The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de ChardinReview by: A. Irving HallowellIsis, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Sep., 1961), pp. 439-441Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/228098 .

Accessed: 09/05/2014 13:07

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

The University of Chicago Press and The History of Science Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to Isis.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.78.109.56 on Fri, 9 May 2014 13:07:47 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

BOOK REVIEWS

PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN: The Phenomenon of Man. With an introduc- tion by Sir Julian Huxley. 318 pp., figs., appendix. New York: Harper & Broth- ers, 1959. $5.00.

The Phenomenon of Man is an un- usual book by an unusually gifted man. Teilhard de Chardin was technically trained in the physical sciences as a young man and, in his mature years, he was recognized throughout the world for his work in Pleistocene geology, Cenozoic vertebrate paleontology and human paleontology. (For his publica- tions in these fields see the obituary notice by H. L. Movius, Jr. in American Anthropologist (1956, 58: 147-150). His attractive personal qualities en- deared him on four continents to those who met and worked with him. At the same time he was a member of the So- ciety of Jesus, living as he said, "at the heart of the Christian world" (p. 292). But the writings which embodied his personal vision of the phenomenal world, although privately circulated in manu- script form prior to his death, were denied the imprimatur of the Church and he was forbidden to teach in his native country, France. His last years (1951-1955) were spent in the U.S. where he was a research associate of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthro- pological Research, N.Y. (A short bio- graphical sketch is now easily accessible in Nicolas Corte, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, His Life and Spirit. Trans. by Martin Jarret-Kerr, C. R. N.Y.: Mac- millan, 1960. More detailed information, with quotations from his letters, may be found in Claude Cuenot, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Les grandes etapes de son evolution. Paris: Librairie Plon, 1958.) The list of internationally distinguished scientists and men of letters, both Cath- olic and Protestant, who sponsored Teilhard's posthumous publications, is not given in the English edition of The Phenomenon of Man but will be found in the Preface to Corte's book (xi). The French edition is said to have reached a sale of 70,000 copies within two years after publication (1955). In both French and English editions, the book has received extraordinary praise from scientists and laymen alike, but not

without critical strictures from both the Protestant and Catholic side. (For the latter, see, e.g., Corte, chap. 8.) I shall only try to sketch the essence of Teil- hard's ideas here; anyone interested in the full range and details of his views should consult the volumes already men- tioned, as well as Claude Tresmontant, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, His Thought (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1959), and other published works of Teilhard not yet translated into English. (L'apparition de l'homme, 1956; La vision du passe, 1957; Le milieu divin, 1957, Eng. trans. 1960; Le milieu divin, ologique humain, 1956.)

The Phenomenon of Man embodies a total vision of the phenomenal world and man's place in it. It is expressed partly in poetic and metaphorical lan- guage by a man of great Christian piety who also commanded a wide knowledge of modern physical and natural science and who conducted personal investiga- tions of his own in the special fields mentioned above. In his book Teilhard makes use of many neologisms, some of which are vital to an understanding of the structure of his thought (a useful glossary can be found in Tresmontant's book, and Sir Julian Huxley in his In- troduction discusses several of them). While Teilhard (p. 29) says that his book "must be read not as a work on metaphysics, still less as a sort of theo- logical essay, but purely and simply as a scientific treatise," not even his Catholic critics agree on this. Some feel it is in the nature of a Christian apologetic. However the case may stand in a precise sense, Teilhard did have a "message" (Book Four: Survival). There is no doubt that he felt it his vocation to ex- press what he considered to be a new conception of man which he thought pro- foundly important for the contemporary world, particularly in relation to the future of our species. As early as 1935 he wrote (quoted in Corte, pp. 52-53), "It's as if, for reasons drawn from the advance of my knowledge itself, the Past and its discovery had ceased to interest me. The Past has shown me the shape of the Future... It is essential to estab- lish myself with more firmness than ever as a specialist on the past, precisely in order to speak of the Future with

439

This content downloaded from 195.78.109.56 on Fri, 9 May 2014 13:07:47 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

BOOK REVIEWS

some authority. But it is a curious thing, isn't it, that the object of my work has in some way withered in yielding me its fruit; and that I no longer believe so much in the value of the discoveries I may be able to make, because their in- terest seems to me henceforth to have been superceded." (The major part of The Phenomenon of Man was completed by 1940 during the period when the author was in China [see p. 298]. The appendix is dated Rome, 1948.)

The essence of his new vision was that in man we must recognize the key which unlocks for us the inner significance of the entire phenomenal world of which we are a part. Man must not be viewed "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" (p. 36). This is the clue to the term hominisation which Teilhard invented and on which he lays so much stress, and to the con- ception of the no-osphere, the "layer" of reflective thought which only emerged and spread in the world through the process of hominisation. The profound significance of this feature of the phe- nomenal world has not been fully grasped, he thinks, because science has approached the study of the phenomenal world from the outside. But there is a "within of things" and "the time has come to realise that an interpretation of the universe-even a positivist one- remains unsatisfying unless it 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" (p. 36). This "inner" aspect of things, moreover, has great temporal and evolutionary depth. One basic aspect of it is con- noted by Teilhard's use of the term "consciousness," albeit in an elusive and ambiguous way (See Tresmontant: Glossary, p. 108). It is a key concept, however, because in its most tenuous meaning "consciousness" is coextensive with all material things, but not in the sense of panpsychism. It indicates the structure of Teilhard's thought because, in all his thinking about evolution, he recognizes continuity even though criti- cal stages must be recognized; there are

