THE END OF PERSPECTIVE AND THE NEW “AMENSION”: GEBSER, PICASSO

15 min readMar 10, 2020

FILM IN PHASE SPACE EPISODE 3

A drawing by Picasso

When we look at this drawing [Pablo Picasso, 1926], we take in at one glance the whole man, perceiving not just one aspect, but simultaneously the front, the side, and the back, everything at once. We are spared both the need to walk around the figure, in order to obtain a sequential view of the various aspects.

In this drawing space and body are transparent. In this sense the drawing is neither unperspectival, i.e., a two-dimensional rendering in which the body is imprisoned, nor is it perspectival, i.e., a three-dimensional sector surrounding the figure with breathing space.

The drawing is “aperspectival;” time is no longer spatialized but integrated and concretized as a fourth dimension. By this means it renders time, is expressed in an intensified and valid form as the present.

‘Aperspectival’ is not to be thought of as merely the opposite of ‘perspectival’; the antithesis of ‘perspectival’ is ‘unperspectival.’ The distinction in meaning suggested by the three terms is analogous to that of the terms illogical, logical, and alogical or immoral, moral, and amoral. We use “aperspectival” to clearly emphasize the need of overcoming the mere antithesis of affirmation and negation.”

Picasso’s drawing was possible only after he was able to actualise all of the temporal structures of the past latent in himself (and in each of us) during the course of his preceding thirty years of painting in a variety of earlier styles. By drawing on his primitive, magic inheritance (his African mask period), his mythical heritage (his Hellenistic-archaistic period), and his classicist, rationally-accentuated formalist phase (his Ingres period), Picasso was able to achieve the concretion of time. (24–26)

One should bear in mind that Gebser spent the years 1937–1939 in a circle which included Picasso.

Picasso’s drawing is aperspectival in that he tries to overcome the spatialized time of the mental structure and integrate it and concretize it in the present emphasizing temporal rather than spatial perspectives well aware of the inadequacy of attempts to transform it from a quantitative dimension into a qualitative “amension”.

Until now the attempts with the fourth dimension have all been inadequate and are comparable to those made with the third dimension during the one-hundred-fifty years between Petrarch and Leonardo da Vinci. (355)

This article introduces The Ever-Present Origin, the magnum opus of cultural historian and evolutionary philosopher Jean Gebser, largely in his own words. According to Gebser, human consciousness underwent a series of mutations each of which has enriched reality by a new (qualitative) dimension. He lists them as archaic or magical, mythical, and mental to the eventual manifestation of its aperpectival happening as we speak.

At present humanity is again undergoing a mutation from the mental, perspectival structure of consciousness to the aperspectival structure. What is trying to do is to create a roadmap to integrate the preceding consciousness structures, rather than suppress them and hence being adversely affected by them.

Causation, creativity, effectiveness

A true process always occurs in quanta, that is, in leaps; or, expressed in quasi-biological and not physical terms, in mutations. It occurs spontaneously, indeterminately, and, consequently, discontinuously. (37)

We can speak here of processes that take place “outside” spatial and temporal understanding and conceptualization, thus preventing us from making a cliche spatial-temporal cause-and-effect relationship. (39)

This consideration also points up the limits of technology, for technology is definitely unable to bestow on man the omnipotence which he imagines himself to have. On the contrary, technology necessarily leads to an “omni-impotence” to the extent that the process of physical projection is not realized. (132–133)

UNPERSPECTIVAL

The archaic structure is the zero-dimensional in the sense of a total absence of differentiation. There is no subject-object polarity (let alone duality), no differentiation between self and other, between soul and nature, between the individual and the universe. Yet the archaic structure was by no means “primitive”.

