Integral Time: Intimations of an Emerging Worldview
with Jeremy Johnson
(in cooperation with the Jean Gebser Gesellschaft, who works tirelessly to help bring the ideas and books of and about Jean Gebser to German-speaking audiences. Get the Jean-Gebser-Reihe (JGR) published by Rudolf Hämmerli and Elmar Schübl here: https://www.chronos-verlag.ch/reihen/2300)
Course starts January 19th - February 16th
This five-part course invites students to embark on a journey of philosophical mythmaking as they explore how to reclaim time from linear progress, ‘see through’ the complex conditions of the present, and trace the outlines of an ‘integral’ spirituality–a spirituality that uniquely meets the challenges of this strange time between worlds.
Jean Gebser (1905-1973) was a Swiss poet, philosopher, and phenomenologist of consciousness whose writing illuminates the conditions of our present-day civilizational crisis. Gebser saw our time as a transitional epoch–a time between worlds and worldviews–where runaway technological and social forces could only be mastered by a new, ‘integral’ mutation, a radical worldview shift that departs from the Cartesian, instrumentalist attitude which has dominated modernity since the early Western Renaissance. The new integral mutation, Gebser saw, heralded the effective end of the modernist worldview dominated by abstract linear time. Integral time involves a discontinuous leap of consciousness: it is a time beyond progress. What comes to the fore in this new time is neither an orientation towards the past nor a fixation on some linear future; it is a turn towards an intensified and ‘diaphanous’ spiritual present. Those who achieve this new ‘temporal’ attitude have moved from a world of conceptual representation–where the self is ‘buffered’ and we can never know the world ‘in itself’--to one of participation, openness, epistemic humility, and radical relationality. The integral person navigates a relational time where past and future shape the dynamism of the living present.
The aim of this course is to introduce the philosophical and spiritual import of Gebser’s oeuvre for our times. This is achieved by going to the very heart of Gebser’s contemplative and philosophical insights on ‘integral time.’ Students will come to deepen their appreciation and intuitive understanding of the ‘temporal’ dimensions of our present-day existential and spiritual crises. Conversely, it is precisely the temporal dimensions of the meta-crisis that open up new possibilities for overcoming them.
In this course, you will:
Students will deepen their understanding of the historical conditions that have shaped the meta-crisis and continue to shape present-day conditions
Students will familiarize themselves with the life and work of the philosopher and intellectual mystic Jean Gebser
Students will be able to apply an integrative meta-theoretical approach to a broad range of cultural phenomena, making sense of cultural trends and challenges
Students will become familiar with a diverse set of supplementary art, literature, and philosophy that will enrich their learning in the course and encourage further illuminations, further ‘meta-linking’
Students will cultivate an intuitive sense of what Gebser described as the “world without opposite,” the aperspectival world, and as they do so, develop a sense of how ‘integrative’ principles can be applied in their everyday lives
Module Outline
All classes will be 90 minutes and are recorded live on Zoom on Sun, January 19th at 9:30 am PT / 6:30 pm CET. Recordings will be made available shortly after the live session.
I. Another Way to go Meta: Re-visioning the History of Consciousness
Rather than imagining the history of consciousness to feature a developmental arc of successive stages and progressive unfoldment, Gebser’s schema offers a more challenging view: the ‘past’ mutations, or ‘structures’ of consciousness, have their own forms of complexity, their own advanced achievements–from the sophisticated knowledge of magical animism to the rich, polyrhythmic experience of mythic time. These past forms still live on in us for those sensitive enough to attune to them in the present, and rather than imagining a linear or teleological progression of human consciousness, Gebser offers a more nuanced model featuring “gains and losses,” as well ever-shifting processual “interrelationships” between the past and present.
