with the know how of highly "efficient" weapons. It means that "objectivity" gets applied to "engineering humanity" whether it is in the behavioral sciences or the physical science
s. He asks of us whether or not we have as of yet had our fill of those horrors. Are we willing to settle into the comfort of our daily life or to take on the process of change? He offers as a guiding note that just as there is also a time to act, there is also the much neglected time of contemplation. In a world where know-how is overvalued, simple knowing must also be nurtured in contemplation. Furthermore, he knew that thought was never simply a mental exercise restricted to one's writing. He calls upon us to realize that we are what we think.
Gebser traces the evidence for the transformations of the structure of consciousness as they are concretized in historical artifacts. He sought to avoid calling this process "evolutionary", since any such notion was illusory when applied to the "unfolding of consciousness." Gebser emphasized that biological evolution is an enclosing process which particularizes a species to a limited environment
. The unfolding of awareness is, by contrast, an opening-up.
Any attempt to give a direction or goal to the unfolding of awareness is illusory in that it is based upon a limited, mentalistic, linear notion of time. Gebser notes that "to progress" is to move toward something and is thus also to move away from something else; therefore, progress is an inappropriate term to describe the structures of consciousness. Gebser wrote that the question as to the fate of humanity is still open, that for it to become closed would be the ultimate tragedy, but that such a closure remains a possibility. To Gebser, our fate is not assured by any notion of "an evolution toward" any kind of ideal way of being.
's Logik der Rettung (translated into English as Avoiding Social and Ecological Disaster), Hugo Enomiya-Lassalle
's Living in the New consciousness, Daniel Kealey's Revisioning Environmental Ethics, Georg Feuerstein
's Wholeness or Transcendence, and Eric Mark Kramer's Modern/Postmodern: Off the Beaten Path of Antimodernism.
Ken Wilber
referred to and quoted Gebser (along with many other theorists) in his 1981 Up from Eden and subsequent works. Wilber found Gebser's 'pioneering' work to align to his own model of consciousness, although Wilber finds evidence for additional later mystical stages beyond Gebser's integral structure.
In his 1996 Coming into Being, William Irwin Thompson
compared Gebser's structures of consciousness to Marshall McLuhan
's conception of the development of communication technology from oral culture to script culture, alphabetic culture, print culture
, and then to the emerging electronic culture
. Thompson applied these insights to education theory
in his 2001 Transforming History: A Curriculum for Cultural Evolution. In his 2004 Self and Society: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness, and in collaboration with the mathematician Ralph Abraham
, Thompson further related Gebser's structures to periods in the development of mathematics
(arithmetic
, geometric, algebraic
, dynamical, chaotic
) and in the history of music
.
Gebser's integral philosophy is evaluated and applied to New Age
thinking about a nascent shift in consciousness in the 2006 book 2012, The Return of Quetzalcoatl by Daniel Pinchbeck
. In A Secret History of Consciousness (2003) cultural historian Gary Lachman links Gebser's work to that of other alternative philosophers of consciousness, such as Owen Barfield
, Rudolf Steiner
, Colin Wilson
, and Jurij Moskvitin
.
Consciousness
Consciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind...
, a linguist
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
, and a poet
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
.
Biography
Born Hans Gebser in PosenPoznan
Poznań is a city on the Warta river in west-central Poland, with a population of 556,022 in June 2009. It is among the oldest cities in Poland, and was one of the most important centres in the early Polish state, whose first rulers were buried at Poznań's cathedral. It is sometimes claimed to be...
in Imperial Germany
German Empire
The German Empire refers to Germany during the "Second Reich" period from the unification of Germany and proclamation of Wilhelm I as German Emperor on 18 January 1871, to 1918, when it became a federal republic after defeat in World War I and the abdication of the Emperor, Wilhelm II.The German...
(now Poland
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
), he left Germany
Weimar Republic
The Weimar Republic is the name given by historians to the parliamentary republic established in 1919 in Germany to replace the imperial form of government...
in 1929, living for a time in Italy and then in France. He then moved to Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
, mastered the Spanish language
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
in a few months and entered the Spanish Civil Service where he rose to become a senior official in the Spanish Ministry of Education. He was also a published poet. When the Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
began, he moved to Paris. He lived in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
for a while but saw the unavoidability of German invasion. He fled to Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
in 1939, escaping only hours before the frontier was closed. He spent the rest of his life near Bern, where he did most of his writing.
