Evolving Consciousness: The Inside Story
If we have learned anything from the critique of reason that was initiated by Kant and completed by Hegel, it is that the very categories of our understanding are historically conditioned. We have come to recognize that there are mental structures that determine how we understand the world and ourselves and that these structures evolve in history.
—David Owen, Between Reason and History
A couple of years ago, while attending the “Towards a Science of Consciousness” conference in Tucson, Arizona, I happened to wander into a panel session that included Dutch theorist Jan Sleutels. The subject was the “evolution of consciousness” and his particular presentation was titled “Recent Changes in the Structure of Consciousness.” Sleutels started out his talk by announcing that he was going to expose one of the central fallacies in our understanding of consciousness—the assumption that it hasn’t changed in the course of human history. He called this assumption “the Flintstones fallacy”—the erroneous idea that human consciousness has essentially been the same for thousands of years, even as technology has developed significantly. We tend to imagine that humans in earlier ages were like the characters on the cartoon show The Flintstones—more or less like us, only dressed in more primitive fashions and carrying clubs instead of cell phones. The outer world may be evolving, so this fallacy goes, but the inner remains essentially the same. “Consciousness is generally seen as an endogenous asset of the mind/brain that is responsive to pressures on an evolutionary time scale, but that is largely unaffected by cultural history,” Sleutels declared. “Substantial changes in recent history are ruled out a priori.”
Sleutels then suggested what he called a more baffling possibility: that as recently as hundreds of years ago we might find “minds substantially different from ours, yet belonging to human beings very much like us. So much like ourselves, in fact, that we find it almost impossible to believe that our ordinary mentalistic vocabulary of beliefs and desires should not apply to them as literally as it applies to us.”
The Flintstones fallacy is, I suspect, one of the great unexamined assumptions of our time. And as Sleutels suggested on that hot Arizona day, it is a fallacy that underpins a great many core assumptions we make about human history. It’s not just the Flintstones—movies, historical novels, and even scholarly studies regularly portray our ancestors as having essentially the same emotional and psychological repertoire that we have today. How many of us have deeply considered the possibility that human consciousness may have changed significantly in the last five thousand years? Five hundred years? Two hundred years? Again, we come back to that overarching insight with which I began this book—the touchstone proposition of an evolutionary worldview. We are moving. That which we thought was fixed, static, and relatively unchanging is revealed to be fluid, moving, changing, and malleable. But it’s easier to break the spell of solidity when we are looking at an external artifact, such as a piece of technology or even a physical organism. It is much harder to accept when it is so close to home, when it’s our own deepest sense of self, our own internal universe that is revealed to be changing, moving, evolving.
Sleutels is a theorist who was partially inspired by Julian Jaynes, the author of one of the most popular books on consciousness written in the last decades, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. His radical thesis shocked readers in the 1970s by suggesting that consciousness, in the way we understand it today as an introspective interior space, only came into being relatively recently in human history, perhaps 2,500 to 3,000 years ago. He suggested that when the ancients claimed to hear voices of the gods, for example, this wasn’t a quaint religious metaphor. They were actually hearing voices directing them to act. They were, in a sense, unable to internalize their own instinctual impulses within the context of a self-structure, and so they externalized them as outside forces. It was what we might call an extreme form of projection, to use current psychological lingo—although Jaynes attributed it to the developmental structures that had not yet formed in the brain. He noted that much of early literature represents a struggle to find a deeper sense of subjective selfhood, but for the most part the characters simply do not refer to themselves in any kind of way that suggests internal reflection.
The characters of the Iliad do not sit down and think out what to do. They have no conscious minds such as we say we have, and certainly no introspections. [ . . . ] The beginnings of action are not in conscious plans, reasons, and motives; they are in the actions and speeches of gods.
Jaynes’s thesis about changes in the brain remains highly speculative, but his basic idea, along with Sleutels’s—that human consciousness has significantly changed, even during recorded history—resonates with the insights being revealed by a number of other evolutionary theorists. Indeed, if these insights are correct, then the very capacities of our awareness, the structures that make up the internal universe have undergone change, even dramatic change, over time. And some have taken this insight a step further, suggesting that not only has consciousness changed but that it has evolved through a series of identifiable stages.
To grasp the significance of this distinction, imagine for a moment how early geologists or paleontologists must have felt when they first discovered that the strata in an exposed rock face were not just random natural decorations but actually represented distinct eras in our planet’s history—a pattern that could be found repeated independently in many different and far-flung locations. One layer of rock would reveal the geological and biological secrets of a particular epoch, while another layer revealed a very different world. Studying these layers of sediment, they could begin to understand how our planet has developed, and to recognize that the continuum of geological evolution has not been a steady curve but a series of distinguishable layers or stages. The same is true, we are now discovering, of the internal universe. It has evolved over time, and that change has not been random or erratic but has unfolded through a series of broadly identifiable stages.
