The Phenomenon of Man by Teilhard de Chardin (Patrick and JL) Start Date: June 28, 2012

[JL]

Description (from Goodreads):
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin was one of the most distinguished thinkers and scientists of our time. He fits into no familiar category for he was at once a biologist and a paleontologist of world renown, and also a Jesuit priest. He applied his whole life, his tremendous intellect and his great spiritual faith to building a philosophy that would reconcile Christian theology with the scientific theory of evolution, to relate the facts of religious experience to those of natural science.

"The Phenomenon of Man, " the first of his writings to appear in America, Pierre Teilhard's most important book and contains the quintessence of his thought. When published in France it was the best-selling nonfiction book of the year.

Reading Plan: 2 days per chapter.

This thread is open to anyone interested to join or eavesdrop. :)

[K.D.]

JL: There is a rule that you have to give at least 3 days margin upon creating a thread to start date so if there are interested other members, they can still join you. Is it okay to move your start date to say Thursday or Friday?

[JL]

oh my, sorry KD, this is my first time to create a buddy reads thread, I've now read the Mechanics and have updated the start date :) Thanks po :)

[K.D.]

Thanks, JL. Parang familiar sa akin yong author. Meron yata akong book nya. I'll check. :)

Ayun! What I have is this book:

THE DIVINE MILIEU

If in case you want to read this book next, I'm in!!!

[JL]

KD: I also have THE DIVINE MILIEU! :)

Patrick: The whole book is dificult :) Yup, I think your reading plan is more sound, I'm ok with it. Baka nga lng medyo maguluhan tayo as the days go by, but heck, lets do this.

[JL]

I must admit that in tackling this book, it would surely cover topics that must be way over my head and expertise to analyze, so that there might be times when I seem to be overreaching, which is never my intention. As they say the magic lies in the attempt, if I don’t get the book, at least I am still made richer by the attempt. (and yes, rereading the sections is somehow easier the second time around!)

Introduction by Julian Huxley

I find it quite interesting to see that the introduction for The Phenomenon of Man was given by Sir Julian Huxley. The name Huxley sounds familiar to me (I’ve read a book called Perennial Philosophy - a compilation of holy texts from the great religions highlighting their common core, by the famous writer Aldous Huxley, which I later found out was his brother), so I did a little bit of research. Sir Julian Huxley, it turns out, was one of the most preeminent evolutionary biologist and humanist of the past century. There are 2 things about him that I find pertinent:

> He’s a proponent of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis or the Neo-Darwinian Theory – which as far as I understand it, which is not saying much, is a sort of union between Darwin’s findings and Mendelian genetics. In a nutshell it means that “evolution is driven by Natural Selection acting on variation produced by genetic mutation, and genetic recombination (chromosomal crossovers)” (Wikipedia)

> He’s a leading figure and supporter of Eugenics (though I think his is the ‘mild’ kind, he detests the radical eugenics practiced by the Nazis), which is the "applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population", usually referring to the manipulation of human populations“ (Wikipedia)

What is fundamental in the Neo-Darwinian theory is that it seeks the ultimate origin of man in the material world, and the question ‘why we are here’ can be fully explained by the mechanism of chance (mutation) and survival of the fittest. I think Eugenics, at its heart, is the belief that some class of humanity is inferior in some way, and that tampering with human genetics to produce a superior race is in some way justified. I’ve seen the movie Gattaca, which is an excellent critique of this position. Now this through and through is the world view expected of a towering intellect with a human secularist bent. The reason I find it interesting is that he would support the English publication of a work of a French Jesuit priest, and not just any work, but a work that attempts to unite the Christian world view and the scientific one. This shows that there is more to Sir Julian Huxley than what Wikipedia shows, and that he sees something compelling with Teilhard’s view, even if it undermines some of the conclusions of the Neo-Darwinianist and Eugenicist.

[JL]

Introduction by Julian Huxley (cont...)

