2.2.3. The Noetic: the beginning of thought
Thought is born and this nativity is no less significant than
the very advent of life. Thought which Teilhard de Chardin likens to reflection
or consciousness coiled back in upon itself finds a home in the human being.
Here at last, says Teilhard de Chardin, is the summit of evolution as we know
it.I
For Teilhard de Chardin, what sets thought apart from all
lesser types of consciousness, and what so fascinates him, is the phenomenon of
reflection. Reflection is a sort of quantum leap in consciousness.
Teilhard de Chardin defines it as
L..] the power acquired by a consciousness to turn in 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.2
Thought, we might say, is consciousness squared and its emergence
affects everything. As Teilhard de Chardin writes:
Man is psychically distinguished from all other animals by
the entirely new fact that he not only knows, but knows that he knows. In him,
for the first time on earth, consciousness has coiled back upon itself to
become thought. To an observer unaware of what it signifies, the event might at
first seem to have little importance; but in fact it represents the complete
resurgence of terrestrial life upon itself. In reflecting psychically upon
itself Life made a new start.3
Life's new start was momentous but not immediately noticeable.
Indeed, like all other advances in evolution, this threshold disappears under
the weight of the past.4
I Ibid., p. I80.
2 Ibid., p. I65.
3 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of
Man, New York, I964, p. 293.
4 Teilhard de Chardin, as an apologist for
evolution, often makes reference to what he calls the suppression of the
peduncles. At every critical stage, the earliest transitionary forms are
the most fragile and vanish under the weight of history. This is true
biologically even as it is technologically; where, he asks, are the very first
buggies? Who was the first Greek or Roman? Cf. The Phenomenon of Man,
pp. I20-I22.
47 "Man came silently into the world," says Teilhard
de Chardin.I We must not make the mistake of treating this
remarkable new human being as something other than a part of nature. The same
play of tangential and radial energy that brought into existence the first
crystals, the first plants, the first animals, here brought to birth the first
occurrence of mind. In short, humanity is a natural phenomenon, the latest of
life's successive waves.2 Teilhard de Chardin describes a world very
much like our own with,
[...]myriads of antelopes and zebras, a variety of
proboscidians in herds, deer with every kind of antler, tigers, wolves, foxes
and badgers, all similar to those we have today. In short, the landscape is not
too dissimilar from that which we are today seeking to preserve in National
Parks -- on the Zambesi, in the Congo, or in Arizona. Except for a few
lingering archaic forms, so familiar is this scene that we have to make an
effort to realize that nowhere is there so much as a wisp of smoke rising from
camp or village.3
Then somewhere, perhaps along the great majestic steppes of
Africa, something revolutionary occurred: a breakthrough. In a flash, in the
midst of the anthropoids, consciousness took an infinite leap forward:
Outwardly, almost nothing in the organs had changed. But
in depth, a great revolution had taken place: consciousness was now leaping and
boiling in a space of super-sensory relationships and representations; and
simultaneously consciousness was capable of perceiving itself in the
concentrated simplicity of its faculties. And all this happened for the first
time.4
This strange and wonderful event, a mutation from zero to
everything, resulted in the first persons. Reflection is consciousness turned
inward. Whereas before humanity, consciousness only radiated outwards
perceiving the world to a greater or lesser degree through the senses, we can
now for the first time in history speak of centers of consciousness. This
enroulement, `inturning process', leads to the reality of
I Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of
Man, New York, I959, p. I84.
2 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of
Man, New York, I964, p. 298.
3 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of
Man, New York, I959, p. I52.
4 Ibid., pp. I68-I69.
48 personalization. Teilhard de Chardin sums it
up, "The cell has become `someone'. After the grain of matter, the grain of
life; and now at last we see constituted the grain of
thought.~I
Surveying the globe today, the significance of this emergence
is uncontestable. Since its recent egression, humanity has ascended to a
position of unrivaled privilege. We are everywhere now engaged in the process
of becoming yet more human, even of making the earth itself more human.
Teilhard de Chardin calls this process hominisation. Hominisation has
two aspects.
