The genesis of the perspectival world

Evolution of consciousness according to Jean Gebser (a partial introduction)

I concluded my last post by saying that I still want to address Kate Crawford’s comparison of the invention of Large Language Models to the invention of artificial perspective in the 1400s.

No one appears to have understood the discovery of perspective better than the cultural historian and evolutionary philosopher Jean Gebser. In his magnum opus Ursprung und Gegenwart (The Ever-Present Origin, Ohio University Press, 1986), first published in two parts in 1949 and 1953, he wrote:

Scarcely five hundred years ago, during the Renaissance, an unmistakable reorganization of our consciousness occurred: the discovery of perspective which opened up the three-dimensionality of space. This discovery is so closely linked with the entire intellectual attitude of the modern epoch that we have felt obliged to call this age the age of perspectivity and characterize the age immediately preceding it as the “unperspectival” age. These definitions, by recognizing a fundamental characteristic of these eras, lead to the further appropriate definition of the age of the dawning new consciousness as the “aperspectival” age, a definition supported not only by the results of modern physics, but also by developments in the visual arts and literature, where the incorporation of time as a fourth dimension into previously spatial conceptions has formed the initial basis for manifesting the “new.” [2]

Jean Gebser

The perspectival [consciousness] structure as fully realized by Leonardo da Vinci is of fundamental importance not only to our scientific-technological but also artistic understanding of the world. Without perspective neither technical drafting nor three-dimensional painting would have been possible. Leonardo—scientist, engineer, and artist in one—was the first to fully develop drafting techniques and perspectival painting. [3]

Interestingly, when it was suggested to Sri Aurobindo that Leonardo da Vinci might have anticipated even Einstein’s theory of relativity, he replied: “Not likely. The age of art and science which Leonardo set in motion was that which closed with the nineteenth century. Relativity belongs to a new movement of knowledge” [LPA 526]¹ — the one that Gebser dubbed “aperspectival.” Gebser continues:

It is our intent to furnish evidence that the aperspectival world, whose nascence  we are witnessing, can liberate us from the superannuated legacy of both the unperspectival and the perspectival worlds.... [T]he unperspectival world is collective, the perspectival individualistic. That is, the unperspectival world is related to the anonymous “one” or the tribal “we,” the perspectival to the “I” or Ego; the one world is grounded in Being, the other, beginning with the Renaissance, in Having; the former is predominantly irrational, the later rational.

Today, at least in Western civilization, both modes survive only as deteriorated and consequently dubious variants.... The current situation manifests on the one hand an egocentric individualism exaggerated to extremes and desirous of possessing everything, while on the other it manifests an equally extreme collectivism that promises the total fulfillment of man’s being. In the latter instance we find the utter abnegation of the individual valued merely as an object in the human aggregate; in the former a hyper-valuation of the individual who, despite his limitations, is permitted everything. This deficient, that is destructive, antithesis divides the world into two warring camps, not just politically and ideologically, but in all areas of human endeavor.

Since these two ideologies are now pressing toward their limits we can assume that neither can prevail in the long run. When any movement tends to the extremes it leads away from the center or nucleus toward eventual destruction at the outer limits where the connections to the life-giving center finally are severed. It would seem that today [1949] the connections are already broken, for it is increasingly evident that the individual is being driven into isolation while the collective degenerates into mere aggregation. These two conditions, isolation and aggregation, are in fact clear indications that individualism and collectivism have now become deficient. [3]

The keyword here, which occurs twice, is “deficient.”

Whereas Sri Aurobindo, in his writings, was chiefly concerned with the large-scale evolution of consciousness, Gebser’s primary concern was the evolution of human consciousness, and in particular the emergence of an aperspectival or integral structure of consciousness from our present perspectival or mental one. (Needless to say, Gebser’s use of the term “mental” differs somewhat from Sri Aurobindo’s.) To Gebser, “the unique event of mankind that underlies, it would seem, all human endeavor” is the unfolding of consciousness.

