2.1. The Teilhardian Methodology
Thomas Aquinas aspired to know the order of the whole world.
It was the quest for that sort of knowledge--universal knowledge--that had
originally led to the establishment of new European schools, schools whose very
name belied the nature of their pursuit: the universities. This vision
of Aquinas's and the original universities' spirit was largely lost in the
institutions of the twentieth century. Isolation, specialization, and a general
lack of interdisciplinary dialogue became the order of the day.
Teilhard de Chardin, though he was a twentieth century man,
rejected this piecemeal approach to truth wholeheartedly. This was, for him, as
much a moral decision as an intellectual one. From his earliest days, he was
confronted with an inescapable desire for unity, wholeness, and coherence. The
world, Teilhard de Chardin intuited, simply had to hold together. This meant
that the hard facts of science-- successive layers of sediment, biological
novelties, and fossil fragments--must somehow converge with theology,
philosophy and thought. It was this passion for convergence that gave shape to
Teilhard de Chardin's methodology. We will explore four principle components of
that methodology. First, we will look at Teilhard de Chardin's unique
phenomenology. Second, we will take further note of his passion for convergence
and his conviction regarding the unity of truth. Then, we will look at Teilhard
de Chardin's special emphasis on the "within" of things before finally
concluding with a note on the ways Teilhard de Chardin moved even beyond his
phenomenology to embrace a yet wider spectrum of truth.
2.1.1. A Phenomenology of the Universe
Teilhard de Chardin referred to the system employed in The
Phenomenon of Man as a 'hyperphysics' or elsewhere, a 'phenomenology' of
the universe. He was avowed in his insistence that this was not metaphysics or
theology but science. His universal
30 phenomenology was not to deal with questions of being or
with revelation; its concern was with phenomena. As he puts it in the preface
to The Phenomenon of Man:
If this book is to be properly understood, it must be read
not as a work on metaphysics, still less as a sort of theological essay, but
purely and simply as a scientific treatise. The title itself indicates that.
This book deals with man solely as a phenomenon; but it also deals with the
whole phenomenon of man.'
It is this attention to the 'whole phenomenon' that makes
Teilhard de Chardin's phenomenology unique for while he vigorously contends
that it is not philosophy or theology, the wholeness of his method ensures that
he borders these subjects.
Teilhard de Chardin's choice of the word phenomenology lends
itself to misinterpretation. Under the influence of Edmund Husserl and
subsequent phenomenolo gists, that word today has come to have a quite specific
meaning. For the latter Husserl, phenomenology is "the study of the essence of
consciousness."' This sort of phenomenological approach to the
understanding of consciousness involves the study of the objects of mental acts
precisely as they are, and with no regard to existence or the outside world at
all. Consciousness alone is the object of inquiry.3 Teilhard de
Chardin's phenomenology is of a different ilk altogether. Whereas Husserl is
concerned only with consciousness and allows this as his sole datum, Teilhard
de Chardin's data is the whole cosmos taken in its physicality and interiority.
However, he does share with Husserl and the phenomenolo gists the conviction
that phenomena must be studied as they are given. Norbertus Maximiliaan
Wildiers says further:
If there is any link between Teilhard and the contemporary
phenomenologists, it is to be looked for in the fact that for Teilhard too
every effort to grasp the significance of the phenomena stands in a relation to
man, seen not only in terms of his structure and his connection with other
structures, but above all in his interiority.... The two forms
I Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of
Man, Preface, New York, I959, p. '9.
'Reinhardt Grossman, "Phenomenology." The Oxford
Companion to Philosophy. Oxford, I995, p. 660. 3
Ibid., pp. 658-660.
of phenomenology differ where their object is concerned;
but in the attitudes which they assume toward that object it is possible to
discover a certain affinity.'
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