[It] can be accepted in the first place as the individual
and instantaneous leap from instinct to thought, but it is also, in a wider
sense, the progressive phyletic spiritualization in human civilization of all
the forces contained in the animal world.2
To clarify: in humanity evolution finally becomes conscious of
itself. We right now are in evolution looking at itself, reflecting upon
itself.3 Humanity stands like a priest representative of all the
forces in the animal world. In the reflective consciousness of a man or a
woman, nature itself after laboring so long, participates in the phenomenon of
thought. Teilhard de Chardin therefore understands the entire span of organic
and cosmic evolution in light of this Hominisation:
[...] if we are going towards a human era of science, it
will be eminently an era of human science. Man, the knowing subject, will
perceive at last that man, `the object of knowledge', is the key to the whole
science of nature.4
Humanity is the key to understanding evolution revealing it to
be precisely an evolution of consciousness. De facto the
history of evolution is the history of the evolution of persons. For Teilhard
de Chardin, that evolution should result in the evolution of persons
is of profound significance.
I Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Op. cit., p.
I73.
2Ibid., p. I80.
3Ibid., p. 22I. 'Ibid., pp. 28I-282.
49
Teilhard de Chardin puts this in historical perspective.
Science, in the person of COPERNICUS, removed humanity from its arrogant
position of privilege within the universe and we have ever since grown
increasingly wary of anthropomorphism, anthropocentrisms, and so on. But now
that same science, this time in an evolutionary form, restores humanity to a
place of even greater dignity as the apex of cosmic evolution. Without
returning to vulgar anthropomorphisms, now, we must nevertheless see the cosmos
in light of the human person.
Man is not the centre 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 in terms of life. Man alone
constitutes the last-born, the freshest, the most complicated, the most subtle
of all the successive layers of life.'
So humanity emerges like an arrow but an arrow pointing
where?2
Here we find ourselves cast upon Teilhard's concept of the
Noosphere. Some years before Teilhard de Chardin, in I875, the Austrian
geologist Eduard SUESS had coined the term biosphere to describe the
skin of living material stretched out upon the earth. Suess derived his
neologism from two existing geological terms: the lithosphere which described
the solid rocky crust of the earth and just below it the yet more dense liquid
of barysphere. With Eduard Suess, we had the barysphere, the lithosphere and
the biosphere. Teilhard de Chardin however, adds the Noosphere as a
description of that skin of mind that, since the advent of Hominisation, has
stretched itself out over the biosphere. Teilhard de Chardin describes this
event:
A glow ripples outward from the first spark of conscious
reflection. The point of ignition grows larger. The fire spreads in ever
widening circles till finally the whole planet is covered with incandescence...
It is really a new layer, the 'thinking layer', which, since its germination at
the end of the Tertiary period, has spread over and above the world of plants
and animals.3
I Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Op. cit., p.
223.
2 See appendix II. Humanity emerges like an arrow
pointing to the Omega Point.
3 Ibid., p. I82.
50
The Noosphere is a sort of envelope of mind, a lattice of
thought, relationships, and love that spans the globe, a matrix of personal
interconnectivity. It is the support structure of Hominisation. As the
Noosphere has developed, with, for example, the invention of oral traditions,
libraries, or various tools and means of communication, it has become, among
other things, a collective depository of human memory. Though we are wont to
regard such noospheric structures as synthetic we must see them as a
continuation of the same cosmic drama to which we have thus far been attending.
When evolution, with the appearance of humanity, took its second critical turn,
the first being the appearance of life, the mechanisms of evolution themselves
went through a decisive change. Now that thought had at last burst forth the
process of evolution moved, more or less, from soma to
psyche.I
The Noosphere is today the psychic front of evolution. Since
the emergence of reflection, evolutionary advancement occurs less and less
through heredity and increasingly through conscious means such as communication
or education. In the Noosphere, we see Teilhard de Chardin's vision of
evolution going far beyond the cosmic or biological spheres. Social evolution,
psychic evolution, cultural evolution and moral evolution: these are all parts
of the one process that birthed both the stars, and the swamps and all of the
life therein. "The social phenomenon, says Teilhard de Chardin, is the
culmination and not the attenuation of the biological
phenomenon."2
Noo genesis occurs on any number of fronts. For example,
Teilhard de Chardin equates it with technological progress of all kinds. He
describes the proliferation of factories, the harnessing of the earth's powers,
the spread of human civilization with awed enthusiasm. He looks reverently
forward to humanity's mastery of eugenics or artificial creation of
neo-life.3 Teilhard de Chardin's optimism in these matters may
seem
IPierre Teilhard de Chardin, Op. cit., p.
202 "[...] evolution has [...] overtly overflowed its anatomical modalities
to spread, or perhaps even to transplant its main thrust into the zones of
psychic spontaneity both individual and collective. Henceforward it is in that
form almost exclusively that we shall be recognizing it and following its
course."
