| Topic: |
Science > Philosophy |
| User: |
"Roving Mouse" |
| Date: |
01 Jul 2004 07:52:17 PM |
| Object: |
Teilhard de Chardin - Visionary or Heretic? |
Explore the legacy of this fascinating Jesuit mystic , featured tonight at:
http://extremewebsurfs.blogspot.com
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| User: "Abakus" |
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| Title: Re: Teilhard de Chardin - Visionary or Heretic? |
02 Jul 2004 10:06:10 PM |
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"Roving Mouse" <surf@tack.net> wrote in message
news:Xns9519D4523C8F567aat@216.148.227.77...
Explore the legacy of this fascinating Jesuit mystic , featured tonight
at:
http://extremewebsurfs.blogspot.com
Neither visionary nor heretic. A confused mystic which didnt understand
science and made a mess of it. Read Medawar's critique of Teilhard's "The
phenomenon of man", for a good laugh.
regards
abakus
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| User: "Albert" |
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| Title: Re: Teilhard de Chardin - Visionary or Heretic? |
02 Jul 2004 08:44:02 PM |
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On Sat, 03 Jul 2004 03:06:10 GMT
"Abakus" <abakus@ntlworld.com> wrote:
<snip>
Neither visionary nor heretic. A confused mystic which didnt
understand science and made a mess of it. Read Medawar's
critique of Teilhard's "The phenomenon of man", for a good
laugh.
Only your tribe would laugh. I thought the book was
enlightening. I think you are funny.
--
"You're Empty!" said Agent Smith.
"So are you! said Neo.
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| User: "Abakus" |
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| Title: Re: Teilhard de Chardin - Visionary or Heretic? |
02 Jul 2004 10:44:42 PM |
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"Albert" <alwagner@tcac.net> wrote in message
news:20040702204402.2424184f@lfs.mydomain.com...
On Sat, 03 Jul 2004 03:06:10 GMT
"Abakus" <abakus@ntlworld.com> wrote:
<snip>
Neither visionary nor heretic. A confused mystic which didnt
understand science and made a mess of it. Read Medawar's
critique of Teilhard's "The phenomenon of man", for a good
laugh.
Only your tribe would laugh. I thought the book was
enlightening. I think you are funny.
Why am I not surprised? You are indeed part of a select and exotic minority.
I recall a book referring to the flat earth society as "enriching" our
cultural diversity, etc. Your opinions doubtless enrich the diversity of
this newsgroup.
regards
abakus
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| User: "Immortalist" |
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| Title: Re: Teilhard de Chardin - Visionary or Heretic? |
01 Jul 2004 11:44:16 PM |
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"Roving Mouse" <surf@tack.net> wrote in message
news:Xns9519D4523C8F567aat@216.148.227.77...
Explore the legacy of this fascinating Jesuit mystic , featured tonight at:
http://extremewebsurfs.blogspot.com
The bald concept of evolution is so powerful and universal that at times it seems
to touch everything. The mystical archeologist Teilhard de Chardin wrote:
Is evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis? It is much more-it is a general
postulate to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must henceforth bow
and which they must satisfy in order to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a
light which illuminates all facts, a trajectory which all lines of thought must
follow-this is what evolution is.
http://www.kk.org/outofcontrol/ch18-e.html
A great many internal and external portents (political and social upheaval, moral
and religious unease) have caused us all to feel, more or less confusedly, that
something tremendous is at present taking place in the world. But what is it?
—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
....People who see a direction in human history, or in biological evolution, or
both, have often been dismissed as mystics or flakes. In some ways, it's hard to
argue that they deserve better treatment. The philosopher Henri Bergson believed
that organic evolution is driven forward by a mysterious "elan vital," a vital
force. But why posit something so ethereal when we can explain evolution's
workings in the wholly physical terms of natural selection? Pierre Teilhard de
Chardin, the Jesuit theologian, saw human history moving toward "Point Omega."
But how seriously could he expect historians to take him, given that Point Omega
is "outside Time and Space"?
On the other hand, you have to give Bergson and Teilhard de Chardin some credit.
Both saw that organic evolution has a tendency to create forms of life featuring
greater and greater complexity. And Teilhard de Chardin, in particular, stressed
a comparable tendency in human history: the evolution, over the millennia, of
ever more vast and complex social structures. His extrapolations from this trend
were prescient. Writing at the middle of this century, he dwelt on
telecommunications, and the globalization it abets, before these subjects were
all the rage. (Marshall McLuhan, coiner of "global village," had read Teilhard.)
With his concept of the "noosphere," the "thinking envelope of the Earth,"
Teilhard even anticipated in a vague way the Internet—more than a decade before
the invention of the microchip.
Can the trends rightly noted by Bergson and Teilhard—basic tendencies in
biological evolution and in the technological and social evolution of the human
species—be explained in scientific, physical terms? I think so; that is largely
what this book is about. But the concreteness of the explanation needn't, I
believe, wholly drain these patterns of the spiritual content that Bergson and
Teilhard imputed to them. If directionality is built into life--if life naturally
moves toward a particular end—then this movement legitimately invites speculation
about what did the building. And the invitation is especially strong, I'll argue,
in light of the phase of human history that seems to lie immediately ahead—a
social, political, and even moral culmination of sorts.