always primordial forms, or manifesta- tions, of what subsequently emerges. Evolution is the inner core of the phe- nomenal world and, at the same time, it involves a process which is orthogenic. (For a critical evaluation of this ortho- genic interpretation of life forms see the review by G. G. Simpson in Scientific American, 1960, 202: no. 4, 201-207). In the course of the evolutionary process "Pre-Life" is followed by the phe- nomena of the Biosphere, which is later overlaid by the No-osphere. And we not only have the development of in- creasingly complex and elaborated levels of organization but an "organic involu- tion" (See Huxley, Introduction, p. 15, on the author's notion of "complexifica- tion") which eventuates in "a correlative increase in interiorisation, that is to say, in the psyche or consciousness" (p. 300). Looking backwards along the course of evolution, "consciousness displays itself qualitatively as a spectrum of shifting hints whose lower terms are lost in the night" (p. 60). Animals, e.g., know, but they do not know they know. Through hominisation the whole inner equilib- rium of the preexisting primates was upset. "What was previously only a centred surface became a centre. By a tiny 'tangential' increase, the 'radial' was turned back on itself and so to speak, took an infinite leap forward. Outwardly, almost nothing in the organs had changed. But in depth, a great revo- lution had taken place: consciousness was now leaping and boiling in a space of super-sensory relationships and rep- resentations; and simultaneously, con- sciousness was capable of perceiving it- self in the concentrated simplicity of its faculties. And all this happened for the first time" (pp. 168-169). Elsewhere (Corte, p. 66) Teilhard speaks of con- sciousness being "squared." We have "Life to the 2nd degree" and, "as a con- sequence, in man it is not just one phylum more which is launching off at the top of the Primates. It is the world itself which, by forcing its way into a domain that up till then had remained closed, starts off again towards itself on a new stage of the way."

It is not difficult to see why Teilhard was dissatisfied with anthropological studies less broadly gauged in concep-

440

This content downloaded from 195.78.109.56 on Fri, 9 May 2014 13:07:47 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

BOOK REVIEWS

tion and with evolutionary studies of man couched in more traditional and empirical terms of inquiry. "To unravel the structure of a thinking phylum," he said, "anatomy by itself is not enough: it must be backed up by psychology" (p. 176). The recognition of the No-osphere, "outside and above" the Biosphere, shows us "how utterly warped is every classification of the living world (or, in- directly, every construction of the physi- cal one) in which man only figures logically as a genus or a new family. This is an error of perspective which deforms and uncrowns the whole phe- nomenon of the universe. To give man his true place in nature it is not enough to find one more pigeon-hole in the edifice of our systematisation or even an additional order or branch. With ho- minisation, in spite of the insignificance of the anatomical leap, we have the be- ginning of a new age. The earth 'gets a new skin.' Better still, it finds its soul ... The greatest revelation open to sci- ence today is to perceive that everything precious, active, and progressive orig- inally contained in that cosmic fragment from which our world emerged, is now concentrated in and crowned by the no- osphere" (pp. 182-183). Man repre- sents "individually and socially, the most synthesised state under which the stuff of the universe is available to us" and is "at present the most mobile point of the stuff in the course of transforma- tion." As the knowing subject he "will perceive at last" that he himself as "'the object of knowledge,' is the key to the whole science of nature" (p. 281). Furthermore, "we need and are irre- sistibly being led to create, by means of and beyond all physics, all biology and all psychology, a science of human ener- getics," in the course of which, "that science, by being led to concentrate on man, will find itself increasingly face to face with religion" (p. 283). "Religion and science are the two conjugated faces or phases of one and the same act of complete knowledge-the only one which can embrace the past and future of evolution so as to contemplate, meas- ure and fulfill them" (p. 285).

It seems to me that we must take Teilhard's book for what it really is, a personal vision of the nature of the

phenomenal world as he saw it, rather than as a scientific treatise. He appears to have been less familiar with the de- tails of contemporary work in such areas as comparative psychology, neurophysi- ology, the study of the social organi- zation of non-hominid primates and culture and personality studies by an- thropologists, than with the natural sciences, physical anthropology and pre- historic archaeology. Perhaps he did not see the inherent difficulties presented in a more empirical approach to the in- vestigation of behavioral evolution that some of the rest of us see. My own opinion, expressed elsewhere ("Self, Society and Culture in Phylogenetic Perspective," in Evolution after Dar- win, Vol. 2, Sol Tax, ed., 1960), is that in so far as a more inclusive frame of reference in the study of human evolu- tion is concerned, Teilhard is quite right in emphasizing a psychological dimen- sion. But this is not a novel idea; Dar- win thought so, too. Its scientific realization, however, has been difficult. But we are at a point now where some progress seems imminent.

Within the framework of the Chris- tian world-view which he expresses, Teilhard's conception of man reminds us in some respects of the great humanists of the Renaissance, like Pico Della Mirandola, who conceived man to be a creature indeterminate in nature, set in the middle of the world, and capable of degenerating or rising to a higher form which touched the Divine. Teilhard, invoking some, but not all relevant sci- entific knowledge, places man within the framework not only of biological, but of cosmic evolution. In doing so, he re- instates the dignity of man in the name of science in a more secular age, by making him the axis of an all-encom- passing evolutionary process. Perhaps this accounts in part for the interest and enthusiasm which Teilhard's writings have attracted (even to the extent of suggesting a cult), in a period when emphasis in science on what he calls the "without of things" has been interpreted by others as belittling man's place in the universe.

A. IRVING HALLOWELL

University of Pennsylvania

441

This content downloaded from 195.78.109.56 on Fri, 9 May 2014 13:07:47 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions