The Co-Evolution of Mental Consciousness and The Western Legal Tradition: Symbiotic Stimuli toward the Mental/Rational
(Inspired by attending Richard Tarnas’ Western World View course at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco)
Roman
legal thought, containing a new sense of objective rationality and natural law
derived from the Greek concept of the universal Logos, introduced systematic
clarity into commercial and legal interactions throughout the empire, cutting
through the welter of divergent local customs and evolving principles of
contract law and property ownership crucial for the West’s later development.
(Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind (NY: Ballantine Books,
1991: 87)
Human
knowledge is the historically contingent product of linguistic and social
practices of particular local communities of interpreters, with no assured
“ever-closer” relation to an independent ahistorical reality. Because human experience is linguistically
pre-structured, yet the various structures of language possess no demonstrable
connection with an independent reality, the human mind can never claim access
to any reality other than that determined by its local form of life. Language is a “cage” (Wittgenstein). (Tarnas 1991: 399)
The
Judaic influence on Christianity in the West -- the sense of a divinely
mandated historical mission, the stress on obedience to the will of God, the
moral rigor, the doctrinal conformity and exclusiveness -- was further
amplified and modulated by the influence of Rome. The Church’s conception of humanity’s
relationship to God as a judicial one strictly defined by moral law was partly
derived from Roman law, which the Catholic Church, based in Rome, inherited and
integrated. ...More fundamentally, Roman legal theory and practice were founded
on the idea of justification; transposed to the religious sphere, sin was a
criminal violation of a legal relationship established by God between himself
and man. The doctrine of justification
-- of sin, guilt repentance, grace, and restitution -- was set forth by Paul in
his Letter to the Romans [footnote omitted], and was taken up again by
Augustine as the foundation of man’s relationship to God. Similarly, the Judaic imperative of
subordinating the highly developed but refractory human will to that of divine
authority found supporting cultural patterns in the political subordination
demanded by the immense authoritarian structure of the Roman Empire. (Tarnas
1991: 158)
Because
induction can never render certain general laws, and because scientific
knowledge is a product of human interpretive structures that are themselves
relative, variable, and creatively employed, and finally because the act of
observation in some sense produces the objective reality science attempts to
explicate, the truths of science are neither absolute nor unequivocally
objective. (Tarnas 1991: 359)
The
Cartesian-Kantian paradigm both expresses and ratifies a state of consciousness
in which experience of the unitive numinous depths of reality has been
systematically extinguished, leaving the world disenchanted and the human ego
isolated. (Tarnas 1991: 431)
What
man knows is a world permeated by his knowledge, and causality and the
necessary laws of science are built into the framework of his cognition. Observations alone do not give man certain
laws; rather, those laws reflect the laws of man’s mental organization. (Tarnas
1991: 343, paraphrasing Kant)
Overview: The Birth of Law and Consciousness
The history of the Western
legal tradition is the history of how a portion of humanity has struggled to
peaceably govern itself; of how theology, philosophy and psychology have
expressed themselves through the politics of statecraft and the rights of
citizens; and how liberty has ebbed and flowed according to the rule of
law. The Western legal tradition
developed a jurisprudence which is inextricably bound up with the ideas of
“democracy”[1] and
“justice,”[2]
ideas which have been discussed and debated since the dawn of humanity’s awakening to Western legal
thought, traditionally traced to ancient Greece (c.1,000 BCE)[3]. Yet law and justice are more than
philosophical and theoretical ideas because they define, promote and preserve,
through enforcement in the courts, the interrelational web of societal
existence. Law and the administration
of justice are actional processes reflecting the underlying moral values that
support the way we perceive the world and ourselves as ordered, interacting
players in that world; and, I contend, law and justice are very much rooted in
and reflective of the socio-cultural norms, assumptions and beliefs that are
embedded in and derive from the contemporary state of consciousness, viz., the
mental/rational.
According to what I will
call the Neumann/Gebser[4]
model, mental consciousness has fully emerged only over the last c. 3,000
years. The time frame of this emergence
coincides with the advent of law. Hence,
my underlying thesis suggests that law arose in response to the emergence of
mental consciousness and was a catalyst for its continued development as it
ramified into mental/rational consciousness. The modern Western legal tradition,
therefore, can be seen as a phenomenon peculiar to (the now) mental/rational
consciousness, which can be described as follows:
perspectival (eye/brain) outer-relating to space, characterized by a
directed dual oppositionality in cerebral functions of reflection, abstraction,
will and volition, emphasizing a causal and directed rationality that
conceptualizes and reflects, sees and measures using thought and ideation to
perceive a materialistic reality from an egocentric [ego-enthroned self/other,
inflated subject/object] representation-conception of the world, through
projective speculation toward a predominately future orientation to time (in
purpose and goal) and within a patriarchal social system that is generally
bonded through religion [or a secular-scientific faith], characterized by
believing-knowing-deducing.[5]
Theories about the origins
and evolution of consciousness seek to inform us of how and why we perceive our
own being and becoming. A
proto-consciousness presaged the mythic and the mental consciousness. Called the magic structure of mind, it is
typified by an undifferentiated unity in which we might imagine that primitive
notions of legal thought may have first expressed themselves as primal
religious urges toward wonder and adoration.[6] The Neumann/Gebser model would place this
magic era within the Paleolithic to early Neolithic time frame (c.200,000 BCE -
10,000 BCE). Hunting and gathering had
gradually been supplanted by horticulture.
