The Ever-Present Origin - by Jean Gebser

The Ever-Present Origin by Jean Gebser (1949): Gebser, like Heidegger, was influenced by his reading of Spengler, but his response was totally different. Whereas Heidegger proceeded with the End of Metaphysics, Jean Gebser built a new theory of the evolution of human consciousness constructed out of a sequence of structures of thought, mainly inspired by the Hindu analysis of consciousness in the Upanishads as a cycle that moves daily from dreamless sleep, to dreaming sleep to waking consciousness. Thus, in Gebser, the ancient Magical Consciousness Structure of oral and pre-literate tribal societies, with its unitary conception of the world, and its frank belief in the reality of the paranormal, corresponds to dreamless sleep; the Mythical Consciousness Structure that emerges with writing and High Civilization, with dreaming consciousness; and the Mental Consciousness Structure that begins with the Greeks, with Waking Consciousness. Gebser adds to these the Integral Consciousness Structure that he saw coming into being in the late nineteenth century: in fact, precisely where Spengler saw a decline of culture in the nineteenth century, Gebser saw the advent of a new consciousness structure, one that took up and relativized all the earlier structures. From Gebser’s point of view, Spengler’s book is really about the decline and disintegration of the Mental (a.k.a. Perspectival) Consciousness Structure; Spengler missed the significance of the Integral structure that is the organizing force behind the entire Modernist development in the arts and the sciences which transcends, but includes all the others.