3.3. Psychosocial evolution and the hyperpersonal
organisation
In human or psychosocial evolution, convergence has led to
increased complexity. In the Teilhardian view, the increase of human numbers
combined with the improvement of human communications has fused all the parts
of the Noosphere together, has increased the tension within it, and has caused
it to become 'unfolded' upon itself, and therefore more highly organised. In
the process of panhuman convergence and even panhuman coalescence, the
psychosocial temperature rises. Mankind as a whole will accordingly achieve
more intense, more complex, and more integrated mental activity, which can
guide the human species up the path of progress to higher levels of
Hominisation.2
In an unlimited environment, man's thought and his resultant
psychosocial activity would simply diffuse outwards: it would extend over a
greater area, but would remain thinly spread. Nevertheless, when it is confined
to spreading out over the surface of a sphere, idea will encounter idea, and
the result will be an organised web of thought,
1 Ibid., p. 271.
2 Julian Huxley in the introduction to The
Phenomenon of Man, New York, 1959, p. 17.
81 a noetic system operating under high tension, a piece of
evolutionary machinery capable of generating high psychosocial energy. This
psychosocial energy leads to a hyperpersonal mode of organisation.
Julian Huxley tells us that the concept of a hyperpersonal
mode of organisation sprang from Teilhard de Chardin's conviction of the
supreme importance of personality:
A developed human being, as he rightly pointed out, is not
merely a more highly individualized individual. He has crossed the threshold of
self-consciousness to a new mode of thought, and as a result has achieved some
degree of conscious integration -- integration of the self with the outer world
of men and nature, integration of the separate elements of the self with each
other. He is a person, an organism which has transcended individuality in
personality. This attainment of personality was an essential element in man's
past and present evolutionary success: accordingly its fuller achievement must
be an essential aim for his evolutionary future.'
Henceforth, the passage from one's individual consciousness in
order to achieve some degree of integration with others in a broader plane,
leads to a convergence of all towards the achievement of the civilization of
the universal which is a panhuman convergence towards the Omega Point. As
Richard Laurent OMGBA tells us,
A Le terme civilisation de l'universel est emprunte au
theologien et philosophe francais Pierre Teilhard de Chardin qui tentait de
montrer dans l'entre-deux-guerres, que le mouvement general des civilisations
les portait vers une convergence panhumaine. » 2
I Julian Huxley in the introduction to The
Phenomenon of Man, New York, I959, p. I9.
2 Richard Laurent Omgba, A Identité
culturelle, civilisation de l'Universel et Mondialisation p, in Marcelin Vounda
E., (ed.), Le Siècle de Senghor, Yaounde, 2003, p. 47. The
concept of the Civilization of the Universal is given to us by the French
theologian and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who asserted in between
the two world wars that the general movement of civilizations was drawing them
towards a panhuman convergence.
The Civilization of the Universal is the drawing up of all
cultures, all civilizations towards a point of universal convergence, the Omega
point. As such, there is no civilization which can claim to be the universal
civilization. This convergence is the work of all human races, all cultures and
all civilizations. It entails not only the recognition of the other but also
the knowledge and the recognition of the self. The Civilization of the
Universal is a futurist vision of the world that was announced by the French
theologian, scholar, and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. His idea was
largely spread because of its humanistic and optimistic elements.
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