* Book: Jean Gebser. The Ever-Present Origin.

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"Gebser identified five structures of consciousness (archaic, magic, mythical, mental-rational, and integralarational) and showed that mutation of the currently dominant mental-rational structure into the last, “fifth structure” gathered momentum at the turn of the last century." [1]

Description

1.

"Jean Gebser was a German-born poet, philosopher and linguist most well known in the English-speaking world for The Ever-Present Origin, first published in 1949. A weighty tome, EPO spans the history of human consciousness –describing a series of trials and tribulations, followed by transformations, that have marked the human journey. Following a “lightning-like” flash of inspiration in the winter of 1932/1933, Gebser sought to understand what he perceived as a radical shift in Western society, exhibited in the poetic expressions of Rilke and other poets of his time. He began a study, starting with Rilke and Spain and culminating – twenty years later – in the first edition of The Ever-Present Origin. From transformations of language, to new expressions of poetry, to scientific discoveries, it was Gebser’s central thesis that a potent “leap” in thinking was happening in the 20th century. This new mode of thought would be a holistic-centered, or integral one; an answer to the type of thinking responsible for economic and industrial crisis, two World Wars, and what many today consider a dire, global ecological crisis." (https://www.metapsychosis.com/books/the-ever-present-origin/)

2. Jan Krikke:

"In 1961, Jean Gebser, a German interdisciplinary philosopher, published The Ever-Present Origin, one of the most ambitious studies of consciousness ever undertaken. Gebser reached back deep into human history and claimed to have identified five stages or “structures” of consciousness: archaic (pre-history and pre-animist), magic, mythical, mental, and integral structure. Each of these structures contains the “origin” (ostensibly the source of Creation as well as consciousness) in latent form. After five “mutations,” consciousness reaches its highest level, the Integral Structure.

Gebser is not specific about historical dates or geographical areas in which the first three structures developed. They existed throughout the world in a similar form. But he situates the manifestations of the first emergence of the Mental Structure in Europe. He arrives at this conclusion by associating the five structures of consciousness to the development of (linear) perspective. In the 16th century, Renaissance artists invented the vanishing point, enabling them to depict the illusion of three-dimensional space on the two-dimensions picture plane.

Gebser associated the development of linear perspective with the emerging awareness of space, a feature of the mental structure. He retroactively designated the preceding structures of consciousness as pre-perspectival and unperspectival.

He writes:

“Scarcely five hundred years ago, during the Renaissance, an unmistakable reorganization of our consciousness occurred: the discovery of perspective which opened up the three-dimensionality of space. This discovery is so closely linked with the entire intellectual attitude of the modern epoch that we have felt obliged to call this age the age of perspectivity and characterize the age immediately preceding it as the ‘unperspectival’ age.”

(https://jankrikke2020.medium.com/china-and-the-search-for-a-global-consciousness-f1e0ef3df710)

3. Ulrich J Mohrhoff

"Ursprung und Gegenwart is the magnum opus of cultural historian and evolutionary philosopher Jean Gebser. Its two parts were first published in 1949 and 1953, respectively. As early as 1951, the Bollingen Foundation  contemplated the feasibility of an English-language version. In his eight-page review, the distinguished philosopher of history and author of studies of the evolution of human consciousness Erich Kahler (Man the Measure, 1943; The Tower and the Abyss, 1957) encouraged publication, calling the book “a very important, indeed in some respects pioneering piece of work,” “vastly, solidly, and subtly documented by a wealth of anthropological, mythological, linguistic, artistic, philosophical, and scientific material which is shown in its multifold and striking interrelationship.” Gebser’s study, he wrote “treads new paths, opens new vistas” and is “brilliantly written, [introducing] many valuable new terms and distinctions [and showing] that scholarly precision and faithfulness to given data are compatible with a broad, imaginative, and spiritual outlook.” Despite this warmly appreciative and incisive estimation, the first complete English translation was undertaken only in 1975, by Professors Noel Barstad (Modern Languages) and Algis Mickunas (Philosophy) at the University of Ohio. In 1977, after discussions with the author’s widow, Professor Barstad undertook a complete retranslation and is responsible for the English version in its present form. The Ever-Present Origin  was eventually published in 1985 by Ohio University Press."

(https://antimatters2.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/2-3-05-gebser-origin.pdf)

Discussion

Michel Bauwens:

The P2P Foundation's founding was originally a left-integral impulse, i.e. an attempt to renew the emancipatory tradition for the networked age, inspired to a certain degree by integral theories and thinking. One of our sources was Jean Gebser and his history of forms of human consciousness, and their successive mutations that also corresponds to types of civilizations. (Peter Pogany has worked on a synthesis between thermodynamic realities, socio-technical infrastructures of human civilizations, and the dominant forms of consciousness that accompany them.)

It's not enough to understand the evolution of socio-economic structures, we must also understand the cultural intersubjective and subjective mentalities that co-evolve with them. This is 'the' book, to understand the evolution of consciousness, in its archaic, magic, mythological and rational forms. Gebser sees how each mode of apprehending the world, has its generative phase, but also its 'deficient' or degenerative phase. The rational mode of consciousness becomes deficient when calculations dominate everything, and the whole can no longer be seen. Civilizational changes are also 'mutations of consciousness'.