Late in life, Gebser travelled widely in India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
, the Far East
Far East
The Far East is an English term mostly describing East Asia and Southeast Asia, with South Asia sometimes also included for economic and cultural reasons.The term came into use in European geopolitical discourse in the 19th century,...
, and the Americas
Americas
The Americas, or America , are lands in the Western hemisphere, also known as the New World. In English, the plural form the Americas is often used to refer to the landmasses of North America and South America with their associated islands and regions, while the singular form America is primarily...
, and wrote half a dozen more books. Gebser was as much a man of science and the arts as he was a mystic
Mysticism
Mysticism is the knowledge of, and especially the personal experience of, states of consciousness, i.e. levels of being, beyond normal human perception, including experience and even communion with a supreme being.-Classical origins:...
. In fact it would be a serious mistake to believe that he favored mystifying dogma over transparent explanations. He was no proponent of fascist or other ideologies using various cultic symbols and myths for self-justification.
He died on May 14, 1973 "with a soft and knowing smile." Gebser had written in Die Schlafenden Jahre, "When we are born we cry and weep, when we die we should smile." Algis Mickunas, professor emeritus of philosophy at Ohio University
Ohio University
Ohio University is a public university located in the Midwestern United States in Athens, Ohio, situated on an campus...
was given a tape of Gebser's last death-bed utterances by Gebser's widow and this tape has been digitally enhanced by the media laboratory at the University of Oklahoma
University of Oklahoma
The University of Oklahoma is a coeducational public research university located in Norman, Oklahoma. Founded in 1890, it existed in Oklahoma Territory near Indian Territory for 17 years before the two became the state of Oklahoma. the university had 29,931 students enrolled, most located at its...
(his weakened state and his asthma made him difficult to understand). This and other personal letters and publications are held at the Gebser Archives at the University of Oklahoma History of Science
History of science
The history of science is the study of the historical development of human understandings of the natural world and the domains of the social sciences....
Collections, Norman, Oklahoma
Norman, Oklahoma
Norman is a city in Cleveland County, Oklahoma, United States, and is located south of downtown Oklahoma City. It is part of the Oklahoma City metropolitan area. As of the 2010 census, Norman was to have 110,925 full-time residents, making it the third-largest city in Oklahoma and the...
, Bizzel Libraries.
Ideas
His major thesis was that the stress and chaos in EuropeEurope
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
from 1914 to 1945 were the symptoms of a structure of consciousness that was at the end of its effectiveness, and which heralded the birth of a new form of consciousness. The first evidence he witnessed was in the novel use of language
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
and literature
Literature
Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...
. He modified this position in 1943 so as to include the changes which were occurring in the arts and sciences at that time.
His thesis of the failure of one structure of consciousness alongside the emergence of a new one led him to inquire as to whether such had not occurred before. His work, Ursprung und Gegenwart is the result of that inquiry. It was published in various editions from 1949 to 1953, and translated into English as The Ever-Present Origin. Working from the historical evidence of almost every major field, (e.g., poetry
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
, music
Music
Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...
, visual arts, architecture
Architecture
Architecture is both the process and product of planning, designing and construction. Architectural works, in the material form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural and political symbols and as works of art...
, philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
, religion
Religion
Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...
, physics
Physics
Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...
and the other natural science
Natural science
The natural sciences are branches of science that seek to elucidate the rules that govern the natural world by using empirical and scientific methods...
s, etc.) Gebser saw traces of the emergence (which he called "efficiency") and collapse ("deficiency") of various structures of consciousness throughout history
History
History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...
.
Gebser's theory is that human consciousness is in transition, and that these transitions are "mutations" and not continuous. These jumps or transformations involve structural changes in both mind
Mind
The concept of mind is understood in many different ways by many different traditions, ranging from panpsychism and animism to traditional and organized religious views, as well as secular and materialist philosophies. Most agree that minds are constituted by conscious experience and intelligent...
and body
Body
With regard to living things, a body is the physical body of an individual. "Body" often is used in connection with appearance, health issues and death...
