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March 1997
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http://www.december.com/cmc/mag/1997/mar/cunning.html
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SPECIAL
FOCUS: SPIRITUALITY ONLINE
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Teilhard de Chardin and the Noosphere
by Rev. Phillip J. Cunningham, C.S.P.
In 1964, while attempting to adjust my thinking to the many
changes following the Second Vatican Council, I first encountered the
writings of the French geologist/paleontologist, Pere Pierre Teilhard
de Chardin. Though he had died nine years earlier, it was only after
the Council that his works began appearing in the United States. That
circumstance necessitates some biographical information.
Pere Teilhard was born in 1881 to a pious, provincial French
family. He chose early on to join the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) and
in the course of his studies pursued geology and later paleontology.
It was his intention to begin a career of teaching and research in
the these fields. He was well on his way to doing so when he was
conscripted for military service during the first World War.
As a stretcher bearer during the ghastliest battles of that
conflict, Teilhard's personal faith was severely challenged. I
believe it was his effort to understand this human tragedy (thousands
of men killed and maimed in minutes to no purpose)that lead Teilhard
to begin developing a vision that combined both his religion and his
science.
The Unity of All Things
In the seeming myriad of entities around us, Teilhard perceives a
unity: "My starting point is the fundamental initial fact that
each one of us is perforce linked by all the material organic and
psychic strands of his being to all that surrounds him."
Moreover, that unity reaches back in time and continues into the
future: "If we look far enough back in the depths of time, the
disordered anthill of living beings suddenly, for an informed
observer, arranges itself in long files that make their way by
various paths towards greater consciousness." (p. 24)
Teilhard's science had already convinced him of the validity of
evolution as a paradigm fundamental to understanding the meaning of
human existence. He affirms that "the belief that there is an
absolute direction of growth , to which both our duty and our
happiness demand that we should conform. It is his [the human]
function to complete cosmic evolution." (pp. 31-33). He goes so
far as to say: "Christ is realized in evolution." (p. 63).
After the war, Teilhard returned to the pursuit of his career as
both teacher and researcher. His career took a fortuitous turn when
he was invited in 1923 to join an expedition in China. In the
following twelve years he was to be part of nine more such
exploratory treks. Much of his growing reputation rested on these
missions. This was particularly true of his association with the
discovery of fossil remains of Sinanthropus or Peking man in 1929.
Sadly, on another front, Teilhard faced the crisis of his life. He
had continued to explore the lines of thought that had begun with his
"Cosmic Life." Perhaps inevitably, his observations came to
the attention of Church authorities. The reaction to some of
Teilhard's ideas was ultimately severe. He was deprived of his
teaching position and admonished not to publish his observations on
religion and science. He observed that restriction until his death in
1955. It was only afterward that collections of his essays were
published as well as his central work, The Phenomenon of Man.
In 1925, Teilhard wrote in an essay entitled
Hominization: "And this amounts to imagining, in one way or
another, above the animal biosphere a
human
sphere, a sphere of reflection, of conscious invention, of conscious
souls (the noosphere, if you will)" (1966, p. 63)
It was a neologism employing the Greek word noos for "mind."
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Teilhard
de Chardin and the Noosphere, by Rev. Phillip J.
Cunningham, C.S.P.
The Sphere
The vision of the "sphere" with its circumscribed
surface is crucial to the Teilhardian perspective. It provided the
closed and limited volume in which the earliest stage of evolution
took place. "And let me also repeat that this [molecular]
synthesis itself would never take place if the globe itself as a
whole did not enfold within an enclosed surface the layers of its
substance." (1961, p. 73)
Similarly, it is on the watery surface of the geosphere, bombarded
by solar radiation and cosmic debris that "the amazing profusion
of organic matter whose matted complexity came to form the last (or
rather the last but one) of the envelopes or our planet: the
biosphere." (p. 79) The initial granule of life was the cell. In
the intervening millions of years, the evolutionary process has
populated the biosphere with incredible myriad of life forms, many
extinct, some extant and some perhaps still evolving.
Teilhard then asks the crucial question: "But, taken as a
whole what is the meaning of this movement of expansion?" (p.
141) Going on, he observes: "Asked whether life is going
anywhere at the end of its transformation, nine biologists out of ten
will say no, even passionately." The percentages today may have
shifted a bit but the passion is still there, witness Daniel C.
