The odyssey of the Western legal tradition. Integral jurisprudence: Toward the self -transcendence of deficient -mental legal culture

This theoretical dissertation explores the origins and charts the development of law and legal culture within the Western legal tradition (WLT) by examining the continuing evolution of jurisprudence in the context of Jean Gebser's (1985) analysis of structures of consciousness. A text-based methodology is used wherein the author's critical intuition informally engages a life-long heuristic tendency that inclines toward a phenomenological understanding of the world. Law's genesis out of custom involves an excursus into pre-history in search of law's epistemological legitimacy; the author asserts that the originary custom and values found in the pre-mental (archaic, magic, mythic) consciousness of primal peoples diverged over time into an acculturated custom, and that only acculturated custom is that custom conventionally cited as a source of law. The earliest notions of law came about by what the author refers to as mytho-concepts , mutating into mental consciousness for various reasons, which the author discusses. Indeed, law is uniquely a creature of mental consciousness and alphabetic literacy. In the WLT, jurisprudence is continually reworked by what historian Donald R. Kelley (1990) posits as the contending, conceptual forces of nomos and physis, employed in an oppositional dialectic that repeatedly plays itself out within the over-arching logos of the age. The WLT has been a container, mirroring back from within it a mental consciousness directing an evolution of law growing increasingly hypertrophied as consciousness intensifies toward a deficient, mental- rational form capable of only reproducing a debilitating consensual reality via a self-reflexive culture trance. Hence, status quo law and jurisprudence is referred to as deficient-mental legal culture and is thoroughly critiqued. The author inquires into whether law, conceptualized via mental consciousness for over two millennia, can adapt and thrive amid a new structure of integral consciousness. Responding affirmatively, the author cites in support thereof new law practice models and legal theorists whose work is generally supportive of Gebser's vision of a new, aperspectival jurisprudence. Thus, the author introduces integral jurisprudence as a new attractor basin within the WLT. It is via integral values, and a worldview and reality premised upon integral consciousness, that individuals might self-transcend deficient-mental legal culture.