Re: Teilhard de Chardin - new documentary

Martin Harran <martinharran@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, 27 May 2024 19:07:03 +0000, *Hemidactylus*
<ecphoric@allspamis.invalid> wrote:
 
[Mercy snip]
 

 
Going back to the OP I just watched this today:
https://www.pbs.org/video/teilhard-visionary-scientist-pt9dc1/ 
 
May not be available outside the US. Didn't delve much into a critical
assessment of Teilhard's views. Eugenics was of course absent from the
discussion.

 
Why would it be included when no substantive case has been offered?
The only "evidence" you have offered is an opinion post by John
Slattery who has no previous known qualifications or expertise to make
his views on Telhard of any significance.
 

Not quite. I provided that lengthy quote from *Phenomenon of Man* where
Teilhard addresses eugenics. That wasn’t substantive? And going on
Slattery’s lead I found Teilhard’s *Activation of Energy* collection
helpful. There’s an essay called “The Sense of the Species in Man” where
Teilhard wrote:

“In animals, I recalled when I began, the sense of the species is
essentially a blind urge toward reproduction and multiplication, within the
phylum.
In man, by virtue of the two allied phenomena of reflection and social
totalization, the equivalent of this inner dynamism in a different context
can only be a reasoned urge towards fulfilment (both individual and
collective, each being produced through the other), followed in the
direction of the best arrangement of all the hominized substance which
makes up what I earlier called the noosphere.
The best arrangement with a view to a maximum hominization of the
noosphere.”

“From this there follows, as a first priority, a fundamental concern to
ensure (by correct nutrition, by education, and by selection) an ever more
advanced eugenics of the human zoological type on the surface of the earth.

“At the same time, however, and even more markedly, there must be an ever
more intense effort directed towards discovery and vision, animated by the
hope of our gradually, as one man, putting our hands on the deep-seated
forces (physico-chemical, biological and psychic) which provide the impetus
of evolution.”

“Finally, and at the same time, inasmuch as evolution is tending, quite
rightly, to be identified (at least so far as our field of vision extends)
with hominization,3 there must be a never-failing concern to stimulate,
within the personalized living mass, the development of the affective
energies which are the ultimate generators of union: a sublimated sense of
sex, and a generalized sense of man.”

Endnote 3 is: ““In this sense, that in our more informed view man is no
longer simply the artisan but also the object of an auto-evolution, which
is seen to coincide, at its term, with a concerted reflection of all the
elementary human reflections, now mutually inter-reflective.”

The above expands greatly on a quote Slattery had used in his Religion
Dispatches piece. Looks to me as Slattery himself opined that eugenics is
connected in some way to Teilhard’s noosphere here.

Can you at least concede Teilhard was incorporating eugenics into his
thought when he was incorporating eugenics into his thought?

Another essay “A Major Problem for Anthropology” had Teilhard saying:

“The time, then, seems to have come when a small number of men
representative of the principal living branches of modern scientific
thought (physics, chemistry, biochemistry, sociology, and psychology) must
come together in a concerted attack on the following points:”

“1. To affirm, and secure official recognition for, the proposition that
henceforth the question of an ultra-evolution of man (through collective
reflection or convergence) must be expressed in scientific terms.”

“2. To seek in common for the best ways of verifying the existence of the
problem and tackling it scientifically, with all its consequences and on
every plane.”

“3. To lay the foundations of a technics (both biophysical and
psychological) of ultra-evolution, from the twofold point of view:”

“a. both of the planetary arrangements that should be conceived (in general
research, for example, and in eugenics) with a view to an ultra-arrangement
of the noosphere”

“b. and of the psychic energies that must be generated or concentrated in
the light of a mankind which is in a state of collective super-reflection
upon itself: the whole problem, in fact, of the maintenance and development
of the psychic energy of self-evolution.”

So again his noosphere idea had a eugenics component. Can you at least
concede that point?