What is a stage in the evolution of consciousness? When it comes to the internal universe, there are at least two ways of answering that question, because there are different ways to understand the evolution of consciousness. One is from the perspective of an individual and the other is from the perspective of the collective, and the tricky factor is that there is much overlap between the two. From the perspective of the collective, we can see, as we discussed in the last chapter, the way in which worldviews—those complex constellations of agreements and shared values—form and influence us in and through our shared, intersubjective space. In this sense, a stage would be a stable worldview. Unlike a geological period reflected in the strata of a rock face, a cultural stage is not simply a particular historical era, such as the Classical period or the European Enlightenment. The reason such eras stand out is because the core logic, the foundational values of new worldviews were birthed in those fertile times. But a particular worldview may endure through many historical eras, finding different surface expressions reflective of the society of the day while the underlying structural logic remains consistent. As philosopher David Owen writes, “One developmental-logical stage can underlie numerous societies with widely differing sociocultural elements.” So a cultural stage of consciousness is not simply a stage of history. At the same time, history shows us that certain worldviews were undoubtedly dominant in particular eras and we can certainly track the evolution of dominant worldviews over the course of human history. One worldview coalesces as the primary outlook of a particular society, which then, for various reasons, breaks down and gives way to another in the long flow of history. The staged nature of the process is a generalization that only becomes apparent from a certain distance—lose yourself in the detail of any particular society or time period, and the general pattern dissolves. Attempt to draw perfectly clear lines between two worldviews and the effort will be in vain. But significant patterns exist for those willing to look through a larger historical lens.
The second way to think about stages in the evolution of consciousness is to consider the individual subjective psychological evolution over the course of a particular lifetime. We are accustomed to thinking about children this way—from toddler to teenager, we recognize that they go through temporary recognizable “stages” or “phases” that they (thankfully) outgrow. The field of developmental psychology maps levels not just of childhood but also of adult psychology that could also be referred to as important markers in the evolution of consciousness.
Arguably, the great challenge of the territory I am exploring in this chapter is recognizing that while these two dimensions of internal evolution—individual and collective—are distinct and have been mapped separately by most theorists, there is also tremendous overlap and interweaving between them. There is a profound relationship between the evolution of consciousness at an individual level and the evolution of culture at a social level, and we can find recognizable and even parallel stages in both.
In this chapter, I want to take a look at what we have come to understand about the stages through which human consciousness has evolved. I will begin with the philosopher Georg Hegel and the German idealists, because Hegel’s evolutionary vision was so formative in shining a light on fundamental developmental logic, or the dynamics and dialectical process through which consciousness evolves. Then I will move into the realm of developmental psychology, in order to show how our increasingly sophisticated understanding of individual development has helped establish the reality that consciousness does evolve through stages, inspiring social theorists as they consider the broader canvas of cultural evolution. In exploring the more challenging territory of intersubjective development, I will turn to one of history’s greatest guides to the vast landscapes of the internal universe—twentieth-century philosopher Jean Gebser.
These ideas are subtle, and they demand that we think in new ways about self and culture. As difficult as it was for the men and women of Darwin’s time to wrap their minds around the idea that human beings had evolved their physical form and features over an extraordinarily long march of natural history, so too is it difficult for many in our own time to come to grips with the idea that the very nature of our consciousness, that inner self-sense that seems so fundamental to our humanness, has evolved through cultural history. But this notion has been developing, hand in hand with evolutionary philosophy, over the last two centuries.
Indeed, the idea that human consciousness has not only evolved but done so through an ascending series of worldviews is itself not new. Our intellectual history is rife with such systems of stages, many of which look quite crude and even silly from the vantage point of decades or centuries. Nineteenth-century intellectuals had many such systems, which unfortunately tended to relegate whole races and cultures to the dustbin of history, unworthy of respect or even simple tolerance. Our more recent embrace of plurality and egalitarian ideals has largely been a response to just such distasteful attempts to label certain people as evolved or advanced and others as primitive and barbaric. And unfortunately, mischaracterizations of the idea of evolution have played no small role in those deplorable schemes. With this in mind, we must be careful to bring tremendous nuance and subtlety to this inquiry, recognizing the real dangers of theorizing about cultural evolution. But even as we acknowledge these failings of history, the intellectual pendulum is swinging back and we are beginning to reexamine the idea that there may be legitimate differences between various worldviews or stages of cultural development that are critical to comprehend and dangerous to ignore. The idea of evolution has once again been a powerful spur, but now we are able to embrace that term in a way that far transcends the “survival of the fittest” ethos of the social Darwinists.
With the dawning recognition that both culture and psychology are caught up in an evolutionary movement, there has been a new enthusiasm that we might finally be able to crack the developmental code and understand more deeply the processes that have shaped and created human culture and human nature as we know them. Some have suggested that the worldviews that make up the internal universe play a role in cultural development that is not dissimilar to the function DNA serves in biological development. As we begin to understand the processes that go into the evolution of complex systems (and what is the human mind, if not a very complex system of processes?), we are recognizing that development isn’t always just slow and steady. Gradualism may be the dominant inclination in scientific circles these days, but both developmental psychology and complexity theory suggests that evolution can also move in leaps and jumps, with periods of relative stasis mixed in with periods of rapid change. One organizing structure dominates until the system is pushed to its limits and then a rapid development takes place and a new organizing principle is formed—a new “dynamic equilibrium,” as psychologist Robert Kegan describes it. We can see this process in psychological systems and even in biological systems. So stages are not exactly foreign to the dynamics of evolution; in fact, quite the opposite.
