To understand Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ we must first look at how he defines ‘evolution’
Today’s Post
Last week we saw how Teilhard asserted that to make sense of things in a way that our skills at navigating the winds and currents of life become more successful, we must learn to see these things more clearly. He offers his ‘lens of evolution’ as a tool for doing so.
As we will see this week, Teilhard’s concept of evolution goes well beyond that commonly found in the scientific as well as the religious communities.
Teilhard’s Understanding of Evolution
Before we can begin to understand how his ‘lens’ can be used to make sense of everything we see and to undo and heal the many ‘dualisms’ that have risen in humankind’s attempt to understand reality, we must first address his comprehensive understanding of ‘evolution’. In his masterwork, “The Phenomenon of Man”, he emphasizes in very strong terms how he considered evolution as such an underlying hermeneutic for understanding reality.
“Evolution: a theory, a system, a hypothesis? Not at all, but much more than that, a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems, must henceforth bow and satisfy if they are to be thinkable and true. A light illuminating all facts, a curve all lines must follow: such is evolution.”
His repetition of the term ‘all’ indicates his belief that putting everything that can be seen into the context of evolution will result in a significant clarification of the reality which surrounds us. Such a context, however, is not one that can be easily found in ‘conventional wisdom’.
To begin with, the term ‘evolution’ itself is not one which on which significant agreement exists. The most common use seems to be that of biology’s theory of ‘Natural Selection’, first proposed by Darwin and limited to a process of successive reproduction and differentiation on a small planet during the universal small time scale of a few billion years. Teilhard, recognizing the incompleteness of such an approach, insists that any perspective which purports to address all of reality must by definition address, as Julian Huxley says in his introduction to the “Phenomenon”
“…the material and physical world,… the world of mind and spirit.. the past with the future; and of variety with unity, the many and the one.”
Thus, if Teilhard’s use of the term ‘evolution’ is to meet his lofty intent it must offer an approach to understanding all phenomena over all stretches of time and all expanses of space.
Through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ everything can be seen in a natural context which can be approached in empirical terms, from physical events in the past, to the oft confusing cacophony of current human affairs. It goes forward to address the bridges to a future that will take us to the ‘fuller being’ that the fourteen billion years of uplift in the universe suggests is possible.
To identify evolution as the underlying principle which explains the appearance of things as quarks, atoms, molecules, cells, neutrons, humans, poems songs and cultures, it is necessary to first identify a metric which is common to all, and therefore by which all things can be seen in a unified context. Again, from Teilhard
“Fuller being is closer union: such is the kernel and conclusion of this book. But let us emphasize the point: union increases only through an increase in consciousness. And that doubtless is why the history of the living world can be summarized as the elaboration of every more perfect eyes within a cosmos in which there is always something more to be seen”.
And in that ‘elaboration’, Teilhard suggests, can be found the missing metric.
“There is not one term in this long series (from quarks to persons) but must be regarded, from sound experimental proofs, as being composed of nuclei and electrons. This fundamental discovery that all bodies owe their origin to arrangements of a single initial corpuscular type is the beacon that lights the history of the universe to our eyes.
In its own way, matter has obeyed from the beginning that great law of biology to which we shall have to recur time and time again, the law of ‘complexification”.
Hence, recognizing that the universe unfolds in the direction of increased complexity is a necessary first step for understanding how everything fits together. The “increase in complexity” is therefore one of the first things to be seen as we look through the ‘lens of evolution’.
Next Week
This week we took a first step into seeing Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ by understanding that the fundamental metric at work in the evolution of the universe is the ‘phenomenon of increased complexity’.
Next week we will look a little more closely at how this ‘phenomenon’ can be seen as the essential activity active in the universe as it unfolds into the state that can be seen today.