I find Huxley’s introduction a very good summary of what we should expect in the book. Teilhard de Chardin’s background as a Jesuit priest and scientist echoes his struggle to reconcile 2 seemingly incompatible worldviews: the Scientific and Christian. Adding fuel to the fire is the position of the conservative Church regarding Chardin’s works as too radical to be published. I’m not sure what the Church’s objections were to his works, but I find him a brave soul for him not to consider the Church’s censure as an impassable wall. Huxley termed it as his lifework, and devling a bit into Chardin’s history, you can feel that at heart, he is a synthesizer, a grand one. The Phenomenon of Man is said to have effected a threefold synthesis: a) the material and spiritual world, the past and the future, and the many with the one. Chardin started with 2 fundamental points: man in its totality are proper objects of scientific study and that it is necessary to adopt an evolutionary point of view – reality, after all, is a process and never static. I would not summarize here what Huxley said in his introduction, but would offer some reflection on those things that I found significant and things that surprised me, especially since it came from Huxley.

Man’s evolution was unique (…in showing the dominance of convergence over divergence: Traditionally, the uniqueness of man is a religious proclamation. The declaration of traditional materialistic science, on the other hand, is that man is nothing but the descendant of the apes. For a scientist to say that there is something in man that is of a different order than what came before, is a step in saying that a part of man is ontologically different not only in degree, but in kind as well.

Since evolutionary phenomenon (of course including the phenomenon of man) are processes, they can never be evaluated or even adequately described solely or mainly in terms of their origins: defining something solely in terms of their origin is I think part of what is called reductionist. By implication, it is the same as defining a whole solely by its parts: Man is nothing but his gene, the mind IS NOTHING BUT the brain, love is nothing but chemicals. Looking at a phenomenon in time, which is evolution, reveals the whole more clearly, and debunks reductionist conclusions.

We must infer the presence of potential mind in all material systems, by backward extrapolation from the human phase to the biological, and from the biological to the inorganic: the way I see it, saying that potential mind pervades the story of the universe from the inorganic to the biological is like saying that the universe is mind-drenched. These are all equivalent or nearly so: mind, consciousness, thoughts, meaning. I prefer to remove the word potential in the equation: mind is the inwardness of nature and the universe, and a universe that is mind drenched is a universe that is meaningful through and through. Hardly a conclusion from a materialist.

We, mankind, contain the possibilities of the earth’s evolution / in modern scientific man, evolution was at last becoming conscious of itself: in saying that man is essential in the furtherance of earth’s evolution is a big stumbling block to the pronouncements of some radical environmentalist preaching that the earth is better off without man (because of his environmental abuse). It is indeed more radical to say: The earth needs man, and man is responsible for earth’s future evolution.

The conditions of advance are these:… and increase in knowledge: This is something I beg to disagree. More knowledge and information doesn’t necessarily increase understanding and ‘sets us in a fruitful and significant relation with the enduring processes of the universe.” This is the famous promissory note of science: wait for us to know more, and we will solve all your problems like poverty and sickness and death. I can know everything about the world, and I would still feel unconnected with it. I guess, knowledge does not automatically equate to wisdom.

[JL]

@JL: Commenting on your last paragraph about knowledge. Isn't it so that knowledge is a prerequisite for wisdom? Wisdom is applied knowledge. Man acquiring more and more knowledge about himself and his world can only mean that there'd be more stuff for wisdom to build on right? I think I do get what you wanted to mean by that last paragraph though. I believe it only goes wrong when the pursuit for knowledge becomes an end in itself. Knowledge for knowledge's sake is a dead end. Just my two cents.

Patrick: Yes, ‘knowledge for knowledge’s sake’ was what I was trying to get to. And I think I was specifically referring to the knowledge commonly being spouted by science: abstract, quantitative and empirical, and that knowledge of this kind when applied always means an increase in technological sophistication. I guess a part of me rebels at the idea that a society surrounded by technology automatically means progress and by implication a ‘wise’ society.

I also wonder how you gather your thoughts on this JL.

Oh, I just write down some of my thoughts in my notebook while reading the book, just an outline really. I just elaborate on the ideas in the actual writing of my comments. I also spend some time researching in the net or go back to a similar book I’ve already read if I’m not familiar with the ideas being discussed by Chardin. How about you and why did you choose index cards as the medium for your notes?

Preface and Foreword

Oh my, I’m so delayed in my comments, and my reading. So I’m making this shorter, I hope. Chardin is using so many unfamiliar terminologies and I find the writing enlightening in some places, but hard to follow most of the time.

