Teilhard de Chardin on the Emergence of the Noosphere

Discussion

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin:

The Threshold of the Terrestrial Planet: the Noosphere

"The biological change of state terminating in the awakening of thought does not represent merely a critical point that the individual or even the species must pass through. Vaster than that, it affects life itself in its organic totality, and consequently it marks a transformation affecting the state of the entire planet.

[...] We have been following the successive stages of the same grand progression from the fluid contours of the early earth. Beneath the pulsations of geo-chemistry, of geo-tectonics and of geo-biology, we have detected one and the same fundamental process, always recognisable—the one which was given material form in the first cells and was continued in the construction of nervous systems. We saw geogenesis promoted to biogenesis, which turned out in the end to be nothing else than psychogenesis.

[...] Psychogenesis has led to man. Now it effaces itself, relieved or absorbed by another and a higher function—the engendering and subsequent development of the mind, in one word noögenesis.

[...]

As regards our understanding of the earth [the consequences of this discovery] are decisive.

Geologists have for long agreed in admitting the zonal composition of our planet. We have already spoken of the barysphere, central and metallic, surrounded by the rocky lithosphere that in turn is surrounded by the fluid layers of the hydrosphere and atmosphere. Since Suess, science has rightly become accustomed to add another to these four concentric layers, the living membrane composed of the fauna and flora of the globe, the biosphere, so often mentioned in these pages, an envelope as definitely universal as the other ‘spheres’ and even more definitely individualised than them. For, instead of representing a more or less vague grouping, it forms a single piece, of the very tissue of the genetic relations which delineate the tree of life.

The recognition and isolation of a new era in evolution, the era of noögenesis, obliges us to distinguish correlatively a support proportionate to the operation—that is to say, yet another membrane in the majestic assembly of telluric layers. 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. Only one interpretation, only one name can be found worthy of this grand phenomenon. Much more coherent and just as extensive as any preceding layer, 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. In other words, outside and above the biosphere there is the noösphere.

With that it bursts upon us how utterly warped is every classification of the living world (or, indirectly, every construction of the physical one) in which man only figures logically as a genus or a new family. This is an error of perspective which deforms and uncrowns the whole phenomenon of the universe. To give man his true place in nature it is not enough to find one more pigeon-hole in the edifice of our systematisation or even an additional order or branch. With hominisation, in spite of the insignificance of the anatomical leap, we have the beginning of a new age. The earth ‘gets a new skin.’ Better still, it finds its soul.

[...] Among all the stages successively crossed by evolution, the birth of thought comes directed after, and is the only thing comparable in order of grandeur to, the condensation of the terrestrial chemism or the advent of life itself.

[...] ...steeped as we are in what is human like a fish in the sea, we have difficulty in emerging from it in our minds so as to appreciate its specificness and breadth. But let us look round us a little more carefully. This sudden deluge of cerebralisation, this biological invasion of a new animal type... , this irresistible tide of fields and factories, this immense and growing edifice of matter and ideas... seem to proclaim that there has been a change on the earth and a change of planetary magnitude. [...] ...to a Martian capable of analysing sidereal radiations psychically no less than physically, the first characteristic of our planet would be, not the blue of the seas or the green of the forests, but the phosphorescence of thought.

The greatest revelation open to science today is to perceive that everything precious, active and progressive originally contained in that cosmic fragment from which our world emerged, is now concentrated in and crowned by the noosphere."

(https://ahistoryofthepresentananthology.blogspot.com/search/label/De%20Chardin)

THE SPIRIT OF THE EARTH

A. Mankind

'Mankind' was at first a vague entity, felt rather than thought out, in which an obscure feeling of perpetual growth was allied to a need for universal fraternity. [...]

In the eyes of the 'prophets' of the eighteenth century, the world appeared really as no more than a jumble of confused and loose relationships... . [...] In the course of a few generations all sorts of economic and cultural links have been forged around us and they are multiplying in geometric progression. [...] If words have any meaning, is this not like some great body which is being born-- with its limbs, its nervous system, its perceptive organs, its memory-- the body in fact of that great Thing which had to come to fulfil the ambitions aroused in the reflective being by the newly acquired consciousness that he was at one with and responsible to an evolutionary All?

[...] But what we are better able to perceive, because we stand on their shoulders, are its cosmic roots... .

[...]

Mankind was a fragile and even fictitious construction so long as it could only have a limited, plural and disjointed cosmos as a setting; but it becomes consistent and at the same time probable as soon as it is brought within the compass of a biological space-time and appears as a continuation of the very lines of the universe amongst other realities as vast as itself.

[...] It appears either as a general idea, a legal entity, or else as a gigantic animal. [...] ...from now on we envisage, beside and above individual realities, the collective realities that are not reducible to the component element, yet are in their own way as objective as it is.

[...]

It is in the last resort only definable as a mind. [...] ...an organic super-aggregation of souls.

B. Knowledge

From this point of view, intellectual discovery and synthesis are no longer merely speculation but creation. Therefore, some physical consummation of things is bound up with the explicit perception we make of them. And therefore, they are (at least partially) right who situate the crown of evolution in a supreme act of collective vision obtained by a pan-human effort of investigation and construction [authors note: To think 'the world' (as physics is beginning to realise) is not merely to register it but to confer upon it a form of unity it would otherwise (i.e., without being thought) be without.].

[...]

Of old, the forerunners of our chemists strove to find the philosopher's stone. Our ambition has grown since then. It is no longer to find gold but life... . [...] With the discovery of genes it appears that we shall soon be able to control the mechanism of organic heredity. And with the synthesis of albuminoids imminent, we may well one day be capable of producing what the earth, left to itself, seems no longer able to produce: a new wave of organisms, an artificially provoked neo-life. [...] ...life rebounds forward under the collective effect of its reflection. ...thus, by grasping the very mainspring of evolution, seizing the tiller of the world.

C. Unanimity

The still unnamed Thing which the gradual combination of individuals, peoples and races will bring into existence, must be supra-physical, not infra-physical, if it is to be coherent with the rest. [...]

...the stuff of the universe, by becoming thinking, has not yet completed its evolutionary cycle, and that we are therefore moving forward towards some new critical point that lies ahead. [...]

We are faced with a harmonised collectivity of consciousnesses equivalent to a sort of super-consciousness. The idea is that of the earth not only becoming covered by myriads of grains of thought, but becoming enclosed in a single thinking envelope so as to form, functionally, no more than a single vast grain of thought on the sidereal scale... . This is the general form in which, by analogy... , we are led scientifically to envisage the future of mankind... .

[...] ...to a mind become familiar with the fantastic dimensions of the universe [perspectives such as these] will... seem quite natural, because they are directly proportionate with astronomical immensities.

[...]

One thing at any rate is sure-- from the moment we adopt a thoroughly realistic view of the noosphere and of the hyper-organic nature of social bonds, the present situation of the world becomes clearer... ."

(https://ahistoryofthepresentananthology.blogspot.com/search/label/De%20Chardin)