Teilhard's Human Phenomenon is too good to be missed. It is as if his work were prematurely published, at a time when the phenomenon of 'globalization' was not clearly grasped. In fact, the first event that forged heart and mind as a global event was the Beatles. If you ask whether there was a specific moment when this event occurred? It was June 25, 1967 when England asked Brian Epstein to present the Beatles music in the My World series live satellite link-up:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4p8qxGbpOk
Mind you, this was the first of its kind satellite hook-up which brought "All You Need is Love" to 400 million souls!
After the Beatles blazed the world, globalization became a fairly undeniable factoid! And for college students of today---it is a given. Not many of this generation have entertained how unbelievable all of this is to someone born in the 60s such as myself. WOW! Trippy. And behind it all there is Teilhard. Carefully decribing as a naturalist 'galaxies', 'megamolecules', protozoans, and the noosphere! I have not even finished reading the new translation---that shows you how excited I am.
There is the marvelous sculpture of man wrestling from rock his own existence like Saruman's Uruk-Hai in Tolkien's Two Towers, which greets the cover. A work by an artist, to whom Teilhard had written in a private correspondence that he wanted this to grace the cover of his book on the human phenomenon. Thanks to this wonderfully researched scholarly translation, Teilhard's wish has been realized! Further, unpublished diagrams in Teilhard's hand were included in this publication as well as an excellent black and white photograph of Teilhard in his priestly collar and scientific coat.
Teilhard conceived of a unified field theory which does not end with mere physics but aspires to account for the quantum of life and consciousness of which man is the centralizing phenomenon.
This awareness of a relativistic space-time continuum is the crowning achievement of Teilhard's synthesis. Unfortunately, Norman Denny's 1959 translation, The Phenomenon of Man, did not communicate this achievement. Teilhard discovered the principle of 'centro-complexity' which indicates the duration of a phenomenon in terms of psychic consciousness. In other words, a method of marking time in universal time-space is to consider on the one hand, the biological centration, and on the other hand to consider its complexity. It is a shortcoming of the static, Newtonian physics of time and space, that sees 'moments' in time or places in 'space' as being interchangeable pieces in a more or less homogenous puzzle. A moment of protozoan duration (whatever that means) does not equal for example this moment reading a blog. The place of the protozan duration cannot be interchanged with the 'digital space' duration that conveys this very thought!
In the relativistic scheme of things where space-time is a continuum this means that phenomenal existence is unique 'relative' to the entire phenomenon
or continuum---in any case, Teilhard clarified this view but not only in terms of physics, but also for biology and even spirituality. For example, hydrogen is ancient and simple, protozoans are terrestrial and relatively new, but ancient in terms of the protovertebrates, and even more ancient in terms of a burrowing mole working the earth today. The complexity of this mole, towers the protovertebrates and by another factor the protozoans. The Biosphere has successively complexified in each moment of duration up until this very moment, and it is complexifying still. However, this phenomenon is also centrating, hence increasing its pyscic "temperature". Trillions of neuronal links allow the human memory to conceive of songs and pictures from youth. Now billions of minds link in trillions of ways---a complexity unsurpassed in universal history! And yet, perhaps this is capable of finding a center.
That is the law that Teilhard discovered---centro-complexity, both forces result in an advance in terms of psychic action and consciousness. Advancing ineluctably to an Omega. In my opinion, it is better to remain within the discipline of Teilhard's phenomenology than to speculate concering the "time" and "place" of the advent of the Omega. The phenomenon Teilhard calls the 'noosphere' extends both in time and in space, to the first moments of the universe's birth more than 15 billion years distant to whatever the 'place' was, the field into which the creation of the material world enacted, up until the present era of globalization, and according to Teilhard's empirical extrapolation and mystical intuition beyond 'hominization' but all within the human phenomenon.
This insight, this 'fait primitif', to use Bergson's expression, is simple and unifying. Like putting many pieces of a puzzle together until 'bing' we begin to see Teilhard's fundamental intuition. To read this work requires effort, but this effort will reward the reader with a first glimpse of a scientific account of a coherent universe---which extends all the way from the most ancient electron to the linking up of the "noosphere"---a hitherto mystical expression which now seems to be gaining in concrete signification.