In the preface Chardin distinguished his work, in order to be understood correctly, from Metaphysics and Theology. It is strictly a scientific treatise. Theology, I’m guessing deals with supernatural revelation, metaphysics I only have a vague notion of. So I turned to Wikipedia again, it states that:

Metaphysics – is concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world

and has been understood to really mean philosophy rather than an empirical explanation of the world, which is the sole domain of science. I would like to think of metaphysics as the basic assumptions we have of our world and our place in it. Whatever it means, I believe this is a metaphysical statement (from the book Forgotten Truth by Huston Smith):

Far from denying life’s progression, tradition provides a reason for it. Microcosm mirrors macrocosm, earth mirrors heaven. But mirrors, as we have noted, invert. The consequence here is that which is first in the ontological order (man) appears last in the temporal order (evolution in time).

Funny, I also consider this statement of Chardin in the Foreword as metaphysical:

Fuller being is closer union… union increase only through an increase in consciousness, that is to say in vision.

So I’m a little perplexed in his insistence to consider his work as purely scientific. For one thing, in dealing with consciousness or its content, we are mostly dealing with immaterial things, things that are the proper study of metaphysics, philosophy or even theology. Science has confined itself mostly with empirical things, those things that can be perceived by the senses. But one of Chardin’s main contentions, I think, is that man is more than just these sensible things, so I guess from this point of view, this is still a work both of science and metaphysics.

But I do love his foreword, especially his discussion of Seeing, and man occupying a peculiar position in nature at which the convergent lines are not only visual but structural. Seeing, I agree with you is more than with the physical eyes, and for me it means aside from the expansion of consciousness, but to get to reality and to have union and fuller being, it would also mean a deepening of awareness. And deepening would show a vertical direction going deeper and deeper into qualities and meaning.

I would like to touch a bit in your imagery of that person in the painting who strives to explain how he's made very much like when we’re trying to explain ourselves. Yes, it would indeed humble us, and it would also be like a form of bondage. But the person inside this painting would be unaware of this need for humility or be crushed with the prospect of bondage if all he is made of is paint in a 2D world, the concept ‘stuck’ will be meaningless if there’s no part of him that is ‘un-stuck’ to be made aware of his ‘stuckness’. A mechanical system can never be aware of itself if everything about it is determined and part of that system, it must have something that is outside of that system and not mechanical to become aware of its condition. Extending your analogy of the stuff of painting and the 2d world to that of matter and the material universe, man by virtue of his self-awareness, his Seeing consciousness, and his awareness of bondage and need for humility, can transcend this 2d world, since a part of him is of the same nature as the 3d world and whoever it is that painted him.

You were also asking whether there is any scientist actively building on Chardin’s work and in connection with this, I received a pamphlet one time when I went to mass in Ateneo by the American Teilhard Association, and in it there’s a list of publications inspired by Chardin:

Teilhard Perspective – provides short articles, reviews of books, and commentary on contemporary issues in the light of Teilhard’s thoughts.
Teilhard Studies – essays focused on different aspects of Teilhard’s vision of the Earth and the human community.
Teilhard in the 21 st Century- book with a selection of Teilhard Studies from 1978 to the present.
More info for this is:

http://www.teilharddechardin.org/stud...

[JL]

ok, I haven’t posted in a while. So sorry about that, last week have been a little bit busy. But I do enjoy reading your posts, which sounds like a director’s commentary for a movie full of personal and useful insights :)

The Higgs Boson particle is indeed a timely topic for the first chapters of the book. But I agree with you, calling it the God particle (supposedly since it will explain how everything has mass) is a bit of a scientific hubris, a subtle teasing of scientists, I think, of the religious that they had the upper hand in terms of their cultural war hehe (that’s just my opinion) But really, I’m a bit uncomfortable by the tendency of science to divide and divide and divide things and to call these the ‘fundamental’ particles: if in the usage of fundamental they mean, the ultimate and essential reality which is the basis of everything else.

Book 1 Chapter 1 The Stuff of the Universe

I have nothing much to say about chapter 1, since it seems just a summing up of abstract generalizations and principles applicable to the early universe, which I have no quarrel with hehe The universe is a SYSTEM (everything is interdependent) by its Plurality, a TOTUM (nothing repeats itself) by its unity, and a Quantum (the radius of action of an element is to the utmost limits of the world) by its Energy.

