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A Review Essay on Jean
Gebser
Toward a New
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It has become almost banal to state that we live in decisive times, at the brink of a historical chasm. On the one side, we have the apostles of doom; on the other, we have the optimists who tell us of a new millennium that will bring harmony, peace and love to our blue planet. Both camps cite their evidence. Much of it is convincing, and much is a matter of interpretation and subjective preference.
As extreme positions, neither view is convincing. The former typically leads, if not to resignation, then to piecemeal scientistic tinkering with the natural and socio-political environment, which is apt to aggravate the situation rather than remedy it. As for the latter, while there is undoubtedly much that is valid and true in the alternative approaches of what is called "New Age" thought, there is also a great deal of humbug associated with it.
What is clearly needed is a realistic response to the present-day global crisis—a response that takes into account the great seriousness of our problems without getting overwhelmed by it all, and that simultaneously appreciates the fact that what we are facing today is primarily a crisis of consciousness. As such it is a crisis that affects and concerns us individually and collectively and that demands both individual and collective measures.
This is where the work of the Swiss cultural philosopher Jean Gebser (1905-1973) can make a profound contribution.
Gebser's monumental work on the evolution of human consciousness first published in Germany in the early 1950s is now attracting increasing attention in the United States. His ingenious model grew out of an intuitive flash he had as far back as 1932, in which he came to understand that the massive changes that the Western world has been witnessing since the beginning of the twentieth century are manifestations of a fundamental shift in our cognitive style. Just as every person experiences life, or reality, in a certain way, so also whole cultures and epochs have their distinct style of thought and life—a shared fundamental pattern of interpreting what is "really" happening.
Gebser read the breakthrough in our century as a radical transformation in our most basic cognitive framework, that is, a structural change in consciousness. He understood it as a dramatic shift toward what he later called the arational consciousness (as opposed to "irrational"). (See note on page 25.) A large part of his subsequent labors was devoted to fleshing out that holistic glimpse, both by going back into our past and by looking more closely at the remarkable developments of the present.
His unique contribution is undoubtedly the evolutionary model that he elaborated in order to account for that cognitive restructuring. Proceeding as a cultural phenomenologist, Gebser was able to identify four major configurations of consciousness is our collective past. He named these as follows:
1)the archaic structure,
2)the magical structure,
3)the mythical structure, and
4)the mental structure.
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The Archeology of Consciousness Gebser's monumental work The Ever-Present Origin is an outstanding contribution toward the archeology of consciousness. Basically, Gebser illustrates, using a wealth of cultural-historical data, a) that our human species has traversed a series of cognitive leaps, or restructurings of consciousness, and b) that we are currently witnesses to, and participants in, a fifth major reorganization of our cognitive field—the emergent arational structure of consciousness.* Gebser further argues c) that the modern psyche is the aggregate of all historically preceding structure and d) that these must be lived according to their own particular valency and in integrated harmony. Mental Structure Only with the European Renaissance do we see the seedlings of a new rationality that is at once more egocentric and demythologizing—the kind of rationality that has led us into the cul-de-sac of the nuclear arms race and the ecological devastation of our planet. Mythical Structure Magical Structure Archaic Structure *The arational-integral structure, which is trying to constellate itself in our epoch, is an integrating type of consciousness that transcends all preceding (but still co-present) structures of consciousness. |
Each structure represents a distinct framework, or unconscious paradigm, within which the world is interpreted. An earlier generation of anthropologists distinguished between a logical and a prelogical mentality. This was a simplistic distinction that deservedly courted criticism and also suffered from a great deal of misunderstanding. Gebser's differentiation into an archaic, a magical, a mythical, and a mental structure of consciousness is appealing because it actually does justice to the complex data about premodern mentalities, and it also makes sense from the perspective of the psychology of the individual.
For, as Gebser saw very clearly, history is alive in us (and, in a certain sense, is living us): In our individual unfolding, each of us recapitulates the evolutionary journey of the human race. This is a correlative theorem to the old biological law that ontogeny is a recapitulation of phylogeny. This is to say, the development of the individual follows the evolutionary pattern of its species, which explains why the human embryo assumes successive forms strongly reminiscent of the shape of the lower animals—fish, amphibian, and furry animal.