Looking back on this endeavor of mankind, we can distinguish three consciousness structures proceeding from origin, from the archaic basic structure. These are the magic, the mythical, and the mental. lf, in the course of the following discussion, we are able to establish the contents, forms of realization, and attitudes expressed by these structures, we should be able to determine to what extent the one or the other of these structurations predominates in us and predisposes our attitude to the world and our judgement of it. We could then consider the new structure and attempt to describe and evaluate it without the danger of intermingling the old with the new. We shall designate this new consciousness structure as the integral structure, and its emergent world modality as the “aperspectival world.” [37]

The danger of intermingling the old with the new is stealthy and real. What needs to be stressed at present, however, is that this successive superseding of one consciousness structure by another is not a gradual process. According to Gebser, “no truly decisive process ... is a continuum”:

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.... The apparent continuity is no more than a sequence subsequently superimposed onto overlapping events to lend them the reassuring appearance of a logically determinate progression. [37]

It would, however, be “tantamount to a misrepresentation if the concept of mutation used here were to be understood by association as biological”:

it is as legitimate to transfer a term from one discipline to another in this instance as in all others. As Erwin Schrödinger has noted, why should only medicine and algebra share a common term, Brüche, for such differing phenomena as fractures and fractions? Bone fractures and algebraic “fractures” have no more (or less) in common than biological mutations and mutations of consciousness. [38]

When a consciousness mutation occurs, it begins by disrupting not only the old ways of making sense of the world but also the old ways of being effective in the world. The hitherto dominant but now moribund consciousness structure enters a final, deficient phase; its initial, efficient phase is over. Gebser attributes the historical instances of the catastrophic downfall of entire peoples and cultures to “the collision of deficient and exhausted attitudes that were insufficient for continuance with those more recent, more intense and, in some respects, superior.”

One such occurrence vividly exemplifies the decisive nature of such crises: the collision of the magical, mythical, and unperspectival culture of the Central American Aztecs with the rational-technological, perspectival attitude of the sixteenth-century Spanish conquistadors. A description of this event can be found in the Aztec chronicle of Frey Bernardino de Sahagun, written eight years after Cortés’ conquest of Mexico on the basis of Aztec accounts. The following excerpt forms the beginning of the thirteenth chapter of the chronicle which describes the conquest of Mexico City:

The thirteenth chapter, wherein is recounted
how the Mexican king Montezuma
sends other sorcerers
who were to cast a spell on the Spanish
and what happened to them on the way.
And the second group of messengers —
the soothsayers, the magicians, and the high priests —
likewise went to receive the Spanish.
But it was to no avail;
they could not bewitch the people,
they could not reach their intent with the Spanish;
they simply failed to arrive.

There is hardly another text extant that describes so succinctly and so memorably the collapse of an entire world and a hitherto valid and effectual human attitude. The magic-mythical world of the Mexicans could not prevail against the Spaniards; it collapsed the moment it encountered the rational-technological mentality. The materialistic orientation of present-day Europeans will tend to attribute this collapse to the Spaniards’ technological superiority, but in actual fact it was the vigor of the Spanish consciousness vis-à-vis the weakness of the Mexican that was decisive. It is the basic distinction between the ego-less man, bound to the group and a collective mentality, and the individual securely conscious of his individuality. 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 by-passes 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.... [5–6]

“Today,” Gebser wrote in 1949, the rational, egocentric consciousness is “confronted by a similar catastrophic situation of failure; consequently, it too can be vanquished by a new consciousness structure. We are convinced that there are powers arising from within ourselves that are already at work overcoming the deficiency and dubious nature of our rational ego-consciousness via the new aperspectival awareness....” [6]

As I mentioned in a previous post, one way to pin down the character of a consciousness structure is by its dimensionality. As I wrote there, one of the characteristics of the unperspectival structure preceding the perspectival one is that the world appears to be — and thus, for all intents and purposes, is — enclosed in a sphere, with the fixed stars attached to its boundary, the firmament. We cannot but ask: what is beyond that sphere? Those who held this notion could not, because for them the third dimension of space — viewer-centered depth — did not have the reality it has for us. Lacking our sense of this dimension, the world experienced by them was in an important sense two-dimensional. This is why they could not handle perspective in drawing and painting, and why they were unable to arrive at the subject-free “view from nowhere” which is a prerequisite of modern science.