In our age, it would seem that looking at the universe as an indivisible whole is quite obvious (informed as we are by science of the story of its birth and expansion/evolution), but I can imagine that such may not be the case in earlier times. Teilhard is right, a revolution in consciousness has occurred by the modern discovery of duration (evolution in time) and spacetime, it offered a new perspective that the world is in the process of transformation. In other words, it gave us a coherent story of how everything came to be. I’m not quite sure though that Teilhard’s view that the universe is a unity by the fact that everything is made up of essentially the same particles, is the only kind of unity there is. (I’m thinking of the unity professed by mystics of all ages that has nothing to do with fundamental particles, but I’m getting ahead of myself). I think the Quantum principle could be related to the discovery of physics that 2 related subatomic particles, no matter the distance can influence each other without any known means of mechanical causation.

I agree with you that the future of the universe named as the Big Freeze or the Big Crunch pronounced by science could be quite, I don’t know, depressing. So that’s our ultimate destination? Is that the destiny of the universe? According to science, it is our inevitable future. I would like to see it as the future as seen through the lenses of a materialistic science, a science which unfortunately has the monopoly of legitimacy in the modern world, since it simply works. Look at all these wonderful technology. Teilhard’s vision is one of those early attempts, to integrate unrelated fields, and offer a different vision of the future. Yes a more optimistic vision, but not based on wishful thinking which the new atheists laugh at, but one that is hopefully, grounded in science and reason.

[JL]

Book 1 Chapter 2 The Within of Things

One really radical idea, that I would like to say to Teilhard Bravo for, is his insistence in the idea that matter has an inside, and that it extends to the smallest to the largest, to the earliest and to the furthest story of the universe. Matter, from the beginning, has an inside, consciousness, meaning and spirit! That to me is really radical. Why is that? What is the common story of the universe we hear in science channels and read in popular science books, in terms of the appearance of consciousness? The big bang happened, in a seething world of random bumps and accidents, life suddenly emerged, and then the animals, and then bam! man with his self-awareness suddenly appeared out of nowhere. By contradicting this story that consciousness suddenly appeared at some moment in time when man with a large enough brain appeared, and by putting consciousness as an intrinsic characteristic of the universe all the way down, that indeed frees up a lot of the reductionist thought so common today. Matter with an inside! Damn, that changes a lot of things. It says that matter, plants, animals, and men are not only things (all surfaces without depth), they have an inside, meaning, and spiritual content. The way I understand it, when we encounter the Other that are less things and has insides, the less they are as objects and more as subjects, and dealing with subjects always entails a moral dimension. Treating animals as objects justifies wild manipulations of their genetic material without any moral implication, but if they are subjects with their own integrity, a kind of respectful conversation rather than one sided manipulation is a more justified way of dealing with them.

In his discussion of Spiritual Energy, in trying to determine the connection between physical and spiritual energy, its kindda similar with the Mind-Body Problem being discussed by some scientists today. I’m not really versed with this topic, so Im going to leave this alone, but I do agree with Teilhard when he said that: essentially, all energy is psychic in nature, or as I understand it, spiritual energy takes primacy over the physical. Another way of saying that the physical counterpart is necessary but not sufficient to manifest what is spiritual. More on this I hope in further discussion.

Atomicity is a common property of the Within and the Without of Things. Hmmm, I do not necessarily agree. It seems to me that Teilhard is trying to imply that the Within of things is commensurate with the Without, quantitatively and qualitatively. The spiritual side of things is commensurate with the material side, so in terms of the beginning of the universe, matter, as the without, is still in its particulate form, does that mean that the spiritual side, is also particulate, small insides like their material counterparts? Hmm, I think not necessarily so. I would still like to think that the spiritual side, even at the beginning, is far more vast than being confined to particulate subatomic forms. An expansive spiritual world tries to radiate outward but is limited by the material outside condensed forms. Teilhard’s law of complexity still applies, the more complex the material structure is, the more the spiritual side is able to radiate and made manifest and be interiorized in the physical world.

[K.D.]

Patrick, JL, Louize, etc.

I found my copy of C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters. Do you want us to buddy read it? If yes, I am open starting on Monday, 10th September 2012. Hope somebody can create the thread kung okay lang.

[K.D.]

Sige, Patrick. Paki-gawa na lang ng thread. Salamat. Hay, sa wakas, I'll have the motivation to read "Screwtape" ha! ha!