HEGEL’S EVOLUTIONARY PHILOSOPHY
“I wish to write a history not of wars, but of society,” wrote the great French philosopher Voltaire. “My object is the history of the human mind, and not a mere detail of petty facts.” Voltaire was one of the first historians to focus not on recounting dates and events but on trying to tell history from the inside out, to get inside the mind of history, and to understand the ideas and motives that made humans tick. Voltaire arguably represented the height of the European Enlightenment, and was certainly aware, in some rudimentary sense, of history as a developmental process progressing through stages, even though evolution was not yet an idea active in the culture at large. He wrote that he wished to track the “steps by which men passed from barbarism to civilization.”
But if we are looking for the first truly robust evolutionary philosophy that set the groundwork for an understanding of stages, we need to move forward in time and northeast in direction—out of Voltaire’s Paris, across the French and Belgian countryside, and over the Rhine, to a small German town on the edge of the river Saale: Jena. It was here, half a century before Darwin, that the great German idealists Georg Hegel, Friedrich Schelling, and Johann Fichte, inspired by the spirit of poet and philosopher Johann von Goethe, first explored how new ideas of change, development, and evolution might affect history and philosophy.5 In this unlikely city, idealism, romanticism, natural science, Enlightenment philosophy, and religious inspiration all came together in a new evolutionary synthesis. As University of Chicago philosopher and historian of science Robert Richards has noted, Schelling was the first person to describe the concept of evolution as we understand it today. And as Napoleonic armies battled on the streets of Jena, Hegel completed his first major work, The Phenomenology of Spirit, in which he declared that “the Truth is not only the result [of philosophy] . . . the truth is the whole in the process of development.”
Let us examine that last statement for a moment. Hegel is, for lack of a better word, evolutionizing the idea of philosophical truth. Truth is the whole in the process of development. He is liberating truth from the spell of solidity. Truth is not just found in this insight or that revelation; it is to be found in the very process of one idea giving way to another, and then being transcended by yet another, in the rough-and-tumble struggle of history. Truth is not static, he is saying, it is a process, a developmental unfolding. In order to appreciate any current philosophical idea, we need to understand its tributaries; we need to recognize the developmental process that has given it life. We need to take into account the give and take, the back and forth, the dialectical process, as Hegel calls it, as one stage of understanding gives way to another. “Hegel was the first to recognize that consciousness develops through a series of distinct stages,” writes Steve McIntosh, “[and] among the first to understand that this process of development or ‘becoming’ is the central motif of the universe.”
According to Hegel, any cultural or philosophical “truth” only becomes clear when seen in light of a larger framework of development. The worldview of any given era of history was “both a valid truth unto itself and also an imperfect stage in the larger process of . . . truth’s self-unfolding.” Just as Theodore Dobzhansky would say over a century later that “nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution,” in a sense Hegel was making the same point about philosophical ideas. They only come into true relief when seen in light of the larger historical evolution of ideas. “Truth is not a minted coin,” he wrote, “that can be given and pocketed ready-made.”
Hegel points out that those philosophers who reject a particular philosophical system in favor of their new and improved version usually fail to appreciate the mutual interdependence of even contradictory ideas—how one is built from the material of another in the flow of history, and all stand on a connected, growing synthetic meshwork of cultural propositions and truths. Indeed, in order to capture the way in which one developmental stage builds on the previous stage—preserving the core ideas of that previous stage while also transcending them and negating certain things as well—Hegel employs a German word that does not translate well into English. It is aufheben, and it means to both preserve and change. He writes:
The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant. . . . These forms are not just distinguished from one another, they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole.
Perhaps the closest translation in our own time comes from Ken Wilber, who uses the phrase “transcend and include” to explain the way in which one stage enfolds another in the march of evolution. It’s a principle that remains true for all kinds of organic and inorganic activities. It captures the way in which molecules transcend and include atoms, for example, which in turn transcend and include particles. Or one could say that one stage of culture is built upon yet moves beyond the essential insights of the stages that have come before. It is a universal principle of evolution that Hegel was beginning to glimpse in the nineteenth century, and it is essential for understanding the more sophisticated models of cultural evolution today.
Now, Hegel, Fichte, and Schelling have not always been loved by their philosophical brethren.* They were innovators, and their complex and obscure ideas did not always earn them acclaim from critics. Arthur Schopenhauer complained about all three of them and wrote that Hegel’s philosophy was a “system of crazy nonsense” and would be remembered as a “monument to German stupidity.” Karl Popper went so far as to accuse Hegel’s philosophy of contributing to the rise of fascism in Germany.
It may well be true that for much of our contemporary intellectual world, the synthesis of the German idealists is more likely to be seen as the last gasp of a dying breed of philosophy. As philosopher Richard Tarnas writes, “With Hegel’s decline there passed from the modern intellectual arena the last culturally powerful metaphysical system claiming the existence of a universal order accessible to human awareness.” But with the rise of an evolutionary worldview, we can now more fully appreciate these extraordinary pioneers and their nascent but significant insights into the evolution of consciousness and culture. Hegel and his brethren may have been the last of the old, but they were also the first of the new. They helped acclimate us to the idea that consciousness evolves and that there are discernible patterns in its historical development. And while that idea would certainly be abused again and again by people looking to situate themselves as the pinnacle of their own evolutionary schema, the seed idea remains essential. We can now appreciate the insights of the idealists as the necessary beta versions of the evolutionary principles that today are maturing into more pragmatic tools with which to understand everything from politics to ecology to religion.
