Jean Gebser
Jean Gebser
Wilber's View
Gebser is one of Wilber's earliest and most durable sources — a structural framework Wilber adopted decades before SES (in Up from Eden) and still leans on heavily here. Gebser's scheme of four (later five) major epochs of human consciousness — the archaic, the magic, the mythic, and the mental — supplies the historical backbone Wilber hybridizes with Piaget's cognitive substages to narrate the whole sweep of cultural evolution. More important for SES specifically is Gebser's account of the next structure past the rational-mental: what Gebser calls the "integral-aperspectival" mind, which Wilber adopts almost wholesale as his own term vision-logic (also called network-logic). Wilber credits Gebser with recognizing, well before postmodernism arrived, that this emerging structure adds up all possible perspectives into a totality without privileging any one of them as final — and with correctly forecasting both postmodernism's real achievement (integrating what rationality had differentiated) and its characteristic pathology (losing oneself in an endless regress of perspectives with no ground). Wilber treats Gebser, alongside Habermas, as an independent convergence: two very different routes arriving at the same structural map of consciousness's unfolding, which Wilber takes as evidence the map is tracking something real rather than a private theoretical artifact.
In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality
"I followed the groundbreaking work of Jean Gebser"
In Up from Eden (and Eye to Eye) I followed the groundbreaking work of Jean Gebser in recognizing four major epochs of human evolution, each anchored by a particular structure (or level) of individual consciousness that correspondingly produced (and was produced by) a particular social worldview. These general stages Gebser called the archaic, the magic, the mythic, and the mental.
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 4
"Gebser called it integral-aperspectival"
I also refer to postformal cognition as network-logic or vision-logic—Gebser called it integral-aperspectival—and it is vision-logic that drives the best of postmodernism.
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 1
"Vision-logic adds up all the perspectives … it is aperspectival"
Jean Gebser refers to the emerging vision-logic as the "integral-aperspectival" mind, which is a particularly apt phrase. The previous structure (the egoic-rational), Gebser refers to as the "rational-perspectival," because rationality can indeed take different perspectives… But vision-logic, or the integral-aperspectival mind, adds up all the perspectives tout ensemble, and therefore privileges no perspective as final: it is aperspectival.
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 5
"Gebser's masterpiece, The Ever-Present Origin"
Gebser's masterpiece, The Ever-Present Origin, was completed in 1953, the culmination of several decades of thought and research. He died in 1973 and thus he did not live to see the full extent of the explosion of aperspectivism in today's postmodern world… The postmodern poststructuralists, for example, have gone from saying that no context, no perspective, is final, to saying that no perspective has any advantage over any other, at which point they careen uncontrollably in their own labyrinth of ever-receding holons, lost in aperspectival space.
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 5
"The part is to a certain degree always a betrayal of the whole" (Gebser, quoted)
As Gebser says, "The part is to a certain degree always a betrayal of the whole, for which reason the sum of the parts also only yields a fictitious but not an efficacious whole."
— Gebser, quoted in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 5
"Mutations in consciousness" (Gebser, quoted)
Gebser refers to such transformations as "mutations in consciousness," emphasizing their radically emergent nature. Nonetheless, each structure unfolds holarchically, transcending and including its predecessor(s). "None of these mutations of consciousness is responsible for the loss of previous possibilities and properties, but suddenly incorporates them into a new structure…"
— Gebser, quoted in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 5
See Also
- vision-logic — the concept page for what Wilber adopts, in essence, as Gebser's integral-aperspectival mind
- habermas — the other major independent-convergence source for the same developmental sequence
- piaget — the cognitive-substage scheme Wilber hybridizes with Gebser's epochal terminology
- holarchy — the general transcend-and-include structure Gebser's "mutations" also exhibit