Human village collectives within this period are believed to have formed
themselves along matri-centric lines (persisting even as late as c.5,000 BCE in
Catal Huyuk).[7] This magic mind-frame (wherein we spent over
90% of our ancestral life as homo sapiens) was a kind of
interpenetrating dream-time, devoid of the walled city and the warrior class
(which would typify the patri-centric, mythic era to come).[8]
The predominating
structure of mind that followed the magic was the mythic (or emerging
consciousness), beginning perhaps as far back as 10,000 BCE and extending
forward into classical Greek civilization.
The story of an emerging consciousness is a story told in terms of the
world’s universal, cross-cultural archetypal myths of the hero’s journey.[9] It was during the mythic period that a
theo-philosophical impulse began to stir.
This was the age of the Old Testament prophets in the Abrahamic (Judaic)
tradition of Moses, David, and Solomon.
We can be fairly confident that Western law, as with the Western
tradition generally, arose primarily from a confluence of the Judaic and Greek
streams, and through a distinctly Western people[10] in
a localized area roughly centered around the Mediterranean basin.
If we consider the
prophets as archetypal lawgivers, we must conclude that each was quite ahead of
his time, i.e., although creatures of the mythic era, their minds had gone
mental to some degree. Or, as Jean Gebser puts it: “Wherever the lawgiver appears, he upsets the
old equilibrium (mythical polarity), and in order to re-establish it, laws must
be fixed and established. Only a
mental world requires laws; the mythical world, secure in the polarity, neither
knows nor needs them.”[11]
Yet laws “came unto
them.” However, these laws (as with the
Babylonian laws) were laws forcefully put into place by a few strong-willed
leaders so as to impose order. The “law,”
as it is traditionally contemplated in the Western tradition, was instead borne
of a society such as that of ancient Greece, “among whom thought and argument
became a habit of educated men...extending to man himself, his nature, and his
place in the order of things, the character of human society, and the best way
of governing it... It is therefore with
the Greeks that the history of reflective jurisprudence in the West, or
European legal theory, must begin.”[12]
The Greek Coagulation
One notices in reading the
works of the ancients that the texts are full of poetic imagery and references
to mythological gods and goddesses (and long lists,[13]
which to the modern mind may seem as excruciatingly dull as a recitation of
legal “boilerplate” language). To
embrace the mental is a kind of “falling from time into space.”[14] Legal thought first coalesced according to
civilization -- first the Greek, then the Roman and the “physio-noospheric
spaces” occupied by each. The Greek
civilization arose during the waning of the mythic era. They were still very much rooted in a mythic
mind-set, albeit one that was rapidly going mental. Ancient Greece emerged from its magico-mythic
world to begin reflecting upon life, calling such reflection “philosophy,” or
what might now be called “consciousness studies.” The transition of the mythic to the mental is
placed by Gebser at the turn of the sixth to the fifth century BCE, mirrored in
the image of Athena’s springing forth from the head of Zeus.[15] According to Gebser, Parmenides (c.480 BCE),
like others whose minds were advanced beyond the common structure of the
general populace,[16]
announced the arrival of the mental in a fragmentary didactic poem, when he
wrote: “For thinking and being is one and the same.”[17]
Along with Parmenides, the
Sophists were developing the art of vigorously arguing the pros and cons of
every issue with equal force and competence.
By demonstrating this cogni-dualist skill they were already establishing
themselves as prototypical lawyers (who must thoroughly consider the arguments
that the opposing party is likely to raise and be prepared to counter
them). The Sophists were fond of saying
that law was made “to make the weaker cause the stronger” to submit to the
notion of a society of equals.[18]
In the early Greek world,
laws were at first collectively stored in the memories of aristocracies which
ruled in most cities and who were the repositories of whatever justice there
was.[19] “The earliest European appearance of
something which obviously corresponds with our ‘law’ in the positive, statutory
sense is with the famous lawgivers Dracon (late seventh) and Solon (early sixth
BC). Undoubtedly this was related to
their recent development of the art of writing. The efforts of these rulers,
among the first by the Greeks, were attempts to inscribe in permanent and
public form rules which formerly had the vaguer status of custom.”[20] “The dramatist Euripides, writing in the late
fifth century, presents the emergence of written laws as a progressive
achievement, tending to equalize the ground of rich and poor...”[21] “Even then, liberty was defined for [the
Greeks] as obedience to the laws.”[22]
“...[I]n the classical era
a unified Greek legal system never existed because no unified Greek state
existed[23]...[T]hey
never produced a practical legal science... What laws the people of Greece
lived by must be gathered...[from]...the physical remains of law-codes or
statutes engraved on stone or bronze...scattered all over the Greek world[24]...[T]here
was no Greek word for ‘law’ as an abstract concept…”[25] What we know of Greece’s ideas of law and
justice are culled mostly from philosophers (e.g., Plato and Aristotle),
orators (e.g., Demosthenes), historians (e.g., Herodotus, Thucydides and
Xenophon) and dramatists (e.g., Sophocles, Aristophanes and Euripides) who
discuss law and justice in the course of the works that survive them. What we discover is that the seeds of modern
jurisprudence were sown in ancient Greece:[26] natural law vs. positive or human law; law as
order having a compulsive force and being the rational product of mind and
consideration; the idea of the “social contract”; leaders as subordinate to the
rule of law; regular and impartial judicial procedures; the recognition and
prohibition of double jeopardy; punishment for crimes as corrective, deterrent
and vindication of the victim’s honor; the materiality of intent to liability
for punishment; apportioning punishment according to the seriousness of the
offense; voluntary and involuntary transactions; affirmative defenses that
included duress and self-defense, but excluded drunkenness and culpable
ignorance of the law; a theoretical equity doctrine; natural familial rights;
equality before the law (exception: slaves); the prohibition of usury; and
(limited) notions of property law and due process.