“THE LAWS OF THOUGHT ARE THE LAWS OF THINGS”
In his latest book, Evolution’s Purpose, Steve McIntosh identifies developmental psychology as “the branch of social science that deals most directly with the evolution of consciousness.” Indeed, this rich tradition, which started out studying the processes and stages through which children develop and later expanded to include adult development as well, is critical for understanding the kinds of research, thinking, and perspectives that have given birth to our new appreciation of how the internal universe evolves. In fact, after Hegel and the idealists, it was the pioneers of this then-brand-new field who took up the idea of stages in consciousness, giving the notion some much-needed theoretical backing and empirical weight.
The true legend in this field is the Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget. If you start up a conversation about stages of human development, sooner or later someone is going to bring up his name. His breakthrough work with children in creating a “staged” model of cognitive development had a huge effect on culture. He changed forever the way we understand children and, by extension, adults as well. But if you ask historians about the pioneers of developmental psychology, another figure comes up—the unsung early hero of the field. And his name is much more directly associated with evolution: James Mark Baldwin.
Baldwin was an early twentieth-century genius who is probably known best for a process called the Baldwin effect or Baldwinian evolution. Still considered seriously today, it suggests that it is possible for individuals of a species to alter their own genome through a sustained change in behavior—to turn a learned habit into an instinctual one. The idea is that some behavioral changes, if continued over multiple generations, can eventually become inherited, and actually written into the genetic code. What starts as habit can eventually become instinct. Lactose tolerance is often used as an example—initially it was common only to children, but as humans became pastoral and started domesticating cows, eventually childhood lactose tolerance extended into adulthood. Darwinian selection pressures begin to favor lactose tolerance.
Baldwinian evolution has gone in and out of favor over the years, but particularly with the emergence of epigenetics in recent decades, science has come to appreciate a whole new level of plasticity in the expression of the genetic code. As a result, Baldwin’s original propositions have recently taken on even more scientific relevance, and his name increasingly turns up in current evolutionary literature. He was perhaps the first psychologist for whom, in the words of author Henry Plotkin, “evolution was an absolute conceptual anchor.” Indeed, to read Baldwin today is to appreciate just how far ahead of his time he truly was.
Just as Hegel exploded the idea of a fixed, static notion of truth, Baldwin exploded the idea of a fixed static notion of mind. Through observing the development of his own daughter, he saw that her cognitive structures were developing through specific stages over the course of her childhood. Baldwin’s careful observation of this process and his work to eventually build an entire theory of cognitive development around those observations was one of the great breakthroughs in psychology of that time. Many people today don’t even realize that only a couple hundred years ago we used to treat young children as if they were little adults, with less knowledge but essentially the same capacities. Our contemporary understanding that children go through a developmental process is in part due to Baldwin’s unique genius combined with his deep appreciation for the power of an evolutionary perspective.
Called a spiritualist metaphysician by one historian, Baldwin and his interests straddled many worlds, and his work has been described as a bridge between “social and cognitive theories of development,” bringing to mind later theories such as Spiral Dynamics (which we will explore in the next chapter) and the philosophy of Jürgen Habermas, which cross the lines between those two realms. Baldwin also wanted to break down the separation between mind and nature. “The laws of thought are the laws of things,” he once wrote, and in fact, he may have been one of the first to try to bring psychological development and biological development under the same general umbrella, anticipating the cross-disciplinary nature of an evolutionary worldview in statements like: “General biology is today mainly a theory of evolution, and its handmaid is a theory of individual development.”
Some have even suggested that if it weren’t for a little incident at a brothel in Baltimore (a “colored” brothel, God forbid) that got Baldwin kicked out of Johns Hopkins University and sent him into exile from America, his reputation today might rival Piaget’s in terms of developmental psychology. As it turned out, his breakthrough proposition that human beings evolve through a very specific series of developmental stages—which he called pre-logical, quasi-logical, logical, super-logical, hyper-logical, and even mystical stages of consciousness—remained relatively obscure, although evidence suggests that it did help to inspire Piaget in his formative years.
Later, in the hands of developmental theorists such as Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan, who studied moral development, and Jane Loevinger, who mapped ego development, Baldwin’s essential multistage evolutionary structure would grow and expand into more sophisticated and empirically studied evolutionary models. And with those theorists would come a deeper understanding of just how evolution actually works in the interior of the self and what exactly this thing called a stage of development is anyway. But in the early twentieth century, even as Piaget went on to introduce the world to a new stage-centered psychology that became enormously influential, Baldwin’s name faded from the limelight. And with him went the critical realization that there is more than a little connection between evolution as a scientific idea, a philosophical notion, and a psychological template.
Today in academia, if there is anyone who is a successor to Baldwin, it would have to be Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan. His work on stages of psychological development has been groundbreaking, and his books, The Evolving Self and In Over Our Heads, are read by college students around the country. Kegan’s understanding of stages has made a seminal contribution to the field and has built on the work of Baldwin and Piaget before him. Suffice it to say that when we look at the development of this field from Baldwin to Piaget to Kegan, we see an emerging recognition that human consciousness is plastic and malleable in a way that continues to be underappreciated even today. Developmental psychology has broken the spell of solidity in multiple respects. First, it helped us understand that children develop, that they do not possess pre-given adult minds but go through psychological stages of growth on their journey into adulthood. And now we are beginning to understand that adults also can develop in remarkable ways. As Kegan explains, “The great glory within my own field in the last twenty-five years has been the recognition that there are these qualitatively more complex psychological, mental, and spiritual landscapes that await us and that we are called to after the first twenty years of life.”
