Jean Gebser (born Hans Karl Hermann Rudolph Gebser, German: [ˈɡeːpsɐ]; August 20, 1905 – May 14, 1973) was a Swiss philosopher, linguist, and poet who described the structures of human consciousness.
Gebser was born in Posen in Imperial Germany (later Poland). His father was lawyer Frederich Gebser and mother was Margaretha Grundmann. He was a cousin of World War I-era chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg.
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 Ministry of Education.
Before the Spanish Civil War began, he moved to Paris, and then to Southern France. It was here that he changed his German first name "Hans" to the French "Jean." He lived in Paris for a while but saw the unavoidability of a German invasion. He fled to Switzerland in 1939, escaping only hours before the border was closed. He spent the rest of his life near Bern, where he did most of his writing. Even late in life, Gebser travelled widely in India, the Far East, and the Americas, and wrote half a dozen more books. He was also a published poet.
Gebser died in Wabern bei Bern on May 14, 1973 "with a soft and knowing smile." His personal letters and publications are held at the Gebser Archives at the University of Oklahoma History of Science Collections, Norman, Oklahoma, Bizzel Libraries.
Gebser's major thesis was 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. Gebser held that previous consciousness structures continue to operate parallel to the emergent structure.
Consciousness is "presence", or "being present":
As Gebser understands the term, "conscious is neither knowledge nor conscience but must be understood for the time being in the broadest sense as wakeful presence."
Each consciousness structure eventually becomes deficient, and is replaced by a following structure. The stress and chaos in Europe 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 sciences, etc.) Gebser saw traces of the emergence (which he called "efficiency") and collapse ("deficiency") of various structures of consciousness throughout history.
Gebser distinguished the following structures:
The archaic structure is the first structure of consciousness to emerge from the "ever-present origin":
The term "archaic" as used here is derived from the Greek arce, meaning inception, or origin. Origin (or Ursprung, in the original German) is the source from which all springs, but it is that which springs forth itself. It is the essence which is behind and which underlies consciousness.
No direct information on this structure is available; it is inferred from writings from later times. It is zero-dimensional; consciousness is only "a dimly lit mist devoid of shadows". It is not individual, but "was totally identical with the whole":
The human being was totally immersed in the world unable to extricate himself or herself from that world. They were identical with that world.
In the magical structure events, objects and persons are magically related. Symbols and statues do not just represent those events, objects and persons, but are those same objects and persons.
Gebser symbolizes this "one-dimensional" consciousness structure by the space-less, time-less "point". Unlike the archaic structure in which there is a "perfect identity of man and universe", man is aware of nature as something within his community to which it must "listen" and out of which it must act in order to survive.
Gebser symbolizes the "two-dimensional" mythical structure by the circle and cyclical time, based on man's discovery of the rhythmic recurrence of natural events and of his inner reflections on his experience of those events. "...[W]hereas the distinguishing characteristic of the magic structure was the emergent awareness of nature, the essential characteristic of the mythical structure is the emergent awareness of soul." In the mythical structure events, objects and persons are woven together in stories. Mythologies give coherence to consciousness. An important element in myth is polarity; the etymology of myth itself implies both speaking (mouth, mythos) and silence (mute, myein). Gebser explains that polarity makes myth particularly foreign to the mental consciousness structure: "Only when we acknowledge both meanings of the root can we discern the fundamental nature of the mythical structure. Only when taken together as an elemental ambivalence, and not a rational contradiction, are they constitutive for the mythical structure." "Only a mental world requires laws; the mythical world, secure in the polarity, neither knows nor needs them."