The achievement of perspective indicates man’s discovery and consequent coming to awareness of space, whereas the unrealized perspective indicates that space is dormant in man and that he is not yet awakened to it.... The illuminated manuscripts and gilt ground 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.... This situation bespeaks for us a hardly conceivable enclosure in the world.... Man’s lack of spatial awareness is attended by a lack of ego-consciousness, since in order to objectify and qualify space, a self-conscious “I” is required that is able to stand opposite or confront space, as well as to depict or represent it by projecting it out of his soul or psyche. [9–10]

There is a document extant that “unforgettably depicts the struggle of a man caught between two worlds,” the unperspectival and the perspectival.  It is a letter of the thirty-two year-old Petrarch written in 1336 to Francesco Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro. In it he describes his ascent of Mount Ventoux, a mountain in Southern France, to the northeast of Avignon.

Artificial landscape courtesy of Blue Willow and countless unpaid artists and photographers

For his time, his description is an epochal event and signifies no less than the discovery of landscape: the first dawning of an awareness of space that resulted in a fundamental alteration of European man’s attitude in and toward the world....

Petrarch’s letter is in the nature of a confession; it is addressed to the Augustinian professor of theology who had taught him to treasure and emulate Augustine’s Confessions. Now, a person makes a confession or an admission only if he believes he has transgressed against something; and it is this vision of space, as extended before him from the mountain top, this vision of space as a reality, and its overwhelming impression, together with his shock and dismay, his bewilderment at his perception and acceptance of the panorama, that are reflected in his letter. It marks him as the first European to step out of the transcendental gilt ground of the Siena masters ... into “real” space....

“Yesterday I climbed the highest mountain of our region,” he begins the letter, “motivated solely by the wish to experience its renowned height. For many years this has been in my soul and, as you well know, I have roamed this region since my childhood. The mountain, visible from far and wide, was nearly always present before me; my desire gradually increased until it became so intense that I resolved to yield to it....  While still climbing, I urged myself forward by the thought that what I experienced today will surely benefit myself as well as many others who desire the blessed life.”

Once Petrarch reaches the summit, however, his narrative becomes unsettled; the shifts of tense indicate his intense agitation even at the mere recollection of his experience at the summit. “Shaken by the unaccustomed wind and the wide, freely shifting vistas, I was immediately awe-struck. I look: the clouds lay beneath my feet. [. . .]² 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. [. . .]”

In the lines that follow, recollecting a decade of suffering, and preoccupied by the overpowering desire for his homeland that befell him during the unaccustomed sojourn on the summit, he reveals that his thoughts have turned inward. Still marked by his encounter with what was then a new reality, yet shaken by its effect, he flees “from space into time,” out of the first experience with space back to the gold-ground of the Siena masters....

Helpless in the face of the expanse before him and groping for some kind of moral support, he opens a copy of Augustine’s Confessions where he chances upon a phrase. It stems from that realm of the soul to which he had turned his gaze after his initial encounter with landscape. “God and my companion are witnesses,” he writes, “that my glance fell upon the passage: ‘And men went forth to behold the high mountains and the mighty surge of the sea, and the broad stretches of the rivers and the inexhaustible ocean, and the paths of the stars, and so doing, lose themselves in wonderment’.”

Once more, he is terrified, only this time less by his encounter with space than by the encounter with his soul of which he is reminded by the chance discovery of Augustine’s words. “I admit I was overcome with wonderment,” he continues; “I begged my brother who also desired to read the passage not to disturb me, and closed the book. I was irritated for having turned my thoughts to mundane matters at such a moment, for even the Pagan philosophers should have long since taught me that there is nothing more wondrous than the soul, and that compared to its greatness nothing is great.”

Pausing for a new paragraph, he continues with these surprising words: “My gaze, fully satisfied by contemplating the mountain [i.e., only after a conscious and exhaustive survey of the panorama — J.G.], my eyes turned inward; and then we fell silent.”

Although obscured by psychological reservations and the memory of his physical exertion, the concluding lines of his letter suggest an ultimate affirmation of his ascent and the attendant experience: “So much perspiration and effort just to bring the body a little closer to heaven; the soul, when approaching God, must be similarly terrified.”