. There are a number of these levels:
- The archaic structure
- The magic structure
- The mythical structure
- The mental structure
- The integral stage
The structures of consciousness
Gebser notes that the various structures of consciousness are revealed by their relationship to spaceSpace
Space is the boundless, three-dimensional extent in which objects and events occur and have relative position and direction. Physical space is often conceived in three linear dimensions, although modern physicists usually consider it, with time, to be part of a boundless four-dimensional continuum...
and time
Time
Time is a part of the measuring system used to sequence events, to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify rates of change such as the motions of objects....
. For example, the myth
Mythology
The term mythology can refer either to the study of myths, or to a body or collection of myths. As examples, comparative mythology is the study of connections between myths from different cultures, whereas Greek mythology is the body of myths from ancient Greece...
ical structure embodies time as cyclical/rhythmic and space as enclosed. The mental structure lives time as linear
Linear
In mathematics, a linear map or function f is a function which satisfies the following two properties:* Additivity : f = f + f...
, directed or "progressive" and space becomes the box-like, vacuum-like homogeneous space of geometry
Geometry
Geometry arose as the field of knowledge dealing with spatial relationships. Geometry was one of the two fields of pre-modern mathematics, the other being the study of numbers ....
.
The deficient form of the mental structure Gebser called the 'rational' structure. The rational structure of awareness seeks to deny the other structures with its claim that humans are exclusively rational.
As each consciousness structure erupts, it also eventually becomes deficient. Gebser held that previous consciousness structures continue to operate parallel to the emergent structure.
The mental structure
The rational structure is known for its extremes as evidenced in various "nothing but..." statements. Extreme materialismMaterialism
In philosophy, the theory of materialism holds that the only thing that exists is matter; that all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions. In other words, matter is the only substance...
claims that "everything is nothing but matter
Matter
Matter is a general term for the substance of which all physical objects consist. Typically, matter includes atoms and other particles which have mass. A common way of defining matter is as anything that has mass and occupies volume...
— atoms". Philosophy, the love of wisdom, is replaced with instrumental reason, the ability "to make". Contemplation
Contemplation
The word contemplation comes from the Latin word contemplatio. Its root is also that of the Latin word templum, a piece of ground consecrated for the taking of auspices, or a building for worship, derived either from Proto-Indo-European base *tem- "to cut", and so a "place reserved or cut out" or...
—looking inward—is devalued in relation to what one "can do". "Wise men" fall out of favor and are replaced by the "man of action." Successes in technologically
Technology
Technology is the making, usage, and knowledge of tools, machines, techniques, crafts, systems or methods of organization in order to solve a problem or perform a specific function. It can also refer to the collection of such tools, machinery, and procedures. The word technology comes ;...
re-shaping matter offer solutions to some problems but also give rise to problems of their own making. Mechanized slaughter of two world war
World war
A world war is a war affecting the majority of the world's most powerful and populous nations. World wars span multiple countries on multiple continents, with battles fought in multiple theaters....
s and the new atomic weapons exemplified and symbolized the expression of the ontology
Ontology
Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations...
of the rational/mental structure. Living becomes hard to bear in such a consciousness structure.
Some saw the cause of this despair as a lack of value
Value (personal and cultural)
A personal or cultural value is an absolute or relative ethical value, the assumption of which can be the basis for ethical action. A value system is a set of consistent values and measures. A principle value is a foundation upon which other values and measures of integrity are based...
s or ethics
Ethics
Ethics, also known as moral philosophy, is a branch of philosophy that addresses questions about morality—that is, concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime, etc.Major branches of ethics include:...
. Gebser saw that it is the very consciousness structure itself which has played out to its inherent end. He saw that its metaphysical
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...
presumptions necessarily led to this ethical dead end. A "value-free" ontology like materialism leads of necessity to living "without value". Any attempt to remedy the situation by a return to "values" would ultimately fail. But it was through this very quagmire
Quagmire
Quagmire may refer to:* Water infused earth or a bog. Solid ground may turn to quagmire following substantial rainfall.* By extension, a situation that is difficult to get out of.* A tactical defense made when defending a territory close to a river...
of "the decline of the West
Western world
The Western world, also known as the West and the Occident , is a term referring to the countries of Western Europe , the countries of the Americas, as well all countries of Northern and Central Europe, Australia and New Zealand...
