|
Pierre Teilhard
de Chardin (1881-1955) |
|
Though Barfield's
Christian understanding of the evolution
of consciousness is often compared to the thinking of the French priest
and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, he was anxious
to distinguish them.1
Teilhard's key concepts--"cosmogenesis,"
"homonization," the "noosphere," "omega point"--are all grounded in strict
Darwinism,
and Teilhard's work, Barfield finds, is through- and-through guilty of R.U.P.
|
See in particular
Unancestral
Voice, Chap. 7, Worlds Apart (in which Upwater frequently professes
Teilhardian ideas), passim. |
1In
Worlds
Apart, the biologist Upwater espouses Teilhardian ideas, as in the
following speeches:
Inorganic evolution had to rely on mechanical
causes; but as soon as life appears, the principles of self-reproduction
and variation which it introduces bring with them the new factor of natural
selection. Moreover that was not the last major advance, as the nineteenth-century
evolutionists appeared to think.
With the appearance of consciousness, and
a little later (for it is a little in terms of the whole vast process)
with the growth of mind in homo sapiens an entirely new phase of evolution
set in, bringing with it a new cause or method of change. Through the human
properties of speech and conceptual thought the cosmic process began to
reflect itself in a microcosm. At the same time, with the coming of the
new technique of communication, which language-and later of course writing
and printing-brought with it-the importance of purely biological evolution
began to fade. For the third phase, the phase of psycho-social evolution,
as it has been well called, had already begun to take its place. (30-31)
With the development of conceptual thought-another
new factor, another method of change made its appearance. The element of
intention, based on the faculty of choosing between alternatives. The human
mind does not only reflect the macrocosm in its system of ideas, it gives
to it its whole significance, since it is only in the human mind that the
process, which is reality, becomes self-conscious. It follows that, through
its spearhead or growing-point of the human mind, the universe may in future
influence, or perhaps-who knows?--conduct its own evolution. (32)
Thinking, then, is the process of convergence
operating in human beings to form something analogous to a new single organism
of global dimensions; and I take it that this was what Teilhard de Chardin
meant, when he said 'Reflection planetizes.' (34)
|
|