The struggle initiated by his internalization of space into his soul — or, if you will, the externalization of space out of his soul — continued in Petrarch from that day on Mount Ventoux until the end of his life. The old world where only the soul is wonderful and worthy of contemplation ... now begins to collapse. There is a gradual but increasingly evident shift from time to space until the soul wastes away in the materialism of the nineteenth century....

The transition mirrored in Petrarch’s letter of six hundred years ago was primarily an unprecedented extension of man’s image of the world. The event that Petrarch describes in almost prophetic terms as “certainly of benefit to himself and many others” inaugurates a new realistic, individualistic, and rational understanding of nature....

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. This concluded a process which had required centuries before it entered human consciousness and effected a fundamental transformation of man's world.... It is only after Leonardo that the unperspectival world finally passes out of its dream-like state, and the perspectival world definitely enters awareness. [12–20]

And now, at last, my comments on Kate Crawford’s comparison of the invention of Large Language Models (like ChatGPT or GPT-4) to the invention of artificial perspective:

KC: We’re looking at a shift that I think is pretty profound. And a lot of people use the iPhone example or the Internet example. I like to go even further back. I like to think about the invention of artificial perspective. So we can go back into the 1400s where you had Alberti³ outline a completely different way of visualizing space, which completely transformed art and architecture and how we understood the world that we lived in. It’s been described as a technology that shifted the mental and material worlds of what it is to be alive. And this [the invention of LLMs] is one of those moments where it feels like a perspectival shift that can feel magic.

In point of fact, what happened in the 15th Century was far more than a perspectival shift, and it wasn’t brought about by the invention of a technology. The reason it wasn’t a change in perspective is that until it happened, there was no such thing as perspective. And to say that it was brought about by the invention of a technology would be putting the cart before the horse. What happened was a consciousness mutation that gave birth to space as we know it, and thus to the world as it is experienced (perceived and conceived) by us. This led, first, to the discovery and eventual mastery of perspective in art and architecture and, second, to technical drafting, which made possible modern science and initiated the technological age.

By the same token, the deficient manifestations of the mental consciousness structure are not primarily consequences of the technologies it spawned. As Gebser points out, “this very same perspective whose study and gradual acquisition were a major preoccupation for Renaissance man not only extends his image of the world by achieving spatialization but also narrows his vision—a consequence that still afflicts us today.”

[Perspective] locates and determines the observer as well as the observed. The positive result is a concretion of man and space; the negative result is the restriction of man to a limited segment where he perceives only one sector of reality.... [He] separates from the whole only that part which his view or thinking can encompass, and forgets those sectors that lie adjacent, beyond, or even behind.... [He] endows his sector of awareness with primacy; but he is, of course, only able to perceive a partial view. The sector is given prominence over the circle; the part outweighs the whole. As the whole cannot be approached from a perspectival attitude to the world, we merely superimpose the character of wholeness onto the sector, the result being the familiar “totality.” [18]

As in “totalitarian.” In fact, mental consciousness by its very nature tends to various kinds of totalitarianism, not the least of which is the totalitarianism of a science that attributes “ultimate reality” to conceptual or computational tools. But there is hope: “although the whole can no longer even be approached from the perspectival position, the whole ... is again being approached in novel ways from the aperspectival attitude.” [18]

So how does the invention of LLMs compare to the invention of perspective as a technique? While the latter played an efficient role in the manifestation of the perspectival world, the former can only be seen as a deficient consequence, intensifying the negative results, increasing the tension between anxiety and delight mentioned below — anxiety brought about by the loss of real ends to justify means, delight in the ever more frantic pursuit of end-less means, or in the invention of ludicrous ends favoring the few and justifying the disenfranchisement of the many.⁴

The over-emphasis on space and spatiality that increases with every century since 1500 is at once the greatness as well as the weakness of perspectival man. His over-emphasis on the “objectively” external, a consequence of an excessively visual orientation, leads not only to rationalization and haptification but to an unavoidable hypertrophy of the “I,” which is in confrontation with the external world. This exaggeration of the “I” amounts to what we may call an ego-hypertrophy: the “I” must be increasingly emphasized, indeed over-emphasized in order for it to be adequate to the ever-expanding discovery of space. At the same time, the increasing materialization and haptification of space which confronts the ego occasions a corresponding rigidification of the ego itself. The expansion of space brings on the gradual expansion and consequent disintegration of the “I” on the one hand, preparing favorable circumstances for collectivism. On the other hand, the haptification of space rigidifies and encapsulates the “I,” with the resultant possibility of isolation evident in egocentrism....