2 Ibid., p. 222.
3 Ibid., p. 250.
51 naïve, and even reckless, but he did attempt to tie
this dangerous concept of progress to a profound reverence for the earth and
all of creation. There is a moral element to his fascination with progress that
is revealed by his comment, "There is less difference than people think
between research and adoration."' His moral bearings become
even more pronounced when he insists on the fact that this progression of
science must always wrestle with the question of "how to give to each and
every element its final value by grouping them in the unity of the organized
whole."2
Which brings us to the most characteristic quality of the
noosphere, namely, collectivity or universality? We recall that evolution has
proceeded all along, in Teilhard de Chardin's view, through the pull of radial
energy. In humanity and the consequent Noosphere, radial energy achieves a new
level of ascendancy. He first notices this in the peculiar phenomenon of
humanity. "Formerly, on the tree of life, says Teilhard, we had
:in all phyla] a mere tangle of stems; now over the whole domain of Homo
sapiens we have synthesis."3 Different races, cultures, and
traditions, what Teilhard de Chardin likens to different species, shuffle and
blend psychically and biologically. The roundness of the earth even plays its
part, for some time now bringing us all ever closer to one another and forcing
greater levels of cooperation and communication. Looking at our modern world,
Teilhard de Chardin comments:
No one can deny that a network (a world network) of
economic and psychic affiliations is being woven at ever increasing speed which
envelops and constantly penetrates more deeply within each of us. With every
day that passes it becomes a little more impossible for us to act or think
otherwise than collectively.'
In this rush to collectivity however, one must not forget the
preeminence of the personal, the essence of Hominisation. The odd trend
displayed by evolution is one towards an ever higher degree of personality
along with a concomitant rise in
I Id.
2 Id.
3 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of
Man, New York, I964, p. 208.
4 Ibid., p. I7I.
52 universality. This is the ideal of radial energy, the
heights of complexity-consciousness. Such a uniting of personal centers with
other personal centers occurs most fully in Love.
And so the evolution of the Noosphere presents itself to us as
a movement towards ever greater unity, cooperation and love. Teilhard de
Chardin illustrates it succinctly:
Evolution = Rise of consciousness,
Rise of consciousness = Effect of union
I
As the Noosphere approaches this collectivity, it has
planetary and even cosmic repercussions. If Hominisation includes all the
forces of the animal world, as Teilhard de Chardin maintains, then the
phenomenon of planetization becomes supremely significant. It is, says Teilhard
de Chardin, nothing short than the emergence of a single planetary spirit; in
Teilhard's language, the spirit of the earth, the spirit of
evolution.2 Teilhard de Chardin looks ahead and
comments,
Peace through conquest, work in joy. These are waiting for
us beyond the line where empires are set up against other empires, in an
interior totalisation of the world upon itself, in the unanimous construction
of a spirit of the earth.3
As radial energy has gained in ascendancy, through the
historical increase of complexity-consciousness, it has become increasingly
liberated from the decay of the tangential. This has translated to an ever
greater degree of environmental freedom each step along the way. With the
deployment of the Noosphere this freedom reaches a high point. Until fairly
recently, evolution continued going along gropingly but unabated. No longer,
for an evolution aware of itself is also an evolution that can choose to simply
quit. In this regard, Teilhard de Chardin says:
I Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of
Man, New York, I959, p. 243.
2 Ibid., p. 253.
3 Id.
[...] evolution, by becoming conscious of itself
in the depths of ourselves [...] becomes free to dispose of itself--it can give
itself or refuse itself. Not only do we read in our slightest acts the secret
of its proceedings; but for an elementary part we hold it in our
hands, responsible for its past to its future.'
Teilhard de Chardin turns to existential language when
discussing this new phase of consciousness evolution. Having become reflective,
evolution conscious of itself, humanity becomes the first creature capable of
cosmic refusal. If in surveying the globe with its conditions of war, poverty,
and injustice, humans conclude that our efforts are futile, then it remains
only for us to give up. To do so would be to relinquish evolution itself, to
bring the whole cosmic process screeching to a halt.
Teilhard de Chardin sees humanity as the apex of evolution but
not the end. He anticipates a future spirit of the earth but concedes that it
is not yet inevitable. There is precariousness to humanity's present condition
that must be met with a reliable vision of the future. Hope must be kindled;
instead of despair and angst, Teilhard de Chardin insists, even the
prognostications of science must somehow generate a taste for life,
for upon this love of life and kindling of hope hangs the whole cosmic project
of evolution.
If progress is a myth, that is to say, if faced by the
work involved we can say: 'What's the good of it all?' our efforts will flag.
With that the whole of evolution will come to a halt--because we are
evolution.2
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