Critique of Economic Anthropology in the Spirit of Jean Gebser

* Article: What’s wrong with the world? Rationality! A critique of economic anthropology in the spirit of Jean Gebser. By Peter Pogany. MPRA Paper No. 27221. Shenandoah Valley Research Press, November 2010

URL = http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/27221/

"what follows is intended only to demonstrate why the heterodox approach to contemporary socioeconomic issues finds support and inspiration in his thoughts"

ABSTRACT

"Jean Gebser (1905-1973) was a multidisciplinary thinker whose ideas about human consciousness and the future inspire the following five vantage points for the heterodox critique of contemporary economic anthropology:

(1) Characteristic attributes of consciousness and those of the environment surrounding the individual are equivalent, eliminating the possibility of single-minded, seamless, rational control, especially during macrohistoric phase transitions;

(2) Diaphaneity as a mode of deep and comprehensive understanding will be needed to deal effectively with emerging global resource and environmental problems;

(3) Costs in the form of irreversibly accumulating inaccessible energy shadow economic expansion that our cultural conditioning portrays as pure progress;

(4) Rationality, as the most laudable motivation for individuals, business firms and nations, has led to an unfounded techno-fetish; and, for various reasons, it fuels accelerated movement toward collective self-destruction;

(5) Signs of chaos (not the harmless and controllable kind found in standard economic literature) corroborate the notion that we have entered a new period of macrohistoric phase transition as interpreted by the thermodynamic comprehension of universal history."

(http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/27221/)

Excerpts

Peter Pogany:

"He identified five structures of consciousness: Archaic, magic, mythical, mental, and integral. These have always been simultaneously and comprehensively present in all of us with a crucial qualification: Historically, they dominate actual consciousness in the sequence indicated. Although with nonnegligible overlaps, each emerged, became decisively influential, turned deficient and was gradually replaced in its epoch-defining capacity. Currently, we live the apotheosis of mental dominance, already in its deficient phase, struggling to ward off the fifth (integral) structure, which began to press to the fore at the turn of the last century.

An originary perception of existence is “ever-present” in consciousness.

It had become suppressed and latent over the ages but once the integral structure defines our relationship to “Being” it will be free again, renewed and enriched with transparency and intensity. This final, culminating moment of consonance will usher in the age of a healthy equilibrium among basic human propensities. The archaic deep sleep and relaxation, the magic sense of unity; experienced, among many other ways, through music; fulfillment of poetic inclinations that characterizes the mythical, and the cultivation of sciences that the mental in us urges, will all have their opportunity to flourish."