Jean Gebser

Jean Gebser (August 20, 1905 – May 14, 1973) was a prodigy, a student of the transformations of human consciousness, a linguist, and a poet. Image File history File links Uploaded from: http://www. ... August 20 is the 232nd day of the year (233rd in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar. ... 1905 was a common year starting on Sunday (see link for calendar). ... May 14 is the 134th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (135th in leap years). ... 1973 was a common year starting on Monday. ... A child prodigy, or simply prodigy, is someone who is a master of one or more skills or arts at an early age. ... Consciousness is a quality of the mind generally regarded to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, self-awareness, sentience, sapience, and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and ones environment. ... Broadly conceived, linguistics is the scientific study of human language, and a linguist is someone who engages in this study. ... Bust of Homer, one of the earliest European poets, in the British Museum Poetry (ancient Greek: ποιεω (poieo) = I create) is an art form in which human language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content. ...

Biography

Born in East Prussia, he left Germany in 1929 to avoid the fascists, lived for a time in Italy and 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. He participated in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the left, barely escaping Spain in 1936. 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. East Prussia (German: Ostpreu en; Polish: Prusy Wschodnie; Russian: Восточная Пруссия — Vostochnaya Prussiya) was a province of Kingdom of Prussia, situated on the territory of former Ducal Prussia. ... 1929 was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will take you to calendar). ... Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler Fascism (in Italian, fascismo), capitalized, refers to the right-wing authoritarian political movement which ruled Italy from 1922 to 1943 under the leadership of Benito Mussolini. ... This article is about the international language known as Spanish. ... History of Spain series Prehistoric Spain Roman Spain Muslim Conquest of Iberia Timeline of Muslim Occupation Medieval Spain Age of Reconquest Age of Expansion Age of Enlightenment Reaction and Revolution First Spanish Republic The Restoration Second Spanish Republic Spanish Civil War The Dictatorship Modern Spain Topics Economic History Military History... 1936 was a leap year starting on Wednesday (link will take you to calendar). ... The Eiffel Tower has become a symbol of Paris throughout the world. ... 1939 was a common year starting on Sunday (link will take you to calendar). ... Location within Switzerland The city of Bern, English traditionally Berne (Bernese German Bärn , German Bern , French Berne , Italian Berna , Romansh Berna ), is the Bundesstadt (administrative capital) of Switzerland, and is the fourth most populous Swiss city (after Zürich, Geneva and Basel). ...

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 mystifing 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". (Georg Feuerstein, Structures of consciousness: The Genius of Jean Gebser, p 32.) Gebser had written in Die Schlafenden Jahre, "When we are born we cry and weep, when we die we should smile." Algis Mickunas, emmeritus professor of philosophy at Ohio University was given a tape of Gebser's last death-bed utterances by his widow and this tape has been digitally enhanced by the media laboratory at the University of Oklahoma (for 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. Far East is an inexact term often used for East Asia and Southeast Asia combined, sometimes including also the easternmost territories of Russia, i. ... America is usually meant as either: The Americas, a set of continents and islands between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, usually subdivided into: North America Central America and the Caribbean South America The United States of America. ... Mysticism (ancient Greek mysticon = secret) is meditation, prayer, or theology focused on the direct experience of union with divinity, God, or Ultimate Reality, or the belief that such experience is a genuine and important source of knowledge. ... Dr. Georg Feuerstein, or George Feuerstein, (born 1947) is a well-known German-American Indologist, and one of the most important Western authorities on yoga. ...

Ideas

His major thesis was that the stress and chaos in Europe from 1914 to 1945 were but symptoms of a structure of consciousness that was at the end of its effectiveness. However his significant and novel contribution was the discovery of 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. World map showing location of Europe When considered a continent, Europe is the worlds second-smallest continent in terms of area, with an area of 10,600,000 km² (4,140,625 square miles), making it larger than Australia only. ... 1914 is a common year starting on Thursday. ... 1945 was a common year starting on Monday (link will take you to calendar). ... Open Directory Project: Literature World Literature Electronic Text Archives Magazines and E-zines Online Writing Writers Resources Libraries, Digital Cataloguing, Metadata Distance Learning Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Classicism in Literature The Universal Library, by Carnegie Mellon University Project Gutenberg Online Library Abacci - Project Gutenberg texts matched with Amazon... 1943 is a common year starting on Friday. ...