So what is the relationship between these individual stages and cultural worldviews? As we learned in previous chapters, we can’t think of worldviews as purely individual matters, or even as an amalgam of individual minds. They are also cultural organisms. They are constellations of values that may be created by humans but that also have their own systemic existence. So are the worldviews that have characterized the development of human culture over millennia similar to the psychological structures through which the self develops? That’s the $64,000 question. Is there an individual/cultural parallel to the old biological idea that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”? That was German evolutionary theorist Ernst Haeckel’s famous phrase, describing the way in which the developing fetus can seem to go through stages that resemble the evolutionary development that life went through in the journey from cells to fish to mammals.6 The idea is that the development of the individual recapitulates the development of the species. Haeckel’s proposition has been disproved as any kind of absolute law, but there is nevertheless an acknowledged correlation. In the same way, there has been much speculation that the development of the individual mind recapitulates the evolution of culture. Do Piaget’s stages of psychological development correspond to the evolution of cultural worldviews over the course of history? Again, we would be wise to steer clear of any overly facile or determinative correlations. But important parallels exist nonetheless. As McIntosh puts it, “Even though individual development and cultural evolution are not identical, the developing mind does reveal patterns in its unfolding, and these patterns resonate with the historical unfolding of culture that occurs on an evolutionary time scale.”
German philosopher Jürgen Habermas is one of the few developmental theorists to take up the challenge of bridging these two domains. He argues that both psychological development and cultural development are ultimately based on linguistic structures, and it has since been convincingly demonstrated by Piaget, Kohlberg, Kegan and others that if a developmental logic exists in the maturation of the individual ego, then there is every reason to suspect that social evolution would exhibit a similar trajectory. The developmental logic that informs one would naturally inform the other, because the same underlying structures are responsible for both.
Habermas also makes the critical distinction we touched upon in the last chapter, between the deep structures that define a stage in consciousness and the more superficial surface manifestations of that stage that might vary greatly from person to person, from society to society. This helps answer one of the common concerns about a stage-oriented view of cultural development—that it does not account for the significant differences that exist among unique cultures around the globe. For example, how could stages that we might see in the historical development of North America and Europe really be applicable in an Asian context? The answer is that two cultures can express significantly different forms and features of surface content contingent upon a host of unique historical circumstances and still be constructed on the same underlying core worldview or deep structure of consciousness. As China and India embrace native forms of modernism, for example, we have the opportunity to observe this principle at work, to see the ways in which each nation brings its own unique character to the leap it is taking, and yet at the same time, both exhibit patterns that are more than reminiscent of the process Europe and North America went through in the last couple of centuries.
More research will be needed to establish the relationship between the evolution of individual consciousness and the evolution of cultural worldviews. But however connected these dimensions may be, there is one big difference when it comes to studying them. It’s much easier to look at the stages of an individual mind in the space of a lifetime than it is to look at the cultural stages that emerged in the dim reaches of history. Where are we to look for historical evidence of the development of a dimension that is invisible to the human eye and not easily discernable by the instruments of science? Evolutionaries who choose to study this aspect of life’s unfolding face a challenge. “Unlike paleontology, where the outlines of ancient life-forms are open to study,” writes scholar of mysticism Gary Lachman, “in trying to understand what a consciousness prior to our own might have been like we run into the fact that there are no ‘fossil remains’ of previous consciousnesses available for our inspection.” We must improvise, he suggests, by studying carefully the outward expressions of human culture, which naturally reveal something about the character and nature of human consciousness. In the artifacts of culture, he writes, we can see “the imprint of human imagination . . . the mind pressing itself upon the material world.” We must look at these “mindprints” in order to catch a glimpse of the consciousness that created them.
Perhaps the best such archeologist of the mind in the last century was philosopher Jean Gebser. Even while living a tumultuous early life that saw him narrowly escape both Franco’s fascists and Hitler’s Nazis, he was able to get inside history, so to speak, to peer into the internal universe and start to map the development of structures of consciousness and culture from the inside out.
“A SUMMONS TO CONSCIOUSNESS”
If James Mark Baldwin, as University of Chicago historian Robert Richards suggests, was a spiritually alive person who “felt the beat of consciousness” in his own life, then Gebser must have felt the music of the entire orchestra. He was, as William Irwin Thompson described him, a “brilliantly intuitive intellectual mystic” whose novel theory of how human culture has evolved through four distinct “structures of consciousness” was born out of a powerful spiritual epiphany. In 1931, Gebser, a struggling German thinker living in exile from his native land in Spain, underwent a mystical awakening that convinced him that a new form of consciousness was beginning to appear in the West. He called this consciousness “integral” and distinguished it from the other forms of consciousness that had come before—which he labeled archaic, magical, mythical, and mental-rational. Over the next two decades, this singular insight would inform all of his work and he would tirelessly explore the implications of his integral awakening, eventually producing his masterpiece of philosophy, mysticism, and history entitled The Ever-Present Origin. For Gebser, integral consciousness is a form of consciousness that is concerned with “integrality and ultimately with the whole.” He distinguished this integral consciousness from the mental-rational stage that had come of age in the Renaissance with the “discovery of perspective” and of three-dimensional space. A friend of Picasso, Gebser was quite concerned with perspective, and often used art as a window into the consciousness of any given historical period. He felt that the artistic discovery of perspective in space was linked to the “entire intellectual attitude of the modern epoch,” and was essential for the scientific-technological world we inhabit today. For Gebser, the dawning of integral consciousness would serve to reintegrate the mental-rational world that had grown so fragmented, and also allow previous stages of consciousness to resurface in our awareness. They would become “present to our awareness in their respective degrees of consciousness.”