Dennett's "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" (New York: Touchstone,
1995). He denies that evolution has any direction or, for that
matter, meaning.
Obviously, Teilhard disagrees, maintaining that evolution has a
direction.
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The Arrow of Evolution
Teilhard maintains that evolution has a definite direction, an
"Ariadne's Thread" as he calls it. "Obviously,
Teilhard disagrees, maintaining that evolution has a direction, an
"Ariadne's Thread" as he calls it. That "thread"
is the increasing complexity of living beings, the focus of which is
their nervous systems, more precisely, their brains. Following the
growth in "cerebralization" we are led to the mammals and,
among them, the anthropoids. The complexity of their brains is
paralleled by the complexity of their socialized behaviour. Recent
studies of the great apes has only increased our appreciation of
their remarkable acuity. Yet, though we are not a radical departure
physically or genetically from these marvelous creatures, we
nevertheless transcend them in some essential manner.
And just what is the source of this transcendence? For Teilhard,
it is "thought" or "reflection." He describes it
as "the power acquired by a consciousness to turn it upon
itself, to take possession of itself as of an object endowed with its
own particular consistence and value: no longer merely to know, but
to know oneself; no longer merely to know but to know that one
knows." (1961, p. 165)
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March 1997
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http://www.december.com/cmc/mag/1997/mar/cunnevol.html
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Teilhard
de Chardin and the Noosphere, by Rev. Phillip J.
Cunningham, C.S.P.
Origins of Evolution
Philosophers have pondered man's ability to think for
two-and-a-half millennia and it would be far beyond the scope of the
present article to even summarize their observations. What can one
say other than, "I think and I think you think."
When did the evolutionary process cross the threshold of thought?
When did what we would call the first human come into existence? Our
understanding of the evolution of the hominids has undergone
considerable refinement since Teilhard's day and it continues. There
were certainly crucial preliminary stages such as walking erect,
modification of the vocal apparatus to increase the range of sounds
produced and an increase in the complexity of socialization. Most
significantly, as Teilhard believed, there was a dramatic increase in
brain size.
What indices do we have of the transition to thought/reflection?
Was it the use of tools? There is ample evidence that animals use
tools. "But there is a great conceptual leap from using tools as
simple hammers with which to break things to using stones to strike a
flake off another stone." (Leakey/Lewin 1992, p. 169) With the
appearance of Homo erectus some two to three million years ago, it
would appear that the crucial transition had been made. "I
believe Homo erectus has a well-developed sense of self and
considerable language ability." (p. 171) In fact, it might well
be that language is the real indication that humanity crossed the
threshold of thought. "Human communication through language is
unprecedented in the natural world, both in terms of rate and density
of information transferred." (p. 245) Unfortunately, that
transition left no fossil record. However, as Monod observes, it
"amounts to assuming that spoken language, when it appeared
among primitive mankind, not only made possible the evolution of
culture but contributed to man's physical evolution. But on the day
Zinjanthropus or one of his comrades first used an articulate symbol
as represent a category, he enormously increased the probability that
at some later day a brain might emerge capable of conceiving the
Darwinian theory of evolution." (1972, pp. 136-137) That phase
of evolution Teilhard called "noogenesis" (1961, p. 185).
Recent discoveries (New York Times, 12/13/96) hint that Homo
erectus survived until relatively recently, thus coexisting with two
other human species, the Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. We had,
therefore, a ramification of human forms just as with other species.
But that changed because by 30,000 years ago only one species of homo
still existed, H. sapiens. It was this form that came to dominate the
planet and occupy all but the most inhospitable areas. The genetic
unity of H. sapiens, however, supplies the foundation for a deeper
unity, that of language. No matter how varied and complex individual
linguistic groups may be, we are able to communicate across such
barriers. At first, language was tribal (as it still is in many
areas). The scope probably broadened with the appearance of farming
and herding. However, it is with the development of trade "over
the horizon" that a gigantic step was taken, written language.
Primitive writing goes back some 30,000 years but written language as
we know it developed over the past three millennia. It is a crucial
advancement since it makes human communication possible, not only at
a distance, but enables the past to communicate with the present and
the future. The noosphere now transcends both distance and time.