....Now humanity, having emerged from one great global mind, has finally, in the
modern era, given birth to another. Our species is the link between biosphere and
what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called the "noosphere," the electronically
mediated web of thought that had taken crystalline form by the end of the second
millennium. This is a mind to which the whole species can contribute, and a mind
whose workings will have consequences for the whole species—epic consequences of
one sort or another.
....Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, writing in the mid-twentieth century, declared the
world's nascent telecommunications infrastructure "a generalized nervous system"
that was giving the human species an "organic unity." Increasingly, humankind
constituted a "super-brain," a "brain of brains." The more tightly people were
woven into this cerebral tissue, the closer they came to humanity's divinely
appointed destiny, "Point Omega."
What exactly was Point Omega? Hard to say. Teilhard's philosophical writings are
notable about equally for their poetry and their obscurity. As best I can make
out, at Point Omega the human species would constitute a kind of giant organic
brotherly-love blob.
Teilhard's superiors in the Catholic Church hewed to a more conventional
theology. They forcefully encouraged Teilhard, a trained paleontologist, to
confine his published pronouncements to the subject of fossils.
After Teilhard's death in I955, his most cosmic writings were finally published.
They generated buzz in some avant-garde circles, but they never gained mainstream
acceptance, either in the church or the wider world. Why? In part because his
notions of how evolution works were mushy and mystical, and never earned the
respect of the scientific establishment. In part because Point Omega meshed so
poorly with extant theology. And in part, perhaps, because comparing societies to
organisms had not-so-long-ago been a pastime of European fascists, who had
justified murder and repression in the name of superorganic vigor.
It's amazing how fast a viewpoint can move from radical to trite. Today, with
fascism seeming like an ancient relic, and the Internet looking strikingly
neural, talk of a giant global brain is cheap. But there's a difference. These
days, most people who talk this way are speaking loosely. Tim Berners-Lee, who
invented the World Wide Web, has noted parallels between the Web and the
structure of the brain, but he insists that "global brain" is a mere metaphor.
Teilhard de Chardin, in contrast, seems to have been speaking literally:
humankind was coming to constitute an actual brain—like the one in your head,
except bigger.
Certainly there are more people today than in Teilhard's day who take the idea of
a global brain literally. But they reside where Teilhard resided: on the fringe
of opinion.
Are they crazy? Was Teilhard crazy? Not as crazy as you might think. And once you
understand how relatively non-crazy it is to call humankind a giant brain, other
aspects of Teilhard's worldview begin to look less crazy as well. Such as: the
idea that there is a point to this whole exercise; the idea that life on earth
exists for a purpose, and that the purpose is becoming manifest.
I'm not saying these things are true at least, I'm not saying it confidently, the
way I've been saying that organic history and human history have a direction. I'm
just saying these things can't be dismissed with a wave of the hand. They don't
violate the foundations of scientific thought, and they even gain a kind of
support, here and there, from modern science.
ARE WE AN ORGANISM?
There are various reasons that, at first glance, you might be skeptical of this
giant global brain business. One is that a real, literal brain belongs to a real,
literal organism. And the human species isn't an organism; it is a bunch of
organisms. But before dismissing the possibility that a bunch of organisms can
themselves constitute an organism, we should at least get clear on the definition
of an organism. That turns out to be harder than it sounds.
....The prospect of peaceful, even respectful coexistence among the world's
peoples might seem enough to satisfy anyone. But Teilhard de Chardin hoped for
more. After all, if peace and tolerance grow only out of non-zero-sum
calculation—only out of rational self-interest— then there is something cool and
mechanical about it all. And Teilhard preferred warm and fuzzy things. In his
musings about humanity's approach, via globalization, to Point Omega, he wrote:
"Humanity, as I have said, is building its composite brain beneath our eyes. May
it not be that tomorrow, through the logical and biological deepening of the
movement drawing it together, it will find its heart, without which the ultimate
wholeness of its powers of unification can never be fully achieved?"
As is often the case with Teilhard, his exact meaning is not clear. But at the
very least he had in mind the expansion of brotherly love, of Christian charity,
to planetary breadth. Is there any hope for such a thing? That would certainly be
good news, on a number of grounds. In particular, as noted in chapter 16, any
such pervasive fellow-feeling could help bring security to the world without
massive intrusions on liberty.
The new technologies of interdependence do sometimes bring flashes of something
richer than mere tolerance. Occasionally, in the e-mails that flit around the
globe, true empathy transpires. Occasionally, watching TV and seeing the
suffering of foreigners in a superficially alien culture, a viewer is struck by
the realization that, fundamentally, all human beings are alike. Certainly
charity in the material sense—donation to the needy—has reached unprecedented
geographic scope this century.
http://www.nonzero.org/
The Noosphere:
http://noosphere.cc/
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=chardin+noosphere&btnG=Search
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