Litigation in ancient
Greece “was conducted less in the spirit of a contest about the objective
applicability of legal norm than as a rhetorical match in which no holds were
barred. Even in Athens we do not know
the name of a single person who worked as a legal advisor (rather than as a
court orator), or who taught law to students, nor the name of a single book on
a legal subject. We are not aware that
such persons or such books existed, and we might not unreasonably conclude,
since this is an era well illumined by history in most respects, that they did
not.”[27]
A Stratified Roman
Clotting
Rome was a civilization
built upon the bedrock of this new consciousness. Greece laid the philosophical groundwork for
the law, the font of wisdom to which Roman lawyers would return time and again
to refresh law’s meaning and find compelling reasoning for their
arguments. In short, Romans excelled at
administering the law. J.M. Kelly
describes this trait as “...the strictly practical, unpretentious, sober bent
of the Roman legal mind.”[28] They administered through a descending
bureaucratic hierarchy of “...elected magistrates, an annually elected pair of
consuls (or, in point of dignity, from the quinquennially elected censor)
through the praetors, whose special responsibility was the supervision of the
administration of justice, to quaestors, who were treasury officers, and lesser
magistrates such as aediles, who discharged a sort of police function in public
streets and markets. The section of the
population originally distinguished from the patrician aristocracy, namely the plebs,
had officers of its own called tribunes.”[29] This system extended to some extent into
Rome’s outer provinces as well, governors being ex-consuls or praetors. This system can be seen as an intensification
of Gebser’s mental: a sophisticated hierarchy which “conceptualizes and
reflects, sees and measures using thought and ideation to perceive a
materialistic reality,”[30]
i.e., the good life of the empire.
Rome’s judicial scheme
provided for judges, who were not “legal experts” at all but members of the
propertied class acting in an honorary capacity. They were selected on an ad hoc,
case-by-case basis, and in private litigation could be assigned only with the
agreement of both parties. Here the
judge acted more like a modern arbitrator than a judge. The praetor’s role was reformative,
regulatory, and supervisory rather than judicial, the praetor having the power
to determine which cases merited being heard by a judge and which did not.[31] Rome was a class-conscious society. There was a de facto separate justice
according to one’s rank, as well as ranked specializations within the
judicature, as described above. This
would be characteristic of Gebser’s mental: egocentric [ego-enthroned
self/other, inflated subject/object].
In Rome were the
beginnings of a legal profession that never existed in Greece. By the late republic period (mid-second
century BCE) lay jurists were expounding rules of law, drawing up formulas for
legal transactions, and advising magistrates, litigants and judges. They also taught their science to generations
of students who would follow them, publishing commentaries, opinions and
textbooks.[32] And as J.M Kelly writes:
For a period of nearly 400
years, from the last century of the republic until the turmoil of the third
century AD, the science of these jurists represents -- together with the Roman
genius for imperial government -- the most characteristic flower of Roman
civilization, and the one least indebted to foreign models, evidently growing
spontaneously from some part of the Roman national spirit without parallel
elsewhere in the ancient world.[33]
For “national spirit” one
might substitute “Western mental consciousness.” These lay jurists, viz., lawyers, practiced
their rhetoric, their art of persuasion, in law courts or other assemblies,
addressing questions of right and wrong (a further, institutionalized
development of “directed dual oppositionality in cerebral functions of
reflection, abstraction, will and volition, emphasizing a causal and directed
rationality” -- Gebser’s mental structure). Stoicism (founded by
the Greek Cypriot Zeno, who lived c.333-264 BCE) made an important impact on
lawyers and the educated Roman classes generally (including Seneca in the first
century AD and emperor Marcus Aurelias in the second). One teaching of Stoicism was that all words
had a natural meaning which their etymology will elucidate. As a result, lawyers often presented the
derivation of words to explain their legal force[34]
(and languaging, especially the written word, can be seen as comporting with
the mental structure -- a “representation-conception of the world”[35]).
Rome’s greatest and most eloquent jurist, Cicero, followed the Stoic
teaching. In his De legibus,[36]
among other great works, he expounds on the law with a philosophical flourish
that far exceeded the terse approach of his contemporaries. Leaving almost no area of the law untouched,
Cicero is especially remembered for a passage on God’s law that a later
Christian writer, Lactantius (c.250-317) described as “almost divine.”[37] (And Gebser’s mental consciousness irrupts
once more in religious overtones of “believing-knowing-deducing.”[38])
Finally, emperor
Justinian, briefly wresting a debilitated Roman Empire from German control in
the mid-sixth century AD, managed to produce a brilliant compilation of the
Roman laws up until the classical jurists of the third century AD. It was to be known as Justinian’s Digest,
and ultimately became the basis for the whole civil law of continental Europe.[39] In the turmoil of a degenerating Holy Roman
Empire, Justinian’s Digest as well as the works of Aristotle were lost
to the West. Not recovered until the
late eleventh century, the Digest would become for Western law what the
reintroduction of Aristotle (c.1150) would signify for a dynamic mentalizing of
Western thought thereafter.