II. Time Breaking Forth
The course turns towards a pivotal moment of cultural transformation not unlike our own time: indeed, our time is entangled in this earlier period like a ‘kaironic knot,’ where the past continues to unfold in the present. The moment in question is the invention of the steam engine by James Watt. The industrial revolution is like a seed crystal for our own time: it is the moment, as Gebser saw, where “time broke forth,” and runaway technological and social forces of ‘fossil capitalism’ were unleashed. Lesson II closely examines this moment of cultural transformation and its repercussions, not only because it illuminates present trends of our planetary ‘metacrisis,’ but also because it may contain the seeds of an incipient integral worldview.
III. Time Breaking In
The transformations of culture and consciousness throughout human history could be understood, on one level, as a series of dramatic reversals. Our present is no different. This lesson takes us to recent cultural developments, applying Gebser’s methodology and insights to cast light on the ‘meta-crisis,’ the ‘polycrisis’ of modernity. Perhaps more than any other phenomena in our contemporary world, the conditions of the climate crisis have initiated a shocking reversal: the long processes of de-naturing and abstracting the world which began in early modernity and accelerated with the Industrial Revolution have come to a dramatic halt. Now, as Isabelle Stengers has articulated, is a time of the “intrusion of Gaia.” The conditions of our postmodern world have reversed into something new, even weird: we live in an increasingly posthuman era where time and nature have begun to suffuse nearly every aspect of our contemporary lives. Gebser’s “irruption of time” has never been a more vivid experience. Time–a weird time, where past, present and future are tangled up in the climate crisis–now prevails as the new ground, the new ‘background’ experience’ of the twenty-first century.
IV. Integral Futurism, or Reclaiming Time from Progress
The course will conclude with a series of aesthetic, spiritual and philosophical fragments that imagine a time beyond progress and the nascent features of an ‘integral’ worldview. How might the crisis conditions of our present be metamorphosed into so many ‘fragments’ of an integral future? How might the seemingly destructive and chaotic conditions of the meta-crisis be reenvisioned as medicine for soulmaking and planetary wayfinding? Riffing on the theme of time, this lesson will meditate on the politics of nostalgia, lost futures, and the quest to realize what Gebser called “time-freedom.” In the process, it is hoped that the lesson can trace, at the very least, the outline of an ‘integral yoga,’ methods of radical ‘self-fashioning’ and ‘transindividuation’ that empower students to reclaim time from progress and live the future in daily life.
V. Postscript: Medicine Bags From the Future
Ursula K. LeGuin famously likened the art of fiction to the ‘carrier bag.’ The carrier bag features no linear arc, no progressive story. Like the novel, what is important in such a bag is the bundled interrelationships–some resonant, some dissonant–between the disparate elements which comprise it. It is a unity, a whole, but a complex whole that invites an altogether different way of thinking. This way of thinking is the way of medicine making. The way of soul. In our concluding session, Integral Time shifts into a discussion format. Students are invited to share their insights and cross-pollinate their ideas. In the intermixture, in the middle, we form the medicine bags of an integral future. The intention is to forge spiritual friendship and intellectual fellowship: we all walk the path between worlds and worldviews. When we disperse, we will carry the seeds of the future in our medicine bags, the spirit of inquiry in our hearts. Together we go forth to tell our own stories, continuing to live the paradox of living from the future.
About your facilitator
Jeremy D Johnson is a writer, author, and teacher living with his partner and son in southern Vermont. He is the author of Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness (2019) and editor-in-chief of Mutations journal (2024). This book was translated into German with the help of the Jean Gebser Gesellschaft in Switzerland.
His next book, Fragments of an Integral Future: Essays on Time, Climate, and a New World View will be published in Spring 2025. Jeremy’s work and research is dedicated to fostering the emergence of new, ‘integrative’ and ‘planetary’ forms of thought and being, taking a special interest in integral meta-theory, posthumanism and eco-literature. He is the publisher of Integral Imprint, a senior research associate at Perspectiva, and a doctoral student in Philosophy at the California Institute of Integral Studies.