Surprisingly, Gebser was not a fan of evolution. He referred to his “structures of consciousness” not as evolutionary stages but as mutations. He saw evolution through the narrow window of his own time, as a limited, materialistic conception of the dominant mental-rational worldview. And so he rejected the term. It is only in retrospect that we can see his insights as being evolutionary in the richest and broadest sense of the word.
Reading Gebser is like reading an impressionist painting; the effect is not in the details of the argument built step by careful step but in the sudden flashes of revelation that one receives as Gebser paints an evocative portrait of how consciousness evolved through the millennia. Unlike many other thinkers, Gebser is not enthralled by the Flintstones fallacy. Indeed, he gives us a peek inside structures of consciousness that were active hundreds and thousands of years ago, bringing forth insights that startle us with their strangeness while simultaneously stirring memories and familiar glimpses. It is worth noting that while Gebser acknowledges that many of these stages remain present in consciousness and culture today, his particular gift is bringing alive a sense of the original versions of these earlier stages as they would have been experienced when they first emerged back in the far reaches of time, unmediated by the overlay of subsequent evolution. It has been left to other theorists, as we shall see in the next chapter, to shine light on the contemporary expressions of these structures and help us figure out how to navigate them.
The earliest structure in Gebser’s model is called archaic. It is ancient and hard to analyze through historical data, as any reference to it is already coming from a perspective that has begun to move beyond it. “Written evidence is itself indicative of a transitional period,” he writes. Archaic man was indistinguishable from the world and the universe, Gebser suggests, living in a state of consciousness in which there is simply no differentiation from nature. He notes only a few sources of information about these early humans, notably Chang Tzu’s statement about the ancients in the fourth century BC: “Dreamlessly the true men of earlier times slept.” The dreamlessness suggests the dormancy of a certain level of conscious awareness.
The next structure is magic. Gebser acknowledges that these stages are fluid among different cultures and time periods, and there are not clear lines between one and the other, only transitional times. The distinguishing feature of the magic stage is that humans have now been released from their “harmony or identity with the whole.” This is a time of human fighting to step outside of nature, to free oneself of the inertia of nature, to be independent of nature. “He tries to exorcise [nature], to guide her,” Gebser writes. “He strives to be independent of her, then he begins to be conscious of his own will.”
This is a time of impulse and instinct, vital forces and group ego, of ritual and rainmaking, totems and spell casting, miracles and taboos, and the barest beginnings of individuation. The more that magic man is able to free himself from that “sleep-like consciousness,” the more he becomes an individual, a unity, as Gebser puts it. At this point he is unable to “recognize the world as a whole, but only the details which reach his sleep-like consciousness and in turn stand for the whole. Hence the magic world is also a world . . . in which the part can and does stand for the whole.” This association between the whole and part allows for a world in which everything “intertwines and is interchangeable”—a world of symbol, a world in which the picture of the bison and the bison can be interfused, just as poking a voodoo doll can elicit a reaction in the person represented, or a ritual sacrifice can elicit real but vicarious suffering.
As always, Gebser uses art to illustrate, demonstrate, and support his primary descriptions. He notes, for example, that art illustrating this structure has several interesting features. First, there is an interesting “mouthlessness” in early sculptures and works of art from this period. Magic humans, or at least their early expressions, had little need of language, as the group ego and the general egolessness of individuals allowed for a certain telepathic communication and submission to the vital needs of the clan. Sounds are more important in this structure. Language is still in its early stages. “Only when myth appears does the mouth, to utter it, appear,” writes Gebser, and he draws parallels between this and preverbal stages of development in infancy. He also remarks on the way in which early art illustrates the overriding fusion between humans and the natural world. Some paintings even seem to have humans and nature essentially merged in this “spaceless, timeless” world, a point that he shows again and again in images representative of the time period. Here again, we see the magic human’s primordial embeddedness in nature and the struggle to be free.
This release from nature is the struggle which underpins every significant will power-drive, and, in a very exact sense, every tragic drive for power. This enables magic man to stand out against the superior power of nature, so that he can escape the binding force of his merger with nature. Therewith he accomplishes that further leap into consciousness which is the real theme of mankind’s mutations.
This remarkable and deeply inveterate impulse to be free from miracles, taboos, forbidden names, which, if we think back on the archaic period, represents in the magic a falling away from the once-prevailing totality: this urge to freedom and the constant need to be against something resulting from it (because only this “being against” creates separation, and with it, possibilities of consciousness) may be the answering reaction of man, set adrift on earth, to the power of the earth. It may be curse, blessing, or mission. In any case, it may mean: whoever wishes to prevail over the earth must liberate himself from its power.