Scabrous Projection:
The Co-Conspiracy of the Rule of Law
Beginning around the 6th
century AD a parochial, xenophobic regression seemed to have set in; an
insulated, relatively isolated Europe, self-protected by an increasingly
entrenched Christian dogma of belief, propped up by doctrinaire,
self-referential thinking, stratified by
a conformism of conduct along class lines, and led by alternating,
competing currents of localized
Frankish, Germanic, Lombard, Visigoth and Anglo-Saxon domination, ebbed into
centuries of miasmic drift referred to as “the Dark Ages.” Law foundered amid the chaotic inertia. But the Germanic idea “that the king reigns
within the limits of the people’s inherited laws and is bound by them”[40]
survived. And this democratic ideal was
nurtured along by Christian ecclesiastics.
Most legal theory
throughout the Middle Ages came from churchmen rather than lawyers. The late
twelfth century saw the founding of the University of Paris, and the age of
Scholasticism (known for its “hairsplitting dialectics,” not unlike the ancient
Sophists) was soon to follow. With St.
Thomas Aquinas[41] and
other scholars in the thirteenth century, law was systematized into an
exposition of a rational ordering of things aimed at furthering the common
good.
The common use of
gunpowder in cannons is first seen in the fourteenth century. This signals the beginning of a trend toward
the removing of personal courage from the martial arts of battle; a further
distancing of the soldier from the adversary, allowing for a more facile
“othering” of the “enemy.” With the
coming of the movable type printing press in the mid-fifteenth century, books
would soon be affordable and available to the ordinary person. Ideas had never had a more fertile instrument
of conveyance since the invention of writing itself. No longer was specialized knowledge to be
confined to the wealthy or priests of the Church. The knowledge monopoly was broken. Martin Luther preached that humanity could
have direct access to God with simply the Bible in hand (and without the mediation
of a priest). Christianity
fractured. At about this time the
mechanical clock started to come into common use, an invention that has done
more to remove us from our natural psychic attunement than perhaps any other
invention until the television. The
clock sectored time and action with a new mental-rational precision.
With ideas more available
to everyone in the form of books, the law, as it had done in the time of Dracon
and Solon, became all the more democratized. It further developed and diverged on the
European continent and in the British Isles.[42] In Italy, Noccolo Machiavelli set forth in The Prince (1513)
an “open elevation of the state and its interests and effective government
to a plane where they are the only values in sight...a form of government in
which the rulers are subject to the laws,” but wherein “the state’s interest
may legitimately require their violation.”[43]
In England, lawyer Sir Francis Bacon would soon release his book, Novum
organum scientiarum (1620) where he introduced “the inductive method of
reasoning whereby the observation of a number of individual instances is used
in order to discover a general principle.”[44]
At the dawn of the modern age, Western law was becoming somewhat diffuse,
reflecting the regional characters of the individual nation-states that came to
comprise modern Europe. But despite the
variations there was a common Indo-European, Greco-Roman linguistic heritage
and common bonds of culture that acted as a unifying thread -- and one that has
wended its way through a distinctly Western mental consciousness.
Starting in the sixteenth
century in the West and intensifying ever since, the mental began further
refining itself. In this historical
period was born the mental/rational consciousness -- a new perspectival
orientation, a ratio-sectoring of knowledge, drifting ever closer toward a
materialist, cogni-centric meaning perspective (or as Gebser would say
“deficient mental,” characterized by “divisive, immoderate hairsplitting.”[45]) These are the accretions that slowly but
surely annexed themselves into the way our minds worked. Within this century Copernicus informed the
world that the universe did not actually revolve around the Earth after all,
and the revolution had begun.[46] It was a short epistemological hop, skip and
a jump from here -- through Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche
-- to showing that the world revolved around the individual observer. But in
the meantime...
As the Americas opened up
to European migration, fertile new possibilities presented themselves for an
enriched legal tradition. Expansion into
an unbounded virgin land fueled imaginations and souls already astir with a
sense of self-liberation from a metaphysical death to the Old
World. What Columbus had really discovered
was an object, the American land mass, representing seemingly unlimited
resources to feed the devouring God of the mental/rational. Enlightenment principles, further forged in
the rugged individualism of a young nation coming into violent contact with its
indigenous culture, would eventually bring forth a new Roman-like republic
infused with an Ancient Greek-like democratic zeal. This new American temperament -- idealistic,
reckless, utilitarian, full of hope, dreams, visions of building a new
Promised Land -- furiously set about establishing law and order[47]
under an unstoppable ethno-centric Manifest Destiny. But if history is the judge, its future is
suspect.[48]
And the law conspired in
the intensification of this rational-way-of-knowing; it conspired with science, the Enlightenment,
modernism and a mongrelized humanism that has resulted in a contemporary
Western world composed of angst-ridden, psychically crippled,
techno-illiterates who none-the-less blithely accept and use
environmentally-unfriendly techno-wizardry in never-ending consumption cycles. Cynics might describe them as automatized
consumers who are largely devoid of any higher cultural ecology beyond Beavis
and Butthead, whose holy mantra -- “’burgers, fries and a Coke”! -- can be
heard ringing and echoing worldwide from the franchises of arched temples. Certainly it cannot be as bad as all
that! Well, whatever the case may be,
please note: this has all been permitted, or at least not prohibited, by law.
Appendix A
This memorable quotation is from Sir Alex Fraser
Tytler (1747-1813), Scottish jurist and historian. He was widely known in his time and was
Professor of Universal History at Edinburgh University in the late eighteenth
century. The quotation is from the 1801
Collection of his Lectures:
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of
government. It can only exist until the
voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public
treasury.