" that Gebser saw the emergence of a new structure of consciousness which he termed the integral.
The integral structure
The integral consciousness structure was made evident by a new relationship to space and time. In the second part of his work, Gebser set out to document the evidence that he saw throughout various human endeavors. Of note here were the incorporation of time in physics, the attempts to "paint" time in the visual arts and the like. Gebser noticed that the integral structure of consciousness was largely witnessed as the irruption of time into the "fixed-reality" of the mental structure. For Gebser, dualisticallyDualism
Dualism denotes a state of two parts. The term 'dualism' was originally coined to denote co-eternal binary opposition, a meaning that is preserved in metaphysical and philosophical duality discourse but has been diluted in general or common usages. Dualism can refer to moral dualism, Dualism (from...
opposed and "static" categories of Being
Being
Being , is an English word used for conceptualizing subjective and objective aspects of reality, including those fundamental to the self —related to and somewhat interchangeable with terms like "existence" and "living".In its objective usage —as in "a being," or "[a] human being" —it...
gave way to transparency.
Transparency points to how it is that the one is "given-through" and always "along-with" the other. For centuries, time was viewed as having distinct categories of past, present and future. These categories were said to be wholly distinct one from the other. Of course, this created all kinds of difficulties regarding how beings moved from one category to the other — from present to past, for example. What integral awareness notices is that though we may utilize categorical thinking for various purposes, we also have the realization that time is an indivisible whole
Holism
Holism is the idea that all the properties of a given system cannot be determined or explained by its component parts alone...
. That various beings in the present are crystallized from the past, and which also extend into the future. In fact, without already having an integral awareness, one could have no notion of time as "past" or "present", etc. Without the awareness of the whole, one would be stuck in a kind of "not-knowing" of an always only "now" not connected to any sense of past or future. Even the mental awareness which divides this whole into distinct categories could not have become aware of those categories without an awareness which was already integral. Thus, awareness is already integral.
Gebser introduced the notion of presentiation which means to make something present through transparency. An aspect of integral awareness is the presentiation, or "making present", of the various structures of awareness. Rather than allowing only one (rational) structure to be valid, all structures are recognized, presented, one through the other. This awareness of and acceptance of the various structures enables one to live through the various structures rather than to be subjected to them ("lived by" them in German).
To realize the various structures within one's language and habits, and even within one's own life and self is a difficult task. But Gebser says that it is a task that we cannot choose to ignore without losing ourselves. This means that our so-called "objective thinking" is not without consequences, is not innocent. That to live "objectively" means to give life to the horrors of nihilism
Nihilism
Nihilism is the philosophical doctrine suggesting the negation of one or more putatively meaningful aspects of life. Most commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of existential nihilism which argues that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value...
combined with the know how of highly "efficient" weapons. It means that "objectivity" gets applied to "engineering humanity" whether it is in the behavioral sciences or the physical science
Physical science
Physical science is an encompassing term for the branches of natural science and science that study non-living systems, in contrast to the life sciences...
s. He asks of us whether or not we have as of yet had our fill of those horrors. Are we willing to settle into the comfort of our daily life or to take on the process of change? He offers as a guiding note that just as there is also a time to act, there is also the much neglected time of contemplation. In a world where know-how is overvalued, simple knowing must also be nurtured in contemplation. Furthermore, he knew that thought was never simply a mental exercise restricted to one's writing. He calls upon us to realize that we are what we think.
Terminology
Gebser cautioned against using terms like evolution, progression, or development to describe the changes in structures of consciousness that he described.Gebser traces the evidence for the transformations of the structure of consciousness as they are concretized in historical artifacts. He sought to avoid calling this process "evolutionary", since any such notion was illusory when applied to the "unfolding of consciousness." Gebser emphasized that biological evolution is an enclosing process which particularizes a species to a limited environment
Ecosystem
An ecosystem is a biological environment consisting of all the organisms living in a particular area, as well as all the nonliving , physical components of the environment with which the organisms interact, such as air, soil, water and sunlight....
. The unfolding of awareness is, by contrast, an opening-up.