THE MAGiC STRUCTURE

The emergence of the magic structure is above all a transition from undifferentiated identity to one-dimensional unity. The magic consciousness is focused on a single “point,” which can be interchanged with other “points” or, as a part, stand for a whole. “Unitemporality”and “canonicity” I think of the Dreamtime, time out of time, everywhen inhabited by ancestral, figures, of heroic proportions, distinct from gods, did not control the material world but were revered

A hunting scene
In his book Unknown Africa, Leo Frobenius describes the following rite, which he observed in the Congo jungle.

[M]embers of the hunting tribe of Pygmies (three men and a woman) drew a picture of an antelope in the sand before they started out at dawn to hunt antelopes. With the first ray of sunlight that fell on the sand, they intended to “kill” the antelope. Their first arrow hit the drawing unerringly in the neck. Then they went out to hunt and returned with a slain antelope. Their death-dealing arrow hit the animal in exactly the same spot where, hours before, the other arrow had hit the drawing. . . . [H]aving fulfilled its magic purpose. . . this arrow was then removed from the drawing with an accompanying ritual designed to ward off any evil consequences of the murder from the hunters. After that was done, the drawing itself was erased. (47)

The responsibility for the murder, committed by the group-ego against a part of nature, is attributed to a power felt to be “standing outside”: the sun. It is not the pygmies’ arrow that kills, but the first arrow of the sun that falls on the animal, and of which the real arrow is only a symbol. With the Pygmies in their egolessness, the moral consciousness is still attributed to the sun. Their Ego is still scattered over the world, like the light of the sun.

Note that all magic, even today, occurs in the egoless, spaceless and timeless sphere. This requires — a sacrifice of consciousness; it occurs in the state of trance, or when the consciousness dissolves as a result of mass reactions, slogans, or “isms.”( 49–51)

The more man released himself from the whole, becoming “conscious” of himself, the more he began to be an individual, a unity not yet able to recognize the world as a whole, but only the details (or “points”) that stand for the whole.

Man replies to the forces streaming toward him with his own corresponding forces: he stands up to Nature. He tries to exorcise her, to guide her; he strives to be independent of her; then he begins to be conscious of his own will. He uses Witchcraft and sorcery, totem and taboo, are the natural means by which he seeks to free himself from the transcendent power of nature to become in- creasingly conscious of himself 46)

THE MYTHICAL STRUCTURE

The mythical structure leads to the emergent awareness of the internal world. Although still distant from space, the mythical structure is already on the verge of time. The imaginary consciousness still alternates between magical timelessness and the dawning awareness of cosmic periodicity. The farther myth stands removed from consciousness, the greater its degree of timelessness. By contrast, the closer its proximity to consciousness, the greater its emphasis on time.

The great cosmogonical images in the early myths are the soul’s recollection of the world’s origination. In later myths, it recalls the genesis of earth and man, reflecting the powers of light and darkness in the images of the gods. Slowly the timeless becomes temporal; there is a gradual transition from remote timelessness to tangible periodicity. (67)

The illuminated manuscripts of early Romanesque painting depict the unperspectival world that retained the prevailing constitutive elements of Mediterranean antiquity. Not until the Gothic, the forerunner of the Renaissance, was there a shift in emphasis. Before that space is not yet our depth-space, but rather a cavern (and vault), or simply an in-between space; in both instances it is undifferentiated space. This condition was gradually destroyed by the expansion of Christianity, whose teaching of detachment from nature transforms this destruction into an act of liberation. (9–10)

PERSPECTIVAL

During the Renaissance, an unmistakable reorganization of our consciousness occurred: The discovery of perspective which opened up the three-dimensionality of space. This is the age the age of perspectivity and characterizes the age immediately preceding it as the “unperspectival” age.

Petrarch’s ascent of Mount Ventoux

A letter of the thirty-two year old Petrarch written in 1336 to Francesco Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro describes his ascent of Mount Ventoux, a mountain in Southern France, to the northeast of Avignon, where the Rhône separates the French Alps from the Cevennes and the principal mountain range of Central France.

“Yesterday I climbed the highest mountain of our region,”

Once Petrarch reaches the summit his narrative becomes unsettled.