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 master work, "Ursprung und Gegenwart" (German, "Origin and Present"), is the result of that inquiry. It was published in various editions from 1949 to 1953, and in an English edition as The Ever-Present Origin. Working from the historical evidence of most every major field, (e.g., poetry, music, visual arts, architecture, philosophy, religion, physics and the other natural sciences, etc.) Gebser saw traces of the emergence (efficiency) and collapse (deficiency) of various structures of consciousness throughout history. Bust of Homer, one of the earliest European poets, in the British Museum Poetry (ancient Greek: ποιεω (poieo) = I create) is an art form in which human language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content. ... Wikibooks Wikiversity has more about this subject: School of Music Look up Music on Wiktionary, the free dictionary Wikisource, as part of the 1911 Encyclopedia Wikiproject, has original text related to this article: Music Wikicities has a wiki about Music: Music MusicNovatory: the science of music encyclopedia Science of Music... Many times, the term art is used to refer to the visual arts. ... // Scope and intentions According to the very earliest surviving work on the subject, Vitruvius De Architectura, good buildings should have Beauty (Venustas), Firmness (Firmitas) and Utility (Utilitas); architecture can be said to be a balance and coordination among these three elements, with none overpowering the others. ... Philosophy is a discipline or field of study involving the investigation, analysis, and development of ideas at a general, abstract, or fundamental level. ... Since antiquity, people have tried to understand the behavior of matter: why unsupported objects drop to the ground, why different materials have different properties, and so forth. ... The lunar farside as seen from Apollo 11 Natural science is the study of the physical, nonhuman aspects of the Earth and the universe around us. ...

He notes that the various structures of consciousness are revealed by their relationship to space and time. For example, the mythical structure embodies time as cyclical/rythmic and space as enclosed. Whereas the mental structure lives time as linear, directed or "progressive" and space becomes the box-like homogeneous space of geometry — a vacuum. But just as each consciousness structure erupts they also eventually become deficient. The deficient form of the mental structure Gebser called the rational structure. Of particular significance is his realization that previous consciousness structures continue to operate. The rational structure of awareness seeks to deny the other structures with its claim that humans are exclusively rational. Attempting to understand the nature of space has always been a prime occupation for philosophers and scientists. ... 8:17 am, August 6, 1945, Japanese time. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Mythology. ... A cycle is anything round, in the physical sense (e. ... The word linear comes from the Latin word linearis, which means created by lines. ... Progressive can refer to: Progressive music, including Progressive rock, Progressive metal and Progressive electronica Political Progressivism Several Progressive Parties Progressive Era in the United States (1890-1913) Progressive, a company providing auto insurance The Progressive, a left-wing monthly magazine The progressive tense in grammar Progressive lenses, used to correct... Homogeneous is an adjective that has several meanings. ... Geometry (Greek Γεωμετρια, geo = earth, metria = measure (check accuracy of this)) arose as the field of knowledge dealing with spatial relationships. ... For other uses, see vacuum cleaner and Vacuum (musical group). ...

The rational structure is known for its extremes as evidenced in various "nothing but..." statements. Extreme materialism 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 re-shaping matter — in technology — offer solutions to some problems but also give rise to problems of their own making. Mechanized slaughter of two world wars 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. The Integral Institute is a think-tank founded by American philosopher, psychologist, and mystic Ken Wilber for studying important issues of many fields of knowledge in an integral way. ... The California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) is a private San Francisco, California-based graduate school whose programs focus on clinical psychology on one hand, and the study of the worlds various spiritual traditions on the other. ... Materialism is the philosophical view that the only thing that can truly be said to exist is matter; that fundamentally, all things are composed of material. The view is perhaps best understood in its opposition to the doctrines of immaterial substance applied to the mind historically, and most famously by... Matter is commonly referred to as the substance of which physical objects are composed. ... Properties For alternative meanings see atom (disambiguation). ... Contemplation is a type of prayer or meditation in the Christian, especially catholic, tradition. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... A world war is a military conflict affecting the majority of the worlds countries. ... The mushroom cloud of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945 lifted nuclear fallout some 18km (60,000 feet) above the epicenter. ... In philosophy, ontology (from the Greek όντος = part. ...

Some saw the cause of this despair as a lack of values 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 stucture of consciousness which he termed the integral. Value is a term that expresses the concept of worth in general, and it is thought to be connected to reasons for certain practices, policies, or actions. ... Ethics is the branch of axiology – one of the four major branches of philosophy, alongside metaphysics, epistemology, and logic – which attempts to understand the nature of morality; to define that which is right from that which is wrong. ... Metaphysics (Greek words meta = after/beyond and physics = nature) is a branch of philosophy concerned with the study of first principles and being (ontology). ... A quagmire (from quake + mire) is, literally, shaky, miry ground; as a political term used to describe a foreign military campaign in which there is either no foreseeable possibility of victory or the objectives are unclearly defined, and at the same time no clear exit strategy has been formulated in... The term Western World or the West can have multiple meanings depending on its context. ...

