Episode 56: On Jean Gebser, with Jeremy D. Johnson

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 25 September 2019

⏱️ 79 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The German poet and philosopher Jean Gebser's major work, The Ever-Present Origin, is a monumental study of the evolution of consciousness from prehistory to posthistory. For Gebser, consciousness adopts different "structures" at different times and in different contexts, and each structure reveals certain facets of reality while potentially occluding others. An integral human being is one who can utilize all of the structures according to the moment or situation. As Gebserian scholar Jeremy Johnson explains in this episode, modern humans are currently experiencing the transition from the "perspectival" structure which formed in the late Middle Ages to the "aperspectival," a new way of seeing and being that first revealed itself in the art of the Modernists. Grokking what the aperspectival means, and what it might look like, is just one of the tasks Jeremy, Phil and JF set themselves in this engaging trialogue. Jeremy D. Johnson is the author of the recently released Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness. REFERENCES Jeremy Johnson, Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and the Integral Consciousness Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin William Irwin Thompson, Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness Ken Wilber, integral theorist Lionel Snell, “Spare Parts” Nagarjuna, “Verses of the Middle Way” (Mulamadhyamakakarika) Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica Object-oriented ontology (OOO) Dogen, Uji (“The Time-Being”), from the Shobogenzo (Treasury of the True Dharma Eye) Special Guest: Jeremy D. Johnson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Spectrevision Radio
0:02.0	Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.
0:23.3	For more episodes or to support the podcast, go to weirdst. I'm J.F. Martel. The Chinese have a saying, may you live in uninteresting
0:56.1	times. There's wisdom in that. Imagine if George R.R.R. Martin had set his Song of Ice and Fire
1:03.0	novels during the long piece of Agon the Conqueror when everything was going swimmingly in Westeros.
1:09.5	That wouldn't have made for much of a story.
1:11.9	Peace is boring. War is interesting. Interesting times are dangerous and scary. There's a lot at stake.
1:19.1	In fact, really interesting times are always, to some degree, apocalyptic. There's a sense that
1:24.3	things are about the change drastically. Faced with major upheaval, the collective mind goes to extremes, imagining that it isn't just an era that's ending, but the world itself.
1:34.6	That the fabric of reality is coming apart at the seams, and the stars are teetering in their celestial aries.
1:41.7	And there's always the possibility that these dramatic imaginings are correct.
1:45.9	Why wouldn't reality just come apart suddenly? That'd be super interesting, but you wouldn't
1:50.9	wish it on your worst enemy. But however wise that Chinese saying may be, it's neither here
1:56.1	nor there as far as we're concerned, because we happen to live in very interesting times indeed, and there's
2:02.5	nothing we can do about it other than become interesting ourselves. Interesting times call for
2:08.2	interesting people. And Jeremy D. Johnson, today's guest, is one of those. Jeremy's a writer,
2:14.7	editor, an integral scholar who recently released a book entitled
2:18.2	Seeing Through the World, Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness.
2:22.9	Jeremy's also a friend, and it was a pleasure to have him on weird studies to talk about
2:27.3	the German poet and philosopher whom he admires so much.
2:31.7	According to Gebser, humanity is currently undergoing a major paradigm shift,
2:36.5	a transition from what he called the Perspectival, a way of seeing and being that came to the
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Phil Ford and J. F. Martel, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Phil Ford and J. F. Martel and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.