“Shaken by the unaccustomed wind and the wide, freely shifting vistas, I was immediately awestruck. I look: the clouds lay beneath my feet. [. . .] I look toward Italy, whither turned my soul even more than my gaze, and sigh at the sight of the Italian sky which appeared more to my spirit than to my eyes, and I was overcome by an inexpressible longing to return home. [. . .] Suddenly a new thought seized me, transporting me from space into time. I said to myself: it has been ten years since you left Bologna.

Having confessed his anguish and unburdened his soul, he describes further his perception of space:

“Then I turn westward; in vain my eye searches for the ridge of the Pyrenees, boundary between France and Spain. [. . .] To my right I see the mountains of Lyon, to the left the Mediterranean surf washes against Marseille before it breaks on Aigues Mortes. Though the distance was considerable, we could see clearly; the Rhône itself lay beneath our gaze.”

Birth of matter, ego hypertrophy

The old world where only the soul is wonderful and worthy of contemplation now begins to collapse. The event that Petrarch describes inaugurates a new realistic, individualistic, and rational understanding of nature. There is a gradual but increasingly evident shift from time to space until the soul wastes away in the materialism of the nineteenth century. (12–15)

The freer treatment of space and landscape is already manifest in the work of Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Giott but Leonardo the perspectival means and techniques attain their perfection. His Trattato delia Pittura is the first truly scientific and not merely theoretical description of perspective.

It is the first detailed discussion of light as the visible reality of our eyes and not, as was previously believed, as a symbol of the divine spirit. Above and beyond this Leonardo’s establishment of the laws of perspective is significant in that it made technical drafting feasible and thereby initiated the technological age. (12–19)

At the same time Copernicus shatters the limits of the geocentric sky and discovers heliocentric space; Columbus goes beyond the encompassing Oceanos and discovers earth’s space: Vesalius bursts Galen’s ancient doctrines of the human body and discovers the body’s space; Harvey destroys Hippocrates’ humoral medicine and reveals the circulatory system. Galileo perfects the telescope, discovered only shortly before in Holland, and employs it for astronomical studies. The discovery of space via perspective, and the incursions into the various spatial worlds mentioned above brought on with finality a transformation of the world into a spatial, that is, a sectored world.

This intense desire to break through the flat ancient cavern wall and conquer space is exemplified not only by the transition from sacred fresco painting to that on canvas but by the realization that even the fabric could no longer serve merely as a surface, but had to reveal the background and substratum.

The problem with this over-emphasis on space and spatiality is that it leads not only to rationalization and haptification but to an unavoidable hypertrophy of the “I,” which is in confrontation with the external world. (21–22)

Perspective locates the “I” in a tiny part of an ever-widening space. In order for it to be adequate to its expanding world, the “I” must be increasingly emphasized. While unperspectival consciousness inhabits a world of images, perspective adds that those images are synthesized into three-dimensional objects, which appear to exist independently both of the “I” and of each other.

This increasing materialization of the world occasions a corresponding destination rigidification of the ego. Thus, on the one hand, the expansion of space brings on the gradual expansion and consequent disintegration of the “I” and, on the other hand, the materialization of the world rigidifies and encapsulates the ”I”.

Although man’s horizons expanded, his world became increasingly narrow as his vision was sectorized by the blinders of the perspectival world view.

A person feels threatened in his vital interests when “He sees” only a vanishing point lost in the misty distance (the vanishing point of linear perspective of which Leonardo once wrote); and feels obliged to defend it, lest he lose his world entirely.

In the sciences, this process of segmentation led to the contemporary state of narrow specialization and the “great achievements” of the man with tunnel vision that has lead to atomization and ultimately will leads us to psychological disintegration. (23)

TIME

By virtue of the fact that it was itself divided, time became measurable; but it thereby forfeited its original character. (178)

As soon as the Now is interposed as an “in between” between past and future, it ceases to be a mental modality of time and becomes a spatialized modality.