It is quite likely that this transcendence paved the way for the
formation of civilization, "the prelude and presage of some new
and superior state for the noosphere." (1961, p. 209) Similar to
biological species, Teilhard points to what he calls five "foci,"
the Mayan, Polynesian, Chinese, Indian (East) and the
Sumerian/Egyptian. Their fates, however, differ. The Mayan
(Meso-American) remained too isolated and the Polynesian (South
Pacific) too dispersed." (pp. 209-10)
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In The Phenomenon of Man, Teilhard posits: "In
truth, a neo-humanity has been germinating round the Mediterranean
for the last six thousand years" (1961, p. 212) He thought that
a "new layer of the noosphere" would soon be formed. "The
proof of this lies in the fact that from one end of the world to the
other, all peoples, to remain human or to become more so, are
inexorably led to formulate the hopes and problems of the modern
earth in the very same terms in which the West has formulated them."
Teilhard was convinced that the shape of the noosphere's future would
be determined by those developments he saw taking place in the Europe
and the U.S.
It was his opinion: "We are, at this very moment, passing
through a change of age. Beneath a change of age lies a change of
thought." (1961, p. 214, 215) That hidden change would at first
influence only a few but it would continue to expand. "I know of
no more moving story nor any more revealing of the biological reality
of a noogenesis than that of intelligence struggling step by step
from the beginning to overcome the illusion of proximity." (p.
216) Humanity had lived (and many still did) in a narrow world,
unaware of the true dimensions of time and space. Moreover these
dimension bore no relationship to each other. Now a new realization
arose: "Time and space are organically joined again so as to
weave, together, the stuff of the universe." (p. 218) What
brought this transformation about?
Teilhard attributes it to the rise of an evolutionary point of
view:
"Is evolution a theory, a system or a hypothesis? It
is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all
hypotheses, as systems must bow and which they must satisfy
henceforth if they are to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light
illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow."
(1961, p. 219)
The Emergence of the Noosphere
Teilhard was convinced that geogenesis moved in the direction of
an ever increasing conscious that brought about a biogenesis that
evolved in the same direction. The process then led to the advent of
though/reflection. However, the process did not cease there. "Man
discovers that he is nothing else than evolution become conscious of
itself. The consciousness of each of us is evolution looking at
itself and reflecting upon itself." (p. 221) The direction then
was toward such a growth in consciousness.
Teilhard was also convinced that a further and even more profound
change had taken place. On the one hand we could see humanity simply
swept along in a evolutionary stream into the future over which he
had no control. Or, we could see that an evolution conscious of
itself could also direct itself. "Not only do we read in our
slightest acts the secrets of [evolutions] proceedings; but for an
elementary part we hold it in our hands, responsible for its past to
its future." (p. 226) Noogenesis moves ever more clearly toward
self-direction; it is now something we determine.
Still, can we make some estimate of where we are going? "Man
is not the center of the universe as once we thought in our
simplicity, but something much more wonderful-the arrow pointing the
way to the final unification of the world. This is nothing else than
the fundamental vision and I shall leave it at that." (p. 224)
Teilhard was hardly alone in that dream of human unity and its
chief benefit, peace. He was also aware of the formidable barriers
that lay in the path of its achievement. Indeed, the very awareness
of the challenges plays its own role in noogenesis. "I can now
add that what disconcerts the modern world at its very roots is not
being sure, and not seeing how it ever could be sure, that there is
an outcome-a suitable outcome-to that evolution." (p. 229)
It was Teilhard's conviction that should
humanity lose hope for the future, the hope of transcending the
barriers to human unity and peace, noogenesis would cease. "Between
these two alternatives of absolute optimism or absolute pessimism,
there is no middle way because by its very nature progress is all or
nothing." (p. 232) Yet, does not evolution itself offer hope. It
has gone from geogenesis to biogenesis and has entered up noogenesis.
Will it now be frustrated at this stage and fail to evolve further
into the future? Teilhard clings to hope, "there is for us, in
the future, under some form or another, a least collective, not only
survival but also super-life." (p. 234) In 1950, Teilhard made
what was a final attempt to get his observations published. He wrote
a short work, Man's Place in Nature, which summarized what he felt
was his scientific position. He carefully avoided mentioning the
religious aspects of his views. Unfortunately, he was no more
successful than he had been earlier. Teilhard does not depart from
his earlier views, but he does state them with greater precision.
