The Phenomenon of Man

"The Phenomenon of Man" ("Le Phénomène Humain", 1955) is a non-fiction book written by French philosopher, paleontologist and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In this work, Teilhard describes evolution as a process that leads to increasing complexity, culminating in the unification of consciousness.

The book was finished in the 1930s, but was published posthumously in 1955. The Church considered that Teilhard’s writings contradicted orthodoxy and prohibited their publication.

"The Phenomenon of Man" contains many insights that have proven prescient with the development of a complex Internet-based global society. [A Globe, Clothing Itself With a Brain, from WIRED magazine, June, 1995. [http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/teilhard.html] ]

Summary

Teilhard views evolution as a process that leads to increasing complexity. From the cell to the thinking animal, a process of psychical concentration leads to greater consciousness. [The Phenomenon of Man, Harper Torchbooks, The Cloister Library, Harper & Row, Publishers, Copyright 1961, p. 169.] The emergence of Homo Sapiens marked the beginning of a new age. Reflection, the power acquired by consciousness to turn in upon itself, raises humankind to a new sphere. [The Phenomenon of Man, Harper Torchbooks, The Cloister Library, Harper & Row, Publishers, Copyright 1961, p. 165. ] Borrowing Julian Huxley’s expression, Teilhard describes humankind as evolution becoming conscious of itself. [The Phenomenon of Man, Harper Torchbooks, The Cloister Library, Harper & Row, Publishers, Copyright 1961, p. 220.] Eventually, trade and the transmission of ideas increased. Traditions became organized and a collective memory was developed. [The Phenomenon of Man, Harper Torchbooks, The Cloister Library, Harper & Row, Publishers, Copyright 1961, p. 205.] Knowledge accumulated and was transmitted down the ages. [The Phenomenon of Man, Harper Torchbooks, The Cloister Library, Harper & Row, Publishers, Copyright 1961, p. 178.] This led to a further augmentation of consciousness and to the emergence of a thinking layer that enveloped the earth. [The Phenomenon of Man, Harper Torchbooks, The Cloister Library, Harper & Row, Publishers, Copyright 1961, p. 244.] Teilhard called the new layer the “noosphere” (from the Greek “nous,” meaning mind). Evolution is therefore constructing, with all minds joined together, mind. [The Phenomenon of Man, Harper Torchbooks, The Cloister Library, Harper & Row, Publishers, Copyright 1961, p. 278.] The development of science and technology caused an expansion of the human sphere of influence, allowing a person to be simultaneously present in every corner of the world. Humanity has thus become cosmopolitan, stretching a single organized membrane over the Earth. [The Phenomenon of Man, Harper Torchbooks, The Cloister Library, Harper & Row, Publishers, Copyright 1961, p. 241.] Teilhard described this process as a “gigantic psychobiological operation, a sort of mega-synthesis, the “super-arrangement” to which all the thinking elements of the earth find themselves today individually and collectively subject.” [The Phenomenon of Man, Harper Torchbooks, The Cloister Library, Harper & Row, Publishers, Copyright 1961, p. 244.] The rapid expansion of the noosphere requires a new domain of psychical expansion, which “is staring us in the face if we would only raise our heads to look at it.” [The Phenomenon of Man, Harper Torchbooks, The Cloister Library, Harper & Row, Publishers, Copyright 1961, p. 253.]

In Teilhard’s view, evolution will culminate in the Omega Point, a sort of supreme consciousness. Layers of consciousness will converge in Omega, fusing and consuming them in itself. [The Phenomenon of Man, Harper Torchbooks, The Cloister Library, Harper & Row, Publishers, Copyright 1961, p. 259.] The concentration of a conscious universe would reassemble in itself all consciousnesses as well as all the conscious. [The Phenomenon of Man, Harper Torchbooks, The Cloister Library, Harper & Row, Publishers, Copyright 1961, p. 261.] Teilhard emphasized that each particular consciousness would remain conscious of itself at the end of the operation. [The Phenomenon of Man, Harper Torchbooks, The Cloister Library, Harper & Row, Publishers, Copyright 1961, p. 262.]