This is a perversion of time, since by being interposed between past and future, the Now becomes as divider. And by thinking of past, present, and future as “parts” of time, it is time itself that gets divided.

Pointing to the “lack of time” characteristic of our material, spatially accentuated world, Gebser asks rhetorically: “How is anyone to have time if he tears it apart?” (180)

The fact that we today still think in terms of the spatial, fixed, three-dimensional world of conceptuality is an obstacle to our realization of the more complex significance of the phenomenon.(285–286)

“I have no time” — even when speaking of time, man today still thinks of clock time. How shocked he would be if he were to realize that he is also saying “I have no soul” and “I have no life” (288)

As we approach the decline of the perspectival age, it is our anxiety about time that manifests itself in various ways. Everyone is out to “gain time,” although the time gained is usually the wrong kind: time that is transformed into a visible multiplication of spatially fragmented “activity,” or time that one has “to kill.”

Our time anxiety shows up in our haptification of time and is expressed in our attempt to arrest time and hold onto it through its materialization. Many are convinced that “time is money,” although again this is almost invariably falsified time, a time that can be turned into money, but not time valid in its own right. A further expression of man’s current helplessness in the face of time is his compulsion to “fill” time; he regards it as something empty and spatial like a bucket or container, devoid of any qualitative character.

Finally, our contemporary anxiety about time is manifest in our flight from it: in our haste and rush, and by our constant reiteration, “I have no time.” It is only too evident that we have space but no time; time has us because we are not yet aware of its entire reality. Contemporary man looks for time, albeit mostly in the wrong place, despite, or indeed because of his lack of time: and this is precisely his tragedy, that he spatializes time and seeks to locate it “somewhere.” This spatial attachment — in its extreme form a spatial fixation — prevents him from finding an escape from spatial captivity. . . . (22–23)

Look at sport records. What was once play has become a frenzy of record-setting. The devotion of the individual to a worthless phenomenon is a symptom of the contemporary transitional era. The addiction to speed [and, nowadays, performance enhancing drug] reveals the deep anxiety in the face of time; each new record is a further step toward the “killing of time” (and thus of life). Precisely these exertions, fleeing into quantification, are a temporal flight born of the time-anxiety which dominates our daily lives. (537)

DEFICIENT MAGIC

Wherever we are caught up in the labyrinthine network of concepts, we may assuredly conclude the presence of a deficient mental, rationalistic source.

Reason, reversing itself metabolistically to an exaggerated rationalism, becomes a kind of inferior plaything of the psyche, neither noticing nor even suspecting the connection. This negative link to the psyche, usurping the place of the genuine mental relation, destroys the very thing achieved by the authentic relation: the ability to gain insight into the psyche.

Wherever we find a doctrine of unity, the establishment of an association, a huge organization, a one-party state and the like; wherever we encounter a stress on the concept of obedience, as in an overemphasis on the military, or of belonging and belongings; and in general wherever we meet up with overweening emotionalism as in mass assemblies, propaganda, slogans, and the like, we may conclude that we are dealing mainly with essentially deficient manifestations of magic.(153–154)

21st CENTURY SCHIZOID MAN

A structure of an unmanageable hugeness and complexity, for the service of man’s mental and physical urges has put man appears headed toward an event which can only be described as a “global catastrophe.” The crisis we are experiencing today is a crisis such as has occurred previously only during pivotal junctures.

Man has created a system of civilisation which has become too big for his limited mental capacity and understanding. Epochs of great confusion and general uncertainty contain the slumbering, not-yet-manifest seeds of clarity and certainty. [T]hese seeds are already pressing toward realization. This means that we are approaching the “zenith” of confusion and are thus nearing the necessary breakthrough. (531)

Anxiety is always the first sign that a mutation is coming to the end of its expressive and effective possibilities, causing new powers to accumulate which, because they are thwarted, create a “narrows” or constriction. At the culmination point of anxiety these powers liberate themselves, and this liberation is always synonymous with a new mutation.