“From that moment on, the majority always votes for
the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the
result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always
followed by a dictatorship.
“The average age of the world’s great civilizations
has been 200 years. These nations have
progressed through this sequence: from
bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage
to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from
selfishness to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to
dependency; from dependency back again into bondage.”
APPENDIX
C
The Neumann/Jungian story begins in the uroboros,
symbolized by the snake eating its own tail, and which perceives itself as
feminine. In this undifferentiated state
of unconscious unity -- similar to Jean Gebser’s unperspectival archaic and
early magical structures, the human mind would have been in a state of complete
interpenetration with its environment, like the fetus floating in the pleroma
of the uterus. The classic Jungian
archetype for this stage in the uroboric is the Great (and ‘good’) Mother, also
symbolized by “[a]nything deep -- abyss, valley, ground, sea, fountains, lakes,
pools, the earth...the underworld, the cave, the house, the city... Anything big
and embracing which contains, surrounds, enwraps, shelters, preserves, and
nourishes anything small belongs to the primordial matriarchal realm.” (Erich
Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, 1954:14).
The process of differentiation toward and through
Gebser’s magical structure proceeded slowly over most of our 1.7 million
years. In this tenuous state of magical
consciousness humans went from loosely organized hunting bands to settled
Neolithic horticultural villages, all the while remaining in a matri-centric
culture. A subtle boundary of mind was
beginning to be felt between humans of this magic structure and their
environment, typified by ‘emotions’.
Whereas before there was a pleromatic unity, an interconnectedness was
now developing wherein the mind began to distinguish a sense of multiplicity --
yet a multiplicity that seemed to center and emanate from the individual. There was still no subject/object split, but
rather a restiveness in the uroboric mindset.
We can see this in the infant who shows a vague familiarity with its
surroundings and in the child who thinks it makes the sun go down by wishing it
so. Gebser would represent this
‘one-dimensional proto-ego’ that is projected outward and dispersed as an
‘interchangeable point’.
Not surprisingly, Neumann spends a great deal of time
describing the archetypal energies that were stewing within this Great Mother
culture and nudging a struggling human mind in its evolution toward a separate
identity (ego or consciousness). I say
‘not surprising’ because the mythic, primordial imagery that comprise Jungian
archetypes rose into consciousness (and therefore ‘into being’) not only from
generation after generation of participation with the natural world; these
archetypes were also burned into consciousness as they were magnified in the
outward mirroring of petroglyphs, in so-called goddess figurines (Cf., William
Irwin Thompson’s discussion of these figurines and pre-history in general in
his Coming Into Being (1996)), in paintings on clay vessels, and finally
in the cultural avalanche of myth, art, literature and music that was soon
following, as consciousness began to fully emerge toward differentiation into
Gebser’s mythical structure.
The struggle to break free from the Great Mother -- i.e.,
into this ego or consciousness that was arising out of the uroboros -- is
characterized by the archetypal hero’s journey.
The Evil Mother archetype (later to be replaced by/mingled with the
symbol of a bear or boar, representing the unsuccessful, castrated son) resists
the efforts of the once incestuous but now rebellious hero-son. (Consciousness perceives itself in a
masculine dialectic, i.e., Prometheus vs. Saturn, son vs. father, wherein the
Terrible Father archetype aids and abets the evil mom, i.e., unconsciousness.)
Jungian archetypes of the battling twins and ‘the hero with a thousand faces’
(a la another Jungian, Joseph Campbell) enter now and the tale is filled with
blood, death and dismemberment. To free
itself, the hero must slay the Great/Terrible Mother; he must embark on a
journey of self-discovery. Gebser would represent this two-dimensional mythical
structure of consciousness as a circle on which a polarization (cf. the twins
archetype) has now formed. This polarity
is typified by the notion of ‘dreams’.
Temporality or ‘a new sense of time’ (and to a fair extent ‘space’) is
the terrain of the mythic. As the mythic
coalesces, Neumann’s ‘primordial parents’ become fully formed as mother and
father archetypes. Behold the adolescent
who has declared independence from the nest!
Behold the warring towns who hold fast to their grain stores while
scaling the walled fortresses of others for the bounty held within! Enter the warrior, patri-centric culture with
its architecture rising upward in phallic, transcendent, vertical monuments to
a hard-won ego. Jungian archetypes
abound in the sun myths, the symbol of the human head, the moon myths,
glorification, deification and divinity myths. (Cf. Neumann’s interpretation of
the myth of Osiris with William Irwin Thompson’s in The Time Falling Bodies
Take To Light (1985))
Neumann uses the term ‘centroversion’ (similar to
Teilhard de Chardin’s ‘granulation’) to describe this self-formative
individuating; it is a subjective projection of the libido onto itself -- when
a sufficient amount of this raw psychic energy inheres, then consciousness can
shift, i.e., a phase change can occur -- and this is what has prompted the ego
to enter into relation or union with the self.
In Jungian archetypal imagery -- the journeying hero has gained the
treasure/ rescued the captive, which means he has discovered his own creativity
as an autopoietic agent in a newly discovered reality of the psyche.
What is left is for consciousness to differentiate
once again into three-dimensionality.
