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object:0.01f - FOREWARD
book class:The Phenomenon of Man
author class:Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
subject class:Christianity
subject class:Integral Theory
class:chapter



Foreword



SEEING

This work may be summed up as an attempt to see and to make
others see what happens to man, and what conclusions are forced
upon us, when he is placed fairly and squarely within the frame-
work of phenomenon and appearance.

Why should we want to see, and why in particular should we
single out man as our object ?

Seeing. We might say that the whole of life lies in that verb—
if not ultimately, at least essentially. Fuller being is closer union :
such is the kernel and conclusion of this book. But let us empha-
sise the point : union increases only through an increase in con-
sciousness, that is to say in vision. And that, doubtless, is why the
history of the living world can be summarised as the elaboration
of ever more perfect eyes within a cosmos in which there is
always something more to be seen. After all, do we not judge
the perfection of an animal, or the supremacy of a thinking being,
by the penetration and synthetic power of their gaze ? To try to
see more and better is not a matter of whim or curiosity or self-
indulgence. To see or to perish is the very condition laid upon
everything that makes up the universe, by reason of the mysterious
gift of existence. And this, in superior measure, is man's condition.

But if it is true that it is so vital and so blessed to know, let us
ask again why we are turning our attention particularly to man.
Has man not been adequately described already, and is he not a
tedious subject ? Is it not precisely one of the attractions of science
that it rests our eyes by turning them away from man ?

Man has a double title, as the twofold centre of the world, to
impose himself on our effort to sec, as the key to the universe.

3i



FOREWORD



Subjectively, first of all, we are inevitably the centre of
perspective of our own observation. In its early, naive stage,
science, perhaps inevitably, imagined that we could observe
phenomena in themselves, as they would take place in our
absence. Instinctively physicists and naturalists went to work as
though they could look down from a great height upon a world
which their consciousness could penetrate without being sub-
mitted to it or changing it. They are now beginning to realise
that even the most objective of their observations are steeped in
the conventions they adopted at the outset and by forms or
habits of thought developed in the course of the growth of
research ; so that, when they reach the end of their analyses they
cannot tell with any certainty whether the structure they have
reached is the essence of the matter they are studying, or the
reflection of their own thought. And at die same time they
realise that as the result of their discoveries, they are caught body
and soul to the network of relationships they thought to cast
upon things from outside : in fact they are caught in their own
net. A geologist would use the words metamorphism and
endomorphism. Object and subject marry and mutually trans-
form each other in the act of knowledge ; and from now on
man willy-nilly fmds his own image stamped on all he looks at.
This is indeed a form of bondage, for which, however, a
unique and assured grandeur provides immediate compensation.
It is tiresome and even humbling for die observer to be thus
fettered, to be obliged to carry with him everywhere the centre
of the landscape he is crossing. But what happens when chance
directs his steps to a point of vantage (a cross-roads, or intersecting
valleys) from which, not only his vision, but things themselves
radiate? In that event the subjective viewpoint coincides with
the way things are distributed objectively, and perception reaches
its apogee. The landscape lights up and yields its secrets. He sees.
That seems to be the privilege of man's knowledge.
It is not necessary to be a man to perceive surrounding things
and forces ' in the round '. All the animals have reached this point
as well as us. But it is peculiar to man to occupy a position in

32



FOREWORD

nature at which the convergent lines are not only visual but
structural. The following pages will do no more than verify and
analyse this phenomenon. By virtue of the quality and the bio-
logical properties of thought, we find ourselves situated at a
singular point, at a ganglion which commands the whole fraction
of the cosmos that is at present within reach of our experience.
Man, the centre of perspective, is at the same time the centre of
construction of the universe. And by expediency no less than by
necessity, all science must be referred back to him. If to see is
really to become more, if vision is really fuller being, then we
should look closely at man in order to increase our capacity to
live.

But to do this we must focus our eyes correctly.