Every dead end or lack of recourse is not only an indicator that the course has run out and that a given development has attained its greatest (quantitative!) extent and may at any moment give way to a loss of tension and consequent annihilation. It is also a sign that only a leap, that is, only a mutation, can bring about a solution( 139)

[O]nce, when the mythical structure began to pale, Greek man was faced with a proliferating chaos similar to ours today. The Greeks were able to master this chaos. The ideas of Plato gave a fixed form to the thought contents of the soul without which the Greeks would never have been able to extricate themselves from soul and myth. This fixation which made the spatial world possible was itself fixed by Leonardo’s perspective.

Mutations have always appeared when the prevailing consciousness structure proved to be no longer adequate for mastering the world. This was the case in the last historically accessible mutation which occurred around 500 B.C. and led from the mythical to the mental structure. (294)

When spatial consciousness led to modern achievements man believed that he too, like mythical man once before, had accomplished all that could be accomplished and was content to remain in his state of achievement. But in this case, as before, a decline sets in because of this self- satisfaction, and, beginning with the Renaissance, mental consciousness increases in deficiency and deteriorates into rationalism.

[For in] every extreme rationalization there is a violation of the psyche.

The authentic relation to the psyche is per- verted into its opposite, to the disadvantage of the ego that has become blind through isolation. In such an instance, man has become isolated and his basic ties have been cut. (97)

APERSPECTIVAL

The irruption of time into our consciousness is the profound and unique event of our historical moment. It presents us with a new theme and a new task, and its realization — which comes about through us — is attended by a wholly new reality of the world: a new intensity and a freer awareness which supplant the confusion that seems to give our world its most characteristic stamp. (283)

Wherever time is able to become “the present,” it is able to render transparent “simultaneously” the timelessness of magic, the temporicity of myth, and the temporality of mind. (181)

The “Present” is not identical with the “moment” but is the undivided presence of yesterday, today, and tomorrow which in a consciously realized actualization 294)

By granting to magic timelessness, mythical temporality and by living them in accord with the strength of their degree of consciousness, we are able to bring about this realization. (356)

The “aperspectival world” is a “world” whose structure is not only jointly based in the pre-perspectival, unperspectival, and perspectival worlds, but also mutates out of them in its essential properties and possibilities while integrating them and liberating itself from their exclusive validity. (294)

The end of philosophy

The age of systematic philosophy is over. What is necessary today to turn the tide of our situation are not new philosophemes like the phenomenological, ontological, or existential, but eteologemes. Eteology must replace philosophy just as philosophy once replaced the myths. Every eteologeme is a “verition,” and as such is valid only when it allows origin to become transparent in the present. (307–309)

[O]ur description does not deal with a new image of the world [Weltbild], nor with . . . a new conception of the world [Weltvorstellung]. A new image would be no more than the creation of a myth, since all imagery has a predominantly mythical nature . . . and a new conception of the world would be nothing else than yet another rationalistic construction, for conceptualization has an essentially rational and abstract nature.

One difficulty which to some will seem insurmountable is the difficulty of “representing” the aperspectival world. This world goes beyond our conceptualization. By the same token, the mental world once went beyond the experiential capability of mythical man, and yet this world of the mind became reality. (267)

Gebser is well aware of the inadequacy of contemporary attempts to concretize time,i.e., to transform it from a quantitative dimension into a qualitative “amension”.

The new attitude will be consolidated only when the individual can gradually begin to disregard his ego. Consciousness of self was the characteristic of the mental consciousness structure; freedom from the “I” is the characteristic of the integral consciousness structure. (532)

The undivided, ego-free person who no longer sees parts but realizes the “Itself,” the spiritual form of being of man and the world, perceives the whole, the diaphaneity present “before” all origin which suffuses everything. (543)