Gebser represents this new structuration with a triangle. Subject/object, self/other duality as
discerned by thought, has arrived; we have become ‘space conscious.’ This is Gebser’s perspectival mental
structure, which can be traced to ancient Greece and which evolved further into
the mental/rational at about the time of the Renaissance (when
perspective was discovered in art). (For
Gebser the “rational” is “the deficient mental.”) It has been proceeding, intensifying ever
since. The adolescent has become a
teenager and is all the closer to adulthood.
Elements of the archaic and magical linger on within
our consciousness in this modern era of the mythic/mental/rational. Even as some of us grasp at the next emerging
structure -- the integral/aperspectival, which Gebser represents as a ‘sphere’
-- we remain, for the most part, tangled in these consciousness holons that are
more fundamental to those that are more complex. Regressions are not uncommon in our day --
from magical thinking in New Age groups to mythic membership playing out in
ultra-nationalism, ‘Balkanizations’ or within the unchecked zeal of
fundamentalist religious groups.
Gebser’s thesis is here presented, taken from his
chapter on The Irruption of Time, under the subtitle, The Awakening of
Consciousness of Freedom from Time. In
it is his projection of where consciousness is headed -- out of an “already
obsolete three-dimensional dualistic-materialistic world conception” (288) to
an aperspectival integrated structure (“[t]he whole [that] can be perceived
only aperspectivally”) (289) in which we plumb the fourth-dimensional depths of
time; an understanding which I interpret as a ‘conscious’ reimmersion in the
Essence -- our genetic heritage and our future:
“It is from origin, which is
not bound to time, that all time forms constituting us have mutated. Origin lies “before” all timelessness,
temporicity, and time. Wherever man
becomes conscious of the pre-given, pre-conscious, originary pre-timelessness,
he is in the time-freedom, consciously recovering its presence. Where this is accomplished, origin and the
present are integrated by the intensified consciousness. The irruption of time into our consciousness
is the first indication, the initial motif of the consciousness mutation that
is today acute. This mutation will bear
its fruits of transforming the world if we succeed in superseding the irruption
of time; but that is tantamount to what we have called the presentiation of
origin, which can be achieved only by the successful achievement of the main
task posed by the new mutation: the coming of consciousness of time-freedom,
the achronon.” (289)
Unconsciousness (magic pre-consciousness to mythic
emerging consciousness) to (mental) consciousness to pathological (rational)
consciousness -- this has been our human trajectory so far as I understand it.
APPENDIX
D: A Short Parody of American
Law... by Jack Suss
Constitutional law -- a valiant attempt to give a
voice to the populace by institutionalizing rights and giving notice of the
respective powers of a three-branch government; set up for an agrarian, small
town mentality; with the coming of the modern industrial state the structure
became unstable and overly bureaucratized; after World War II the republic
turns into a “national security” state.
Treaties -- a way to buy-off and plunder the land of
indigenous populants
Property: the notion of private real property,
as inherited from England, is a privatized space wherein real property could be
claimed, sectored off and depleted by legal entities through legal ownership; personal
property became accretions to the person -- from the style of dress and
accessories that ornament the body of the self, to one’s inviolate TV and the
automobile as an extension of the ego shell with its vehicle laws of ownership,
rights of way, do’s and don’ts...road rage.
Corporation -- a fictional body; a new, collective
corpus for transacting business, with its insular protections of personal
wealth and fictional accountability
Tort law -- “reasonable man” standard; proximate
cause; assigning legal fault, responsibility; a binary, separating out of
persons and groups.
Maritime law -- tort law of the sea giving birth to
the insurance industry and its marvels.
Contract law -- the replacement of personal honor and
trust; a written memorialization between “legal entities” with the threat of
enforcement by the courts if breached.
_____________________________________
...and Order
School: a
device to keep the crime rate down
Marriage: a
device to keep the economy going
Job: a device
to keep the population from going crazy from being idle
Sports, Business and Entertainment: devices to keep
the population so continually distracted that “know thyself” becomes an
incoherence, impossibly vague
_________________
From the wild autonomous, to social contrivance and
laws, to the informed autonomous -- could this be the human trajectory of mind
detectable throughout history, past and yet-to-come?
[3] J.M. Kelly, A
Short History of Western Legal Theory (Clarendon Press: Oxford, England,
1992); also see Max Hamburger, The Awakening of Western Legal Thought
(New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1969, orig. pub. 1942); in the mythic age of an
emerging consciousness, law as apprehended by the earliest known Greeks was
described as “coming from the gods.”
From Homer (who memorialized events in c.800-700 BCE from an oral
tradition that came down from c.1300-1100 BCE) the earliest Greek notion of law
was referred to as themis, understood as meaning “god-inspired” or “law
of the heavens.” (Kelly 1992:7); but compare, e.g., Martin Bernal, Black
Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (Rutgers University
Press, 1991), who argues that Greece was a kind of mulatto culture that had
been created from a hybridization of black African Egypt and the Semitic
Phoenicians; also, consider Babylonia’s laws of Eshuna and King Hamurabbi’s
code (2000 BCE and 1800 BCE respectively), which preceded the early formative
period of law in ancient Greece by a millennium. Thus, one might say that written laws of man
were already in existence in Mesopotamia when the Greeks were still fidgeting
around with their themis. Also,
if we only stop to consider what Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey are
about, we might note in passing the high likelihood of foreign influences --
the Iliad is all about military conquest, always a “forcing together” of
the cultures of conqueror and conquered; and the Odyssey is all about
Odysseus, doomed to wander for years in foreign lands where exotic cultural
influences await; the Judaic contribution is discussed below.