Scientism: The Devaluation of Science
Our civilization, enamored of the apparent successes of science and technology, has for the past three hundred years celebrated ratio, or rationality. Gebser, airing the feelings of some of the best minds of our age, has debunked this naïve view. For him, ratio is the straitjacket into which the mind is forced when it fails to be motivated or awed by anything larger than itself.
Thus, in Gebser's model, the rational consciousness is not hailed as the culmination of the evolution of the human cognitive system. On the contrary, Gebser regards the rational consciousness (which should not be confused with logical thought) as the deficient form of the mental structure (which is inherently balanced). What he means by "rational" is best exemplified in the pseudo-philosophy of scientism, that is, the ideological exploitation of the scientific method, applied in areas that lie outside the competence of science (such as metaphysics or ethics). As Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1967) put it: Scientism is "the devaluation of science to a routine job like that of the bookkeeper or mechanic, and the intrusion of scientific (or rather pseudoscientific) ways of thinking into fields of human experience where they do not belong; that positivistic, technological, behavioristic and commercialistic philosophy which devaluated man into a robot and handles him accordingly" (p. 114).
Scientism elevates science to the status of a religion, namely the religion of scientific materialism. This has nothing to do with the legitimate application of the canons of logic or the law of parsimony, and it is a misappropriation of the tools, or skills, intrinsic to the mental structure of consciousness. As a total program for science or, worse, for human civilization as a whole, the scientistic stance is depressing and unproductive, and in the last analysis unviable. As Gebser sees it, the rational mode is a perversion of the mental structure and achieves its hegemony by repressing all other structures on consciousness. To underscore it, Gebser does not reject reason and logic per se. he only criticizes severely heartless, self-divisive, and atomistic reasoning—the kind of rationality that continues to be the source of a great deal of human misery and the violation of the ecological system. For Gebser, the attitude of rationalism—in this sense—is an evolutionary dead end.
Modern Consciousness as Interplay of All Four Structures
Gebser's work has a strong historical-evolutionary component, but he has always emphasized that the various structures of consciousness are not merely a matter of the past. Rather they are co-constituents, essential features, of our modern consciousness. That is to say, we are as much mental beings as we are archaic, magical, and mythical beings. This is an important insight that has great practical relevance.
In my book Structures of Consciousness, I have described our everyday consciousness as a "play" of these structures. Or at least, this is how we can consciously relate to them. They are, however, always at interplay with each other. Thus, every single day our consciousness completes a cycle of movement through the different stages—from waking to dreaming (or reverie), to sleep, and finally to deep sleep. But, more importantly, throughout the day, we thematize the four structures in interaction with others, or in response to our environment.
The fact is that we spend far less time than we like to think in the mental structure of consciousness. Instead, for much of our time we live out of less focused states of awareness, as Gurdjieff, among others, has reminded us. It can be a useful exercise to consider approximately how much of our day we are actually consciously present, and to what degree.
What happens to our consciousness when we listen intently to music? When we want to win an argument by resorting to sophistry rather than logic? When we sit in front of the television? When we feel bored? When we are in love? When we have an orgasm? When we sense someone's sincerity or dishonesty? When we fret over our finances? When we tell a story to our children?
When we examine our ordinary daily experiences closely enough, we find that the accompanying awareness undergoes changes in quality. Different experiences are, or can be, associated with different cognitive styles. When we listen spellbound to music, the qualities of the magical structure of consciousness come to the fore. When we tell a story, it is the mythical structure that becomes dominant in us. When the "earth moves" for us when we make love and ecstatic sensations drown our self-awareness, then the archaic structure is our temporary residence.