Before continuing our presentation of Teilhard's views of the outcome
of noogenesis,
I
would note some of these more precise statements.
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Teilhard
de Chardin and the Noosphere, by Rev. Phillip J.
Cunningham, C.S.P.
Origins of Civilization
As he did in Phenomenon, Teilhard affirms that civilization "is
ultimately, simply zoological 'specialization' extended to an animal
group (man) in which one particular influence (the psychic) suddenly
begins to assume a predominant part in the ramification of the
phylum. From this point of view the formation of tribes, nations,
empires, and finally of the modern state, is simply a prolongation of
the mechanism which produced animal species." (1973, p. 87)
Noogenesis is truly an evolutionary process.
Nevertheless, Teilhard was aware that when one applies the
evolutionary paradigm to noogenesis there are a significance
differences. "First among these is that, since the older
chromosomic heredity is now partnered by an 'educational,'
extra-individual, heredity, the preservation and accumulation of the
acquired suddenly assumes an importance in biogenesis of the first
order." We now have Lamarkian (inheritance of acquired
characteristics) and Darwinian evolutions combined.
Not unrelated, certainly, to this "educational" heredity
is an evolutionary phenomenon unique to noogenesis, "the
confluence of branches" (p. 89) After an initial phase of
ramification, one species alone, homo sapiens, survives.
Civilizations now seems to be on the same path. At first, there was
ramification giving rise to some twenty-one distinct civilizations,
largely isolated from one another. Like animal species most are
extinct or vestigial. Still there remained and remains resistance to
the homogenization of culture. Indeed, there seems to be a growing
effort to preserve a plurality of cultures.
Yet, in Teilhard's view this resistance is yielding to crucial
forces. One he speaks of is "ethnic compression the mainspring
or initial motive force of the whole phenomena." (p. 97) In
brief, "the human population is coming close to saturation point
on the closed surface of our planet." Under such pressure, one
would expect some sort of rearrangement, some change in structures.
These, Teilhard believed, could be seen in the new
"economico-technical organization" of the planet, the
industrial revolution being an earlier example. Incidentally, since
compression is the "motive force" we would expect such
transitions to generate a certain amount of violence. "It is
not, in itself, surprising that a rise in 'psychic temperature'
should automatically accompany a better social arrangement." (p.
98)
As in Phenomenon, Teilhard turns his attention to what is to come.
The ever more complex social arrangements produced by the above
compression signals as well a change in human consciousness; the
noosphere evolves. "This super-compression, in turn,
automatically a super-organization, and that again a
super-'consciousisation': that, in turn, is followed by super-super
compression, and so the process continues." (p. 99) A
multiplicity of stages in noogenesis lie before us.
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A Foreboding of the Internet
Crucial to the process of human evolution, i.e. to progress is, in
Teilhard's view, scientific research. In the past such investigations
were isolated, sometimes no more than the hobbies of individuals.
"Today we find the reverse: research students are numbered in
the hundreds of thousands-soon to be millions-and they are no longer
distributed superficially and at random over the globe, but are
functionally linked together in a vast organic system that will
remain in the future indispensable to the life of the community."
(p. 106) One can't but think of today's "Internet," yet
this was written forty-six years ago.
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Indeed, Teilhard was acquainted with the early forms of the key
element in that "organic system." He writes, "And
here I am thinking of those astonishing electronic machines (the
starting-point and hope of the young science of cybernetics), by
which our mental capacity to calculate and combine is reinforced
and multiplied by the process and to a degree that herald as
astonishing advances in this direction as those that optical
science has already produced for our power of vision." (p.
110) Obviously Teilhard had only a faint hint as what was actually
to occur.
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Steve Mizrach relates Teilhard de Chardin's ideas
to the metaphysics of information.
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But what of the ultimate future, if any. Teilhard says there are
no guarantees, "synthesis implies risk." "Life is less
certain than death." (p. 117) However, if evolution does in fact
reach a final stage it will be "the self-subsistent centre and
absolutely final principle of irreversibility and personalization:
the one and only true Omega." (p. 121) Teilhard's hope for the
future of the noosphere is found in what he called the "Omega
Point," perhaps the most controversial aspect of his thought. To
understand it, we return to The Phenomenon of Man.
