Jean Gebser’s Structures of Consciousness and Biological Evolution

In The Ever-Present Origin, Jean Gebser suggests that both cultural and psychological processes can be parsed into five nonhierarchical “structures” or “mutations” of consciousness, which he calls archaic, magic, mythical, mental, and integral. He also suggests that these five structures complexly correlate with increasing degrees of dimensionality, from zero degrees of freedom for the archaic, to four degrees of freedom for the integral. In my book The Dynamics of Transformation, I suggest that another fractal repetition across scale of this schema can be discerned in biological evolution. However, Gebser, in two brief passages and one endnote, seems to contradict this claim. He writes:

With the unfolding of each consciousness mutation, consciousness increases in intensity; but the concept of evolution, with its continuous development, excludes this discontinuous character of mutation. The unfolding, then, is an enrichment tied, as we shall observe, to a gain in dimensionality; yet it is also an impoverishment because of the increasing remoteness from origin. (Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1985, 41)

This statement expresses the prevailing view when The Ever-Present Origin was published in 1949 that evolution is a gradual process mediated through continuous variations, altering each generation a miniscule amount, but amounting to the vast biodiversity that has emerged over billions of years, from prokaryotes to humans. The theory of punctuated equilibrium, though, which Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge introduced in 1972, and which is now broadly accepted, is precisely the idea that biological evolution occurs in relatively discontinuous leaps. This information was not available to Gebser, which I think may explain why he briefly and perfunctorily rejects the notion that there are stages of biological evolution which correspond to the mutations of consciousness. That he spends so little space addressing this issue in such a large and complex tome perhaps suggests that this rejection is not an essential aspect of his system, and that he may have been open to this self-similar correlation in light of the more recent discoveries in biology.

On the same page, he writes:

The manifestation of this mutational process should not be construed as a mere succession of events, a progress or historicized course. It is, rather, a manifestation of inherent predispositions of consciousness, now incremental, now reductive, that determine man’s specific grasp of reality throughout and beyond the epochs and civilizations. (Gebser 41)

And in an endnote to this passage, he writes:

We wish to particularly emphasize this fact, since it underscores the requisite detachment from the principle of evolution—a point we deem important. It would be incorrect if our presentation of the emergence of consciousness were understood as an evolutive process, since our discussion has demonstrated the basic structure of time as a world-constituent and a timeless intensity that is time-free with respect to consciousness. (Gebser 104n25)

Gebser, in these passages, suggests that movement through the five posited structures on the scales of individuals or cultures is not merely a linear, historical process, but a process that exceeds linear temporality. However, he also seems to imply throughout the text that a linear, developmental model is one valid construction (characteristic of the mental mode) among several possible construals of these distinct mutations in the individual and cultural domains. He specifically denies a correlation of these structures with biological evolution, though I suspect that Gebser might have been impelled to reconsider this position if he had possessed the concepts and language of fractal geometry, introduced by Benoit Mandelbrot more than two decades later in 1975. So while it is true that, on the micro scale, temporal relations among these structures of consciousness can occur in many complexly intertwined ways, exhibiting regressions, bifurcations, eddies, and formal resonances, and with all of the developmentally previous stages continuing to coexist within and around each emergent mode, on the macro scale for each layer of process, there can be discerned a linear, historical progression, which Gebser implies elsewhere. Even though the archaic, magic, and mythical modes of consciousness continue to exist in our era, both in cultures for which these modes are variously predominant and in the developmental processes of individuals, Gebser also seems to recognize that these different modes have been globally predominant at different stages of historical time, so that the magic mode became predominant tens of thousands of years ago with the emergence of spoken language in shamanic, tribal cultures, the mythical mode became predominant thousands of years ago with the emergence of writing, cities, agriculture, and gods, and the mental mode became predominant hundreds of years ago, roughly correlating with the emergence of modernity through the movable type printing press, the Copernican Revolution, the Renaissance, and the discovery of perspective in visual art.

As with the issue of discontinuity in biological evolution, Gebser spends very little time discussing this nuance, and so it seems that, if he had been aware of fractal geometry, in which similar structures and processes tend to repeat in increasingly diminutive and expansive iterations across scale, he probably would have been open to the suggestion that, like the emergence of distinct modes of consciousness in human history, qualitatively novel stages of biological evolution have successively emerged, though these emergences happen in different  places at different times, and the emergent stages always coexist with the previous developmental stages, sometimes reverting to them, or coming locally to sudden ends, as evolution continues to branch out in its profligate efflorescence. But as with cultural development from preverbal archaic cultures to modernity, and as with individual development from infant to adult, biological evolution has apparently passed through distinct stages in the developmental line that leads to us, from prokaryotes to animals to hominids to homo to homo sapiens, each of which (along with other intervening stages, visible through finer-grained schemas) has constituted a qualitative advance into a novel, emergent mode, though this is far from the only evolutionary line that has produced novel results.

And something is always lost in each emergence. Certain relational capacities which were the focus of libidinal attention at one stage inevitably fade into the background for a later stage. So while it is clear that adults possess various mental and physical capacities not possessed by children, and modern cultures possess scientific and technological capacities unknown in primal cultures, it is equally clear that children possess profound imaginal capacities greatly diminished in most adults, and primal cultures take for granted a deep connection with, and intimate knowledge of nature that is impossible to achieve in modern cultures, a connection and knowledge for which many of us harbor a profound yearning. Furthermore, any suggestion that the recognition of these structures hierarchically denigrates either children or primal cultures is based on the fallacious assumption that the capacities privileged by adults or modern cultures are intrinsically more valuable than those possessed by their precursors. Nevertheless, as the most conscious animals produced by evolution, at least the kind of consciousness we can recognize, humans have a special pride of place in the branching evolutionary movement, one of the most brilliant blossoms on a vast tree stretching both toward the heavens and deep into subterranean realms.

If, in light of the discoveries of punctuated equilibrium and fractal geometry, Gebser had been open to the correlation of stages of biological evolution with these other scales, he would almost certainly have agreed that these biological stages correlate with increasing degrees of dimensionality, just as he posited this correlation in individual and cultural mutations of consciousness. In fact, the philosopher Terence McKenna, who seems to have been influenced by Gebser, is perhaps the theorist who has most explicitly suggested that biological evolution is partially constituted in an ascendance through increasing degrees of spatiotemporal freedom. As McKenna proposed in a lecture:

One of the very large creodes that we can see at work in nature and society is what I call the conquest of dimensionality. Biology is a strategy for moving into and occupying ever more dimensions. (Terence McKenna, “Appreciating Imagination,” Transcription of lecture given at Esalen Institute, 1997).

And so, when I discuss Gebser’s “structures of consciousness” and his “concretion of time” hypothesis in The Dynamics of Transformation, it takes these nuances into account, assuming that Gebser would naturally have expanded his theory to biological evolution in light of the major discoveries in evolutionary theory and mathematics that occurred within just a few years of his death in 1973.

Photo used with permission of ZVG.