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 eruption of time into the "fixed-reality" of the mental structure. For Gebser, dualistically opposed and "static" categories of Being gave way to transparency. The term dualism is the state of being dual, or having a two fold division. ... A being, in the most general sense, is anything that is alive. ...

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. Holism (from holon, a Greek word meaning entity) is the idea that the properties of a system cannot be determined or explained by the sum of its components alone. ...

Awareness is already integral, makes present via transparency, that is it presents. Gebser's notion of presentation is based upon the integral awareness of time. Another aspect of integral awareness is the presentiation 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 sciences. 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. Gods death or nonexistence is a quintessential nihilistic concern. ... Behaviorism (or behaviourism) is an approach to psychology based on the proposition that behavior is interesting and worthy of scientific research. ... Physical science is an emcompassing term for the branches of natural science, and science (generally), that study non-living systems, in contrast to the biological sciences. ...

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." Biological evolution, as Gebser noted at length, was an enclosing process, that particularized 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 notion of time, the mental, which is linear and hence implies "progress." To be sure, Gebser was fully aware that any notion of "human progress" was already played out. He notes that "to progress" is to move toward but is also a moving away from, and he knew 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. Our fate is not assured by any notion of "an evolution toward" any kind of ideal way of being. This article is about biological evolution. ... Progress can refer to: The idea of a process in which societies or individuals become better or more modern (technologically and/or socially). ...

Gebser's theory is that human consciousness is in transition, and that these transitions are structured jumps and not continuous. These jumps or transformations involve structural changes in both mind and body. There are a number of these levels: The mind is the term most commonly used to describe the higher functions of the human brain, particularly those of which humans are subjectively conscious, such as personality, thought, reason, memory, intelligence and emotion. ... With regard to living things, a body is the integral physical material of an individual, and contrasts with soul, personality and behavior. ...

1. The archaic structure (before approx. 200,000 years ago)
2. The magic structure (approx. 200,000 to 50,000 years ago)
3. The mythical structure (approx. 50,000 to 1,000 B.C.)
4. The mental structure (stage 1) Philosophy and Theology.
5. The mental structure (stage 2) Perspective and Science.
6. The integral stage

Influence

His work has formed the basis of a number of other important studies, in particular Ken Wilber's Up from Eden, Rudolf Bahro's Logik der Rettung (translated into English as Avoiding Social and Ecological Disaster), Hugo Enomiya-Lasalle's Living in the New consciousness, Daniel Kealey's Revisioning Environmental Ethics, and Georg Feuerstein's Wholeness or Transcendence. See, "Modern/Postmodern: Off the Beaten Path of Antimodernism," (Praeger, 1997) which introduces a theory of comparative cultures and communication styles called the theory of Dimensional Accrual and Dissociation by Professor Eric Mark Kramer, inspired by Jean Gebser and Lewis Mumford. Also see, "Consciousness and Culture: An Introduction to the Thought of Jean Gebser" which is volume 101 in the Praeger series "Contributions to Sociology" (E.M. Kramer, Ed.). This volume contains several scholarly articles written expressely for it, covering many areas of research where Gebser's ideas are applied such as architecture, fine arts, anthropology, literature, political science, communication theory, mass communication, social movements, psychology, and philosophy. Additionally of interest are the various publications by the Jean Gebser Society which was founded in 1973, with annual meetings and refereed proceedings edited by Professor Mike Purdy, as well as a scholarly book series. The 34th Annual conference of the Jean Gebser Society will be held at Rice University, October 27-29, 2005. Ken Wilber Kenneth Earl Wilber Jr. ... Rudolf Bahro (18 November 1935 - 5 December 1997) was a member of the East German opposition. ... Dr. Georg Feuerstein, or George Feuerstein, (born 1947) is a well-known German-American Indologist, and one of the most important Western authorities on yoga. ...

See also

• Perspective
• Integral (philosophy)

Perspective is the choice of a single point of view from which to sense, categorize, measure or codify experience, typically for comparing with another. ... Also known as the integral-aperspectival stage of consciousness, the term integral has been used in a philosophical sense by several twentieth century philosophers and psychologists that is different from the mathematical sense. ...

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 Combs
• An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean Gebser, originally published in Integrative Investigations, January 1997, Volume 4 Number 1.