Immortal Curiosity

The Phenomenon of Man (my edition)
by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, trans. Bernard Wall; Perennial, 1965.

~Introduction, by Sir Julian Huxley-

1. “In The Phenomenon of Man he [Chardin] has effected a threefold synthesis– of the material and physical world with the world of mind and spirit; of the past with the future; and of variety with unity, the many with the one. He achieves this by examining every fact and every subject of his investigation sub specie evolutionis, with reference to its development in time and to its evolutionary position. Conversely, he is able to envisage the whole of knowable reality not as a static mechanism but as a process. In consequence, he is driven to search for human significance in relation to the trends of that enduring and comprehensive process[.]” [p11, emphasis added]
   1. –>Expressed in this way, the synthesis that Huxley claims is present in the Phenomenon becomes most interesting. The issues presented by dualistic philosophy are addressed, as are the ancient considerations and difficulties associated with the many and the one. In addition to these is added the intriguing catalyst: the past and the future, viz. the notion of change, progress, progression. This is what I found to be unique and refreshing about Hegel, the notion of actual development, the idea that the world and philosophy are essentially different in one time as compared to another, and that later forms arise from changes in previous forms. The latter idea is expressed in the method by which the Chardin achieves the synthesis, at least as claimed by Huxley, namely the ubiquitous evolutionary viewpoint, making everything sub specie evolutionis. This phrase is quite interesting in connection with its use in works, and on themes, associated with Chardin and his thought in various ways. E.g. in this ( http://www.theosophical.ca/Theosophy.htm ) expression of Theosophy, the author states as one of the traditional teachings of the Wisdom-Religion: “This universe is designed according to a Plan, which is evolution. All creatures are His children, owing their life to Him. They are indeed Himself ‘sub specie evolutionis’, that is, under the limitations of time and form.” While this expression may not be fully shared by Chardin, it is worthy of investigation: living beings as temporal, developmental manifestations of the Divine Ground. The supreme truth being unchanging and atemporal in some respect, the process of life is its temporal and flowing expression.
2. “[A]lready in 1913 I had envisaged human evolution and biological evolution as two phases of a single process, but separated by a ‘critical point’, after which the properties of the evolving material underwent radical change.” [p11]
   1. –>Is the change in material referred to from the purely material (either genetic, or somatic, or behavioral) to the mental (viz. the noösphere)?
3. “Though for certain limited purposes it may be useful to think of phenomena as isolated statically in time, they are in point of fact never static: they are processes or parts of processes. The different branches of science combine to demonstrate that the universe in its entirety must be regarded as one gigantic process, a process of becoming, of attaining new levels of existence and organization, which can properly be called a genesis or an evolution.” [p12-13]
   1. –>Although I will most likely be more directed in my thought once I read Chardin’s account of this, I am drawn to consider the notion of space when Huxley mentions Chardin’s noösphere being superimposed on the biosphere, and I find myself thinking back to other considerations I have made on the presence of spatiality in thought. This notion would add several interesting dimensions to the formulations I had been making. Such a complex web could be imagined: individual minds and their thoughts, including those of evolution and development and connections, and knowledge of this, along with societal, historical, biological, national, and other streams and connections, and the web of connections between minds, qua noösphere, and their connections with the other webs present. And the process of this vectorization itself becomes more complex when Chardin’s notion of the importance of man living on a sphere is added: because man spreads across this surface “idea will encounter idea, and the result will be an organized web of thought, a noetic system operating under high tension[.]” [p17] This performs for humanity what the cell membrane performs for the cell: delimiting its expansion to facilitate the development of complexity within the boundary.
4. [p20-21] –> Evolution, including the phenomenon of man as an extension of its action, is becoming conscious of itself through the cephalisation of mankind: the noösphere and a common pool of knowledge is providing the evolutionary process with the “rudiments of a head” (Cp. Strauss’ thoughts on the posture of man). It must be equipped with the equivalents of the various organs man possesses to facilitate its development. This again adds another and amazing level of complexity to the understanding of man and his development, of the relationship between man and evolution itself. Thus arises the isomorphism of the biological evolution of man as a necessity of ecological constraints leading to increasing psychosocial energy and the development of man by evolution in the universe to allow for a new stage in its own development.The expression continues to grow in complexity: The essentially anti-entropic, increasingly self-directed force of evolution takes its final form in the collective cephalization of man, in his coming to be as a coherent whole in a particular environment that facilitates this development through compounding advances in complexity. Through knowledge and understanding, mankind becomes united with the universe and evolution, and through knowledge the universe and evolution become fully aware of themselves, as they take a new form.