[4] See Appendix C
for an elaboration of this model, used as a framework as I trace the Western
legal tradition.
[5] I am
presenting the above paraphrase of Jean Gebser’s mental/rational consciousness
from the table appended to the back of The Ever-Present Origin (Ohio
University Press: Athens, Ohio, Eng. trans. 1985, orig. 1949 and 1953)). Gebser describes the “mental” as “directive,
discursive thought.” He refers to the
“rational” as the “deficient mental,” characterized by “divisive, immoderate
hairsplitting.” It is
my own contention that mental/rational consciousness, while universally
“available” to populations and cultures of all nations, is adopted and
“retrofitted” in part or in whole, according to the prevailing lifestyle and
cultural norms, values, assumptions and beliefs in “non-Western-ized” areas --
or rejected altogether in pockets of relative changelessness, i.e., in
populations wherein mental/rational consciousness barely comports with
traditional ways of being and knowing, such as with various indigenous peoples
worldwide. It might also be argued that
certain populations are selectively accepting the mental, while rejecting
rational (referred to by Gebser as “the deficient mental”) consciousness. By “Western” I am referring to a particular
ethno-cognicentric (albeit cross-cultural) mental/rational consciousness that
has so intensified as to dominate, suppress and ignore to varying degrees the
more embodied magic (unity) and mythic (polar complementarity) structures of
mind, which can be associated more with emotions, feelings, nature, archetypes,
imagination, the feminine, a sense of unity and cosmic wonder. As a result, “non-Western” areas, e.g., in
Asia and the Southern Hemisphere, have developed quite different models of jurisprudence.
[6] See, E.
Adamson Hoebel, The Law of Primitive Man: A Study in Comparative Legal
Dynamics (Atheneum: NY, 1968: 258)
[7] See
generally, William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take To Light (New
York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1981, 1996)
[8] Ibid.
[9] Erich Neumann,
The Origins and History of Consciousness (Mythos, 1995, orig. pub.,
Rascher Verlag: Zurich, 1949; 1st Eng. trans., Bollingen Series XLII, Princeton
University Press, 1954); also see Appendix C
[10] Of course, how
“distinctly Western” were we in the first millennium, BCE? Seafaring and overland trade routes were
fairly well-established during this period.
This exposed the West to an ongoing cultural intercourse as commerce
intensified with the Middle East, the Far East and Africa. With Alexander the Great’s conquests
eastward, extraordinary social upheaval forced further multi-cultural
interaction. Out of this continual
blending came the cosmopolitan melange that proceeded through the centuries of
the Hellenistic period.
[11] (Gebser 1985:76)(Emphasis added) Gebser explains that unlike in the duality of
the mental/rational, “in polarity, correspondences are valid. Every correspondence is a complement, a
completion of the whole. Whatever is
spoken is corroborated by the invisible and latent unspoken to which it
corresponds; in the polar, unperspectival world of the mythical structure both
the voice (die Stimme) and the muteness (das Stumme), appropriate
to myth -- what is spoken and what is left unsaid -- are correspondences and
complements to each other. They suspend
and supersede the polarity, returning it to near-integrality, to an identity
that nonetheless remains diminished, since its archaic authenticity seems to be
irrecoverable; it is a recompleted, not a complete identity.” (1985: 85-86); Cf., Plato’s Protagoras, 677ff.
(322 BCE), speaking of our post-diluvial condition: “They had no need of formal
laws, but lived by custom and patriarchal rules...” (paraphrased by Kelly 1992:
12)
[12] Kelly 1992:1;
See note 3: Some may view such a starting point as ethno-centric bias. Cultural forms stubbornly reinforce their
separatist developmental structures, and the Western legal tradition can be
seen in its own provincial light. The
Greek notion of the city-state -- as in the “city” being the locus of both
individual and communal identity -- foreshadowed a mental provincialism that
would persist wherever Western thought got a foothold to reflect, centuries
later, hegemonic Western imperialist notions of colonialism. And the law was always there.
[13] See,
William Irwin Thompson, Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the
Evolution of Consciousness (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996,1998:129)
[14] Gebser 1985:
77 The space-time relationship in the
mythic is emphasized in a spaceless, natural temporicity, in the mental it is
spatial and abstractly temporal. (See
Gebser’s appended table.)
[15] Ibid.
[16] While sages
and artists are on the vanguard of this evolutionary consciousness shift,
general populations (who may or may not follow them) tend to lag behind. Thus, as with the excerpt from Parmenides
above, the lives and the works produced by those who are ahead of their time
act as benchmarks -- artifacts to be studied and from which humanity might
learn the teachings of these exemplars in the centuries that follow. And so we might imagine that cultures impose
themselves on this advancing, ever-shifting “consciousness template,” fostering
a diversity of interpretive socio-cultural forms. (Accordingly, legal traditions will vary
too.) Consciousness -- the self, the ego, the individual, separate from an objectified
world of others and things -- was fully emerging and the avant garde of the
times were announcing it. During the
axial period (c.600-300 BCE) there was a dramatic flowering of self-realization
through what may be described as a worldwide “incarnation of the logos” (the
almost simultaneous appearance of a host of sages, including in the East the
likes of Lao Tze, Gautama Buddha, and Confucius). The West was riveted on its own avatars of
that same axial period -- Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato and
Aristotle.