Any attempt to give a direction or goal to the unfolding of awareness is illusory in that it is based upon a limited, mentalistic, linear notion of time. Gebser notes that "to progress" is to move toward something and is thus also to move away from something else; therefore, progress is an inappropriate term to describe the structures of consciousness. Gebser wrote that the question as to the fate of humanity is still open, that for it to become closed would be the ultimate tragedy, but that such a closure remains a possibility. To Gebser, our fate is not assured by any notion of "an evolution toward" any kind of ideal way of being.
Influence
His work has formed the basis of a number of other important studies, in particular Rudolf BahroRudolf Bahro
Rudolf Bahro was a philosopher, political figure and author who was a noted East German dissident and who became a leader of the West German party The Greens...
's Logik der Rettung (translated into English as Avoiding Social and Ecological Disaster), Hugo Enomiya-Lassalle
Hugo Enomiya-Lassalle
Aiun-ken Hugo Makibi Enomiya-Lassalle was a German Jesuit priest and one of the foremost teachers to embrace both Roman Catholic Christianity and Zen Buddhism.Enomiya-Lassalle joined the Society of Jesus on the 25 april 1919...
's Living in the New consciousness, Daniel Kealey's Revisioning Environmental Ethics, Georg Feuerstein
Georg Feuerstein
Dr. Georg Feuerstein is a German-Canadian Indologist specializing on Yoga. Feuerstein has authored over 30 books on mysticism, Yoga, Tantra, and Hinduism...
's Wholeness or Transcendence, and Eric Mark Kramer's Modern/Postmodern: Off the Beaten Path of Antimodernism.
Ken Wilber
Ken Wilber
Kenneth Earl Wilber II is an American author who has written about mysticism, philosophy, ecology, and developmental psychology. His work formulates what he calls Integral Theory. In 1998, he founded the Integral Institute, for teaching and applications of Integral theory.-Biography:Ken Wilber was...
referred to and quoted Gebser (along with many other theorists) in his 1981 Up from Eden and subsequent works. Wilber found Gebser's 'pioneering' work to align to his own model of consciousness, although Wilber finds evidence for additional later mystical stages beyond Gebser's integral structure.
In his 1996 Coming into Being, William Irwin Thompson
William Irwin Thompson
William Irwin Thompson is known primarily as a social philosopher and cultural critic, but he has also been writing and publishing poetry throughout his career and received the Oslo International Poetry Festival Award in 1986. He describes his writing and speaking style as "mind-jazz on ancient...
compared Gebser's structures of consciousness to Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
Herbert Marshall McLuhan, CC was a Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar—a professor of English literature, a literary critic, a rhetorician, and a communication theorist...
's conception of the development of communication technology from oral culture to script culture, alphabetic culture, print culture
Print culture
Print culture embodies all forms of printed text and other printed forms of visual communication. One prominent scholar in the field is Elizabeth Eisenstein, who contrasted print culture, which appeared in Europe in the centuries after the advent of the Western printing-press , to scribal culture...
, and then to the emerging electronic culture
Electronic media
Electronic media are media that use electronics or electromechanical energy for the end-user to access the content. This is in contrast to static media , which today are most often created electronically, but don't require electronics to be accessed by the end-user in the printed form...
. Thompson applied these insights to education theory
Education theory
Educational theory can refer to either speculative educational thought in general or to a theory of education as something that guides, explains, or describes educational practice....
in his 2001 Transforming History: A Curriculum for Cultural Evolution. In his 2004 Self and Society: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness, and in collaboration with the mathematician Ralph Abraham
Ralph Abraham
Ralph H. Abraham is an American mathematician. He has been a member of the mathematics department at the University of California, Santa Cruz since 1968.- Life and work :...
, Thompson further related Gebser's structures to periods in the development of mathematics
History of mathematics
The area of study known as the history of mathematics is primarily an investigation into the origin of discoveries in mathematics and, to a lesser extent, an investigation into the mathematical methods and notation of the past....
(arithmetic
Arithmetic
Arithmetic or arithmetics is the oldest and most elementary branch of mathematics, used by almost everyone, for tasks ranging from simple day-to-day counting to advanced science and business calculations. It involves the study of quantity, especially as the result of combining numbers...
, geometric, algebraic
Algebraic
Algebraic may refer to any subject within the algebra branch of mathematics and related branches like algebraic geometry and algebraic topology.Algebraic may also refer to:...