Towards Omega
There we continue Teilhard's treatment of noogenesis: "We are
faced with a harmonized collectivity of consciousnesses to a sort of
superconciousness. The earth not only becoming covered by myriads of
grains of thought, but becoming enclosed in a single thinking
envelope, a single unanimous reflection." (1961, pp. 251-2) Yet
such a unanimity of consciousness implies a condition that humans
generally reject, depersonalization. Indeed, the conclusion seems
inevitable: "So that at the world's Omega, as at its Alpha, lies
the Impersonal." (p. 258) At this point, "Omega," the
last letter in the Greek alphabet, simply refers to the final stage
of evolution. At the end the noosphere become an "all" that
absorbs all.
In refining his description of "Omega"
Teilhard seems to agree. "Because it contains and engenders
consciousness, space-time is necessarily of a convergent nature [and]
must somewhere in the future become involuted to a point which we
might call Omega, which fuses and consumes them integrally in
itself." (p. 259) Here "Omega" takes on its deeper
meaning. Noogenesis, as it evolves,
inevitably
reaches a single focus.
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Teilhard
de Chardin and the Noosphere, by Rev. Phillip J.
Cunningham, C.S.P.
Reaching Omega
But, citing the principle that "union differentiates,"
Teilhard affirms: "Thus it would be mistaken to represent to
represent Omega to ourselves simply as a centre born of the fusion of
elements which it collects, or annihilating them in itself. By its
structure Omega, in its ultimate principle, can only be a distinct
Centre radiating at the core of a system of centres." (p. 262)
Consciousnesses lose their individuality but not their "person-ness."
The Omega Point is a person among persons.
In concluding the main body of Phenomenon, Teilhard has the
following summation: "To make room for thought in the world, I
have needed to 'interiorize matter: to imagine an energetics of the
mind; to conceive a noogenesis rising upstream against the flow of
entropy; to provide evolution with a direction, a line of advance and
critical points: and finally to make all things double back on
someone. " (p. 290) Are we to conclude that the "someone"
is God?
The final line of Man's Place in Nature is: "And it is at
this point, if I am not mistaken, in the science of evolution that
the problem of God comes in-the Prime Mover, Gatherer and
Consolidator, ahead of us, of evolution." (1973, p. 121)
In Phenomenon's epilogue, The Christian Phenomenon, Teilhard
admits: "The universe fulfilling itself in a synthesis of
centres in perfect conformity with the laws of union. God the Centre
of centres. In that final vision the Christian dogma culminates. And
so exactly, so perfectly, does this coincide with the Omega Point
that doubtless I should never have ventured to envisage the latter or
formulate the hypothesis rationally if, in my consciousness as a
believer, I had not found not only its speculative model but also its
living reality." (1961, p. 294)
Teilhard, in tracing the evolutionary genesis of the noosphere,
came to a "point" that he appears to have envisioned from
the very beginning. Such should not be a surprise. Back in those
horrendous days during World War I, when he sought to understand what
was happening, Teilhard already knew where the answer was to be
found. "God is vibrant in the ether. Through Him, all bodies
come together, exert influence upon one another and sustain one
another in the unity of the all-embracing sphere. God is a work
within life. He helps it, raises it up, gives it the impulse that
drives it along. I can feel God in the deep biological current that
runs throu gh my soul and carries it with it. God shines through and
is personified in mankind." (1965, p. 61)
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In midst of a particularly ghastly fulfillment of the dictum "War
is hell," Pierre Teilhard de Chardin struggled to hold on to a
hope for the human future. Ultimately, he found it in noogenesis and
in the future of the noosphere. However, to view his thought as no
more than an exercise in science or metaphysics, is to fail to reach
the core of Teilhard's vision. At the conclusion of The
Phenomenon of Man is an Appendix added in 1948. The final line
is: "In one manner or the other it still remains true that, even
in the view of a mere biologist, the human epic resembles nothing so
much as a way of the Cross." (1961, p. 313)
References
Rev. Phillip J. Cunningham is a retired priest living in San
Francisco. He graduated from UCLA, taught at the Johns Hopkins
Unversity, served as a priest in Venezuela and Rome and currently
writes and lectures on Bible studies.
Copyright © 1997 by Phillip J. Cunningham. All Rights
Reserved.