In addition, the one-sided emphasis on space, which has its extreme expression in materialism and naturalism, gives rise to an ever-greater unconscious feeling of guilt about time, the neglected component of our manifest world. As we approach the decline of the perspectival age, it is our anxiety about time that stands out as the dominant characteristic alongside our ever more absurd obsession with space. It manifests itself in various ways, such as in our addiction to time. 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 ... 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....

As it developed over the centuries, this state of affairs gave rise to the most destructive of the stigmas of our age: the universal intolerance that prevails today, and the fanaticism to which it leads. A person who is anxious, or who is fleeing from something, or who is lost either with respect to his own ego or with respect to the world—it holds equally true in both instances—is a person who will always be intolerant, as he feels threatened in his vital interests. He “sees” only a vanishing point lost in the misty distance ... and he feels obliged to defend his point fanatically, lest he lose his world entirely.

The European of today, either as an individual or as a member of the collective, can perceive only his own sector. This is true of all spheres, the religious as well as the political, the social as well as the scientific.... 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. And there is no “going back”; the ties to the past, the re-ligio, are almost non-existent, having been severed, as it were, by the cutting edge of the visual pyramid. As for a simple onward progression and continuity (which has almost taken on the character of a flight), they lead only to further sectors of particularization and, ultimately, to atomization. After that, what remains, like what was left in the crater of Hiroshima, is only an amorphous dust; and it is probable that at least one part of humanity will follow this path, at least in “spirit,” i.e., psychologically.

In summary, then, the following picture emerges: there is on the one hand anxiety about time and one’s powerlessness against it, and on the other, a “delight” resulting from the conquest of space and the attendant expansion of power; there is also the isolation of the individual or group or cultural sphere as well as the collectivization of the same individuals in interest groups. This tension between anxiety and delight, isolation and collectivization is the ultimate result of an epoch which has outlived itself. Nevertheless, this epoch could serve as a guarantee that we reach a new “target,” if we could utilize it much as the arrow uses an overtaut bow string. Yet like the arrow, our epoch must detach itself from the extremes that make possible the tension behind its flight toward the target. Like the arrow on the string, our epoch must find the point where the target is already latently present: the equilibrium between anxiety and delight, isolation and collectivization. Only then can it liberate itself from deficient unperspectivity and perspectivity, and achieve what we shall call, also because of its liberating character, the aperspectival world. [22–23]

A final word on the relation between Gebser’s work and Sri Aurobindo (not only his writings). In a lecture published in 1970,⁵ Gebser made the following statement:

Be it noted that my concept of the emergence of a new consciousness, of which I became aware through a flash-like intuition in the winter of 1932/33, and which I began to put forward in 1939, largely resembles the world scheme [Weltentwurf] of Sri Aurobindo, which was then unknown to me. My own, however, differs from his in that it appeals to the Western world only and does not have the depth and pregnant origin of his ingeniously presented conception. I see an explanation for this phenomenon in the fact that I was in some way brought into the extremely powerful spiritual field of force radiating through Sri Aurobindo.

1. Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Poetry and Art (Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department, 2004).

2. Ellipses in square brackets are Gebser’s.

3. Leon Battista Alberti, Della pittura (1436). The three volumes contain a first systematic attempt at a theory of perspectival construction (in the chapter “Della prospettiva”).

4. See the recent article by Dave Troy, “The Wide Angle: Understanding TESCREAL — the Weird Ideologies Behind Silicon Valley’s Rightward Turn,” The Washington Spectator, May 1, 2023. The acronym stands for the AI-centric world views of Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism.

5. J. Gebser, Der unsichtbare Ursprung, pp. 96–97 (Walter-Verlag, 1970).