, dynamical, chaotic
Chaos theory
Chaos theory is a field of study in mathematics, with applications in several disciplines including physics, economics, biology, and philosophy. Chaos theory studies the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions, an effect which is popularly referred to as the...
) and in the history of music
History of music
Music is found in every known culture, past and present, varying wildly between times and places. Around 50,000 years ago, early modern humans began to disperse from Africa, reaching all the habitable continents...
.
Gebser's integral philosophy is evaluated and applied to New Age
New Age
The New Age movement is a Western spiritual movement that developed in the second half of the 20th century. Its central precepts have been described as "drawing on both Eastern and Western spiritual and metaphysical traditions and then infusing them with influences from self-help and motivational...
thinking about a nascent shift in consciousness in the 2006 book 2012, The Return of Quetzalcoatl by Daniel Pinchbeck
Daniel Pinchbeck
Daniel Pinchbeck is an author living in New York’s East Village, where he is editorial director of Reality Sandwich, a blog website centered around New Age philosophy and activism. He is the author of Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism and 2012:...
. In A Secret History of Consciousness (2003) cultural historian Gary Lachman links Gebser's work to that of other alternative philosophers of consciousness, such as Owen Barfield
Owen Barfield
Owen Barfield was a British philosopher, author, poet, and critic.Barfield was born in London. He was educated at Highgate School and Wadham College, Oxford and in 1920 received a 1st class degree in English language and literature. After finishing his B. Litt., which became the book Poetic...
, Rudolf Steiner
Rudolf Steiner
Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was an Austrian philosopher, social reformer, architect, and esotericist. He gained initial recognition as a literary critic and cultural philosopher...
, Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
Colin Henry Wilson is a prolific English writer who first came to prominence as a philosopher and novelist. Wilson has since written widely on true crime, mysticism and other topics. He prefers calling his philosophy new existentialism or phenomenological existentialism.- Early biography:Born and...
, and Jurij Moskvitin
Jurij Moskvitin
Jurij Moskvitin was a classical pianist, composer, philosopher, mathematician and boheme....
.
English
- The Ever-Present Origin by Jean Gebser, authorized translation by Noel Barstad with Algis Mickunas (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985, 1991)
- Anxiety, a Condition of Modern Man (Visual series, 2) by Heiri Steiner and Jean Gebser (Paperback - 1962)
German
- Rilke und Spanien, 1936–1939
- Der grammatischer Spiegel, 1944
- Einbruch der Zeit, 1995
English
- Structures of Consciousness: The Genius of Jean Gebser: An Introduction and Critique by Georg FeuersteinGeorg FeuersteinDr. Georg Feuerstein is a German-Canadian Indologist specializing on Yoga. Feuerstein has authored over 30 books on mysticism, Yoga, Tantra, and Hinduism...
(Feb 1987) - Jean Gebser: What Color Is Your Consciousness by Georg Feuerstein (May 1989)
- Consciousness and Culture: An Introduction to the Thought of Jean Gebser (Contributions in Sociology) by Eric Mark Kramer (Nov 30, 1992)
German
- Adolf Portmann, Jean Gebser, Johann Jakob Bachofen: Drei Kulturforscher, drei Bilder vom Menschen (Texte, Thesen ; 67) by Joachim Illies (1975)
- Das schwierige Kind: Jean Gebsers Bewusstseinsphänomenologie in der kinder- und jugendpsychiatrischen Praxis (Reihe Psychologie) by Ursula Assing-Grosch (1993)
- Jean Gebser (1905 - 1973). by Elmar Schübl (Mar 1, 2003)
External links
- The Jean Gebser Society
- Gebser Online
- An Overview of the work of Jean Gebser
- Inner and Outer Realities: - Jean Gebser in a Cultural/Historical Perspective by Allan CombsAllan CombsAllan Combs is a consciousness researcher, neuropsychologist, and systems theorist. He considers his most significant work to be the development of a developmental/evolutionary model of the mind using concepts from systems science. Much of this was accomplished in collaboration with his friend and...
- An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean Gebser, originally published in Integrative Investigations, January 1997, Volume 4 Number 1.
- The Integral and the Spiritual in Ken Wilber and Jean Gebser by Steven Swanson, JOY: The Journal of Yoga, September 2002, Volume 1, Number 1, (pdf)