This English translation of Gebser\'s major work, Ursprung und Gegenwart (Stuttgart, Deutsche Verlag, 1966), offers certain fundamental insights which should be beneficial to any sensitive scientist and makes it available to the English-speaking World for the recognition it deserves.
He also sensed the necessity to go beyond the confines of this first treatise so as to include the humanities (such as political economics.
Gebser has noted two results that are of particular significance: first, the abandonment of materialistic determinism, of a one-sided mechanistic-causal mode of thought; and second, a manifest "urgency of attempts to discover a universal way of observing things, and to overcome the inner division of contemporary man who, as a result of his one-sided rational orientation, thinks only in dualisms." Against this background of recent discoveries and conclusions in the natural sciences Gebser discerned the outlines of a potential human universality.
As early as Planck it was known that matter was not at all what materialists had believed it to be, and since 1943 Gebser has repeatedly emphasized that the so-called crisis of Western culture was in fact an essential restructuration....
It was with these foundations--the natural sciences--that Gebser began.
The consequences of such pessimism continued to proliferate long after its Foundations had been superseded.
Freud had redefined culture as illness--a result of drive sublimation
Klages had called the spirit (and he was surely speaking of the hypertrophied intellect) the "adversary of the soul," propounding a return to a life like that of the Pelasgi, the aboriginal inhabitants of Greece; and Spengler had declared the "Demise of the West" during the years following World War I.
In the wake of materialism and social change, man had been described in the early years of our century as the "dead end" of nature. "The path which led Gebser to his new and universal perception of the World is, briefly, as follows.
This English translation of Gebser\'s major work, Ursprung und Gegenwart (Stuttgart, Deutsche Verlag, 1966), offers certain fundamental insights which should be beneficial to any sensitive scientist and makes it available to the English-speaking World for the recognition it deserves
