Skip to main content

Teilhard de Chardin

And published tomorrow in CLA this pretty skimpy, unoriginal take on Teilhard de Chardin---what IS interesting is the focus on complexity--- that in fact is a great secret.....

The dog, the cat, or the bird train their young in countless ways to hunt, to fly, to build a nest. ... Far from being an artificial, accidental, or accessory phenomenon, in relation to living creatures, education is nothing less than an essential and natural form of biological additivity....[W]e see heredity pass through education beyond the individual to enter into its collective phase and become social.

These are the words of Pierre Teihard de Chardin (May 1, 1881, and died on April 10, 1955) in The Future of Man, (written 1941, published 1959). This was after his death, since the church did not allow him to publish much during his lifetime.  And though by the time of publication DNA had been discovered, that would have been beside the point to our priest.  Neither DNA nor evolution theory really "explained' the appearance of the new. He was pointing his audience to the reality of man as part of a planetary wide growth, in a "Universe of  convergent consciousness."

And In the words of his Britannica article

[W]hat is of permanent value in traditional philosophical thought can be maintained and even integrated with a modern scientific outlook if one accepts that the tendencies of material things are directed, either wholly or in part, beyond the things themselves toward the production of higher, more complex, more perfectly unified beings.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

May 27, 1564

  May 27, 1564 John Calvin, a Protestant theologian who argued for predestination, was fond of his wife's cat,"Henriette." His wife and his wife's cat died in the same month, and according to J. Stephen Lang, author of 1,001 Things You Always Wanted to Know about Cats, Calvin did not get another wife or another cat. John Calvin died on May 27, 1564.
Post a Comment
Read more

August 23, 1941

Onora Sylvia O'Neill (August 23, 1941) is a British thinker. She studied at Oxford and received a doctorate from Harvard. After a noted career, in 1992, she  accepted the post of  Principal of  N ewnham College, Cambridge, and since 2006 she has been Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge. Her 1997 paper, "Environmental Values, Anthroporphism, and Speciesism" contains a timely  argument  in which Dr. O'Neill, (she prefers that title to the "Baroness" to which her elevation to the peerage allows) points out inadequacies in the use of the term speciesism to argue against according humans more ethical rights than aspects of the non human world.  A viewpoint that puts " a person torturing a cat is on a par with a cat torturing a bird," is not one she finds supportable. The link is to a downloadable version of this paper.  We have  this picture  of Onora O'Neill, in 2002, at Newnham College: We meet in the Principal's lodge at Ne...
Post a Comment
Read more

July 8, 2006

 Raja Rao, the Indian writer credited for his authentic portrayal of Indian values in English publications died on July 8, 2006. From his obituary in The Guardian this description of two books Rao wrote. "Aiming at an ultimately positive encounter between east and west, Rao's metaphysical novel,  The Serpent and the Rope  (1960), displays an intellectuality that goes beyond the textual, through its metaphysical associations and a spiritual dimension that tells us much about the Indian and European worlds. His protagonist, Ramaswamy, entertains his friends with philosophical discussions ranging over an impressive set of themes - including Buddhism, theology, monasticism and world politics - while at the same time he charmingly invites the reader to envisage reality from his Hindu viewpoint, offering the key of distinguishing the projected reality of the serpent from the existing reality of the rope, an image derived from Shankara. ...[In a subsequent book,] Rao manages to ...
Post a Comment
Read more