Great Possibilities for Self-Knowledge
Clearly Gebser's model opens up to great possibilities of self-knowledge. It helps us understand the archeology for our own psyche and consciousness, and how our present responses and reactions are shaped by collective patterns of consciousness which have their origin in the developmental past of our species. More importantly, Gebser's work sensitizes us to our evolutionary potential. As we apply his insights, we become more aware of those countless moments during the day when we fall short of the challenge of the emerging structure of consciousness: when we fail to transcend the gravity pull of the dominant mental rational structure of consciousness and the hardened ego personality associated with it. We also tend to notice more readily those occasions when we succumb to the lure of diminished consciousness, that is, when we drown ourselves in phylogenetically "earlier" structures that promise relief from the burden of focused awareness and from the obligation to go beyond rather than merely escape our egoic personality.
Sadly enough many people have not even met the challenge of the mental structure of consciousness yet, but live in regressive flight from the full-fledged egoic consciousness and will, allowing authority figures—the corporation, the state, the welfare system, the media, the psychiatrist, or the guru—to make their life choices for them.
Before the egoic-mental consciousness can be transcended, it must first be incarnated in full. The arational consciousness, which Gebser saw as constellating itself in our century, calls for great self-knowledge and responsibility. It is not "appropriated" automatically like a consumer article. In order for it to become effective in our lives, we must become transparent to ourselves. This entails that we become sensitive to the efficacy of our phylogenetic history within us and realize that, as José Ortega y Gasset (1968) put it, "to excel the past we must not allow ourselves to lose contact with it; on the contrary, we must feel it under our feet because we have raised ourselves upon it" (p. 204).
If we believe in the rebirth of our civilization, a "New Age", then clearly this renaissance must begin in the chambers of our own hearts. It begins with a courageous commitment to self-understanding and an irrepressible desire to allow oneself to be transformed by a life lived consciously, rather than to be frozen into unreal postures by one's own fears and delusions. We cannot wait for "society" to change, or for our institutions and organizations to be renewed. We, as individuals, must assume responsibility for our own personal transformation. What this means Gebser spelled out for us in his Ever-Present Origin:
Each attempted and successful clarification of the confusion in our daily lives and actions, each interception of anxiety, each achieved grain of certainty, each distanciation from oneself—regardless of how slight—each discarded prejudice and resentment: these are necessarily achievements in order to establish the new reality and to obtain for each and all a sense of meaningfulness. Everyone is free to achieve this. Whoever gambles away this freedom has gambled and lost his life and death (p. 532).
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Jean Gebser is one of our century's most versatile, deep, and daring thinkers. By boldly asking the "big" essential questions and by taking a breathtaking panoramic view of human existence, Gebser succeeded in furnishing us with revolutionary insights into our present situation. Long before it became popular to talk of a millennium, he spelled out just what it is that has been fermenting ever since the turn of the century. In Gebser we encounter a visionary thinker in the grand style of Gerald Heard, Erich Kahler, Lewis Mumford, Oswald Spengler, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to whose generation he belonged. His work on the evolution of human consciousness was published in Germany in the early 1950s. Gebser's thinking was first introduced to American audiences through not always accurately translated excerpts in the now defunct journal Main Currents in Modern Thought (1973). It was these materials that inspired, among others. Ken Wilber to avail himself of Gebser's history of consciousness in his Up From Eden (1981). Then in 1985, the Ohio University Press published the long-awaited English version of Gebser's magnum opus, entitled The Ever-Present Origin. Two years later, my book Structures of Consciousness was published, which is an introduction to and, at the same time, a critique of Gebser's work. Georg Feuerstein |
References:
Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Robots, Men and Minds. New York: Braziller, 1967.
Georg Feuerstein, The Essence of Yoga. New York: Grove Press, 1976.
Georg Feuerstein, Structures of Consciousness. Lower Lake, Calif.: Integral Publishing, 1987.
Georg Feuerstein, Jean Gebser: What Color is Your Consciousness? San Francisco: Robert Briggs Associates, 1988. (Due to be published this winter as part of the series Broadside Editions.)
Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1985. Paperback edition, 1986.
Erich Neuman, The Origins and History of Consciousness. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970.
José Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968.
Ken Wilber, Up From Eden, Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1981.