~Preface [p29]

1. “If this book is to be properly understood, it must be read [...] simply as a scientific treatise.” “I have chosen man as the centre, and around him I have tried to establish a coherent order between antecedents and consequents.”
   1. –>”Chosen” seems odd here. Nowhere else does this hint of an arbitrary selection emerge.
2. “It is impossible to attempt a general scientific interpretation of the universe without giving the impression of trying to explain it through and through.”
3. Two basic assumptions which go hand in hand to support and govern the development of the theme:
   1. The primacy accorded to the psychic and to thought in the stuff of the universe; the pre-eminent significance of man in nature,
   2. The “biological” value attributed to the social fact around us; the organic nature of mankind.
4. Without these assumptions, it does not seem possible to give a full and coherent account of the phenomenon of man.

~Foreword, Seeing [p31]

1. The purpose of this work is to see and make others see what happens to man, and what conclusions are forced upon us, when he is placed in the framework of phenomenon and appearance.
2. “Seeing. We might say that the whole of life lies in that verb– if not ultimately, at least essentially.”
3. “Fuller being is closer union[...] union increases only through an increase in consciousness, that is to say in vision. [...]To see or to perish[...], in superior measure, is man’s condition.”
   1. –> To see more fully provides a closer union which is fuller being. But what are the objects here? It could be taken very generally, i.e. to see more, in the very sense of “know” we come to exist closer to being, to have more union, which provides us with a more pronounced awareness of being. Or is it a reference to more individual things particularly?
4. [p32]–> He speaks of an “early, naïve stage” of science, during which scientists believed they could look on the world from a great distance that their consciousnesses could penetrate without being affected or effecting it.: What does this mean? Is he speaking of the earlier days of science, and if so, when is that? Aristotle? Leibniz? Faraday? He continues to speak in the past tense, so it seems he means a period in the past, not a “stage”, i.e. a level of development of science that could be atemporal.
5. Scientists are beginning to discover they are intimately connected with the things they tried to observe from a distance. This bondage also brings a unique and assured grandeur.
6. “But what happens when chance directs his steps to a point of vantage (a cross-roads, or intersecting valleys) from which, not only his vision, but things themselves radiate?” Here “perception reaches its apogee” and man truly sees.
7. “It is peculiar to man to occupy a position in nature at which the convergent lines are not only visual but structural.” Man finds himself at a ganglion which commands the universe that we can observe.
8. Man is the center of construction of the universe. He has only recently begun to look scientifically at his significance in the physical world.
9. “For man to discover man and take his measure, a whole series of ‘senses’ have been necessary, whose gradual acquisition, as we shall show, covers and punctuates the whole history of the struggles of the mind:
   1. A sense of spatial immensity disarticulating and spacing out the orbits of the objects which press round us,
   2. A sense of depth going through endless series and measureless distances of time,
   3. A sense of number discovering and grasping the multitude of material or living elements involved in the slightest change in the universe,
   4. A sense of proportion realizing the difference of physical scale which separates, in rhythm and dimension, the atom from the nebula,
   5. A sense of quality enabling us to distinguish in nature absolute stages of perfection and growth without upsetting the physical unity of the world,
   6. A sense of movement, capable of perceiving the irresistible developments hidden in extreme slowness, the entirely new insinuating itself into the heart of the monotonous repetition of the same things,
   7. A sense of the organic discovering physical links and structural unity under the superficial juxtaposition of succession and collectivities.
      1. –>There is a great deal that could be said about all of these, each containing a wealth of thoughtful explanations and references to things difficult to speak about. Discovering these senses is man discovering how he can know about how he knows. They all coalesce into the sense of “voluminous sight”, or sight beyond sight, that I had been considering before. Or, more accurately, that amorphous sense, hovering and shimmering in that “thin layer of the past”, finds its true meaning as it divides itself into these separate sense.
10. Without these sense, man remains an erratic object in a disjointed world.
11. Once we rid our vision of smallness, plurality, and immobility, man can take his central position: “the momentary summit of an anthropogenesis which is itself the crown of a cosmogenesis.”
12. Man must see himself at least partially related to mankind, and that related to life, and that to the universe.
13. Thus the plan of this work: Pre-Life, Life, Thought, determining for the future a single, continuing trajectory, the curve of the phenomenon of man.
14. What will be depicted here is not the past in itself, but as it must appear to an observer standing on the peak where evolution has placed him.
15. “Man is seen not as the static centre of the world [...] but as the axis and leading shoot of evolution, which is something much finer.”

~Book One: Before Life Came
~~Chapter One: The Stuff of the Universe

1. My vision for mankind? To enter a renaissance to rivals all human revolutions, in which man’s form and relations are altered such that his thoughts form his environment, such that his environment is only limited by his thoughts. We need not be limited to walking among the stars: We can form the stars, watch them die, become them and form them anew.