object:4.01 - Conclusion - My intellectual position
book class:Let Me Explain
author class:Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
subject class:Christianity
subject class:Science
class:chapter
Conclusion
My intellectual position
(written in answer to a
questionnaire but never published).
The thought of Pere Teilhard de Chardin in his
own words: 'My intellectual position. 1
In its essence, the thought of Pere Teilhard de Chardin is
expressed not in a metaphysics but in a sort of phenomenon
logy.
A certain law of recurrence, underlying and dominating
all experience, he thinks, forces itself on our attention. It is
the law of complexity-consciousness, by which, within
life, the stuff of the cosmos folds in upon itself continually
more closely, following a process of organization whose
measure is a corresponding increase of tension (or psychic
temperature). In the field of our observation, reflective man
represents the highest term attained by an element in this
process of organization.
Above individual man, however, this involution is carried
further, in mankind, by the social phenomenon, at the term
of which can be discerned a higher critical point of collective
reflection.
From this point of view < hominization , (including sociali-
zation) is a convergent phenomenon: in other words it dis-
plays an upper limit or internal point of maturity. At the
same time this convergent phenomenon is also, in virtue of its
structure, irreversible in nature: in this sense, that Evolution
having become reflective and free, in. man, it can no longer
continue its ascent towards complexity-consciousness unless
it realizes two things about 'vital involution - that, looking
1 In the pages that follow we give, as a continuous whole, the paper
written by Pere Teilhard in 1948 (see Introduction), passages from which
have been given at the head of the preceding chapters.
145
Let Me Explain
ahead, it escapes annihilation or total death, and, what is
more, that it gathers together all that can be permanently
saved of the essence of what life will have engendered in the
course of its progress. This demand for irreversibility has a
structural implication, the existence, at the upper term of cos-
mic convergence, of a transcendent centre of unification,
'Omega Point'. Unless this focus-point, which gathers things
together and ensures their irreversibility, does in fact exist,
the law of evolutionary recurrence cannot hold good to the
very end.
It is upon this 'Physics' that, in a 'second phase', Pere Teil-
hard builds first an apologetics: under the illuminating in-
fluence of Grace, our minds recognize in the unifying prop-
erties of the Christian phenomenon a manifestation (or a
reflection) of Omega upon human consciousness, and so
identify the Omega of reason with the Universal Christ of
revelation.
It is upon this Physics that P£re Teilhard simultaneously
builds up, secondly, a Mysticism:
The whole of Evolution being reduced to a process of
union (communion) with God, it becomes, in its totality,
loving and lovable in the innermost and most ultimate of
its developments.
Taken together the three branches of the system (physics,
apologetics and mysticism) suggest and readily lend them-
selves to forming an outline of a Metaphysics of Union,
dominated by love, in which even the Problem of Evil is
given an acceptable intellectual solution (the statistical neces-
sity of disorders within a multitude in process of organiza-
tion).
This 'philosophy' has been criticized as being no more than
a generalized Concordism. To this Pere Teilhard answers that
146
Conclusion
concordism and coherence should not be confused. Religion
and science obviously represent two different meridians on
the mental sphere, and it would be wrong not to keep them
separate (that is the concordist mistake) ; but these meridians
must necessarily meet somewhere at a pole of common vision
(that is, coherence). Otherwise all that is ours in the domain
of thought and knowledge collapses.
New York, April, 1948
147
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