From the dawn of his existence, man has been held up as a
spectacle to himself. Indeed for tens of centuries he has looked at
nothing but himself. Yet he has only just begun to take a scientific
view of his own significance in the physical world. There is no
need to be surprised at this slow awakening. It often happens
that what stares us in the face is the most difficult to perceive.
The child has to learn to separate out the images which assail
the newly-opened retina. For man to discover man and take his
measure, a whole series of ' senses ' have been necessary, whose
gradual acquisition, as we shall show, covers and punctuates the
whole history of the struggles of the mind :

A sense of spatial immensity, in greatness and smallness, dis-
articulating and spacing out, within a sphere of indefinite radius,
the orbits of the objects which press round us ;

A sense of depth, pushing back laboriously through endless
series and measureless distances of time, which a sort of sluggish-
ness of mind tends continually to condense for us in a thin layer
of the past ;

A sense of number, discovering and grasping unflinchingly
the bewildering multitude of material or living elements involved
in the slightest change in the universe ;

A sense of proportion, realising as best we can the difference
of physical scale which separates, both in rhythm and dimension,

33



FOREWORD

the atom from the nebula, the infinitesimal from the immense ;

A sense of quality, or of novelty, enabling us to distinguish in
nature certain absolute stages of perfection and growth, without
upsetting the physical unity of the world ;

A sense of movement, capable of perceiving the irresistible
developments hidden in extreme slowness — extreme agitation
concealed beneath a veil of immobility — the entirely new in-
sinuating itself into the heart of the monotonous repetition of the
same things ;

A sense, lastly, of the organic, discovering physical links and
structural unity under the superficial juxtaposition of successions
and collectivities.

Without these qualities to illuminate our vision, man will
remain indefinitely for us — whatever is done to make us see —
what he still represents to so many minds : an erratic object in a
disjointed world. Conversely, we have only to rid our vision of
the threefold illusion of smallness, plurality and immobility, for
man effordessly to take the central position we prophesied — the
momentary summit of an anthropogenesis which is itself the
crown of a cosmogencsis.

Man is unable to see himself entirely unrelated to mankind,
neither is he able to see mankind unrelated to life, nor life un-
related to the universe.

Thence stems the basic plan of this work : Pre-Life : Life :
Thought — three events sketching in the past and determining for
the future (Survival) a single and continuing trajectory, the curve
of the phenomenon of man.

The phenomenon of man — I stress this.

This phrase is not chosen at random, but for three reasons.

First to assert that man, in nature, is a genuine fact falling (at
least partially) within the scope of the requirements and methods
of science ;

Secondly, to make plain that of all the facts offered to our
knowledge, none is more extraordinary or more illuminating ;

Thirdly, to stress the special character of the Essay I am pre-
senting.

34



FOREWORD

I repeat that my only aim, and my only vantage-ground in
these pages, is to try to see ; that is to say, to try to develop a
homogeneous and coherent perspective of our general extended
experience of man. A whole which unfolds.

So please do not expect a final explanation of things here, nor
a metaphysical system. Neither do I want any misunderstanding
about the degree of reality which I accord to the different parts of
the film I am projecting. When 1 try to picture the world before
the dawn of life, or life in the Palaeozoic era, I do not forget that
there would be a cosmic contradiction in imagining a man as
spectator of those phases which ran their course before the
appearance of thought on earth. I do not pretend to describe
them as they really were, but rather as we must picture them to
ourselves so that the world may be true for us at this moment.
What I depict is not the past in itself, but as it must appear to an
observer standing on the advanced peak where evolution has
placed us. It is a safe and modest method and yet, as we shall see,
it suffices, through symmetry, to bring out ahead of us surprising
visions of the future.

Even reduced to these humble proportions, the views I am
attempting to put forward here arc, of course, largely tentative
and personal. Yet inasmuch as they are based on arduous investi-
gation and sustained reflection, they give an idea, by means of
one example, of the way in which the problem of man presents
itself in science today.

When studied narrowly in himself by anthropologists or
jurists, man is a tiny, even a shrinking, creature. His over-
pronounced individuality conceals from our eyes the whole to
which he belongs ; as we look at him our minds incline to break
nature up into pieces and to forget both its deep inter-relations
and its measureless horizons : we incline to all that is bad in
anthropocentrism. And it is this that still leads scientists to refuse
to consider man as an object of scientific scrutiny except through
his body.

The time has come to realise that an interpretation of the
universe — even a positivist one — remains unsatisfying unless it

35



FOREWORD

covers the interior as well as the exterior of things ; mind as well
as matter. The true physics is that which will, one day, achieve
the inclusion of man in his wholeness in a coherent picture of the
world.

I hope I shall persuade the reader that such an attempt is
possible, and that the preservation of courage and the joy of
action in those of us who wish, and know how, to plumb the
depths of things, depend on it.

In fact I doubt whether there is a more decisive moment for
a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he
discovers that he is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes,
and realises that a universal will to live converges and is hominised
in him.

In such a vision man is seen not as a static centre of the world
— as he for long believed himself to be — but as the axis and
leading shoot of evolution, which is something much finer.



BOOK ONE

BEFORE LIFE CAME



36




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