Next in Gebser’s schema is the mythic stage. Again, transitional phases are acknowledged, and there are inevitably differences in terms of timing across different cultures and geographical regions. Human cultural evolution is not some kind of monolithic movement forward, everyone together in lockstep. This is an important point and often misunderstood by critics. Moreover, Gebser suggests that there are both positive and negative expressions of each of these stages, time periods in which they are rising with growth, vitality, and all the energy of new emergence and time periods in which they are fading, losing their vitality, and entering a more “deficient” period.
With the arrival of mythic human culture, we have also the beginning of history, literally. The magical is prehistoric; it lies “before our consciousness of time,” as Gebser puts it. Recorded history is itself a sign of the emergence of a new consciousness, a sign that the timeless consciousness of the magic culture is giving way to a new sense of time and history. Time is beginning to come into human awareness, an emerging sense of temporality, which will lead into new stories of human origins and mythical cosmologies. And with these new myths and cosmologies, there is a new sense of language and words to express them, a new oral tradition that places emphasis on the power of the “vocalized mythical narrative” (“In the beginning there was the Word”). Words take on great significance in the mythical structure as conveyors of psychically rich meaning and vitally infused content. Even today, Gebser notes that the mythic structure exists as a pictorially rich, imaginatory world, characterized by the imagistic nature of myth, which alternates between “magical timelessness and the dawning awareness of cosmic periodicity.”
Gebser, as I mentioned, was fascinated by artistic perspective and notes that mythic humans evolved a new sense of perspective, an “unperspectival” two-dimensional polarity signified by the circle, a cyclical mindset that “encompasses, balances, and ties together all polarities as the year, in the course of its perpetual cycle of summer and winter, turns back upon itself; as the course of the sun encloses midday and midnight, daylight and darkness, as the orbits of the planets, in their rising and setting, encompasses visible as well as invisible paths and returns unto itself.” And this polarity is captured not just in physical expression but in psychic and religious realities as well. For example, in the invocation of the “sub terrestrial Hades and . . . the super terrestrial Olympus.” Later, of course, we see this same polarity in the belief in a heaven above and hell down below.
The emergence of the mythic represents a new cognizance of the internal universe, the world of the soul, as Gebser explains it. Awareness is increasing; the inner world is becoming larger, richer, and more conscious. One sign of this increasing consciousness, he notes, is the inclusion of human anger and wrath in early literature, a demonstration of a new individuation and self-assertion that marks the human ego striving to break free of the constrictive bonds of the group, the collective, the clan. We see this in the wrath of Moses, “awakener of the nation of Israel,” and in the hero mythologies like the Iliad—perhaps the earliest work of Western literature—which actually begins with the statement: “Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles, son of Peleus.” In this light, we can see how this mythical shout-out to Achilles is simultaneously a tribute to the awakening of a self-directed sense of self, or as Gebser puts it, a “summons to consciousness.”
The mental structure of consciousness is more familiar to us, as it still represents the dominant stage of our culture today. I have tended to refer to it as modernist in this book, the phase of consciousness or worldview that came of age in the culture at large during the European Enlightenment. Gebser places its true beginning in the Axial Age, however, in Hellenic Greece, the fountainhead of the Western mind. It is the emergence of the rational mind of directed and discursive thought, another step in the long journey of the individuated ego to free itself from the domination of nature, the vital bonds of the clan, and the psychic energies of myth. Gebser, ever the subtle mythologist, cites not only the philosophers of Athens as the birthplace of the mental-rational, but also the birth of Athena, the goddess of wisdom who is born from the cloven head of Zeus. This goddess of “bright . . . clear-thinking” is an owl-eyed deity who can see into the unconscious, unawakened darkness, is the namesake of the Athenian mind, and is destined to become a patroness of the sciences. It is here, as Gebser notes, speaking from the perspective of the European mind in the middle of two disastrous world wars, that the mental-rational “world came into being, our world which is now perhaps coming to a close. Anyone who perceives the end and knows of its agonies should know of the beginning.”
Gebser notes that thinking or “thought forms” in the manner that we think of mentality today is really a feature of this new mental-rational structure. We cannot really speak of thought as we know it in the original mythical structure, he suggests. Thought forms, in that earlier structure of consciousness, are different, more like “being-thoughts”—a designation that illustrates the more embedded character of individual consciousness in the mythical structure. In the mental stage, there is an unambiguous “I” doing the thinking (“I think, therefore I am”), but in the mythic world, humans could not so easily distinguish their conscious agency from the thought forms that occupied their psyches. “Whereas mythical thinking, to the extent that it can be called thinking,” he writes, “was a shaping or designing of images in the imagination, discursive thought is fundamentally different. It is no longer polar related, enclosed in . . . but rather directed toward objects . . . and drawing energy from the individual ego.” And in the magic structure we lose even more dimensionality; Gebser calls thought forms here “being-in-thought”—an expression of a less individuated ego, more immersion; a world not of discursive, representational thought or psychic experiences but of vital experiences in which the individual being is almost completely subsumed.
The mental is a structure dominated by men, mentality, matter, and materialism in which we move from mythology to philosophy, in which “man is the measure of all things” and man measures all things. The emergence of this new stage is earthshaking in that “it bursts man’s protective psychic circle and congruity with the psycho-naturalistic-cosmic-temporal world of polarity and enclosure. . . . Man steps out of the two-dimensional surface into space, which he will attempt to master by his thinking. This is an unprecedented event, an event that fundamentally alters the world.”