[17] Gebser 1985:
77 (citing Diels-Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Berlin:
Weidemann, 1934: 231), i; fragment 28 B 3)
[18] Hamburger
1969: 42-43 (quoting Plato, the Sophist Kallikles speaking: “...the makers of
laws are the majority who are weak; and they make laws and distribute praises
and censures with a view to themselves and to their own interests; and they
terrify the stronger sort of men, and those who are able to get the better of
them; and they say that dishonesty is shameful and unjust; meaning by the word
injustice, the desire of a man to have more than his neighbors; for knowing
their own inferiority, I suspect that they are too glad of equality.”
(from Plato’s Gorgias, 483b-484a, Jowett trans.); But cf. the opposite view
(in true Sophist fashion), as expressed by Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic I
338c, “I proclaim that justice is nothing but the interest of the
stronger.”; but in general the Sophists
argue that human law goes against natural law: the survival of the fittest,
i.e., the “strongest” [that which adapts to its environment in optimal
symbiotic accord is ‘selected’ by nature to survive and pass its genetic
attributes for strong survivability to its progeny]. Therefore, it is not in accordance with
nature that the stronger should be held in check by the weaker. (Ibid. 36)
[19] Kelly 1992: 9
[20] Ibid.; But cf.
what Socrates relates in Plato’s Phaedrus (274 C-276 A): “ ‘...the
Egyptian god Theuth (i.e., Thoth), the inventor of writing, commended his
discovery to King Thamus: it would make the Egyptians wiser and increase their
capacity to remember. But the King would
have none of it: ‘For this will create forgetfulness in the souls of those who
learn it because they will neglect to use their memories...You offer but the
semblance of wisdom to your pupils, not its true self.’ Written records are, according to Socrates,
only a mnemonic aid for him who already knows that with which the writing is
concerned. They can never impart
wisdom. That can be done only with speech
‘written in the pupil’s soul with knowledge.” (Ernst Robert Curtius European
Literature and the Latin Middle Ages [Princeton, New Jersey: Bollingen
Series XXXVI, 1953: 304)]
[21] “...laws, once
publicly written up on stone or bronze, were equally knowable and accessible to
all, and so no longer subject to the arbitrary statement or interpretation of a
closed and privileged class.” (Ibid.)
[22] Ibid. 10
(quoting de Romilly, La Loi dans la pensee greque, 23, commenting on the
Greek mind of the fifth and fourth centuries)
[23] Ibid. 4; also
see, A.R.W. Harrison, The Law of Athens: The Family and Property (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1968)
[24] Ibid. 5
[25] Ibid. 6
[26] For original
sources, see Kelly: 1992: 1-38
[28] Ibid. 69
[29] Ibid. 42
[31] Kelly: 1992
[32] Ibid. 48
[33] Ibid.
[34] Ibid. 51
[36] “For Justice is
one; it binds all human society, and is based on one Law, which is right reason
applied to command and prohibition...” Ibid. 59 (quoting De legibus
1.15.42.)
[37] “True law is
right reason in agreement with nature, diffused among all men; constant and
unchanging, it should call men to their duties by its precepts, and deter them
from wrongdoing by its prohibitions; and it never commands or forbids upright
men in vain, while its rules and restraints are lost upon the wicked. To curtail this law is unholy, to amend it illicit, to repeal it impossible; nor can
we be dispensed from it by the order either of senate or of popular assembly;
nor need we look for anyone to clarify or interpret it; nor will it be one law
at Rome and a different one at Athens, nor otherwise tomorrow than it is today;
but one and the same Law, eternal and unchangeable, will bind all people and
all ages; and God, its designer, expounder and enacter, will be as it were the
sole and universal ruler and governor of all things; and
whoever disobeys it, because by this act he will have turned his back on
himself and on man’s very nature, will pay the heaviest penalty, even if he
avoids the other punishments which are adjudged fit for his conduct.” Ibid. 58 (Quoting Cicero, De republ.3.22.33.)
[39] Kelly 1992:82
[40] Ibid. 99
[42] “These were
the centuries in which the character of Europe’s later legal systems was
determined, above all in which the great division of the civilized legal world
into the two families of ‘civil law’ and ‘common law’ began to emerge. The essential basis of the division was the
permeation of continental Europe’s jurisdictions [footnote omitted] by Roman
law, the ius civile in the Roman’s own language; and, by contrast, the
failure of Roman law permanently to penetrate the English legal profession,
which persisted in the native traditional rules; these, uniformly applied
throughout the kingdom by a single body of judges, were for this reason called
the ‘common law.’ Ibid. 179
[43] Ibid. 172
[44] Ibid.
207 In a footnote on this same page
Kelly notes that Bacon was a “corrupt judge: in 1621 he was convicted of taking
bribes and removed from his office of lord chancellor, fined, and
imprisoned.” Perhaps his many
observations of corruption did not lead him to the proper “general principle.”
[46] “ The
Copernican shift of perspective can be seen as a fundamental metaphor for the
entire modern world view: the profound deconstruction of naive understanding,
the critical recognition that the apparent condition of the objective world was
unconsciously determined by the condition of the subject, the consequent
liberation from the ancient and medieval cosmic womb, the radical displacement
of the human being to a relative and peripheral position in a vast and
impersonal universe, the ensuing disenchantment of the natural world. In this broadest sense -- as an event that
took place not only in astronomy and the sciences but in philosophy and
religion and in the collective human psyche -- the Copernican revolution can be
seen as constituting the epochal shift of the modern age. It was a primordial event, world-destroying
and world-constituting.” Tarnas 1991:
416
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