Contents

Book One: Before Life Came

Chapter I. The Stuff of the Universe
1. Elemental Matter
2. Total Matter
3. The Evolution of Matter

Chapter II. The Within of Things
1. Existence
2. The Qualitative Laws of Growth
3. Spiritual Energy

Chapter III. The Earth in its Early Stages
1. The Without
2. The Within

Book Two: Life

Chapter I. The Advent of Life
1. The Transit to Life
2. The Initial Manifestations of Life
3. The Season of Life

Chapter II. The Expansion of Life
1. The Elemental Movements of Life
2. The Ramification of the Living Mass
3. The Tree of Life

Chapter III. Demeter
1. Ariadne’s Thread
2. The Rise of Consciousness
3. The Approach of Time

Book Three: Thought

Chapter I. The Birth of Thought
1. The Threshold of Reflection
2. The Original Forms

Chapter II. The Deployment of the Noosphere
1. The Ramifying Phase of the Pre-Hominids
2. The Group of the Neanderthaloids
3. The Homo Sapiens Complex
4. The Neolithic Metamorphosis
5. The Prolongations of the Neolithic Age and the Rise of the West

Chapter III. The Modern Earth
1. The Discovery of Evolution
2. The Problem of Action

Book Four: Survival

Chapter I. The Collective Issue
1. The Confluence of Thought
2. The Spirit of the Earth

Chapter II. Beyond the Collective: The Hyper-Personal
1. The Convergence of the Person and the Omega Point
2. Love as Energy
3. The Attributes of the Omega Point

Chapter III. The Ultimate Earth
1. Prognostics to be set aside
2. The Approaches
3. The Ultimate

Epilogue: The Christian Phenomenon
1. Axes of Belief
2. Existence-Value
3. Power of Growth

Postscript: The Essence of the Phenomenon of Man
1. A World in Involution
2. The First Appearance of Man
3. The Social Phenomenon

Appendix: Some Remarks on the Place and Part of Evil in a World in Evolution

Quotes

● “The cell has become someone. After the grain of matter, the grain of life; and now at last we see constituted the grain of thought.” ["The Phenomenon of Man", Harper Torchbooks, The Cloister Library, Harper & Row, Publishers, Copyright 1961, p. 173.]

● “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. It is really a new layer, the thinking layer, which (…) has spread over and above the world of plants and animals. In other words, outside and above the biosphere there is the noosphere.” ["The Phenomenon of Man", Harper Torchbooks, The Cloister Library, Harper & Row, Publishers, Copyright 1961, p. 182.]

● “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.” ["The Phenomenon of Man", Harper Torchbooks, The Cloister Library, Harper & Row, Publishers, Copyright 1961, p. 182.]

● “In the same beam of light the instinctive groping of the first cell link up with the learned gropings of our laboratories. (…) The spirit of research and conquest is the permanent soul of evolution.” ["The Phenomenon of Man", Harper Torchbooks, The Cloister Library, Harper & Row, Publishers, Copyright 1961, p. 223.]

● “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 fulfill the ambitions aroused in the reflective being by the newly acquired consciousness that he was at one with and responsible to an evolutionary All?” ["The Phenomenon of Man", Harper Torchbooks, The Cloister Library, Harper & Row, Publishers, Copyright 1961, p. 245-6.]

References

External links

A Globe, Clothing Itself With a Brain [http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/teilhard.html] , from WIRED magazine, June, 1995.

Catholic church monitum [http://www.catholicculture.org/library/view.cfm?recnum=3160] (warning) in 1962, on the writings of Teilhard de Chardin

"Cyberspace and the Dream of Teilhard de Chardin" [http://theoblogical.org/dlature/united/ph2paper/noosph.html] from summer 1994 Creation Spirituality magazine