More than even his unique and, in most respects, unprecedented description of these stages of consciousness, Gebser also captures the agonies and the ecstasies of the heroic struggle of human evolution, the hard-won victories of our increasing consciousness, and the increasing freedom and dimensionality of our experience. For him, it is unquestionably a spiritual process, and our reflection on it a chance to perceive the very “seedlings of the future” that will light the way to the next emergence. And it reveals both the wonderful and terrible consequences of our complex journey from the unity of a primordial fusion with nature into the freedom, light, and power of a conceptual, rational universe.
And it would be well for us to be mindful of one actuality: although the wound in the head of Zeus healed, it was once a wound. Every “novel” thought will tear open wounds . . . everyone who is intent upon surviving—not only earth but also life—with worth and dignity, and living rather than passively accepting life, must sooner or later pass through the agonies of emergent consciousness.
Through Gebser’s evocative writing, we can begin to see human evolution through this rich tapestry of stages and structures. What happens when worldviews collide? When we see historical events through the lens of the evolution of consciousness, it changes our perspective in important ways. We become less focused on the material manifestations of the worldview and more on the inner dimensions, on the internal structures and where they are situated in evolutionary time. For example, in one particularly evocative passage that illustrates this perspective, Gebser describes the reasons why the Aztec civilization of Mexico gave way so easily to the Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century. How could so few conquer so many, so easily? He begins by referring to an ancient Aztec account of how Montezuma tried to send his sorcerers to cast spells on the Spanish. Their failure was not just a failure of will or effort or technology or manpower or weaponry but of consciousness, he explains. The Aztec culture was reflective of Gebser’s magical and mythical stages, whereas the Spanish were more rooted in the mental-rational. Montezuma sent his spell casters, priests, and soothsayers to intercept the Spanish, but as the manuscript recounts, they “could not reach their intent with the Spanish; they simply failed to arrive.” Current theorists may attribute this to a superstition on the part of the Aztecs, but Gebser suggests that “authentic spell-casting, a fundamental element of the collective consciousness for the Mexicans, is effective only for the members attuned to the group consciousness. It simply bypasses those who are not bound to, or sympathetic toward, the group. The Spaniards’ superiority, which compelled the Mexicans to surrender almost without a struggle, resulted primarily from their consciousness of individuality, not from their superior weaponry. Had it been possible for the Mexicans to step out of their egoless attitude, the Spanish victory would have been less certain and assuredly more difficult.”
Gebser’s account of this encounter between cultures gives a hint of what it means to begin to look at history through the lens of the interior evolution of consciousness rather than exclusively focusing on the more material world of technology, economics, science, or politics.
In addition to delineating these stages of history, Gebser was also tracking the awakening of a new worldview—one that he had glimpsed as a young man, and labeled “integral.” But the new is also about the old, in the sense that the dawning of integral consciousness includes reawakening both our historical knowledge and inner connection with previous structures, making them more conscious, more transparent, more accessible. But this is neither a return nor a regression. We cannot go back; the way forward is greater consciousness, not less. We must not try to reinhabit or romanticize cultural structures inappropriate for our own time. We see this happening, for example, in postmodern society’s near obsession with indigenous cultures’ wisdom and connection to nature, which was really, as Gebser shows us, an immersion in nature. And we see it in those who retreat into mythic religious worldviews, seeking the established security of accepted meaning and a sense of place.
Once again, I should point out that while Gebser readily admits that we may see these early stages active in our own psyches and that they may be prominent and even dominant in certain cultures today, their original historical character would have differed significantly from their expression in our own time. A mythic-stage culture, when it represented the very leading edge of human evolution, valiantly struggling to liberate itself from immersion in the magic stage, would inevitably be worlds apart from a mythic worldview existing in the context of a postmodern globalizing world, much of which has left mythic consciousness far behind in the misty reaches of the past. Each of these structures continues to mutate and evolve, some quite significantly, even if certain core elements, the deeper structures of consciousness that underlie each stage, remain roughly the same. This distinction between the deep underlying structures of these stages of consciousness and their more relative, changing, contingent surface expressions is a critical feature of a robust view of cultural evolution. More important, it illuminates the world around us. For example, it explains why we can have reactionary Islamic fundamentalism that is both a very contemporary response to modernity and at the same time expresses core elements of a very ancient mythical structure of consciousness.
Gebser would continue, throughout his life, to look for examples of the new integral consciousness emerging in world culture, eventually traveling to India, where a second spiritual illumination occurred at Sarnath, the site of the Buddha’s first teaching, which he described as a “transfiguration and irradiation of the indescribable, unearthly, transparent ‘Light.’ ” In the introduction to the second edition of The Ever Present Origin, published in 1966, he noted in a passage that burnishes his credentials as a significant Evolutionary that among examples of this new stage of consciousness, “the writings of Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin are preeminent.”
Gebser’s rich and extraordinary insights were inspired by his own awakening glimpses of integral consciousness. And his work has done a tremendous amount to contribute to the body of philosophical thought that is emerging today around the notion of stages of cultural development. He also set the stage for a whole generation of thinkers to research, fill out, and refine the basic patterns he had identified and begin to work with them as they appear in culture today. As we will see in the following chapter, understanding the consciousness of yesteryear is essential not only for appreciating the fact that consciousness has evolved but also for enabling it to evolve, in our very own time, even in some of the most volatile places on our ever-smaller planet.