See the link below for a preview of Sarah Appleton-Weber's new translation of Teilhard's classic work in philosophical anthropology---The Human Phenomenon.http://books.google.com/books?id=vTi7de7vv5wC&dq=the+human+phenomenon&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=eGXzSbL2CYTCyQXnxci6DA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4p8qxGbpOk
After the Beatles blazed the world, globalization became a fairly undeniable factoid! And for college students of today---it is a given. Not many of this generation have entertained how unbelievable all of this is to someone born in the 60s such as myself. WOW! Trippy. And behind it all there is Teilhard. Carefully decribing as a naturalist 'galaxies', 'megamolecules', protozoans, and the noosphere! I have not even finished reading the new translation---that shows you how excited I am.
There is the marvelous sculpture of man wrestling from rock his own existence like Saruman's Uruk-Hai in Tolkien's Two Towers, which greets the cover. A work by an artist, to whom Teilhard had written in a private correspondence that he wanted this to grace the cover of his book on the human phenomenon. Thanks to this wonderfully researched scholarly translation, Teilhard's wish has been realized! Further, unpublished diagrams in Teilhard's hand were included in this publication as well as an excellent black and white photograph of Teilhard in his priestly collar and scientific coat.
Teilhard conceived of a unified field theory which does not end with mere physics but aspires to account for the quantum of life and consciousness of which man is the centralizing phenomenon.
This awareness of a relativistic space-time continuum is the crowning achievement of Teilhard's synthesis. Unfortunately, Norman Denny's 1959 translation, The Phenomenon of Man, did not communicate this achievement. Teilhard discovered the principle of 'centro-complexity' which indicates the duration of a phenomenon in terms of psychic consciousness. In other words, a method of marking time in universal time-space is to consider on the one hand, the biological centration, and on the other hand to consider its complexity. It is a shortcoming of the static, Newtonian physics of time and space, that sees 'moments' in time or places in 'space' as being interchangeable pieces in a more or less homogenous puzzle. A moment of protozoan duration (whatever that means) does not equal for example this moment reading a blog. The place of the protozan duration cannot be interchanged with the 'digital space' duration that conveys this very thought!
In the relativistic scheme of things where space-time is a continuum this means that phenomenal existence is unique 'relative' to the entire phenomenon
or continuum---in any case, Teilhard clarified this view but not only in terms of physics, but also for biology and even spirituality. For example, hydrogen is ancient and simple, protozoans are terrestrial and relatively new, but ancient in terms of the protovertebrates, and even more ancient in terms of a burrowing mole working the earth today. The complexity of this mole, towers the protovertebrates and by another factor the protozoans. The Biosphere has successively complexified in each moment of duration up until this very moment, and it is complexifying still. However, this phenomenon is also centrating, hence increasing its pyscic "temperature". Trillions of neuronal links allow the human memory to conceive of songs and pictures from youth. Now billions of minds link in trillions of ways---a complexity unsurpassed in universal history! And yet, perhaps this is capable of finding a center.
That is the law that Teilhard discovered---centro-complexity, both forces result in an advance in terms of psychic action and consciousness. Advancing ineluctably to an Omega. In my opinion, it is better to remain within the discipline of Teilhard's phenomenology than to speculate concering the "time" and "place" of the advent of the Omega. The phenomenon Teilhard calls the 'noosphere' extends both in time and in space, to the first moments of the universe's birth more than 15 billion years distant to whatever the 'place' was, the field into which the creation of the material world enacted, up until the present era of globalization, and according to Teilhard's empirical extrapolation and mystical intuition beyond 'hominization' but all within the human phenomenon.
This insight, this 'fait primitif', to use Bergson's expression, is simple and unifying. Like putting many pieces of a puzzle together until 'bing' we begin to see Teilhard's fundamental intuition. To read this work requires effort, but this effort will reward the reader with a first glimpse of a scientific account of a coherent universe---which extends all the way from the most ancient electron to the linking up of the "noosphere"---a hitherto mystical expression which now seems to be gaining in concrete signification.
See the link below for a preview of Sarah Appleton-Weber's new translation of Teilhard's classic work in philosophical anthropology---The Human Phenomenon.http://books.google.com/books?id=vTi7de7vv5wC&dq=the+human+phenomenon&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=eGXzSbL2CYTCyQXnxci6DA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4
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